Karen might come home early from the hospital. Here’s a secret: I hope she doesn’t. I’m not ready for her yet. A lot of things happen when she leaves. There’s stuff that I try not to notice, like how good it feels to eat a meal without keeping one eye on how many bites Karen takes or wondering how Mom is going to get her to eat something. And it feels good not to eat in front of her. When she’s here and we all eat together, every bite is like your teeth don’t just cut into the food, they cut into everything that’s wrong in this house, and the taste can choke you. Food disgusts her. And when we eat, she watches us like we watch her. She looks fascinated and repulsed at the same time. It’s hard to eat a meal like that. And when she’s here, there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t eat: pizza, Chinese food, anything that tastes really good. Just the smell of it will send her flying out of the house yelling an excuse about going to the library or a school play or over to the house of a friend we’ve never heard of. With her gone, we get really good food delivered almost every night. And the nights we don’t order in, Mom gets out her cookbooks, or Dad makes chili or barbecue. Dad is the other thing that happens when she’s gone. He’s been home almost the whole time. Somehow the long drive to work doesn’t bother him anymore. He and Mom still fight, but before it really heats up and I have to go outside, they sigh and then talk about something else.
Here’s something else that happens when Karen’s gone: Me. I happen. Without her to absorb all the energy, there’s some left for me. They don’t even really talk about her, at least to me. The most they say is something like “When your sister gets back.” Instead they ask me questions about what my day was like and if I can handle how hot the chili is. What’s hard is that even though this would be the time for me to tell them everything, I don’t. I tell them school is fine. I tell them cool stories that I overhear at school, except I tell them they happened to me. I don’t tell the truth because things are too far gone. I can’t tell them how things are now because I’d have to explain how they got this way, and the truth is, I have no idea. It’s better to play along.
When Karen’s gone, she’s not the only one recovering. The truth is we need the rest. She leaves and we sleep well. When she’s not here, there’s no reason to fight about food, there’s no one to scream at Mom, there’s no one to ask Dad why he even bothers coming home, there’s no reason to watch what you say and what you do, because God forbid we piss Karen off and she leaves before dinner. It’s not like she leaves and everything gets better. We just take a break and pretend everything’s okay. We just need a break.