by PJ Sharon
Miss Montgomery sat up and put her feet on the floor, rolling her chair in behind the desk as she leaned toward me. She folded her hands and rested them on her desk as if she were going to say a prayer or maybe send me to the principal’s office, that thing that adults do when they expect you to listen up and pay attention. Her gray eyes peered at me hard. “Anything you say to me is confidential, you know that, right?”
“Okay.” I folded my arms across my middle and leaned back further in my chair, studying the stacks of files on her desk.
“I want to help you, Penny, but I need you to be honest with me. Can you do that?” She had the kind of blue-gray eyes that seemed ancient and wise, the kind you wanted to trust.
I hesitated. “I’ll try.” Since lying hadn’t served me well recently, maybe some truth wasn’t a bad idea.
“Good. Do you know why you’re suffering from bulimia?”
Her words hit me like a slap. My heart raced and my stomach flopped over like a landed fish. “What do you mean?”
Her sad smile returned and she sighed. “You know what I mean. You are rail thin and you have scars on the backs of your knuckles from forcing yourself to vomit.”
“I don’t...” My fists curled and I wanted to crawl under the desk.
“Do you want me to tell you what I think?”
Speechless and as scared as I’d ever been, I hesitated and then slowly nodded. The truth was I didn’t know why for sure. There were all the usual suspects. My skating coach telling me I was fat, my mother putting all the expectation of her unfulfilled dreams on my shoulders, my father not ever having told me he loved me, blah, blah, blah. But down deep, I didn’t know why I couldn’t be strong enough to fight against all those things and simply choose to be healthy and normal. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought I had it all under control...but...maybe...
“I think that you don’t believe you deserve to be alive, to be happy and healthy.”
My breath caught in my throat and I stayed very still, letting her words sink in, trying them on like a new skin. In that one sentence, I realized that she’d spoken the truth in a nutshell. No lie could cover it. I couldn’t argue or smile my way out of it. Whatever line of defense that remained in place crumbled.
“Maybe I don’t,” I whispered. I leaned forward and lowered my head into my hands. When I looked up, my eyes found hers, “My mother is dying. What am I supposed to do?”
“Do you want to die too?” Her face had lost any hint of amusement and I thought how she looked like an avenging angel at that moment, serious and on a mission. Her golden hair flowed in waves over her tanned shoulders, those ancient blue-gray eyes seeing past my flesh and into my soul.
“I...I don’t know. Maybe it would be easier.” My head dropped down again and my forehead rested on my palms. Tears dripped onto the carpet below me, as steady as a leaky faucet. The knot in my stomach loosened—such a small release. “The truth shall set you free.” The words rang clear and true in my head like a lighthouse bell clanging in the fog. I’d been a prisoner, living in a cell where the four walls were made up of darkness and lies. And she had opened a door. I had the sense that I simply had to step through to the other side to find the light that would lead me to safety.
Fear reached up from deep inside me and gripped my heart, choking my words, and trying to keep me locked in that dark room. I knew then that if I stayed there, I would die. I lifted my head from my hands and said with as much conviction as I could, “No. I don’t want to die.”
Before I knew what happened I was crying and telling her everything. I told her about Carter and how he’d tossed me aside and moved on without blinking an eye, about Tom and the horrible thing he’d done to me without me even knowing what was happening, about how sick I felt all the time—how hungry I’d been—for love, for sex, for food, for relief from my pain. I told her I hated my mother for smoking and getting cancer and for making me watch her die, and making me feel responsible for her happiness...her unhappiness. How I hated my father for being a coward, for hiding, for running away, for not loving me. How mad and jealous I was of my sisters for escaping and leaving me behind. I poured out every ugly thing that I kept locked inside of me as if I was throwing up the words, no longer willing to be silent in my suffering.
Shame and grief and rage spilled out of me in a toxic flood. When I finally stopped, I found myself on the floor, weeping sad, keening moans. I lay cradled in her arms, draped across her lap like a large toddler, sniffling and shaking, exhausted but too tired to do anything but cry. Her arms around me felt strong and safe, and for the first time in a long time, I thought maybe, just maybe, there was a spark of hope. When all the truth was told, the most important truth was that I wanted to live.
∞∞∞
Miss Montgomery recommended that I see a doctor and have a complete physical. I balked at this idea for several reasons, not the least of which was that I had no intention of telling my parents any of what I’d just shared with her. She insisted we could keep it all confidential and asked if I had anyone in my family I could talk to about what I’d been going through. I decided Sarah was my best bet. We’d gotten closer lately and I hoped she wouldn’t freak out. After talking with Miss Montgomery, I knew I couldn’t do this alone anymore. And I needed someone close I could trust. I called Sarah to come pick me up. When she arrived, I let Miss Montgomery explain about the eating disorder and the rape to save me going through it all again.
“It will take some counseling to determine the exact nature of her eating disorder, but I think it’s a combination of anorexia and bulimia that responds well to therapy.” She smiled sympathetically at me. “Penny has placed some strict controls around food, but she has managed to keep herself relatively healthy. That makes me think we’ve caught this problem at a very good time.” She patted my shoulder and hesitated, her eyes flashing from me to my sister, who rocked nervously forward and back, obviously shaken and processing the information, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “I’ll get you both something to eat and drink,” Miss Montgomery said, rubbing her own arms as if just noticing the air conditioning. Then, she excused herself and left us alone.
A moment later, Sarah broke down. “Oh, Penny, why didn’t you tell me?” My sister, normally composed and perfectly put together, sat across from me, tears rolling down her cheeks, her face contorted in pain. In jean shorts, no makeup, and a tank top, she looked more like the sister I had grown up with, and I remembered that when I was little she had held my hand whenever we were in the store or crossing a street. I was dragging Sarah back into her role as my protector and guide and I wasn’t sure if it would be good for either of us, but I needed her whether I liked it or not.
My throat ached from crying, my shoulders slumped from exhaustion. “The family has enough to deal with. I didn’t want to lay all of this on you. I’m sorry I dragged you into this.” I watched the grief and guilt crush my sister as she crossed the room and sat beside me on the leather couch in Miss Montgomery’s office.
Sarah wrapped her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “I’m the one who’s sorry, Peanut. I should have been here for you. I’ve been so caught up in my own life, I didn’t see what was happening.” She sat up and looked at me hard as if seeing me for the first time. “I didn’t want to see what was happening.” She wiped the tears off her face with the backs of her hands and took in a deep breath. “You don’t have to go through this alone anymore. We’ll get you help. We’ll do whatever we have to, okay?”
“We can’t tell Mom and Dad. Not now.”
She looked at me for a long time and nodded. “Agreed. I’ll take care of any expenses until we can figure out the insurance. I don’t want you to worry about anything.” Her face turned stony. “And when I get my hands on this Tom guy...”
“No, Sarah. You can’t...there’s nothing we can do. I have no proof, no evidence that he did anything.” A wave of nausea poured over me and I thought for sure I would be
sick. I couldn’t even entertain the thought of confronting Tom. The idea that Carter would know what his friend had done to me had my insides twisting into painful knots. He would never be able to look at me the same way again. That is, if he even believed me. I clutched my throbbing head. “Just let it go, please?”
Miss Montgomery returned with steaming cups of clam chowder and bottled water, and the three of us ate in silence. The chowder went down hard in small chunky bites, scraping against my raw throat. I chewed every bite for a long time before swallowing, trying not to think about calories or fat. My contracted stomach filled up quickly, but the warmth and flavor soothed something deeper. I accepted the nourishment with gratitude for the first time in months.
Sarah and I left the office, exhausted but hopeful, armed with a plan. Miss Montgomery hooked me up with referrals to both a family therapist and a general practitioner—both women—and suggested I talk with a rape crisis counselor. We had gotten the ball rolling. Now it was up to me to see it through.
Sarah snuggled into bed with me that night like she had when I was little. I slept better than I’d slept in years, safe in her arms, my belly full, and my mind freed of its burdens—at least until the sun came up and the light of another day broke the horizon, ready to shine its glowing rays into every dark corner of my life. Then there would be no more hiding—no more lies to keep me safe.
Chapter 17
Sunday, August 29th
Sarah knows everything. She spent the weekend, and we talked and cried and laughed, and cried some more. I was sad to see her go, but she has to be at work Monday morning. She said she’d be back on Wednesday after she picked up Rachael and Marie from JFK Airport. They’ll all be here to help get things set for the Labor Day picnic. I’m supposed to start school on Wednesday, but I convinced Mom that not much would happen the first couple of half days, and she agreed to let me start the following week after the holiday. It should be interesting seeing my sisters again. It will be the first time in almost five years that we’ll all be here together. I made Sarah promise not to tell them what happened.
Sarah made the phone calls and set up a doctor’s appointment for me tomorrow. She wanted to be here to go with me, but I insisted I could handle it on my own. As much as I’m grateful that someone knows what’s happening with me, I want to do as much as I can alone. Sarah has her life in New York and Mom won’t be around much longer. I don’t expect anything from Dad. I have to get used to taking care of myself.
I miss Carter every minute of every day.
Monday morning I went for my physical. The thought of seeing a doctor made my blood run cold.
The last time I’d been to my family doctor I was fourteen. He was an old Irish country doc my mom had used for years. He supplied her with a steady prescription of a variety of drugs, so he was a God in her book. When he insisted on teaching me self-breast examination and discussed the natural benefits of masturbation, I decided never to be sick again. Miss Montgomery had found me someone else.
It turns out that other than being malnourished, I was pretty healthy. Doctor Cheng was a young Asian woman, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, according to the diploma on the wall. I sat in a treatment room, chilled in my paper gown, while I waited for her to come back with the test results. She knocked and entered, a sympathetic smile plastered on her face.
“Well, Penny, you’re a little anemic, but otherwise your blood work looks good. I’m sending it for further testing to determine specific deficiencies, then we can set up an appointment with the nutritionist. You are underweight, but I expect to see that change pretty quickly. If you’re willing to co-operate, we can do outpatient therapies rather than hospitalizing you.” She wrote some notes on the chart and then took in a deep breath, letting it out slowly as she looked up again.
I could see the “but” on her face, and my heart did one of its quick stops and starts. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
“You’re pregnant,” she said carefully. Her face was so neutral, I thought I must have heard wrong.
“I’m...pregnant,” I repeated, my words falling flat and hard in the cool air.
“Since your periods have been so irregular, and your blood work is not reliable at present, we’ll have to wait for more test results to come back to determine exactly how far along you are.” She laid her hand over mine and the warmth startled me. “This isn’t the end of the world, you know. You have some choices here...”
She continued to talk, but nothing registered. A loud buzzing took over inside my head. Twenty minutes later I walked out of her office with a prescription for prenatal vitamins and an appointment for an OB-GYN examination the following week—right after Labor Day. I’d have to miss my first full day of school. I called the only person I thought I could tell.
I waited on the sidewalk in front of the medical offices until Sami pulled up in her brother’s old Chevy pick-up. I hadn’t seen her since the catastrophe with the Barrett Street Boys and I couldn’t believe how much had changed in a month. I climbed into the front seat and she smiled her best “let’s find trouble” grin at me. Then she saw my face.
“Shit. You look terrible. What happened? It’s not your mom, is it?” she asked, a note of panic rising.
I stared out the front window, sightless. “Let’s drive, okay?”
We drove out to the lake. The sky was overcast and the air cool, so the beach was quiet except for an older couple walking their dog and a few groups of kids playing Frisbee or tossing a football. I told Sami about all of the drama that had been going on the last few weeks and about the pregnancy. I hadn’t had time to process any of it and it came out in the monotone voice of a war veteran who’d seen too much. For the first time, I saw my dad in a whole new light. One person could only take so much.
When I told Sami about what happened with Tom, she swung to face me. “That bastard! I swear I’m going to cut his balls off in his sleep.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” I figured Tom would get what was coming to him, one way or another. “I can’t deal with him right now.”
“What are you going to do?” Sami asked, making room for me to walk beside her on the narrow trail leading around the lake.
A breeze drifted through the trees, bringing the scent of dry grass, dying leaves, and change. “I don’t know. I haven’t really had time to think about it. I know I can’t tell my mom. It would kill her. I have to wait and see what all the blood tests say I guess.” My stomach fisted into a knot at the thought that I could be carrying Tom’s baby as easily as Carter’s. I shook my head to rid myself of that wretched possibility.
“Well, if you want me to take you to the clinic or anything, I will. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there for me when I went through all that stuff.” She hadn’t mentioned it since, and I’d never heard her use the word abortion. I wondered how she felt about it now.
The path branched off and headed down to a small secluded beach. Without needing to consult each other, we took the fork and came out at a thirty foot stretch of rocky coastline. I picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the rippling water. It hopped three times and sank. “Do you think about it—the baby, I mean?”
Sami lifted a stone and gave it a toss. It arced through the air and dropped with a soft plunk. “I try not to,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any point in dwelling on something I can’t change.”
I searched the shore and found another small, round, flat stone. “Do you ever wonder though? What it would be like if you had told Bull about the baby? Maybe he would have wanted you to keep it. Maybe you could have raised it together.” I dipped my right shoulder and whipped the rock, side-armed, sending it skipping six, seven, eight, times, before it disappeared under the surface.
“That’s a lot of ‘if’s’ and ‘maybe’s’, Pen.” She lobbed another stone and watched it drop, a circle of wide ripples spreading out around the spot. “I suck at this.”
I sm
iled, surprised my lips co-operated, and then continued. “What do you think Bull would have said?” I dropped onto the sand and Sami sat down beside me. We watched as a Great Blue Heron sailed across the water, its giant pterodactyl wings skimming the surface, graceful and silent in its hunt for food.
“I don’t know. He’s a good guy. He probably would have been all stupid about it and wanted to get married or something. I wasn’t ready for that and I would have always wondered if he was only with me out of obligation. Besides, he might have thought I did it on purpose to trap him. It was a lose-lose situation all the way around. You know what I mean?”
“I do.” I had been having the same thoughts about Carter for the last two hours.
I watched the heron float down as if parachuting onto the lake, its spindly legs breaking the glassy surface and settling itself into the shallows to perch and wait for an unsuspecting frog or crayfish. A moment later its head disappeared under the water and then popped up, a small struggling fish caught in its long, sharp beak. The bird took flight, tucking long thin legs gracefully under its sleek body. Thick blue-gray wings flapped hard against the air as if the food that would sustain it was something it had to fight for and conquer. I felt sorry for the fish, minding its own business and then suddenly ripped from its simple fish life and carried off to be torn apart by a merciless predator.
But watching the Heron rise above the water and soar effortlessly across the sky, all of its basic needs met in that one moment in time—no thoughts of the future—no questions, no burdens, no guilt. Right then, I would have given anything to be that bird.
Chapter 18
The next day, I skipped skating practice and went to my first counseling appointment with the psycho-therapist. I barely managed to make it in the door before falling apart. I spent the hour crying my eyes out over the disaster my life had become. One more bit of bad news and they’d have to lock me up, for sure.