by Brianna Hale
That was her disease talking. I want to hate her, but it feels wrong because it’s all Lacey. Sometimes I sense someone else in there when I talk to her. I can see darkness and cruelty lurking behind her eyes, an entity just waiting to latch onto my girl and drag her down to hell.
Right now, Lacey’s terrified, so she’s retreated behind what she knows. Therapy. Eating plans. Doctors. Nothing in her life for her. Nothing that makes her happy. Nothing that makes life worth living. My chest aches at the thought. How long can she go on like that, knowing that happiness is right there, but denying herself? She’s at the limits of her strength right now. What if next time I see her that other Lacey is looking back at me?
What if I never see her again at all?
I get on the Tube at the next station. At home, I go out into the garden with the intention of working on a particularly tricky cascade I’m trying to train with wire, but I’m still too riled up. The museum is the only place I can distract myself from the pain of not having Lacey, so I do the minimum of upkeep required on my plants and then head in, even though it’s Saturday.
The foyer is packed with visitors, but the staff areas are blessedly empty. In my office I boot up my computer and get to work, but my concentration is patchy. I find myself staring at the sofa in the corner of my office where Lacey used to eat her lunch, going over and over the events that landed her back in that ward.
Something’s been bugging me about the conversation we had this morning. Specifically, about the box she uses to trap her anorexia. It seems all wrong, because isn’t therapy about overcoming fears, not trapping them? Or is that some pop-psychology bullshit I got from TV?
I want to go back to the ward and ask her about it, but I’m not sure that they’d let me see her twice in one day, or if Lacey would appreciate me bursting in there again. I could call Petrou, but he’s sick of hearing from me and won’t be drawn into detailed discussions about Lacey’s health. I wonder if it’s too frightening for him, and I don’t blame him.
There’s one other option. Before I met Lacey, Petrou gave me his home number in case I needed him urgently over the Laxos matter, and I still have it. If I call it, Mrs. Petrou might pick up, and I think she’s the one I need to talk to. Not just because she seems heavily involved in Lacey’s treatment, but because she’s another problem I need to overcome. Mrs. Petrou despises me. I can’t do anything about Lacey’s anorexia pouring poison into her ear about me, but I can try to show her mother that I’m not the enemy. I could use fewer enemies when it came to Lacey.
I think about it a moment longer, and then pick up my desk phone and dial the number. A woman answers on the third ring.
“Don’t hang up, please. It’s about Lacey.”
There’s a pause, and then Mrs. Petrou says accusingly, “Is that Stian Blomqvist?”
“Yes, it is. I saw her this morning, and she said something that worried me. I wanted to talk to you about it.”
I hold my breath, hoping that maternal concern wins out over her distrust of me.
In an only slightly less unfriendly tone, Mrs. Petrou says, “Well? What did she say?”
“Lacey was talking about a box where she mentally places her anorexia in order to cope with it. That’s why she can’t be happy, because other things get trapped in there, too. It worried me, and I needed to know that someone else was aware of it.”
Because Lacey won’t let me talk to her about it, and it’s killing me.
Silence stretches on the line. I ball my fist and press it hard against the tabletop, aware of how strange I must sound but desperately hoping that Mrs. Petrou can see past her dislike of me to listen to what I’m saying.
“It seemed to me like a strange way to cope with her disease. Does it sound right to you? Has she mentioned it to you?”
Mrs. Petrou takes a shaky breath. “No. She won’t talk about these things with me at all. She never has.”
I suspected as much. Lacey’s too good at pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not. “I just thought you should know. I don’t like going behind her back but considering where she is and that she won’t… Anyway. Maybe it’s something her therapist should know. Goodbye.” I go to hang up, but Mrs. Petrou tells me to wait.
“Thank you, Mr. Blomqvist,” she says jerkily. “I appreciate the call.”
“Please don’t thank me,” I tell her, and hang up.
I sit back and look over at the sofa again, wondering if I’ve done the right thing. When Lacey finds out I’ve passed on details of our conversation to her mother she’ll probably be angry with me. I’ll just have to live with that. Even if I can’t be with her, I still need to protect her, in any way that I can.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lacey
They let me out after four weeks. I’m not better.
No one who leaves the clinic is ever “better.” They’re just not in imminent risk of relapse or organ failure. If I maintain my current weight and keep attending therapy with Doctor Loftin, I won’t be forced to go back. The thought of going back used to strike terror into my heart, but I even can’t bring myself to be afraid of that anymore.
Dad arranged for me to take a break from coursework for the rest of the semester, sending documentation to the university that showed I was in a psychiatric ward. That’s the second time he’s had to do this. I wonder how many more times they’ll allow me to defer before they just kick me out.
Mum and dad are both tense and unhappy, even more so than the first time I was released. We had hope then. Hope seems to have flown away this time.
I see Doctor Loftin twice a week, and it’s the only time I leave the house. I have to strip down to my underwear before I’m weighed. My food diary is intensely pored over, and I’m questioned about the feelings I experience at every single meal.
We talk a lot about acceptance. I tell her I have accepted things, but Doctor Loftin doesn’t seem to believe me, or that I’ve accepted the right things.
I don’t know. I don’t see the point in anything she wants me to do anymore.
At the end of my first week living at home, mum hugs me after I come home from a session. “You’ll get better, sweetheart. I know you will.”
I push her away. “How do you know that?”
“Because I have hope. Don’t you have hope?”
What I have is a food diary that makes me want to scream every time I look at it, a therapist who thinks I’m a failure and the knowledge that another relapse is just over the horizon, and then another, and then another.
“Fuck hope,” I snarl. “Hope’s something healthy people hold up like some sort of trophy. Well, congratulations, mum, for having hope. I hope you’ll be very happy together.”
I run upstairs so I don’t have to look at her shocked, hurt expression.
At my next session with Doctor Loftin, she surprises me out of my miasma with a question I’m not expecting. “Has Stian Blomqvist been in contact with you?”
My belly swoops like a swallow at dusk. “I told you, I don’t want to talk about him.”
“I hear he visited you on the ward.”
I narrow my eyes at her. Who told her that? I suppose the people who run the ward like to pass on all sorts of juicy gossip. “Yes, once. But not for long because there’s nothing more for us to say to each other.”
“Your mother called me yesterday. She’s worried about you. Apparently, she’s spoken to him as well.”
Mum talked to Stian? And she didn’t tell me? “What? When? She hates him.”
“I suppose she loves you more,” Doctor Loftin observes mildly. “Stian was concerned about something you said to him, and when he couldn’t reach you, he called your mother.”
“He what?” I grip the arms of my chair. How dare he pass on details of our private conversation to my mother? What could possibly be of interest to her about our relationship?
“Tell me about this box that you keep your anorexic voice in.”
I frown, puzzled. That’s what he
was calling my mother about? I suppose that’s not a great secret. I just don’t talk about it. Impatiently, I describe the box. It’s not a very big box. It’s not even a very strong box, to look at. It’s made out of brown cardboard, like an archive box I’ve seen in record offices, though there are no holes for the handles.
“She was crammed in there, folded up and uncomfortable. And raging, always raging. If I didn’t stay vigilant, or if I did things that she really didn’t like, she would start testing the strength of her cage, and I’d hear the lid rattling.”
“What would make the lid rattle?”
“Anything new or dangerous. New foods. New places or experiences. Being around a lot of people. Having strong feelings.”
Doctor Loftin has been making notes as I talk, but now she lays her pen down. “This isn’t a coping technique I taught you. Did you learn it on the ward? Perhaps from another patient?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I made it up myself, I guess. I found if I compartmentalized the things she was saying to me, it became easier to get through the day. She was still furious, but I just couldn’t hear her as much.”
“How restless was she when you first started at the museum?”
I take a deep, shuddering breath. “At first, I thought she wasn’t going to let me work there, but the structure of the work and Mr. Blomqvist’s—Stian’s—authority meant that everything just seemed to grow quiet in my head. There were a few hiccups. He caught me eating on the stairs, and I was afraid he’d think I was crazy. There was a drinks reception I ran out of. Then we started… Well, you know what we started doing.”
“Did you think about her in that box very often?”
I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “All the time. I spent so much energy visualizing that box and making sure it was sealed tight, but in the end it was no good. She got out.”
“What allowed her to escape?”
“I did, because I’m not strong enough. I started thinking about a life I could have with Stian, one where we were a proper couple. I think I knew that I wouldn’t have the energy to maintain her prison and do all the things I wanted with him, and everything just crumbled. Out she came, bigger and stronger than before.”
“What did she say when she got out?”
“That I’ll never be free of her. That I belong to her, and no one else.”
My eyes land on my food diary, a pathetic, weak tool in the face of her strength. I snatch it up and start tearing the pages out. “I hate it all!” I scream. “I hate everything. It was all a huge lie. What’s the point of living if I can’t be happy? If all I can do is just exist?”
I hurl the book to the other side of the room, and it flutters to the ground like a bird that’s been shredded midflight. Little pieces of paper flutter down like broken feathers.
“There is more for you,” Doctor Loftin tells me gently, after a few minutes. “But we have to deal with your disease first. The more you try to suppress something, the harder it fights back to be heard.”
“I’m not able to deal with her in any other way. Right now she’s free, and she’s rampaging around in my head. I don’t know how to get her back in that box, and I’ve got nothing with which to arm myself against her. The only thing that makes her quiet is not eating. I have to eat, and so she just screams and screams.”
I rub a shaky hand over my face. I haven’t slept properly since the surgery.
“Have you been practicing the techniques they taught you on the ward and the exercises we do together? It’s important to allow the disordered thoughts to flow through your mind like water.”
“She’s too loud, and too much,” I whisper, shaking my head. “None of it works.”
What’s a little mindfulness going to achieve when what I really wanted was a life with Stian? I’m not going to meditate my way through a date with him. Mindfulness isn’t going to cut it when I want to spend the night in his bed.
Doctor Loftin twists her pen in her hand, just watching me. This is what she dislikes the most: when I throw what she’s offering back in her face. I suppose it hurts her professional pride, being told that everything she believes can help me isn’t worth anything.
She glances at the clock. Our time is up, and she closes her notebook. “There’s so much you want from life, Lacey. If you shut all possibilities down, there won’t be anything left for you.”
I can’t be happy with just some possibilities. Every time I think about Stian and the life I imagined with him, I become overwhelmed by despair.
There’s a chasm between what I want and what I can have, so what’s even the point of trying?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lacey
“What about re-enrolling? We should probably think about you going back for the next semester so you can earn that Masters degree.”
Mum straightens the duvet and the cushions on my bed, which is hard to do, seeing as I’m lying on them. I got out of bed today, for a while at least, but now I’m back in my room again. I’m still in my pajamas at eleven in the morning.
“Yeah,” I say listlessly, staring at the ceiling. “I guess.”
She looks down at me helplessly and then pinches the bridge of her nose. “Lacey, you have to do something. You were never like this before.”
I roll onto my side and face the wall, closing my eyes. Mum sighs and leaves me alone.
I’m too tired to re-enroll. I’m too tired to do anything at all, though when night comes I can’t sleep, and instead I lie awake in the dark, wondering what Stian’s doing. Asleep in his big bed, probably, shirtless beneath the sheets, his blond hair rumpled against the pillow. During the day he will have been fiendishly busy at the museum, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he types, or marching through exhibition spaces, his discontented blue eyes searching for things that don’t meet his exacting standards. That someone has so much energy seems magical to me now, though it wasn’t so long ago that I was working ten or eleven hour days at his side.
I haven’t heard from him since he stormed out of the ward. He probably hates me for being so weak. I suppose the phone call to my mother was his way of washing his hands of me. One final thing before he said goodbye.
There’s a knock on the door, and I wrap my arms over my head. “What?” I mutter peevishly. It’s probably time for my next meal. “I’ll make it in a minute.”
My mother’s voice sounds uncharacteristically timid. “Darling, there’s someone here to see you. Can I let him in?”
My eyes fly open.
“Him who?”
But the door’s already opening. I flip over in a panic, sending a paperback book and three stuffed animals sliding to the floor. Dear god, no, he can’t see me like this. Through the crack I see my mother’s face, and she must decide that I’m decent enough because she steps back, and a large figure moves into the doorway.
A large, blond figure, in gray trousers and a black sweater.
“Lacey.”
He stops where he is, studying me uncertainly. I swing my bare feet to the floor, and then just sit there, paralyzed by the sight of him.
Mum looks between us for a moment and then disappears back down the hall.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
I glance around the room. It’s not messy exactly, but it’s not how I would have liked him to see it. I’m not how I’d like him to see me, either, but there’s nothing I can do about that now, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, anyway.
“Um. Yeah.”
“May I?” he asks, indicating the end of the bed.
I nod, and he sits down. Stian looks large and incongruous in the small room, his dark, masculine clothes in stark relief to all the white and pastels. The bed sinks a little beneath his weight, but there’s still more than a foot of space between us.
I poke at a stuffed bear on the carpet with my toe. “Mum must be desperate if she let you in.”
“Actually, she’s the one who called me.”
I glance at him in surprise, but t
hen I remember how Stian got into mum’s good books. “Oh, yeah. You guys have talked before.”
He’s not here because he wants to be. You’re a charity case.
“I’m sorry that I went behind your back. Are you angry with me?”
I reach down and clutch the bear to my chest. “It wasn’t really a secret, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Doctor Loftin says I can’t use the box, because it’s not healthy.”
Stian nods and stares at his hands, flexing his fingers as if examining his tattoos. “I stayed away because I wanted to give you time. I know how important space is when you’ve lost yourself. But I also didn’t want to leave you adrift for too long.” His voice is low, almost unemotional, but I can see tension in his shoulders. “Will you come back to me now, Lacey?”
I breathe in sharply and clutch the stuffed animal even tighter. When he stormed out of the ward, I was sure that was the end of things between us. He’d reached the end of his patience with me. If he’s been waiting for me to get better then he must be sorely disappointed at the sight of me.
When I don’t speak, Stian curves his fingers briefly into fists. He wants to demand, to take hold of me. “I’ve missed you so much it’s been a physical ache. It doesn’t have to be all at once. We can take things slowly in any situations you find stressful.”
“That’s every situation,” I whisper.
“Then I’ll be patient in every situation.”
Silence stretches between us. It’s not that I don’t believe he has patience. It’s that I don’t have any hope anymore. He could be as patient as a stone monument, but what would be the point if we never get anywhere?
“This grumpy asshole has enough patience in his heart for one scared girl.”
I take a deep breath. “Your patience isn’t mine to wear through, and I’m not a puzzle for you to figure out.”
Stian looks up at me. “Is that what you think you are to me? Do you know how much I smiled before I met you? Once a year, at Christmas, for my mother. Now I’m up to three times a week. It’s disgusting.”