Dear Linda,
I think about you all the time. I’m trying to be ready for when you get here. Ready to say yes again, I guess. Ready to keep up with you. Ready to try for something I’ve never thought I could have before.
I know I can achieve a lot on my own and I will. But some things would be easier if I could breathe the same air as you for a while every day.
Are you well? Are you safe? Do you remember what I remember?
Love, Marissa, Day 23 without you
If she actually put them to paper she’d have dozens of such letters by now. If Linda knew how sentimental and corny she was—
sleeping with a shirt under her pillow—she’d probably be turned off by it.
There was good news in her office, however, in the form of Ocky who met her at the door with a gleeful smile. “I did it—we’re going to offer group parties and discounts. No more stigma and 118
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shame about using a mate-finding service. Get your friends involved and all that. There’s no end to the number of women who don’t have time for bad dates. And where the women start enrolling the men follow.” Ocky did a little dance. “Want to go have a burger?”
“No—can’t do it today. I eat too much.”
“But you’re working out.”
“I’m gaining weight, not losing it.”
“When was the last time you ate a package of Oreos? You’ve totally changed your habits since we left college.”
“Too little, too late. I don’t need the Oreos anymore,” she added without thinking. “Hey—I came out to my mother.”
Ocky collapsed into the only chair that wasn’t layered with files.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Just told her. Told her that . . .” Oops, she’d nearly mentioned Linda but she’d not told Ocky about Linda. “I told her that someday I hoped to have a woman in my life. I think she already knew. She was angry because she couldn’t ignore it any longer.”
“That is so totally cool. Good for you. Feeling better now?”
“Not really. I care about her, I guess. I was hoping she’d prove she cared about me.” Why had she stopped eating the Oreos after college? She and Ocky had concocted their Finders Keepers scheme and started it all out of Ocky’s garage and with Marissa’s dead grandmother’s trust fund payouts. For the first four years they’d both had dead end jobs. Marissa’s had been doing basic systems maintenance at a women’s health clinic.
“You’re all she’s got. I hope she figures that out finally.”
Marissa shrugged. “She will or she won’t. I think she’d love to brag about me at the club and compare me to other people’s kids—
live through me a little. But other than surviving a shipwreck, there’s little to brag on.”
“Only because she’s got whacked priorities.”
Marissa had to agree and she finally waved Ocky out of her office, eager to make some headway on several fronts.
But as she spent the next several hours sorting through ques-119
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tionnaire feedback in preparation for their next update, she found herself occasionally musing on the role of Oreos in her life.
“She didn’t say a word, not one word, and I was like you said—
like a teenager. Deep down I think that if I talk enough, it’ll make her angry and she’ll break. She doesn’t want me to talk. She didn’t like me talking to other contestants and certainly not to my teachers about what it was like to be in a pageant. I wrote a paper in high school about it and she had a fit.” Curled in one corner of the large chair, Linda couldn’t stop one leg from fidgeting as she talked.
Dr. Kirkland was listening intently and nodding. “What do you think she’s afraid you’ll say?”
“That’s worse than all the stuff she had done to me when I was a kid? I don’t know.”
“But teenage Linda knows, doesn’t she?”
Raking one hand through her hair, Linda said, “I think so.
When my mother treats me like I’m not there I think, you know, I don’t have to take that from her. I don’t have to clean my plate. She can’t treat me—”
“Back up. Why did you say that?”
“What?” Linda tried to rewind her last few sentences. “That I don’t have to take that from her?”
“No, after that.”
“She can’t treat me that way.”
“No.” Dr. Kirkland leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You said you didn’t have to clean your plate.”
“I did?” Linda winced at the throb that pulsed right below her left cheekbone. “I mentioned a plate?”
“Yes, you did. Last session you said ‘clean plate’ when you meant ‘clean slate.’”
“Slip of the tongue.”
Dr. Kirkland didn’t say anything at all, just kept that thoughtful, supportive gaze trained on Linda’s face.
“It’s just a random memory.”
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“I’ve always been surprised that you don’t have an eating disorder, given how much your mother pushed you about how you looked.”
“She never withheld food.”
“Encouraged you to eat, even?”
“She was strict about nutrition but sometimes she’d make me a favorite meal. Especially the one time with the plate I keep remembering. The time that . . . oh.”
Linda didn’t think that Dr. Kirkland was breathing. She wasn’t sure she was either. She said again, slowly, “The time that . . . she gave me a plate of food. It wasn’t lunch. It wasn’t dinner. Just a lot of food. Things I liked. She told me to clean my plate.”
In a low voice, Dr. Kirkland prompted her with, “Describe every action, everything you remember. If you don’t remember just skip to what you do.”
“She tidied up the counter. Threw stuff away, that sort of thing.
Then she turned to me with the food. It was on a white plate. She handed it to me and I took it. I don’t remember after that.”
“How old were you?”
“My hands are . . .” Linda glanced down, visualizing her hands as she saw them in the memory. “They’re not so tanned as they are now. My fingernails are manicured and painted. So I must have been fourteen or fifteen.”
Slowly, Dr. Kirkland repeated back, “She tidied up the counter.
Threw stuff away, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Linda closed her eyes against the rising pain of the headache. “She tossed out the take-out containers and the yeast packet, then turned—O h! God.”
She saw it then, the red, blue and yellow packet. Saw her mother tear it open and sprinkle most of the contents over Linda’s favorite Chinese take-out.
Pressing both hands over her mouth, Linda relived the bloat-ing, the pressure, the urge to vomit. Sweat prickled in a hot flush all over her body. The next thought, even worse, struck across her mind like a lightning bolt: it hadn’t been the first time.
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Dr. Kirkland was already on her feet, quickly stuffing the waste-basket between Linda’s knees even as she wrapped one arm around Linda’s shoulders, saying intensely, “I’m so sorry. So very sorry. It makes me so angry that she did that to you. It’s okay. You’re not there. It’s okay.”
Linda gulped for air through her hands and swallowed down the burning of bile. Never again. She remembered now. She remembered everything and she wouldn’t get sick again.
The light in the office had changed by the time she was able to sip some water and breathe more normally.
“It was the first time I saw her do it but then I realized she’d been doing it for years. Every time I lost a pageant I got sick, really sick. I threw up for days. She’d get all this great food for me to tempt my appetite, she said. She took me to doctors, who were mystified. She told pageant people that I�
��d obviously had food poi-soning the night of the competition or else I’d have never lost.”
“So you saw her put the yeast on your food?”
“And she told me to clean my plate.” Linda swallowed hard. “I took the plate from her and she said a good meal would make me beautiful.”
“How long after that time that you saw her did you attempt suicide?”
“Probably a week, maybe a little more. The attacks lasted at least that long and I couldn’t keep anything down. I kept the pills down.” She’d never been sure whether her failure to lock the bathroom door had been an oversight or if she’d really not meant to be successful. Not that the difference mattered to the fallout.
“And she had you committed.”
A white-hot bolt of anger split Linda’s head in two. “She threw me away into that place because I was her loser daughter. I couldn’t win a tiara and she couldn’t present me to the world like a prize pet she’d groomed to champion status.”
The migraine blossomed into a full aura of red as she finally 122
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broke down into wracking sobs. “That’s what she did. She made me sick. I can’t tell Marissa. I haven’t called her. She’ll hate me.
She couldn’t understand.”
She cried into the warm shoulder, frightened and hurt and so far down into the pain that it felt as if she’d never crawl out of it again. She felt fourteen. Fifteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-six when that soccer ball had brought back all the memories of all the surgeries she’d endured. All those times when she had thought the pain of living was too much and tried to end everything.
It hurt so damned much. It hurt . . . and she was all alone to bear it, the way little Linda had been alone and teenage Linda had been alone.
It was a while before she could form any other conscious thoughts beyond the depth of the pain and the intensity of the awareness of how lonely the despair had made her all her life. She wasn’t alone, though, there was a thoughtful, supportive and caring woman hugging her, someone who believed what she’d said. She wasn’t alone.
“If I can understand, then anyone can, Linda. Anyone who cares about you will be able to listen to your story, hurt for you and understand.”
“Yes, but if I told Marissa, it would be like letting my mother hurt her too.”
“You don’t have to tell anyone at all. The only person who needs honesty is you. Your mother hurt you, she hurt you badly.
But you survived. You survived and did whatever it took to hold that secret back until now. Now you can handle it.”
“No,” Linda said between shudders. “No, I can’t bear this. It hurts all over again.”
“Yes, it does. It hurts just as bad as it did all those other times.
The pain you feel is the beginning of healing it. If I gave you a pill right now and told you if you took it you’d die in minutes, what would you do?”
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Linda knew right away but it was more than a few seconds before she could work her surprised answer past her lips. “I wouldn’t take it.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’re strong enough for the pain now.
That’s why you remembered.”
Linda slumped in the seat. Her brain felt bruised from the inside and her vision blurred in waves of red. Weakly, she said, “I wish I could sleep.”
“I don’t do this often, but I have a spare room clients sometimes use. I really think you shouldn’t go home.”
“Okay,” Linda said quietly. “I don’t want to go home. It’s not home. Just for a little while, then—”
Dr. Kirkland shushed her. “We’ll worry about that tomorrow.
You’ve done enough hard work today.”
Sometime later as she slipped into sleep, Linda was vaguely aware that she was in a safe place. Dr. Kirkland’s husband had a quiet voice. The walls were a soothing, pale blue which reminded her of an ocean sparkling outside a bungalow door. She’d felt safe there too . . . safe with a woman who laughed . . .
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Chapter 9
“Well, of course exercise is important. We here at Take It Off have a sensible, modest exercise program that will only further accelerate your weight loss.”
Agreeing silently that a plan of four thirty-minute walks a week qualified as “modest,” Marissa glanced over the menu program that the perky size-five Emelie had given her. “So the program is two of your TIO shakes a day, two of the special energy and nutrition bars and one of the pre-made meals.”
Emelie’s smile was blinding. “That’s the weight loss program, yes, you’ve got it perfectly. But when you get to stage three where you want to stop losing weight, there’s a different maintenance plan. You could be at your goal weight in a matter of months.”
The idea that she would ever not be trying to lose weight seemed outlandish. She remembered Bianca’s story about the magic fat burning pills—it was another pipe dream she wanted to believe. She wasn’t here thinking the program was an instant cure.
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She wanted to be absolutely certain of what she was eating, that was all. “Oh, I don’t think so. But it’s nice to imagine it.”
Emelie leaned forward as if to share a secret she didn’t tell just anybody. “You don’t have to exercise. It’s not crucial.”
Marissa knew she’d keep up her work at the gym but she’d do less of it if she was also carefully watching her calories. “I do work out.”
“Oh, of course you do. You know, instead of the regular Take It Off shakes, you might want to go with the premium. Extra protein and potassium since you do work out. Working out is good for you, I’m sure.”
Marissa wrote a check for her enrollment and the first two weeks of food. Poorer, and not entirely encouraged, she took it all home.
It had been seven weeks since the shipwreck. Six weeks since she’d said good-bye to Linda. There were no messages, no postcards.
Likewise, there was no communication from her mother. She wondered if she should be the one to break the impasse. She’d done nothing wrong—okay, maybe been a little ungracious and abrupt—so why was she supposed to be the one who made nice? It was a bit of a relief not to spend each day dreading a phone call.
Her Saturday night, empty of a beau, loomed long and lonely.
Wasn’t that the most common reason given by new clients? That they were alone on Saturday night and decided to give Finders Keepers a try? She and Ocky had agreed not to use the FK services for themselves so they wouldn’t have to admit they’d failed, should that happen. What if Linda never got in touch? Maybe she should at least profile herself so she could study the profile of her ideal partner? What if it wasn’t Linda? What if it wasn’t Ocky either?
Well, it wouldn’t be Ocky—Ocky didn’t and wouldn’t ever care for her back, not sexually. And, dang it all, after a great night of sex with Linda there was no way she was accepting something less.
Dear Linda,
I didn’t tell you about Octavia—not the whole truth anyway. Until you turned around on the lifeboat and talked 126
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to me like I had a brain and a body, I was happy enough to have a crush on Ocky. I was alone on Saturday nights because I chose to be. Now I see it wasn’t a choice I made, but one made by so many others who saw only a brain in me, and wanted bodies that were anything but like mine.
Until you, I didn’t know what it was like to be wanted.You made a miracle for me, and I don’t know if I will ever see you again. I want to see you again. I want so much more than merely seeing.
Love, Marissa, Day 42 without you
P.S. Please don’t make me survive without you.
She frowned at her dinner. Such depressing thoughts, on a Saturday night all alone, meant there was nothing else for it but to p
luck her eyebrows. Staring into the bathroom mirror she realized she didn’t flinch as she had for a while after that horrific self-assess-ment in Tahiti. But the woman on the outside still did not match the woman she now truly believed existed on the inside. The woman who had made it up that cliff was not the helpless fat chick she still saw in the mirror, even after all these weeks of elliptical trainers and core-tightening weight lifting.
In the morning, her eyebrows perhaps a bit too thin, she made herself drink the first shake and tried not to be hungry. She plod-ded to the gym, even though she felt it was pointless.
Five weeks later, and feeling as if it had been a lifetime, the chill of the conference room was a welcome reminder to Linda that her heart was like ice where her mother was concerned. The week of uncomplicated days and nightly unbroken sleep at Dr. Kirkland’s house had brought her more peace than she’d ever thought possible. Only those few minutes after climaxing in Marissa’s arms had been better.
From Dr. Kirkland’s house, flush with the very small quarterly stipend from the only investment account in her name, she’d 127
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found a small studio outside Boston—way outside—and decided she wasn’t too proud to flip burgers for food money. The last month had been tiring but, in an odd way, exhilarating.
She did not want to live this way forever, however. She wanted to start over deciding what exactly she proposed to do with her life.
Even if she got everything she wanted out of this meeting, she would not go back to being a drifter. Having a driving purpose to prepare for this meeting over the last four weeks had felt wonderful.
She looked over at her lawyer and smiled. Ted Jeffers was a decent human being, as was Dr. Kirkland.
Alligator entered first, just as before, then held the door with an air of ushering in the most delicate woman in the world. Her mother didn’t look at her.
There were pleasantries, which Ted Jeffers concluded with,
“My client has decided not to delay the competency hearing any further.”
Linda had the tiny satisfaction of seeing her mother blink.
Alligator beamed. “That’s very good news.”
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