January 1998
A COUPLE OF DAYS after the police came to our house, I passed out on my high school soccer field during team practice.
When I woke up, I was in the hospital after being admitted for a low heart rate, and a nurse was inserting an NG feeding tube through my nose. The pain of it making its way up my nostril was unbearable.
I could feel it passing the back of my throat until it reached my stomach, and I had the urge to gag and spit it out. But I was too afraid that I’d have to withstand the painful insertion process again if I did. After the nurse finished, she taped the tube on my face and marked it so she’d know if I tried to move it.
“When will it be taken out?” I asked her with begging eyes.
She explained the hospital policy required me to eat all of my meals for seventy-two hours before removing it, and liquid meal replacement like Ensure didn’t count. That meant I had to eat three meals and three snacks daily for three consecutive days. I had no interest in recovery because I had no interest in living without my mom. But I did what I was told because it was the only way to get the tube out.
After three days, I was ready to be discharged. Dad was terrified of me returning home. He knew I wasn’t well, and I’d fall back to restricting. He pleaded with the hospital to keep me, and when they told him they couldn’t, he asked the staff to help transfer me to a residential center.
This was the nineties, and the Malibu coast wasn’t lined yet with rehabs and treatment centers. Eating disorders were even more amorphous than they are now. The nurse told him there was only one local place, but it had no beds available, and there was a three-month waitlist. He had no choice but to take me home.
When we returned, he made dinner for us—hamburgers with tater tots and broccoli. He put the plate of food in front of me, and I threw it on the ground, watching it crash into a dozen ceramic pieces. Our small rescue dog, Rascal, ran over to gobble the burger up, but Dad quickly put him in his crate before he got to it.
Dad then returned to the dining room table, put his face in his hands, broke down, and cried. It was the only time I’d ever seen him cry. Even at Mom’s funeral, when he held my hand as her casket was lowered into the ground, and I saw he was about to, he bit his lower lip to stop himself. He was old school and believed he needed to exude strength so that I knew I still had one parent there for me.
As I watched him sob at our dining table, a tiny part of me that ED hadn’t completely taken over hated myself for what I’d done to him. But ED roared back, reminding me that Dad was a monster who secretly wanted me to gain weight.
I angrily got up from the table, stormed to my bedroom, and locked the door.
Later that night, I heard Dad talking to someone on the phone, saying he couldn’t manage me on his own anymore and didn’t know what to do.
The following day, when I woke up expecting him to drive me to school, I found him seated in the living room.
“Beans,” he said. “A bed opened up at the treatment center. I’m taking you there now.”
Not another place where I’d be forced to eat again. “I’m not going,” I said defiantly.
“It’s not a choice,” he told me.
“Well, you can’t make me,” I dug in.
“Either you come with me in my car, or the police will escort you there,” he said.
ED was cornered, so I stomped back to my room and packed a small bag to go to the stupid treatment center. I wasn’t planning on staying there long. I’d gotten myself out of the hospital in three days. I’d quickly find a way to get out of there too.
As we drove through the San Fernando Valley toward the center, I wanted to know who was responsible for ripping me away from my home and Rascal and, most importantly, interfering with ED.
“Who were you on the phone with last night?” I asked him.
“Uh … Rose,” he stammered.
I’d never heard that name before.
“Who’s that?”
“A friend of your mom’s … a former colleague,” he said.
“Is she the one that got me into this place?”
He nodded.
It struck me as odd that I’d never met or heard of this Rose friend before, and yet she was the one responsible for this. Whoever she was, I didn’t like her.
When we finally reached the center, Dad pulled up in front of a sprawling ranch in Hidden Hills. The exterior somehow looked familiar, as if I’d been there before, but I couldn’t place it. When we got out of the car and walked up to the front door, I spotted a red barn next door. And that’s when it hit me—Mom had shown me a picture of this place.
About six months before she died, we discussed where I might want to go to college and what I might want to do with my life, and she took me through her academic and professional history. She showed me a picture of her graduating from NYU, photographs of her at the UCLA psychology graduate program, and the various places she’d interned before becoming a licensed psychologist.
“This is where I did my first clinical internship,” she told me, pointing to the ranch. “Next door was a red barn filled with horses that the girls used for equestrian therapy.”
As I stepped inside the ranch for the first time as a patient, I imagined Mom greeting me, telling me it had all been a bad dream and that she was here, and everything was going to be okay.
But she was long gone, and I would have to face being there alone.