Phyllis stayed perfectly still. Waiting for whatever was to come.
“Even if he determines, because of those examples, to go the opposite way, the values he grew up with are second nature to him. They feel like part of him. Those feelings again guide him to the assumption that he’s capable of the bad stuff, too. More capable than someone who grew up in TV-land. And then, one day, bad things start to happen, almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe, because he believes he can’t help it, he makes a bad choice or two. And once that kid’s in any trouble at all, the judging begins. No one’s surprised. He is, after all, the son of a convict. His family is rotten. Everyone knows it. They feel sorry for him, but don’t doubt his rottenness. They shake their heads and think it’s sad the poor kid never had a chance—and maybe wonder how it took him so long to get to this point. And they ask themselves—sometimes loud enough for the kid to hear—what business a man like his father had had fathering children in the first place.”
With the help of much practice, Phyllis schooled her face into impassivity, but she cringed inside as Matt’s words fell unemotionally between them. Cruel remarks could do so much damage to a psyche. Especially when spoken by adults and overheard by children.
“So what if one of the kid’s parents is an ex-con, but the kid’s raised in a home with good values with none of the bad examples?”
Matt blinked, looked at her almost as though he’d just realized she was there. “The truth will still come out eventually,” he said. “And with it, the reputation.” He’d reconnected with himself. There was emotion in his voice again. Defeat. Resignation.
There was also some truth to his words. Some.
“You’re a good man, Matt Sheffield,” Phyllis said. Her voice might be soft, but it was filled with conviction. “This isn’t the time for you to be a father, we’ve already decided that, but please don’t think you shouldn’t ever be one.”
“It’s not up for discussion.” He opened the door again.
“Fine, we won’t discuss it,” Phyllis said, joining him at the door, holding it as he left the house. “But you’d make a wonderful father, Matt,” she said behind him.
He stopped cold, didn’t turn around.
“You’ve got the most reliable conscience of anyone I’ve ever met. What’s more, you listen to it. And live by it.”
He stood where he was for a few more seconds and then strode off into the darkness.
He didn’t say goodbye.
PHYLLIS WAS READY and waiting for Sophie the next morning. She’d just gotten off the phone with Tory. Her friend was home, up and around, happier than Phyllis had ever heard her. Apparently Phyllis Christine was the most perfect baby ever to arrive on this earth. Phyllis couldn’t wait to go over and see her…see them both.
She’d left the door to her office open and Sophie knocked as she came through. The girl, frighteningly thin, was wearing a pair of stretchy beige hip-huggers and a long gray sweater that showed just how little there was to her stomach and thighs. Her blond hair was fashionably styled but didn’t have any luster. Her makeup was impeccable.
She was a beautiful girl.
Sophie sat in the chair at the side of Phyllis’s desk. Crossing her legs, a little self-conscious about her own recent weight gain, Phyllis turned her chair so she was facing the girl diagonally.
“I’m glad you could come in.” Phyllis tried to meet the girls’ eyes, to let her know she meant the words.
Sophie was looking around the room. She shrugged. “Matt asked me to.”
Matt? Phyllis was a little surprised, considering how reserved he was, that Matt’s relationship with his students seemed so casual.
The girl was still looking around, her eyes not landing anywhere for long.
“You have anything you’d like to talk about?”
Her brows raised, lower lip pouting just a bit, Sophie shook her head. “No. I’m just here because Matt asked me to come.”
Yes. She’d already said that.
“Mind if I talk a bit, then?”
Sophie met her gaze for the first time, obviously caught off guard. “No,” she said slowly.
“Matt told me you were thinking about quitting school—”
“Only for a minute,” Sophie interrupted, her expression earnest. “I’m over that, which is what I tried to tell him yesterday, but he’s got himself all concerned, anyway. He’s like that, you know.”
“Right.” Phyllis watched Sophie closely, trying to read between the lines—and through the bravado.
Perusing the room again, Sophie didn’t seem able to focus her attention on anything.
Phyllis grabbed a bowl of candy from the cabinet behind her, held it out. “Would you like a piece?” she asked.
“No thanks.” Sophie didn’t look at the bowl.
Phyllis put it back. She never ate the stuff herself, but liked to have it handy for her students—and the faculty who often stopped by for a dip in the bowl. She enjoyed the camaraderie of their visits.
“Do you like sweets?” she asked.
“Nah.” Sophie appeared to be studying Phyllis’s degrees hanging on the wall behind her.
“I love them,” Phyllis confessed. “Or I did.”
Sophie glanced at her and then back toward the degrees.
“I graduated from Boston College,” Phyllis said. “And then Harvard for my masters in psychology and Yale for my doctorate.”
“Wow.” Sophie sounded genuinely impressed. “You must be smart.”
Phyllis shrugged. “Or just good at going to school.”
“Yeah, but Harvard and Yale?”
“I know.” Phyllis rolled her eyes. “Pretty impressive, huh?”
“I’ll say.”
“Well, I gotta tell you, impressive as those degrees might be, I still ended up doing something pretty stupid with my life.”
Sophie stared at her, frowning. “Teaching here? That’s not stupid! Montford’s one of the best schools in the country.”
“No. Not professionally, personally.”
“What’d you do?” The girl, leaning back in her chair, skinny legs extended almost straight in front of her, was starting to focus a bit.
“I chose the wrong man to marry, for one.”
Sophie’s eyes clouded. “Bummer.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re divorced?”
“Yep.”
“How many times?”
An odd question.
“Only once,” Phyllis answered, trying not to appear as carefully observant as she was. “I’d had a couple of pretty serious breakups before that, but only one divorce. It’s all I intend to have.”
“You say that now.”
“I know it,” Phyllis assured the girl. “I’m not going down that road again.”
“That’s what my mom always says.”
“Always?”
“Yeah, each time she gets divorced.”
“How many times have there been?”
“Five, counting the one she’s going through now.”
That could certainly cause low self-esteem and emotional insecurity in an adolescent girl.
“What about your father? Do you ever see him?”
“Nah. He left when I was about two. I think he remarried, but my mom never really said for sure.”
“You ever consider looking him up?”
Sophie shrugged. “What’s the point? He knows where I am if he wants to see me. It’s been eighteen years, so I’m guessing he doesn’t.”
Phyllis’s heart went out to the young woman. “You don’t know that,” she said. “It’s possible he thinks you don’t want to see him. That he’s trying not to interfere in your life.”
Sophie looked away. “I wrote to him between husband number three and four,” she said with youthful bitterness. “I was just starting high school. He never wrote back.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SITTING THERE in her office, facing the chair that had been occupied by numerous st
udents over the past year and a half, Phyllis felt a personal pain she’d never felt with a student before. She wondered if it was because this girl was Matt’s star pupil, and Phyllis and Matt’s lives were so confusingly tangled at the moment. Or, more likely, she thought, Sophie was just something special all by herself, which was why she’d become Matt’s star pupil.
“Maybe your father didn’t get the letter.”
“He got it,” Sophie said dryly. “And even if he didn’t, surely he got at least one of the four other letters I sent him before I figured out he really didn’t care.”
The bastard. That was the type of man who had no business fathering a child. Not someone like Matt Sheffield, who was so aware of the far-reaching responsibilities of fatherhood that he was sparing all future children from suffering because of him.
“Could you have had the wrong address? Maybe he moved.”
“He paid child support sporadically—whenever my mom was in between husbands and went after him for it. I got his address off one of the checks she left lying around.”
Warming to the girl, to the problem that wasn’t completely unlike her own experience, Phyllis searched for a way to connect—to help Sophie.
“You know, after my husband left, beating me up emotionally on his way out, I had a really hard time realizing that his rejection had nothing to do with me. That the problem was him—not me.”
Sophie looked away, her gaze somewhere around the window behind Phyllis’s desk.
“He wasn’t home enough to really know me there in the end,” Phyllis went on, “but of course, he knew me better than your father knows you. I mean, how can a man who hasn’t seen you since you were two even know what he’s rejecting?”
Sophie’s eyes were bright as she looked back at Phyllis, but although Phyllis waited, Sophie didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, after Brad left, I wasn’t very smart. I went through a period where I just hated myself. I wasn’t woman enough to keep a man. Wasn’t pretty enough, sexy enough,” Phyllis said, telling this special girl something she’d only told her very closest friends. And then, only recently.
“What’d you do?” Sophie asked quietly, her chin lowered as she watched Phyllis from beneath her lids.
“I punished myself, my body, by eating everything in sight. I was undesirable. I deserved to be fat, to have men look right through me when I walked down the street.”
“But you aren’t fat!” Sophie said, her eyes wide.
“Not now. And that leads right into the next stupid thing I did.”
“What?”
Phyllis had the girl’s attention now.
“I did a complete reversal. I started punishing myself by not eating at all. For a brief period there, the only time I liked myself was when I went twenty-four hours with less than a thousand calories. And the scariest part was that I didn’t know I was still punishing myself. I thought I was finally coming through for me, becoming the healthiest, most attractive person I could.”
“Well, it worked,” Sophie said. “You look great.”
Coming from someone whose whole life, whose sense of beauty and very sense of self was based on being thin, that was indeed a compliment.
“It didn’t work,” Phyllis came back immediately. “I realized I wasn’t doing myself any good by risking my health. I knew from my research and clinical experience that if I didn’t stop, I’d wake up some morning and have to get out of bed in stages because I’d be too dizzy to stand. Or too weak. I’d end up having trouble concentrating. And my emotions would be all over the place.”
Phyllis tried to remember the other symptoms Matt had listed, certain she could name them, too. Because while she was definitely choosing words that were designed to help Sophie see herself, they were also the truth. Her own lack of perspective on the issue of weight had never been as extreme, or as long-term, but it was something Phyllis had experienced. She understood Sophie’s dilemma on a personal, as well as a clinical level.
“Must’ve been rough,” Sophie said. If she was getting the message, she was damned good at hiding the fact.
And to this point, Sophie hadn’t been good at hiding anything. Not her nervousness. Or her complete lack of interest in being there when she’d first arrived.
Her genuine fondness for Matt.
“Yeah. The roughest part was recognizing what I was doing. After that, I lost weight the right way. A healthy diet and exercise. It wasn’t easy to start eating again, though.”
“What’s so hard about eating again?” Was that scorn in the girl’s voice? Or was Phyllis just so intent on helping Sophie, on helping Matt, that she was looking too hard and seeing things that weren’t there?
“When you’ve learned to hate yourself for every bite you take and love yourself for every bite you don’t, having to eat is very difficult. For that first week or so, I’d make myself eat a healthy meal and then feel depressed. I couldn’t bear to go out or have anyone see me because I was sure they’d see every single calorie and fat gram as though I were wearing them on top of my clothes, instead of underneath.”
“You could always wear bulky clothes.”
Gotcha, Phyllis thought. Sophie was right there on the journey with her, traveling a familiar road.
“But you have to take them off sometime. To bathe. Change. And what about when you want to go swimming?”
Sophie sat up. “Yeah, well, I’m sure glad I don’t have to go through that,” she said confidently. “I eat too much sometimes, too, but I don’t ever gain weight. I guess I’m just lucky to have such a great metabolism.”
As she spoke, Sophie started to flick her right index finger with her thumb. Rapidly enough that Phyllis couldn’t help noticing—even if she hadn’t been keenly observing every nuance of the girl’s body language since she’d walked in the door.
Not only was the nail on Sophie’s right index finger shorter than all the others, but there was an almost blisterlike scab on her lower knuckle, as well. Phyllis knew what that meant.
She’d bet her life’s savings—her baby’s college fund—that it wasn’t metabolism keeping Sophie skinny when she broke down and went on an eating binge.
“You are lucky,” she replied calmly, while her mind buzzed with options. “So that’s one thing you’ve got going for you. What are some others?”
If Sophie wasn’t ready to admit her problem—it was entirely possible she hadn’t even acknowledged it to herself yet—perhaps Phyllis could take a less obvious path to offer assistance. Eating disorders were usually a physical manifestation of an emotional problem. A symptom. If she could tend to the real problem, help Sophie find value in herself as a person so that she wasn’t forced to derive all her worth from her body, then perhaps the anorexia and bulimia would die away.
Sophie had been considering the question quite seriously. Or at least she appeared to be doing so. It was also possible that she couldn’t concentrate enough to find an answer at the moment.
Or sadder yet, couldn’t find one, period.
“How about your grades?” Phyllis asked. She knew they were good. Matt had told her that. “You ever hit the dean’s list?”
“Yeah, every semester since I’ve been here.”
“Okay, that’s huge. You know, I have students who have to study nonstop just to get the Cs necessary to stay in this program.”
“Bummer.”
She wasn’t reaching her. Phyllis could feel the girl slipping away.
“So what else would you say you have going for you?” she asked, truly interested. She really liked Sophie, liked the determination she read in the girl’s eyes, the ready intelligence.
And she sympathized with the vulnerability she could see just below the surface.
“I’ll tell you one thing…” Sophie said, her eyes suddenly alight in a way Phyllis hadn’t seen yet. The girl’s face took on a whole new beauty, an ethereal, otherworldly aura. And Phyllis had thought her gorgeous before.
“…but only if you promise not t
o tell anyone.” Sophie looked at her intently. “Isn’t there some kind of oath or something you guys take that says you can’t tell secrets?”
“If I was a practicing psychologist, yes,” Phyllis said with an easy smile. Sophie, for all her maturity in some areas, was endearingly young in others. “But you don’t have to worry,” she said. “The one thing I’m good at is listening to people—helping them—and you can’t do that if you hear and then tell.” She paused. “The only person I might say anything to is Matt, but only under appropriate circumstances.” Phyllis had to be honest about that.
“Well…” Sophie hesitated. With her head lowered again, she looked up at Phyllis, away and then back. Her knee was bobbing. But, as she leaned forward, creating a mood of confidentiality, it stopped.
“You were going to tell me something,” Phyllis prompted gently when it appeared that Sophie was having a hard time getting started.
“I have the love of the most amazing man at Montford,” the girl said in a rush.
“You do.” Phyllis was a little taken aback. Usually eating disorders were a manifestation of feeling unloved.
“Yeah. I’ve known for a while, but you’re the first person I’ve told.”
“And do you love him back?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Sophie pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and Phyllis got a good look at the fuzz on her arms. The girl showed every sign of anorexia. So where was the problem that was prompting the disease? Unless…
“Is he married?”
“Of course not!” Sophie said, sitting back. “I’d never go for a married man. I am not going to be like my mom.” The girl’s knee started to bob again.
They’d come back to that one later.
“So tell me about this man.”
Sophie was obviously trying to hold back a smile and then gave up. Lucky man, whoever he was.
“He’s gorgeous, for one,” she said. “Black hair, taller than I am, slim, but he has all the right muscles in all the right places.”
It fit that, obsessed as she was with her own physical appearance, she’d think of the man in terms of looks first. The girl was a case of classic anorexia/bulimia. Every minute in her company made Phyllis more certain of that.
Just Around the Corner Page 14