The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  “And she looked well?” You spin round to face me, and I can feel your eyes boring into mine, as if you will find Eleanor’s reflection in there, just so long as you look hard enough.

  “Yes, same old, same old. A little tired, but . . . that’s freshers’ term for you, I suppose.”

  I bend down to kiss you, and for the first time in years I close my eyes as I do so. I don’t know what they will give away.

  Eleanor had averted danger once, but regular service soon resumed. We were being cut off, slowly but surely; we knew as much even if we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit it out loud. Do you remember when she was little, just toddling, and we wouldn’t have a second to ourselves? The minute we were out of the room, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, she would be stomping after whichever one of us it was, dragging Jeffrey the bear behind her. I would have done anything to have that back, Mags. That closeness. That connection. That sense she still wanted us. Looking back now, I feel so selfish for wishing she would grow up faster, so we could have a second of peace and quiet. When she did, I couldn’t be at peace without her.

  She called sporadically, although there was so much silence on the line that I often wondered why she bothered. Was she reaching out, do you think? In some long-winded way? We would ask, in turn, as the phone passed between us, Are you sure you are OK? You can always come down here for a weekend, you know that, don’t you? I’ll drive you back as well . . . Here, talk to your mum, darling. With every stream of fabricated engagements that would stymie our attempts to visit, I could see the way you cradled the phone with such tenderness, cupping the plastic with both hands as if you were holding Eleanor as a newborn all over again.

  When she did return home in those first two years of university, we never received much warning. Sometimes Eleanor would ring for a lift from the station; other times there would just be a ring on the doorbell. That was the cruelest part, the not-knowing. I couldn’t bear to watch the way your face would light up at every unexpected call, the hope in your eyes, the way you would take a deep breath as if to open up the chamber of your heart to create just that little bit more space for love. I can imagine only too well what debilitating disappointment greeted the double-glazing salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses in our neighborhood.

  In the November of Eleanor’s third year, salvation came early. It must have been the first week, as there was a strong smell of bonfire in the air. Either next door was feeling festive or they had a lot of evidence in need of urgent disposal. We nearly didn’t hear the doorbell over the sound of fireworks from the park down the road.

  “Frank! That’s the door!” You are surrounded by piles of bills and the file boxes from which they emerged. The shredder burbles at your feet. “Frank!”

  I don’t need to ask what the urgency is. We have been living with it for years.

  “Yes, yes, I’m going. Calm down!”

  Even with my reading glasses I can see it is Eleanor. It is her size, her restless shuffling from one foot to another, the fact that her finger is poised to ring the bell again but hovers just an inch away.

  “Eleanor! You’re home.”

  It’s been over three months since I last saw her. She was here for a night in July, visiting friends before heading back up to Manchester, where she had a summer job. She arrived late, left early. Like every visit since she left for university, it was so short that it was impossible to draw anything out of her. Nothing important, at least.

  Maybe it is the arrival of winter, but the Eleanor on the doorstep now is the palest I have ever seen her, positively ashen, all the color drawn out of her. As if to compensate, there is a swipe of cherry-red lipstick across her mouth. I wonder if she did it on the bus; the blurred edges don’t quite match up with the pale curves of her own lips, and there is a smudge on the bottom of her top left tooth. It doesn’t do much to distract from her pallor.

  “Yeah, I’m back. That OK?” Eleanor looks down at her feet, kicks the front step. For a second, I am overwhelmed with a desire to tell her off, to remind her that we didn’t pay for scuffed shoes. That part of parenting never disappears, does it, Mags?

  “Yes, of course, Ellie, come on in.” I reach out to take the duffel bag that she is struggling to manage with both hands. She is wearing fingerless gloves that seem to accentuate just how little flesh there is. Her hands give a slight tremor as she passes her bag over. As she steps inside, I see her eyes flick, almost imperceptibly, over her shoulder. I wonder who might be outside. I wonder if this has become a habit too.

  Eleanor barely reaches the hallway before you are out, released from the burden of household bureaucracy and bundling her into your arms. She doesn’t reciprocate. Not obviously, anyway, not with arms outstretched or by leaning into your neck. She doesn’t shrink back, though, and I feel the relief course through me.

  Over dinner, I am grateful at how you manage to carry the conversation, to generate some sort of flow with even the most reluctant conversationalists. I find myself looking for signs that things are on the up, that what I had seen was a one-off. I stare so hard at her sleeves that a pain starts up behind my eyeballs.

  “So, Ellie, do you know how long you will be staying?” I have always been one for absolutes, as well you know.

  “Frank! What a question to ask! Eleanor has barely arrived.”

  “Not that we don’t want you here,” I scramble, trying to fight against the tension that is encroaching around the table. “You know you can always stay as long as you want. It’s just so we can make plans, maybe take some time off?” I meet your gaze and am glad to see that you are smiling again, nodding.

  Eleanor is pushing the carrots around her plate, and I am reminded of how she used to hide her vegetables under her knife and fork as a child, lining the sweetcorn up in two perfectly straight columns just to get down from the table.

  “Any idea, Ellie?”

  “I was thinking a few weeks.”

  In the corner of my eye I see you flush—with delight? Fear? I can’t tell.

  “Oh, Eleanor, that would be marvelous.” You are overcompensating, reaching over to touch her as if to check that this is for real.

  “What about your cour—”

  “I’m sure you need a break from all that hard work.” I am not sure you have ever cut me off with such decision before or since.

  “Thanks, Mum,” Eleanor mumbles, stretching out her hand toward yours.

  That night, when we are as sure as we can be that Eleanor is asleep, you finish my question for me.

  “What about her course? About university?”

  Even though we have gone months without seeing her, you still meticulously mark her term dates in our three-way family calendar, the sparsity of entries in the Eleanor column only serving to remind us of how close the hinges on our triptych are to falling clean off. I roll onto my side to face you and brush the stray hairs out of your eyes.

  “Let’s take each day as it comes.” I am close enough to feel your breath warm my collarbones. Your bottom lip quivers, and I stretch my neck to kiss you, to still you.

  The days themselves were stilted; the more we reached out, the more she pulled away. I mentioned it once—what I had seen, up in Manchester. I asked if she had spoken to someone, like I’d suggested. She told me she had. There was a free service up at the university. It was fine. She had sorted it. It was all in the past. The whole time she was speaking, she was fiddling with the tassel on a cushion, twirling it endlessly around her index finger. She didn’t meet my eye. Now, after everything that has happened, I wish I had pushed more. Pulled up her sleeves, demanded some incontrovertible proof that this wasn’t just another way to get us off her back. But then? I was just grateful to have her home for more than twelve hours. I returned to the living room and our own round of family charades: Eleanor in her room, door closed, pretending to work, us downstairs, door open, pretending to read, alert to her every movement.

  In the end, Eleanor barely made it through five nights. She left befor
e supper on the sixth day, which I could see killed you. When I returned from the station, the stroganoff was in the bin and you were in bed. I crawled under the duvet, fully clothed, my shoes still on. You buried your head in its spot, pressing your ear against the coarse wool of my jumper.

  “What if she gets hungry?”

  I was too late to save your bottom lip that time.

  I had long suspected Eleanor’s studies had fallen by the wayside, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to voice my concerns, not even to you. Still, when, shortly after her abrupt departure, Eleanor texted to let you know she would be deferring her final year, getting some “real-world experience,” it took a feat of willpower for me not to phone her and tell her in no uncertain terms that it was a terrible, terrible idea. Not that she would have picked up, I suppose.

  It killed me, Mags. That. It wasn’t about the money, how it looked to other people. It was her bright brain, all those stellar school reports—Top of the class! Firing on all cylinders!—the intelligent questions and the curiosity and our evenings on the patio discussing why everything was the way it was. It was the last dregs of all this pouring down the drain.

  When I held her that first time, her tiny, wrinkled fist clutched around my index finger, all I saw was potential. She could be anyone, do anything. I told myself I would do anything in my power to make that possible.

  And now? I had no idea if any of this was salvageable. While I agonized over what else we could do, you replied by text and told her that we supported her “no matter what.” I wasn’t consulted on that. I don’t blame you—finding the right words never has been my specialty.

  From then onward, there was even less regularity to when we saw Eleanor. We discussed an intervention. Multiple times. At first it felt so farcical saying that word, in the kitchen, hushed over supper, or sitting side by side on the sofa, cowering behind the Radio Times. That’s denial for you. And once we broke through that and accepted it as our only option? There must have been half a dozen occasions when we had steeled ourselves for it, only for our resolve to go out the window the moment Eleanor appeared on our doorstep, both of us desperate to hold her and touch her and confirm in her physical form—the shredded jumper, the messy hair—that yes, she was still among us. Distant, different, yes, but still there.

  Eleanor’s twenty-first birthday came and went without fanfare. It was the August after she should have graduated and she was still in Manchester, cagey about the work she was doing. Something in an office, answering phones, admin, “that kind of thing.” We sent a present, a necklace consisting of a fine chain and a slim disc of gold. We’d had her initials engraved on it, along with her birthdate. On the back, Love always, Mum & Dad. You had gone to all the trouble of getting the package tracked, insisting on sending it first class. A week later, the parcel came back. The recipient was no longer at that address.

  I remember the first time Eleanor came home on a comedown. Or the first time it was obvious, at least. It was only two months later, and the necklace was still in its navy cushioned box on your bedside table, the packaging long since crushed at the bottom of the bin. She arrived just after supper when you were in the bath. God, I was grateful for how long you spent in there then, Mags. You didn’t need to see Eleanor like that, really you didn’t.

  Her nose and eyes were streaming, which she blamed on the pollen, even though it was October and the pollen index must have been on the floor. Her pupils were large, like an owl’s, glazed and lost. There was a slick of moisture across her forehead, the sort you get with a fever, only she hadn’t mentioned she felt sick. Before you went to bed, you cranked the heating to high, and still she was shivering as I watched her from the living-room door.

  “It’s good to see you, Ellie,” I say to her back as she fiddles with the remote. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  She doesn’t turn round, so I go to sit on the armchair, forcing myself into her eyeline.

  “But, Ells, you don’t look it.” I steel myself. “What have you taken?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, Eleanor, there is nothing that matters to me more.”

  Eleanor turns off the TV and, briefly, meets my eye.

  “I’m an adult now.”

  “I know. It doesn’t mean we don’t care.”

  “I can do what I want.” Eleanor’s eyes flare. She’s prickly. Instinctively, I want to back off, but I’ve already got this far.

  “Yes, but your mum and I worry about you constantly. We want to help.”

  Eleanor looks as if she is about to speak, only it’s a yawn that comes out, the sort that seems to reset her jaw and looks as if it could swallow me whole.

  “Eleanor, please. What can we do? We can get you help. You can stay here as long as you want. We can . . .” I am exhausting my store of ideas, all of which seem vaguer out in the open than they did in my head.

  There is a silence and then—“It’s my life, right?”

  I nod because, well, she is right, isn’t she?

  Eleanor leans forward on the sofa and begins to thumb one of the array of cacti that sit on the coffee table, testing her pain threshold on one with long, thin spines. That particular specimen has lasted since one of our earliest dates together. I try to channel some of its tenacity.

  “So, I can lead it how I choose.”

  “Eleanor—not like this!” The last word comes out as a hiss. I am wary of disturbing you, of you coming back down and facing a scene. “Please, Eleanor, we love you.”

  The trump card. The one I’d hoped was so blindingly obvious I wouldn’t need to play it.

  “I know you do. I don’t deserve it. I’m bad. I messed up. I’m not what you wanted from your only child. I know all that.”

  “That isn’t what I meant at all.” I reach to touch her arm, just above the elbow. Under my palm, her whole bicep shakes, the muscles in spasm.

  “We love you as you are. But we want you well again, Eleanor. What did we do wrong, huh? Just tell me so we can fix it. We would do anything for you.” I am whispering, in fear of my own daughter. It is one thing to imagine you have a problem and quite another to have it confirmed.

  “Nothing,” Eleanor breathes, meeting my eye. “It’s just me that went wrong.”

  I don’t have the chance to ask more. Before I know it, she is on the move, snaking past me. For a second, she hovers by my side, close enough for me to reach out and touch the spot on her forehead where her baby hairs have never quite grown out. I am too scared to stand and kiss her there in case she bolts.

  “Night, Dad.”

  The next day she was gone. You didn’t even have the chance to give her the necklace.

  After that, we began operating some sort of halfway house. Or at least that was how it felt to me, putting her up when she was between places, low on funds, high and erratic or suffering the aftereffects. I never knew how much you caught of the interactions between Eleanor and me, usually snatched during the moments when you would be taking a bath or popping to the shops for supplies.

  She would never demand money, not in so many words, but the absence of overt pleading didn’t stop it from feeling as if she did: “My rent is due and I’m short.” “My phone broke.” I never found the energy to query these things, preferring to save my energy for asking the important questions: “Are you OK, Eleanor? Do you want to talk?” She’d shake her head, numb, like a child rudely awoken from a nap. She was vanishing before us, Mags. The lights were out, and there was no one I recognized at home. All I wanted was to hear that she felt something, anything at all.

  When I slipped crisp twenties into her hand, defeated and terrified by the thought of our daughter in need, evicted onto the streets, going hungry, I needn’t have reminded her not to tell you; the notes had barely left my hand before they were folded and stuffed in her pockets. The worst of all? “The train fare wiped me out,” as if visiting us was the real problem here.

  Having seen what I’d seen—was it reck
less of me? Maybe, Mags, but how do you turn away your only child coming to you in need? I like to think you would have done the same. The same instinct that compelled us to feed her when she cried out for it was now feeding her habit instead. I hoped it was a phase, for your sake, for hers, for my bank account. You tell yourself all manner of things to reconcile yourself to a bad decision. To keep that most invaluable part of you—your own genetic code—in your life, even in some diminishing form, you would do anything. You must know that too.

  The whole time I was thinking: This is not happening to me. This should be happening elsewhere, to someone else’s family. We had a comfortable home, an excess of love to give. How the hell had this happened? I judged myself, Mags. I should have taught her better, showed her the right path. Even when I thrashed one out for her, nothing would get through. The clinics, the meetings, the retreats—no-shows.

  I suppose what I’m trying to say, Mags, is that we never knew with Eleanor. We spent five years after she dropped out of university without a clue—when we would see her, how long it would be until the next time. And in the meantime, we were just about keeping afloat, while Eleanor did what she had to do. That was the agreement, right? She had to hit rock bottom. Because without it, in free fall, there was nothing to check her. She needed that jolt. That slamming realization that this had to stop. We would wait for as long as that took.

  I began almost to welcome the moments when she would take her leave of us. I hated myself for that. But then I would see you crumpled there, in the hallway, pawing at the carpet on the spot where she had just been as if it could give you back more than your own daughter could, and I understood why—or I nearly did. My heart was being torn in two, and there was no adhesive I could find that was strong enough to close the fissure.

  This isn’t a justification for what I’m about to tell you, Maggie, for what I did. No, there is no justification for that. Trust me, I’ve tried to find one. I’ve been trying to tell you this all along—what I did, what made me close off . . .