IT’S been only three days and already the nurses purse their thick sausage lips when they see they’ve been assigned to my table. More paperwork. There’s a binder for each girl: the thicker the binder, the stronger the girl. I’ve been charted eight times already—one entry for each meal since I arrived.
Today at lunch, I am painstakingly careful in my selections: a symmetrical sliver of lettuce, a perfectly dissected bit of carrot. I hold their watery weight on my tongue. At the end of the meal, the Yellow and Green Girls clear their plates and claim their mug of weak coffee as a reward (two creamers! no more!). I’m cold, and coffee, black, would warm my insides. But the nurse on meal duty sits to my right, watching me.
I breathe through my mouth and try not to look down. I know what’s waiting if I slip: thick tomato soup like clotted blood. Rotting vegetables beaded with milky oil. Pale yellow applesauce in a congealed, sugary mass. If I look at it, smell it—or, god forbid, touch it—it will find its way inside me.
Across the table, CB tries to catch my eye. “I know it’s hard at first,” she sympathizes over her coffee mug. “All you have to do is tryyyy. Just do the best you can. That’s good enooough.”
The other two girls from Cottage Three, Teagan and Cate or Cate and Teagan, murmur their agreement. The one with the feeding tube whispers something with a vaguely encouraging intonation. I expect something more from a girl like her.
“Are you done, Stephanie?” asks the nurse. There are several nurses, five or six, but this one I remember because her name sounds thick, like flesh: Hannah. I’ve heard some of the other girls whisper Hammah behind her back.
“Yeah,” I say.
Hammah’s narrow eyes dart over my plate, which is nearly untouched.
“How about trying some supplement?” Her voice knows the answer, so I don’t respond.
“Just a little? So I can tell them you’re trying?”
“No.” I already ate the salad. Josh always told me to eat my vegetables. It’s the very least I can do, but it threw off my calculations for the day. Pathetic. I stare at the wall behind her for so long that my eyes drift out of focus. I let them. It’s nice to see the world that way sometimes, blurred around the edges like I’ve sunk to the bottom of the ocean and am staring up at the sun.
After lunch, I head to the lawn. My schedule for the day allows for three thirty-minute sessions of solo reflection time before my next session, where I’m supposed to reflect with Shrink watching me. Bullshit, all of it. I’m reflecting all the time, anyway. About Mom. About Eden. About Josh. I am reflecting so much that I can hardly breathe.
Instead of reflecting, I do my exercises to atone for the salad. Teagan or Cate braids Curly Blonde’s hair on the other side of the lawn. A carrot-headed girl with thick, pale ankles talks too loudly about how her Spanish teacher for sure has a crush on her, which is kind of creepy but actually? He’s kind of hot. Other girls I haven’t bothered to meet gossip or journal or write letters home.
“Hey, Stevie.” Shrink is wearing a long, mint-green T-shirt dress and brown sandals. A beaded bracelet sags around her left ankle.
I’ll have to be more careful now that she’s here. If staff catch you exercising, they chart it and keep you inside for the rest of the day. But the committed among the committed always find a way. I am clenching and releasing every muscle in my body, from my shoulders to my calves. Secret penance.
Stomach: clench, release. Ass: clench, release. I shield my eyes and look up at her.
“Sorry I’m a little late,” she says. “Then again, you don’t really have any place else to be, am I right?”
I snort. “Cute.” Calves: clench, release.
She crosses her ankles and drops next to me.
I wait for her to yell at me for refusing so many meals. For growing a thick binder after only a few days here. I wait for her to tell me that I’m not trying hard enough, that I’m failing.
“We could have the session right here, if you’d like.”
“Fine.”
She stays silent. My insides start to itch. The quiet gets louder and louder, until it’s screaming at a fever pitch.
“Josh never raped me,” I say.
Her eyebrows lift slightly. Not an arch, like What the hell, freak? Just a lift, like Oh.
“Or molested me or touched me or anything like that,” I say.
“Okay. Maybe when you’re ready, you’ll tell me about him.”
I stiffen. My words have given her the wrong idea. This isn’t me starting to open up. “I just wanted you to know. I don’t know why I lied.”
“I wonder . . .” she speaks slowly, the words crystallizing on her tongue, “if you felt pressure from me. To share something you weren’t ready to share. Maybe it felt safer to make something up?”
“I . . .” My breath catches in my throat. “What?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about our last session.” She kicks off her sandals. “You obviously weren’t ready to talk about the first time you used a behavior, and I was pushing you to let me in. Pushing too hard, I think.”
I can hear my heart’s slow chug in my ears. My chest is throbbing.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret about us therapists,” she says. “We’re just so . . . human. And we make mistakes sometimes—I make mistakes sometimes. And the other day, I made the mistake of asking you to tell me too much, too soon. We don’t know each other. Why would you share parts of your life with me that you probably haven’t shared with anyone?”
I can feel her gaze on my forearm, steady like the sun. I trace the flat purple-black border of my mother from the inside of my pale veined wrist to my elbow. The image calms me and enrages me at the same time.
“You want to know about the tattoo?” I ask.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“Okay.” After a few seconds, Shrink stands up and curtsies.
“What was that?”
She flops back onto the blanket. “You didn’t notice?” She pouts like a little kid.
“Notice what?”
“What a good job I was doing not pushing for information. That was almost ten seconds.”
“Are you being serious? What, do you want a cookie or something?”
She grins. “I’d rather you have a cookie.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. The sound is like stale dust rising from the depths. “Good luck.”
She doesn’t answer, just scrunches her lips together. But not in a disapproving way. More like she’s thinking.
“Last session you were trying to remember what book Josh was reading during that picnic. I asked if maybe it felt like forgetting meant he was slipping away.” She tucks a lock of reddish hair behind one ear.
“And I said I didn’t know.”
“I wonder if that’s the reason for the tattoo.”
I roll my eyes and sit up. “So much for not prying.”
“I just think it’s beautiful, is all. Hard to take my eyes off her.”
Again, I trace the lines from my wrist to my elbow. I could do it blindfolded: my mother’s wide eyes, strong Roman nose, and full, red lips. The strand of pearls around her neck. She is exquisite. Permanent.
“I wonder if the tattoo is so you won’t forget the details,” Shrink suggests.
“I wonder if you read too much into everything.”
“Maybe.” She flexes her toes. Her calves are white in the sun. It’s strange how she doesn’t cover them when she sees me looking. How she allows her dress to trace the curves of her ass, to betray the softness of her stomach. “I do think most things have meaning.”
I look away. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. She’s gone.”
“How long?” she asks softly.
I point to the two dates below her image: one for birth, and one for the day she left. “A year in May. I was sixteen and Josh was seventeen. I was eating dinner on the back porch,” I say.
“When—”
“When my dad told me she was gone.”
“And what did he say?” Shrink’s face is different from the faces I used to get around the time Josh died. Faces that were twisted in disbelief and even curious fascination. They wanted to know how it happened, exactly how it happened, don’t leave anything out. Like his death was the climax of a tragic film, and they’d snuck outside for a smoke and missed the best part.
But Shrink’s face is relaxed, blank except for the eyes, which are the color of grass today. They are wide, almost sad.
“I don’t know,” I say sharply. I don’t want to relive this, not with her here. “I don’t remember what he said.”
“What do you remember?”
“Fried chicken.” The words are unexpected, like hot oil on my tongue. “And sweet tea.”
Josh was still in class, but I was on the porch swing in the back, at the house on Broad, when I heard Dad’s Buick pull into the garage. I was eating fried chicken from the Chicken Shack, a comfort-food place run by a black family from Macon. Little girls with plastic barrettes at the ends of their braids brought the food outside in white paper bags.
The night was humid, the kind of heat that made it feel like you were drowning. Next to me on the swing, Dad smelled like sweat.
“She did the best she could, Stevie,” he said. “And for whatever reason, she just . . . needed to go. But you should know that none of this is your fault.”
He read that in a book, I thought.
“And it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you, little girl. She just . . . doesn’t know how.”
I sat there, silent with my arms crossed over my chest, until he finally gave up. “Well, I’ll give you some time alone,” Dad said.
So will she.
He stood up, and the porch swing suddenly felt too light. He went inside.
Hours later, Josh found me leaning over the porch railing, sick with the loss of her, the putrid smell of my own vomit mixed with jasmine from the trellis.
“Get cleaned up, Sass,” Josh said quietly. “Go take a shower.”
I didn’t answer. In the yard, lightning bugs flickered yellow-green around the azaleas. My only thought was: All this pretty is a goddamn lie.
“It’ll make you feel better.”
The lump in my throat tasted like fried flesh. I shook my head.
Josh pulled me in close like a rag doll. His heart was steady.
“Stop.” I tried to pull away.
“Nope,” he said into my ear, and squeezed even tighter. “Love you. And so does she.” I felt his tears hot on my cheek and I pretended they were mine. “Now go on.” His voice cracked a little. “And come find me when you get out. I have something for you.”
Upstairs in the shower, I convinced myself that maybe when I stepped into the hallway she’d be back. Maybe if I washed my hair just right or made my legs the kind of smooth you see in magazines. Maybe if I could mold myself into the perfect girl, the kind of girl who didn’t sneak chocolates or beg for sugary cereal. Maybe then.
I stayed in the shower for over an hour, huddled under the spray long after it turned cold. When I got out and stepped into the hall, the silence was unspeakably loud. The kind of silence that seeps into your bones and tells you that you are alone. My body knew before I did: She was still gone.
On the way to my room I left shiny footprints on the floor planks. Inside, I let the threadbare towel drop to the floor and faced myself in the full-length mirror.
Look at yourself.
The girl in the mirror was too much and not enough. Her lines were soft, curved as though they had buckled under the pressure of being. Weak, her flesh.
It was my fault her absence hurt the way it did. My body was powerless to stop the pain. I turned and slapped my ass, staring in horror at the undulating excess. Punched my stomach, kneaded the flesh there. Too much, all of it. No wonder my mother chose to leave. I took up so much space; she couldn’t breathe! I crushed my beautiful mama with the weight of my very existence.
I locked eyes with the girl in the glass.
“No more,” I said out loud.
Shrink’s voice draws me back. “So food is linked to the memory of your mother leaving.”
“You asked what I remembered.”
“I did.”
“So that’s it.”
Shrink stays quiet for too long.
“What?” I say, suddenly irritated. Last night after Curly Blonde went to sleep, I figured out that every hour here costs twenty-eight bucks. For that kind of money, Shrink should be speed talking and fanning me with palm fronds.
“I was just thinking about . . . how difficult it must be to lose a parent like that, and then lose a brother. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you.”
No. She can’t. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“I have a sister. An identical twin, actually.”
It’s freaky to think that there’s a carbon copy of Shrink out there, sitting in the grass in a T-shirt dress and bobbing her head.
“Josh and I were Irish twins,” I say. “Or that’s what my dad called us. Have you heard of those?”
“Born in the same year, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And he passed away . . .”
That’s not what this was. Wrinkled men who breathe last breaths on the cheeks of their sleeping wives pass away. “July thirty-first. Last year. Just a couple months after my mom left.” Desert dust makes my eyes sting. I blink and stare directly at Shrink. I want her to know I’m not crying.
Ask me, I dare her. Ask me about how I killed my brother and haven’t shed a tear about it since.
Instead she says, “I imagine you might have felt very alone. Abandoned, even.”
I say nothing because there is nothing to be said.
After a minute passes, she tries again.
“What did he say?”
“Huh?”
“The night you found out your mother was gone. What did Josh say?”
“Oh. Nothing. He gave me a journal.” I wave her away. “I used it in this writing class I took.”
“And do you still use it?”
“Why would I? He’s dead.” I press the soles of my feet together, hard. Every fiber of every muscle in my thighs is working silently.
“Okay.” She sits up straight. “So what would it mean, if you chose to write even though he’s not with us anymore?” She eyes my legs.
“He was never with us.” I roll the hems of my jeans up, then down. Up, then down. Up, then down.
“Even though he’s gone, I mean.”
Jesus, she’s exhausting.
“Okay, I’ll cut to the chase,” she says. “I’d like it if you’d start journaling again. Would you consider it?”
I cock my head. “Depends on what you want me to write.”
“I want you to write about what those days were like for you, after your mother left. About the things that stood out for you. Whatever you—”
“I’ll think about it,” I cut in.
“Good enough for me.” She smiles. Her eyes flicker to the thin gold watch on her wrist. “We’re out of time. But we’ll meet again day after tomorrow?”
“I’ll check my schedule.”
She laughs as she fishes for her sandals in the grass. “Our next session will be a little different. We’ll meet with your treatment team: the psychiatrist, dietician, and physician. Now that you’ve had a little time to settle in, we’ll spend the hour talking about the best course of treatment and how to move forward during your time here. Sound good?”
“No.” I stand up. We are almost the same height.
“Noted. See you then.”
As I head for the villa I realize I never finished my exercises. I assign myself triple the reps. I’ll have to do them in bed tonight, after CB is asleep.
Just as I reach the double doors of the villa, Shrink’s voice floats to me across the lawn.
“Don’t forget to journal,” she calls.
I yank open the door and let it slam shut behind me. She thinks writing can save me. She never considers that it was writing that got me here in the first place, destroying me from the inside out.