Hope and Other Luxuries

by Clare B. Dunkle

  Elena was the only thing the Dunkle slumber party had been missing. She couldn’t get enough of her brand-new niece. She held baby Gemma and wouldn’t put her down. And she and Clint fell into a fun and annoying brother-and-sister role that came naturally to both of them. They teased each other and tripped each other and punched each other on the arm.

  “Oh my God, you two!” said Valerie.

  The next morning, I came into the kitchen to discover my girls sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard, talking and smoking their cigarettes. Over my dead body, Valerie had started smoking again now that Gemma was born. I hated the habit—hated it with a passion.

  But when I looked out the window and saw my girls that morning, I felt bittersweet nostalgia. They looked so much like Joe’s own sisters had looked, years and years ago. I remembered watching those sisters and their mother sit outside and smoke and talk like that, years before Elena was even born.

  Life isn’t a line, I thought. It’s a circle.

  “Elena,” I called, standing in the doorway as the cats weaved back and forth in figure eights and collided with me softly. “Did you remember to take your pills this morning?”

  “Yep!” she called from the lawn chair.

  “Did you eat breakfast?”

  “Yep!”

  “Liar!” Valerie said dispassionately between puffs. “You watched me eat, but you didn’t eat.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t hungry.”

  This didn’t surprise me. Life at the treatment center had helped Elena gain weight, but she still had trouble listening to her body’s cues. She didn’t feel normal hunger yet.

  “Well, why don’t you come eat something now,” I said.

  “Sure. I will in a couple of minutes.”

  And I went back inside.

  An hour later, the girls were watching a horror movie with Clint while Gemma dozed in Valerie’s arms.

  “Hey, Elena, did you have that breakfast?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Elena said, distracted. “Mom, you ought to watch this. You’d like it.”

  “Nope,” Valerie contradicted with calm enjoyment. She might be a wife and a mother, but tattling on one’s sibling never gets old.

  “Oh! That’s right, I forgot.”

  “I reminded you,” Valerie said.

  This wasn’t good. Missing a meal was one thing, but by this time, it was almost noon, and Elena had missed two. Back at Clove House, she would have eaten two thousand calories by now. Her high metabolism made it very difficult for her to hold on to weight.

  “Elena!” I said. “You need to eat breakfast. And now you’ve missed snack, too!”

  “Mom, you’ve got to chill out about this,” Elena said kindly. “This is my problem. I have to manage it.” And my imagination flashed to the image of a helicopter parent, humming along anxiously.

  Why was she making me worry like this? Really, it was her fault that I hovered!

  “Okay, it’s your problem. So manage it!”

  “I am. Tomorrow, I start at Sandalwood. I’ll be eating five times a day there. It’s not going to matter what I eat today. The real work of recovery starts there.”

  Did that make sense?

  Not really. But sort of.

  Did I like being a hovering, mopey mom?

  Not at all.

  “Now, come watch this,” Elena said. “It’s really good.”

  “It is really good,” Clint echoed. “We can restart it.”

  “Well . . . Okay,” I said, and I scooped my old terrier off the couch behind them and took her place. Then, at the look in her sad brown eyes, I scooped her back up and plopped her onto my lap.

  So what if I should be doing laundry? The laundry could wait. My three children wouldn’t always be together in one room like this, and they wouldn’t always invite me to join them. How many mothers had that kind of luck? Treatment was starting tomorrow. This was a fight I could leave to the professionals.

  That made me think of poor beaten-down Emily at Clove House. Emily had been the new me. Did I want to become the new Emily?

  Not if I could help it.

  The next morning, Elena got up early, wrapped herself in the darkest of emotional thunderclouds, and swept out the door to drive to Sandalwood.

  “Have a good time!” Valerie called after her.

  “Like hell!” Elena said.

  At ten o’clock, my phone rang. My heart beat faster as I answered it. Phone calls never meant good news.

  “Hello?” I faltered.

  It was Dr. Leben, from Sandalwood.

  Of course.

  “Elena just walked out the door,” she said apologetically. “I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I was dismayed and upset, but I wasn’t surprised.

  “What happened?”

  “Honestly?” Dr. Leben said. “I don’t know. I think Elena was looking for reasons to make this not work.”

  That didn’t surprise me either. And the Edward Gorey mother fluttered back into my imagination, wringing her hands and trailing her handkerchief.

  I told you! she sobbed. I told you!

  “So . . . What do we do now?”

  What do we do? What do we do?

  “Well, if I were you,” Dr. Leben said, “I’d try to talk her into trying again. Let her know that we’re right here for her. We’re ready as soon as she is.”

  Almost as soon as I hung up the phone, the door slammed.

  “Hey!” Valerie called. “Do I have to murder you? Gemma’s asleep!”

  “That place sucks!” Elena announced as she stomped into the room. “I’m never going back there again!”

  “Why? . . . ,” I said. “What? . . .”

  I could hear the anxious whimper in my voice. I could feel the nervous thumping of my heart. And, oh, God! I could feel myself turning into her, that Edward Gorey mother, the silly Victorian melodrama mother whose shrill voice flutters around her children in a series of falsetto grace notes:

  Oh, I don’t think we should! Oh, I don’t know about this! Darling, darling, wait! Can we please talk about this?

  Meanwhile, Elena was ignoring me (such mothers are always ignored) to pour out an equally melodramatic tale of her own. According to her, Sandalwood was a terrible place where unqualified leaders used their work as a shallow excuse to hustle their closed-minded religious beliefs, where patients were either stooges or cheats, where the kitchen smelled horrid and the staff were uncaring; a place, in short, where no illness of any sort could possibly be healed and where Elena’s only hope of survival lay in her rapid and headlong flight.

  “It’s bad for me to be around people as sick as those people are,” she said. “I’m much closer to recovery than they are. All they would do is depress me and teach me new tricks. I’m better off here, with my family who loves me.”

  “But Elena!” I said. “Your family doesn’t have the training to help you!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elena said. “I have the training. I know what I need to do.” And she went outside to smoke.

  Valerie gave me an elaborate and meaningful shrug. And then she went out after her.

  I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted to have a tantrum. Victorian melodrama mother that I was, I wanted to have hysterics.

  How had I let Elena do this to me? How had I given her all the power? Hadn’t I known she was too weak? Hadn’t I known what she would do?

  What are we going to do?

  But I didn’t have hysterics because Clint was standing there. Poor man, he was learning far more about our family’s inner workings than I would have hoped. But then again, Clint was family.

  “So . . . pizza tonight?” he asked mildly.

  “I was thinking we’d change it up,” I said. “Maybe spaghetti.”

  “Sweet!” Clint said. “I love spaghetti.” And he followed the two girls out into the yard. From the kitchen window, I could see Valerie call him over to the chair next to her. Elena gave
him a playful shove with her foot as he walked by.

  The Dunkle slumber party continued over the course of the next week. Valerie and Clint sat on the floor and shot zombies while Elena cheered them on. I could hear their laughter as I worked on my web pages in the living room. The three of them were having a great time.

  I wasn’t. I was back to staring at the ceiling at night, almost sick with worry. Elena was surrounded by food, but she was eating almost nothing. She still had that vivacious personality and those pink, healthy cheeks. She could still get out of bed and go do things. But for how much longer?

  Valerie asked me to watch Gemma for them while she, Elena, and Clint went out together to get very similar but slightly different tattoos. I wasn’t a fan, but then again, it wasn’t my money. While they were gone, I rocked my granddaughter and told her nursery rhymes. I sang her the alphabet song as I bounced her in time to its rhythm.

  Gemma drank me in with solemn blue-gray eyes. She wrapped her tiny hands around my fingers and pulled them into her mouth to chew on them.

  A universe of possibilities. What would she grow up to be?

  The front door slammed. “Take a look, Mom!” They’d all gotten stars and their initials.

  “They look like tattoos,” I confirmed. “You know how I feel about tattoos. So, did you guys eat while you were out?”

  “Nope,” Valerie said as she walked to the fridge. She located the whipped-cream chocolate cake I’d made the day before and cut a piece for herself and one for Clint.

  “Elena,” I said, “what have you had to eat today?”

  “Mom,” Elena reminded me patiently, “I have to do this for myself. This isn’t something you can do for me.”

  I held the lid on my anger.

  “Sure, I know that,” I said equally patiently. “I’m not trying to do anything for you. But: What have you had to eat?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elena said. “It’s important not to count calories.”

  She wasn’t sure? Of course she was sure! Food was all she thought about.

  These days, it was all I thought about, too.

  Elena had had one brown sugar Pop-Tart without the crusts. That was it, all day long. And what was that—maybe two hundred calories?

  “How about the last piece of cake?” I suggested. It wasn’t real food, but at least it was something.

  “Nah,” Elena said. “I’m not really a cake person. I’ll get something later.”

  Later.

  I knew what that meant.

  And she didn’t get something later, of course. I haunted the kitchen instead, consuming cookies out of a sense of desperation. It was a kind of primitive sympathetic magic, as if my own eating would somehow feed my child.

  That evening, when Joe and Clint invaded the kitchen to whip up malts in the blender, Elena reached into the freezer for a frozen pickle. “It’s the best thing in the world!” she gushed, gnawing on it while we ate our ice cream. “Pickles are great! I’ve been craving them all day.”

  Pickles! It was the last straw.

  I didn’t diet, but I knew an empty food when I saw one. A frozen pickle was nothing but an anorexic trick. Elena not only wasn’t eating, she was working hard at not eating. She’d have hollows in her cheeks in no time.

  “You need to work on your recovery,” I told Elena after the others had left the kitchen. “Psychiatrist—therapist—something.”

  Elena put down her half-eaten pickle, and tears swam in her eyes.

  “I miss Clove House,” she said. “I miss my friends. You were right, Mom. I never should have left.”

  I told you! wailed the Victorian mother in my head, having hysterics on my behalf. She never should have left—and you were the one who helped her leave.

  You helped her leave—again!

  While the others went back to the PS3 and picked splicers off the ceilings of Rapture, I took myself off to bed and shut the door. Laughter and happy shouts came filtering in as I lay there in the dark.

  I had done this. I had let Elena talk me into doing this. Three months ago, Elena had been dying in her room. The only thing three months of treatment had done was buy us a little time—and teach me just exactly how right I had been when I had realized that a little time was all we had left.

  I pushed aside my anger and frustration. They were useless here. Elena had a horrible illness. She was the victim, not me. I had seen how painful it was for her to force herself to eat. Would I have the courage to face that kind of horror?

  I pushed aside the terror and anxiety, too. They weren’t helping, either. And I didn’t cry. The quiet little child who had sat with her coloring books in the corner had learned what crying was for. It was for making other people solve your problems for you. Time after time, I had watched children break down and seen people sweep in to gather them up.

  My adults hadn’t done that. They had had more respect for me than that. They had known—as I had known—that I could solve my own problems. Yes, life had been hard sometimes, and yes, it had been lonely. But I had learned how to take care of myself.

  So now, I looked inside my swirling cloud of emotions, and I found the guilt. I hugged it, and I let it help me.

  Guilt has a bad reputation. People talk about it as if it’s a dirty word. And it’s true that undeserved guilt is as bad as any other false and unfair judgment. But it isn’t bad because it’s guilt. It’s bad because it’s a lie.

  True, honest guilt is a reminder that once, we had the power to choose what to do—and the power to choose is what makes us human. Saying I feel guilty is the same as saying I had options. And where there were options once, there probably still are. I had made the wrong choice when I had let Elena talk me into bringing her home. Okay, then—what options did I have now?

  And really, it was simple once I began to think about it. There was only one thing to do.

  It was simple. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

  When Joe came to bed half an hour later, he found me sitting up in the dark, scribbling down notes on old receipts by the light of my laptop screen.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as he passed me on his way to the closet.

  “Elena has to go back to Clove House,” I said.

  “Yes,” his voice agreed mournfully from the closet.

  So he’d been noticing the lack of eating, too.

  “And . . . I have to go with her.”

  I said it around a lump in my throat. I didn’t want to leave my family—not now! We were finally all together again. Valerie, Clint, and baby Gemma: it was such a precious gift to have them with us. I loved the routine of my house. I loved my husband and my animals and my bright, happy blue fish.

  But I blinked the tears away. Because I loved Elena, too.

  I loved this funny, fragile young woman whose life had come from my life—loved her with a searing, shining passion. And right now, out of all the ones I loved, Elena was the one who needed me most.

  Elena couldn’t help herself. She didn’t have a choice—not really. I was the one who had power here. I was the one who could solve this problem.

  “I know Clove House won’t take her back,” I said, “unless she has someone to stay with her. She was already iffy at their halfway house. It wasn’t working out, and I don’t think they’ll try it again. And the insurance company wanted her to come home because they want her interacting with family. It’s supposed to be an important part of her recovery. So, if I promise to stay with her and go to family therapy with her, maybe I can get them all to sign up to it again.”

  Joe came back through the darkness and sat down on the bed beside me to look at the laptop screen. I’d been looking up hotels and running figures.

  “How long will you be there?” he asked.

  “There’s no way to know,” I said. “Only, the thing is—this time, I’m not coming home too soon. This is twice now that Elena’s cried and said she wished she’d stayed in treatment. I’m not helping her get out of treatment again.”


  Joe didn’t ask about the crying and wishing. He just sighed and picked up one of the scribbled pieces of paper. It was covered with columns of numbers.

  He asked, “Can we afford it?”

  I shut down the laptop and put it on the nightstand. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got a few places to call tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he said. Then he lay down and pulled up the blanket.

  “You’re right,” he said, and his voice sounded dull and empty in the darkness. “Since she won’t go to the place in town, this is the only way.” And when I brushed the notes off my side of the bed and lay down, too, he rolled over and put his arms around me.

  I cried there in the dark, in Joe’s arms.

  I don’t want to do this! I thought to myself, a little-child wail in my mind. I don’t want to leave my husband and family. I don’t want to leave my grandchild!

  But it didn’t matter what I wanted. It only mattered what I could do. And I knew, as clearly as I knew anything, that Joe and I were right.

  This was the only way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Once again, Elena and I were in the car, and once again, we were singing along to her music. But not for much longer. After hours of thick forests and little towns, the big city was reaching out to us again.

  First, the hotel chains appeared, clustered on the outskirts. Then lane after lane added itself to our highway. Gas stations and fast-food restaurants popped up along the access roads, and wide avenues rolled off into new brick suburbs. One office building after another came into view. A green glass hospital sprawled on the crest of a hill.

  “It’s not far now,” I said. “Let’s see what thirty dollars a night can buy.”

  The city that houses Clove House is renowned for its medical care, and people come from hundreds of miles away to seek treatment. The Clove House staff had told me about a special charity in the city that offers cheap lodging and free food to patients and their families. That charity was going to put us up for thirty dollars a night.

  As I thought about this, I felt distinctly sorry for myself. I had left behind my grandbaby and the Dunkle slumber party. I was missing the rest of my family. And waiting for us at the end of this drive wouldn’t be our nice corner suite with the huge picture windows and the furniture in soft spa greens and browns.