The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  We started getting letters home from school two terms into that first year of sixth form, alarming calls to my mobile that would flash up mid-consultation and send my stomach crashing to the floor. There was no problem with her work, not by any means, but some teachers had noticed she wasn’t participating in class. She seemed tired. The nurse had noticed she was losing weight. I sat through one excruciating weigh-in with Eleanor in the school sick bay—Now, Eleanor, we all need to eat! I know a lot of young girls aspire to be thin, but that isn’t healthy at all—and hoped she would be condescended back into her previous appetite.

  That night, at dinner, she did eat a little more. It was progress, embryonic, but progress nonetheless. I was so desperate not to let that slip that once she was in bed, I got up, went to the bathroom, and then waited outside her door until I could hear her snuffling snores start up. Our little truffle pig, you had called her as a toddler. I doubted that would go down very well now. Once I was convinced she was asleep, I edged into Eleanor’s room and sat with my back against the crenulations of the radiator until my coccyx felt on fire. I stayed there long after that point too.

  “Come back to me,” I whispered.

  Eleanor didn’t wake up. Or if she did, she never told me. Do you know, Frank, what I missed most when she went to university? It was that. The habit I developed, dedicating long nights to a vigil held at the foot of her bed, one hand supporting my own weight, the other reaching out, too scared to touch Eleanor lest she wake up. I never tired of watching her, the subtle inhale and exhale of her breath, the endless thrashing about from one side of the bed to the other.

  I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I watched her, at night, nothing else bad could happen. I’m wincing writing that, Frank. Naivety doesn’t suit me, as well you know. And I’m not sure that’s even what it was. I was paralyzed. I wanted to do it right—being a mother. Now, when I think about it, that is where I know I went wrong—thinking too much, wanting too much—and I hate myself for it.

  I will never stop feeling responsible for what happened. Not a day has gone by since she told me when I haven’t obsessed over what more I could have done. Frog-marched her to the therapist? Force-fed her three meals a day? Pulled her out of school and sent her somewhere else entirely? I have imagined all these scenarios, but none of them has struck me as the long-lost key to success.

  Do you blame yourself for what happened too, Frank?

  Through the chink in the study blinds, Frank watches as the neighbor’s children traipse to the bus stop. Eight o’clock. The oldest is never unplugged, headphones either in his ears or looped over the top like a bouncer who has yet to grow into his brawn. He has a short-sleeved shirt on, they all do today, and the skin on his biceps is covered in dark pink pimples. He doesn’t smile, and he certainly doesn’t engage with his siblings. Every time he sees him, Frank feels nervous.

  They never did get round to fixing the blinds, so there is no way to shut out the world, now awake and jostling with reminders. Without thinking, he finds himself on the stairs, planner in hand, and pushing open the door to Eleanor’s room. He switches on the light. It is exactly the way it was the last time she stayed: sparsely furnished, with very few personal touches anymore.

  Frank settles himself, back to the radiator, legs extended straight out ahead of him. He presses his palms into the carpet and feels the soft tufts of pile popping up between his fingers. Maggie did so much—dealing with the therapists, the school, guarding their child when she should have been asleep. She did the lion’s share, that was for sure. There was something so very personal about Eleanor’s pain. Even whilst it was still an unknown, it sometimes made him feel as if it wasn’t his place to be involved. It was that feeling of backing out of a room, hands up in surrender—Sorry, sorry for asking—and retreating, redundant, even when he hadn’t approached her in the first place. It didn’t mean he didn’t care, though. Quite the opposite.

  And what had he been doing while Maggie sat in this very spot, arms outstretched to their sleeping daughter? The same thing he has been doing for the past six months, albeit to a lesser extent. Do you blame yourself for what happened too? That’s exactly it. If he had a pen with him now, he’d mark her question with a big fat tick.

  “Of course I blame myself, Mags. That’s what I was about to say.”

  One day to go

  It’s a funny thing—blame. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, these last few months. For obvious reasons. For others too. It’s there, latent, as you go about your day-to-day. It’s in the prickle of guilt that starts the moment the alarm goes off, it’s behind every rash or sharp comment that punctuates the working day, it’s in the constant treadmill of anxiety that stops me from dropping off at night. And still life has to go on. Eleanor was about to go off to university, whether we could figure out our own chain of responsibility or not.

  Parenting would be so much easier if the age-old adage out of sight, out of mind actually applied to it. If anything, I felt worse when she was away in Manchester. When she was still at home, I could comfort myself with the knowledge that, in among the sweeping differences, there were still so many little parts of her intact. I could still see the old Ellie as she cut an apple into four pieces before eating it. I saw it in the way she licked her bottom lip in concentration while doing it. That sounds so silly, written down. Inconsequential. But when those tiny tics are all you have to hold on to? It’s everything, Frank; you must know that too.

  Once Eleanor was at university, those brief windows into the daughter we knew clouded right over. She would come home to visit during those first two years, but the occasions were so sporadically spaced that the subtle gradients of change disappeared in favor of fat slaps of strangeness. She stopped eating with us and wouldn’t come down to watch TV. Even when she did emerge from her room, she wouldn’t engage with either one of us willingly. There was withdrawal—we had seen that begin only too clearly—and then there was this: Eleanor in the grips of her illness. That was what it was, wasn’t it? It was obvious to us both by then.

  In the first term of her third year she came home not long before she dropped out. We hadn’t seen her since the summer, and even then it was just for a night. I had envisaged us catching up, making plans. Instead, she treated the house like a bed-and-breakfast, if she even managed to rustle up the latter. A few days in and I was so desperate to convince myself I hadn’t imagined the child I thought I had that I took the albums out of the cabinet and pored over the pictures of her when she was young, before everything went wrong. I looked for traces of her smile, on a fairground ride or being swung like a propeller in the park, your hands under her armpits and her feet spread wide. Where did she go, Frank? There is no helpline for parents who cannot recognize their own child anymore.

  I ran my hands over every precious, priceless smile and wished I had cherished them more when they were there. I missed her laughter and her curiosity, the way she lit up every room. I missed the warmth of her trust. I missed her while she slept just meters above my head.

  She caught me there.

  “Can I see?”

  I was so shocked I could barely speak.

  “No worries, then.”

  “No, no, please.” I moved to the corner of the settee to make space.

  She turned the pages in silence for a while before she asked me, “What’s your favorite?”

  “Photo?”

  She nodded.

  “Hard to say—there are so many.” I flicked back through a couple of the pages, the plastic sheets rustling before snapping down flat.

  “I like this one,” I said, after a while.

  It was one of the two of you at the kitchen table. According to my scribbled description beneath: Eleanor’s tenth birthday. Even without that, you could tell because there was a huge banoffee pie with a candle in it, her favorite, as the centerpiece, or so it should have been. Only something has tickled you both and your heads are bowed, foreheads touching. Neither of you has your ey
es open, both laughing so hard that your seams have split, glee pouring out in the breadth of your smiles.

  “What about you?” I ventured. “Are there any photos you like?”

  There was a second’s hesitation before Eleanor reached across to pick up the album. I felt that fragile stirring of hope. So deceptive.

  And that was when I saw it—a deep purple puncture in the center of her wrist.

  She noticed quickly enough because she dropped her hand, our bonding over, and wrapped the misshapen fabric of her sleeve back around her wrist. She began to stand up, but before she had even managed to get to her feet, I grabbed her. I thought I could feel the mark under the fabric, a drill hole in her skin, but that may just have been my mind playing tricks.

  “Eleanor.”

  “Get off me, Mum.”

  “No, Eleanor. Not until you explain.”

  “What is there to explain, Mum?”

  “Why?” I whispered.

  Was that when I started to cry? Probably. Eleanor inched toward me.

  “I never meant to hurt you, Mum. You know that, right?”

  I breathed in a lungful of her shampoo, but it only made the crying worse. Apples. Just like you, Frank.

  “Don’t. Don’t do this. Please.”

  I wasn’t making any sense, the words caught up in between sobs. Eleanor leaned closer, kissed me on the forehead. When had she grown taller than me? How had she made me into the child here?

  “Let us help,” I begged, grabbing fistfuls of her jumper.

  That was too much, clearly. She pulled back and went up to her room. She left less than ten minutes later, while I still sat rocking, my head in my hands, on the toilet seat, before I had so much as a chance to say goodbye.

  When Eleanor was little, we could fix anything. Cuts and bruises, arguments and disappointments—we could sort them all. Now she was an adult, in body if not in mind, and I couldn’t help her. That was what she was saying, wasn’t it, when she pulled away? Do you know how that killed me? All I wanted was to make everything all right for her. And I couldn’t, Frank. I couldn’t.

  I failed.

  Failed. Frank has thought about that word a lot recently, the long wail of despair stuffed in its middle. No one prepares you to fail as a parent. He wishes he could reach out and touch Maggie again, even if he did have to compete for space with the tubing and the IVs and the rustling of the strange, papery gown. “You didn’t fail, Maggie,” he would say. “I did.”

  For a while, Frank thought that he was doing it right. He didn’t panic. He didn’t push Eleanor away. Every time he gave in, every time she overstepped the mark and he adjusted his expectations, he told himself he was doing the Right Thing. He thought of their summer on the garden chairs, side by side underneath the stars, and the way Eleanor would talk when she’d wanted to. It had worked once, so surely it would work again. Right?

  But Maggie had said it, there in writing—it was an illness. The worst kind. He would have taken anything over this. If it was glandular fever, they could have waited it out. If she’d needed a kidney, she could have had his. Hell, take both. But when it’s an addiction, and they don’t want help? What then? Well, Frank knows what he did—he fed it because of his failure to know what else to do.

  He rereads the last page, Maggie’s scribbled transcription of her attempt to get through to Eleanor. He can see her, eyes imploring, a cloud across them that warns of the impending torrent of tears. Just speak to me. Open up. I’m here for you. He has heard those phrases all too often since he stopped speaking, especially in the first few weeks, when Maggie swung between burning frustration and a look of disappointment that kneecapped him. It is not just Eleanor he has failed.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the whole sorry debacle at the hospital, his confession on the very tip of his tongue. Then the nail jab and the alarm and the army of consultants. Another string of excuses and another opportunity to let Maggie down. Enough. When Frank is allowed back, he will tell her what he did the minute he is through the door. He will tell her everything, and he will throw himself at her mercy. He will say sorry until he runs out of breath.

  He failed to get it out the first time, but he will not fail again.

  One day to go

  How many times did we see her in the years that followed, Frank? A handful? No more. I have tried counting, but somehow they all blur into one—our desperate attempts to reach out and keep her safe. Our complete inability to do either.

  I tried to keep tabs on her, but what little online presence she had went dead. She moved out of the house on Albemarle Street shortly after she dropped out of university. She worked a series of temp contracts and was always on the move. “Couch-surfing,” she once called it, which sounds a damn sight safer than it ever seemed to me.

  For a while I was determined to report her to the police.

  “And tell them what?” you asked, rolling me over to face you, disrupting our spooning.

  “That . . . she’s missing.”

  “No, Mags, she’s not. She’s just not here. What could they do, anyway?”

  “Find her.”

  You told me she had to want to be found. You reminded me that she still texted, infrequently, yes, but it was hardly the behavior of a missing person. You told me she needed time.

  “How much time, Frank? How much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The bed creaked, equally uncertain.

  “I miss her, Frank.”

  “I know, Maggie. I miss her too.”

  We would go months without seeing Eleanor, and the whole time she was away from me, my skin itched with my need to see her. My eyes watered, and my whole body ached for her. I barely slept; I barely ate. She was the only drug I needed. The only thing I craved. When she was there, I was on my highest high. And when she was gone? I didn’t know it was possible to feel that low.

  So then imagine my guilt, Frank, when I came to dread her coming home—my Eleanor-shaped hit. You would make sure to get to the door first—to pave the way or clean her up. It was one of your greatest kindnesses to me, really it was. I would lock myself away in the bathroom while you carried on with the charade of a welcome and I would run both bath taps at full blast. I would watch the condensation settling on the mirror, the cabinets, the windows. Never once did I get in. What a terrible waste of water.

  By the time I came downstairs again, you would have given her cash. You never said as much, but I could tell. Even so, a day or so later, when I popped to the bathroom, I’d come back to find my purse ransacked and the cash gone. I stopped taking out money, and I wanted to tell you to do the same. Only I knew you wouldn’t listen, because without it, what would she resort to? I couldn’t bear the thought.

  I drew the line at bolting her in. You cannot keep your own child a prisoner. We did try an intervention, once. I say “intervention,” but that suggests we managed to make her listen when, in practice, quite the opposite was true. It wasn’t so much us confronting her as the other way around. And the anger in her then—there’s no way you can have forgotten that. Four years after she had left university, and after months of not seeing her, she was basing herself nearby. Temporarily, she said. In reality all it meant was that she was letting herself in and out of the house at all times of the day and night, taking what she needed and then leaving before we could do anything about it.

  Do you know, Frank, what I see when I close my eyes? Every night, without fail? It is that evening, the one time you caught her with my handbag. It is Eleanor pushing you by the shoulders, against the wall, to the edge. Your knees buckled against the radiator, braced for a fall.

  “Eleanor, please!” I approached her from behind, pulling at her hips, desperate to get her away from you. I had never seen her like this, so physical, so ugly. So far out of control.

  “Get off me. Just leave me alone!”

  Eleanor had taken her hands off you, but she was still close enough for the spit and the venom of her words to sma
ck you wet in the face.

  “Darling, please.” I tried to get her to calm down, to take a seat on the stairs, but she wouldn’t listen. You were too shell-shocked to say or do anything to help.

  She took a step back. “I should go.” Her voice cut like a knife across the corridor, slicing through the static. Gone was the fury of minutes before. Eleanor stopped and slumped against the bannister, one elbow jostling with the coats, her head in her hands.

  “Really, I should go.”

  I wasn’t about to refute that.

  “You don’t have to,” you said from the corner of the hallway, one hand still steadying you against the wall. Eleanor headed up the stairs.

  When she came down a few minutes later, bag in tow, she walked straight past me and toward you. “I’m sorry,” she said. She kissed your cheek and then the door swung shut behind her.

  We didn’t stop her then, did we? Not with proper force, not like a human barricade. No, we could shout and reason and cry and beg, but we could not lock her in. To do that would be to stymie that most beautiful part of Eleanor—her freedom.

  But if I had known, known what was about to happen? Well then that would have been different. For six months now I have spent every day considering what more I would have done had I known it would be the last time I would see her. There should be a memo about these things, so you don’t mess up your last shot. If I had my time again, Frank, I promise you I would have done it better. I would have kept her for us, even if it killed me.