Skinny

  “Does Mikey know?”

  “Mikey doesn’t know anything. Mikey . . .”

  “Saul told you about Azalea.”

  “You know about Azalea?”

  I floated out of my body, watching us: a mother perched on a hospital bed, holding her daughter’s feet.

  “He told me he told you her name,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I know I’m missing something.” She pulled one of her earrings off and I saw that they were clip-ons, covering the holes. “Like why you wanted to meet Azalea Bellham’s daughter, like why you cared about any of this. I know you miss Dad. You were looking for a connection. Was that it? You wanted a connection to him?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I just can’t fathom why you—”

  “She’s my sister!” I said. “Why wouldn’t I care? You guys never told me she existed!”

  My mother cocked her head at me. “Who’s your sister?” Her eyes moved over my face.

  “Eden,” I said, my voice weak.

  My mother shook her head. She leaned in to inspect me more closely. She seemed to be searching my eyes for a hint that I was joking. Then she leaned back. “You don’t have a . . . Gray! What?”

  And that was how I learned that I had gotten the whole thing wrong.

  Part III

  After

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  This was what happened at Camp Carolina while Eden and I were unconscious: Friday morning, people with serious faces, sensible shorts, and socks and sneakers arrived in official-looking vehicles. They came from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the North Carolina Department of Health. It took them under an hour to announce that the jig was up.

  Camp Carolina’s kitchen didn’t meet the state’s sanitation standards. Lewis, sometimes with campers in the car, had been driving around all summer with a revoked driver’s license. There were other infractions, too, a list that amounted to seventy-eight; and while the child molester accusation, at least presently, seemed to be fictitious, Lewis was still going to be swimming in lawsuits.

  Spider’s parents were suing.

  The original kitchen ladies were suing.

  Kimmy’s parents were suing.

  Harriet’s parents were suing. She’d returned from camp with a staph infection.

  From Friday morning until Saturday morning, parents came and collected their children. Because of all the chaos, no one ever took the kids’ “after” pictures. All that was left of the summer were the pictures from before.

  The kids were either devastated or stoic. Miss and Whitney screamed and sobbed, as if they hadn’t just screamed and sobbed about how much they hated camp, as if they hadn’t been whining all summer about how badly they wanted to leave. Other campers stepped stone-faced into their parents’ minivans and didn’t look back.

  They rode away from the Blue Ridge Mountains and back to their homes, to the places where they had grown fat. They stepped into their houses and remembered the smells that were trapped in the walls—the years of pancake breakfasts and Sunday night pizza dinners. They lay on their beds and felt happy and thin. They took naps in the middle of the day. Then they woke up and went downstairs, where their parents had ordered feasts of Chinese food, or where their mothers had made them their favorite lemon cake.

  In the morning, they had Belgian waffles for breakfast.

  They watched television.

  They ate Kettle chips straight from the bag.

  Sure, some of them tried to keep losing weight. They ran around the block every morning, or attempted the exercises they’d done in cals, or strained to remember what they’d learned in Mia’s nutrition class. Some asked their parents to buy them Dance Dance Revolution. But even the ones who wanted to try wound up feeling confused. Was Diet Coke okay? Was pizza healthy if it was covered in vegetables? Was cereal acceptable? What about a second bowl of cereal? What about apple pie? After all, it was mostly fruit.

  Eventually, the trying was replaced with not trying.

  Only Pudge would make a drastic change. Nurse would take him home with her, enroll him in school, treat him like a son. In time, she would get her nursing certification, and then she would pay for his gastric bypass surgery. For a while, that surgery would make his life better.

  But for most, the successes were extremely short-lived, as if weight loss were a wound, something time was supposed to heal.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Here’s what I learned from my mother fourteen months after my father’s death, in my bed at Falling Rock Hospital: When I was a child, when my father was still a lawyer, a man named Jimmy Hagen fell from a ladder while trying to replace a roof shingle.

  After he fell, Jimmy paced around his yard, cradling his aching arm. He cursed for a few minutes, and then popped black-market prescription painkillers, cracked a beer, and passed out. The next morning, his left wrist swollen and throbbing, he drove to see Dr. Koa Bellham, an orthopedic surgeon in Cambridge, a friend of a friend of a friend, who had agreed to see Jimmy free of charge, and who suggested immediate surgery.

  Jimmy refused. “Buddy of mine had shoulder surgery and his shoulder was never the same again.”

  It is important to understand some things about Jimmy Hagen. He was thirty-seven years old. He lived with his mother in the house he’d grown up in. Sometimes he had a job. More often, he did not. When he was nineteen, he lost five thousand dollars in a pyramid scheme. In subsequent years, he attempted his own pyramid schemes, but his attempts were unsuccessful because no one ever trusted him.

  “I don’t have insurance,” Jimmy said. “I have no money.”

  Dr. Bellham sighed. He looked at Jimmy’s wrist again. “Look,” he said. “Off the record, maybe you could wait a few months on this. Maybe it will heal on its own. I don’t recommend it, though.”

  “A few months?”

  “Could heal without surgery. It’s not my recommendation, but it is possible.”

  Nine months after Jimmy’s fall, my father got a call from an old friend. “My cousin needs legal advice. None of us likes the black sheep fuckup, but . . . you know how it is. Family.”

  Days later, in his office, my father looked across the table at the splint on Jimmy Hagen’s wrist.

  “So the doctor told you to have surgery immediately.”

  “My wrist is ruined!” Jimmy cried. “Forever! My life will never be the same.” He was desolate, as if his injury spelled the end of his career as a concert pianist. “The medical profession is corrupt. I want to fight for justice.”

  “You really don’t have a case,” my father said. “He advised you to have the surgery. You didn’t follow his advice.”

  “He told me ‘off the record’ that I didn’t have to.”

  “Really?”

  “He did! He did! He told me not to tell anyone. He said, ‘Don’t bother with surgery, Jimmy.’ ”

  My father was suspicious, but—why not?—he did a little research into Dr. Koa Bellham, and this was what he learned: Koa Bellham was thirty-three years old. He had grown up in Hawaii. His wife was pregnant with their first child. Oh, and his malpractice insurance had lapsed.

  Dr. Bellham had let his insurance lapse not because he was unethical (he was not unethical), not because he was trying to pinch pennies (he was meticulous and fair), but because of a fatal oversight. His practice was new. He’d made a mistake. The lapse was only three and a half weeks, but the timing, for Dr. Bellham, could not have been worse. For Jimmy Hagen, it could not have been better.

  My father told Dr. Bellham, “I know what you told my client ‘off the record.’ Bad medical advice? Lapsed insurance? You wanna play rough? Okay. It’s on!” Or something to that effect.

  “I told him to have surgery!” Dr. Bellham said.

  “Oh, yeah? You have that in writing?”

  “No. I saw him as a favor.”

  “You should really get everything in
writing,” my father said. “If you don’t have anything in writing, there’s not much we can do now, is there?”

  Because of Jimmy Hagen, because of my father, because of Dr. Bellham’s oversight, because of bad luck, because of greed, because of fate or the alignment of the stars or God’s will or corruption or justice, Dr. Koa Bellham, his wife pregnant and unemployed, turned every penny he owned and then some over to Jimmy Hagen and my father.

  My father told my mother, “I might have just done something reprehensible. I’ve become one of those lawyers I never wanted to become.” But then, for a few weeks, he barely thought about Dr. Bellham again.

  Perhaps Dr. Bellham, hopelessly in debt, wandered around his house at night, unable to sleep. Perhaps he thumbed through the Boston Herald want ads, circling words he could barely read through his panic. Perhaps one day, while drawing these circles, he paused and saw the futility of life—how the best that anyone could do was make loops with a cheap red pen.

  He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, stood, walked down to the basement in his pajamas and socks, entered the garage, sat on the wooden workbench, and shot himself in the mouth.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  I thought of Eden’s eyes and her gold Jewish star. Even as I remembered her, she looked different from the way I’d been seeing her. Eden was half-Hawaiian. Not Jewish. Not my half sister. Not my father’s daughter.

  “You really thought Dad had an affair?”

  “I thought he was hiding all this from us. I thought you had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We always said we wouldn’t.”

  “But Dad must have wanted me to know.”

  “After you finally spoke with Saul, I kept expecting you to ask me about it. And you didn’t. So I figured you didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t know, Gray. It seems stupid now. I should have brought it up. Of course I should have.” My mother fished a tissue from her purse and touched it to the inner corners of her eyes. “Do you remember when Dad couldn’t get out of bed?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That’s good. We always wondered if you’d remember. We told you he had the flu. I kept telling Dad, ‘It’s business. Things happen. You didn’t kill the man. You just did your job.’ But that suicide . . .” She smoothed the tissue out and blew her nose.

  I thought of the black-and-white picture I’d seen a few times of my father’s father, wearing a white undershirt tucked tightly into his pants, squinting in sunlight, smiling at the camera, holding a baby—my father. He didn’t look like a person who would hurl himself off a bridge.

  “Whenever Dad thought of Azalea, he imagined his own mother, raising her sons by herself. He set up a trust for Azalea. Not a lot of money, but it was something. He blamed himself completely. The trust will stop when Azalea’s daughter turns eighteen.” She stood and crossed the room to a wastebasket, and then returned to the bed.

  “I’ve put Azalea’s daughter in a coma.”

  “She’s not in a coma. She’s fine. She woke up an hour ago. And she said you were driving her to the hospital because she was having stomach pains. You were trying to help her.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Was she covering for you? Azalea thinks you were trying to save her daughter’s life.”

  “Lying, yes. Covering for me? No.”

  “You kidnapped her.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You drove recklessly in an old, unsafe car with a minor in the passenger seat. I’m not saying what I think. I’m just saying . . . if Azalea were angry instead of grateful, these are the things she could accuse you of. She’d have a case. If being married to a lawyer taught me anything, it’s that everyone’s got a case.” She rubbed her temples with the pads of her fingers. Her wedding band twinkled. “That woman. Maybe Dad had a role in her husband’s death. Maybe. But if you ask me . . .”

  “What?”

  “She had a bigger role in Dad’s.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  In the coming weeks, my mother and I talked more than we had in three years. We lounged on the couch in the living room I’d grown up in, sat on the porch my father had built, watched television together in the bed she’d been sleeping in alone. We talked while my scrapes and bruises healed, while I tried to decide what to do with my life. But the only decision I made in those weeks was to stop keeping secrets.

  This was how my father—the man whose eyes I’d believed had no tear ducts, the man who called me Brenda Preston, the strict detractor of emotional rhetoric—responded to Dr. Koa Bellham’s death: He climbed into bed, drew the blinds, denied the sunlight, and swallowed pills that would keep him asleep. He woke up now and then and thought, I’ll take more pills and sleep more, and when they wear off, I’ll take a few more, and I’ll sleep and sleep and sleep.

  My mother called a friend of theirs, a doctor, who entered the dark room, tried to speak with my nonresponsive father, and confiscated his pills.

  “I’m not seeing a shrink,” my father told my mother.

  “Fine. Then what?”

  “I’ll go back to work. I’ll plod through life. I’ll get to the end of it eventually.”

  He rose from bed and returned to work. He moved through his life as if dutifully performing a choreographed dance. Until one day, his miracle came.

  My father’s phone rang at work. A hysterical man with a Yiddish accent had been referred to my father by a friend. He cried that he’d been accused of malpractice in his accounting business. “It’s crazy!” he said. “I am nothing if not honest in business. Please help me. My wife is pregnant with our fourth child. If I lose my business, I’m in serious trouble.”

  My father recognized this second chance. Through his office window, he watched the sun push its way out from behind a cloud. The pane of glass glared gold. “I’ll help you,” my father said, the weight of depression sliding smoothly off his shoulders. “And then I’m never going to practice law again as long as I live.”

  “Baruch Hashem,” the man whispered.

  That was how my father found God.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  I meant to call Eden. All of my campers’ numbers were still programmed into my cell phone, where they’d been since that day at Adventure Gardens, in case anyone had separated from the group. But when I thought about the conversation we would have to have, when I thought about having to explain myself, to defend my sanity, all I wanted to do was sleep. At my mother’s house, I was sleeping a lot. Before bed, I would think, Tomorrow I’ll call Eden. Tomorrow I’ll be better. Tomorrow will be the day I start my life anew.

  But after a week, Eden called me.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I wasn’t hurt.”

  “Eden,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t mean to crash.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And you had my back. You didn’t tell anyone we were going to eat food that wasn’t in the program.”

  “Right. But.” I wondered if I should tell her that I’d lied about that restaurant, that there was no such thing as comfort food, that I hadn’t been driving anywhere.

  “My mom told me who you are,” Eden said.

  I was lying prone on my childhood bed, looking at things that had mattered to me—a wooden jewelry box from my father, framed pictures of friends whose names I had to squint to remember, a jar of pennies, a shelf of my college business textbooks.

  “It all probably makes no sense to you,” I said.

  “I heard your dad died.”

  “You must think I’m off my rocker.”

  I listened to Eden’s silence, to the faint sounds of a television going in the background. When she spoke again, she said, “Remember how I told you about that thing I did? That night when I was so drunk?”

  “You only sort of told me.”

  “I was seriously wasted.” Eden paused. “But want to know why I did it? Aside from being wasted?”
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  “You don’t have to explain yourself.”

  “There’s this bookstore by my school that I used to go to a lot. I would sit in the self-help section and read all the books. I didn’t even care what they were about. I just liked them. I read the cookbooks, too. Maybe this year I won’t anymore. I might have more friends this year. Not that I don’t have friends. I have friends.”

  “I read a lot of self-help books last year, too,” I said. “I love self-help books. Although I’m not sure they help.”

  “Well, there was this one I read about how girls without fathers act out. They meant sexually. They meant, girls without fathers might be, like, skanky. So when I did what I did, it was because I thought the book had told me I could. Does that . . . ?”

  “It makes a lot of sense.”

  “I think that’s what you were doing, too. You wanted to find me because you felt like you were allowed to.”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe you had a descent into madness. I just saw a show about a woman who had a descent into madness.”

  “That might have been part of it, too.”

  “But she came back.”

  “Did she?”

  “She’s better now. She’s a dental hygienist. It happens to lots of women, according to the show.”

  Above me, the light fixture housed a mass of dead bugs, rendering the room unnecessarily dim. I would have to stand on my bed to unscrew it. I could take it outside and shake it out on the sidewalk. But since I’d left the hospital, even tasks as small as that one felt enormous. Still, I could picture myself doing it. I could practically feel the satisfaction of it—how I would lie on my back afterward and admire my work, basking in new, clean light.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  The diet was over. It had been since the day Mikey showed up at camp. Every morning, while my mother was at work, I walked down the street to the grocery store, hoping I wouldn’t see people from my past. (But I constantly saw people from my past.) I bought boxes of Pop-Tarts, family-size bags of Smartfood, cartons of Whoppers, blocks of cheddar, fresh baguettes, packages of Ritz Crackers, and four-for-one frozen pizzas.