Hope and Other Luxuries (31 page)

“Okay,” Joe said. “Well, could you please ask him to call me back, then?”

No, came the answer: Dr. Moore didn't have time to do that, either.

“Oh,” said Joe. “Well . . . thank you for trying.”

He hung up and looked at me.

“I'm going to hope,” he said, “that Dr. Moore is really,
really
busy. Let's just assume that. And while we're assuming that, let's go get some coffee, too.”

So Joe and I walked to the nearby shopping mall, sat in the food court, and talked about our plans. Dr. Harris in Texas had moved Elena's appointments to the next week. Tomorrow, we would pick her up from Drew Center and start driving.

Dr. Harris's office was over fifteen hundred miles away. That should have seemed daunting. Actually, I couldn't wait.

“Should we book a hotel room?” Joe asked.

“Nope, let's just drive till we get tired. I'm ready to have a little less structure in my life.”

At six forty-five that evening, we headed to Drew Center for visiting hour, ready to see our captive daughter. Joe hadn't seen Elena in over two weeks. Fifteen or so relatives and friends of patients had gathered in the little waiting room with us. At least this time, I didn't have to be locked in by myself.

At seven o'clock, the door to the center buzzed open, and a staff member appeared with a clipboard.

“Edgerton,” she read out loud. “Towney. Dunkle. Your family member is not allowed to have visitors. The rest of you, proceed past me to bag check.” And the other visitors filed inside.

One of the mothers whose name she had read started to cry. I wondered if she, too, hadn't seen her child in weeks. I wondered if she had traveled a long way to see her child, and if Dr. Moore was keeping that patient by force, too.

“Why can't we see Elena?” Joe asked the nurse. “What did she do?”

“She didn't gain weight today.”

“What rule did she break?” Joe asked.

“She didn't break any rules.”

“Then she didn't eat everything?” he wanted to know.

“No, she was fully compliant.”

I didn't know how Joe felt about this, but I started shaking. I was literally shaking with rage.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Our daughter did everything you asked her to do. You're punishing her for something that's out of her control.”

The nurse set her jaw. “Weight matters.”

Now I could see that Joe, too, was barely hanging on to his temper. “Then why didn't you feed her more?” he demanded. “You're punishing her for doing everything you asked, and I'm not going to stand for it. I am
going
to see my daughter!”

The mother who had been crying was still standing next to us. She said, “And
we're
going to see our daughter, too!”

The nurse gave an exasperated sigh, and I could feel it again: that sense of hostility and distrust. It had crackled through Dr. Petras's stern voice and angry threats, and it had hummed behind the bland comments of Dr. Moore. It had even been present when I was talking to the set of three psychiatrists, hidden though it was under polite serenity.

Hostility breeds hostility. Now it was mutual.

“I have to check,” the nurse muttered. A minute later, she came back. “Oh, come on, then,” she grumbled. And we joined the rest of the visitors.

Next morning, Joe and I packed the trunk of our tiny hatchback rental car and drove over to pick up Elena. We spent a tense twenty minutes parked under the big shade trees of the college campus that wasn't a college campus at all—the stately redbrick University of the Mentally Ill. Then Elena burst out the front door, lugging her suitcase.

“So, did Dr. Moore tell you good luck?” I asked.

“It was kind of weird,” she said. “It wasn't him. It was another guy, an older guy who looked nice. He asked me where I was going, and I told him we were going to see Dr. Harris in Texas, and he said we'll like Dr. Harris, he's a great psychiatrist.

“So I said Dr. Moore didn't seem to think so, because he wouldn't let me leave, and the old guy snorted and said, ‘I bet he threatened that you'd be leaving against medical advice, too, didn't he?' And he left that box unchecked. See?”

Elena produced her discharge paper. Sure enough, the
Against Medical Advice
box was unchecked.

That put the crowning touch on my happiness. After all the frustration and hostility I'd faced, those friendly words about Dr. Harris and the scornful ones about Dr. Moore seemed like a vote in my favor. I had made the right decision. We were doing the right thing.

Joe took the on-ramp to the highway, and our car picked up speed, and my spirits soared as they hadn't soared in months.

My family was with me, gathered together again despite almost insurmountable obstacles. Valerie wasn't here physically, but she'd been
writing me more and more often, and I felt that she was safe and content and connected, too. The dark time was over—the dark, imprisoned time. I had rescued my daughter. I had rescued us all.

Outside my window was bright sunshine, and inside my mind was bright sunshine, and between the inside and the outside, I felt like a flake of transparent crystal. I felt as if the clean, fresh light was shining straight into my soul and striking rainbows that stretched to the horizon.

“That doctor was really nice,” Elena said in a low voice, almost to herself. “I kind of wish . . . I wish maybe I'd stayed.”

T
his odd comment puzzled me for a while. Elena couldn't seem to explain it, and I couldn't work it out into anything that made sense. But I was so grateful to have my family together again that nothing could bring me down for long. I sang along to the new CDs I'd bought at the shopping mall, and the heartfelt smiles I saw on the faces of gas station employees and convenience store cashiers that afternoon must have been a reflection of my own.

We stopped whenever and wherever we wanted to stop, and when we pulled off the highway for the night, the little countryside motel seemed particularly charming. We all crowded onto one bed to sit and watch the old-fashioned boxy television, and the six channels it pulled in seemed to be loaded with hilarious shows designed especially for our amusement. I listened to Joe and Elena laugh together, and my heart brimmed with happiness.

But by the next morning, I was already feeling anxious again.

Something was different about Elena. She could still laugh, but her laughter no longer felt spontaneous. A part of her was shut off, and she was watching over it. I knew Elena could be careful with people outside the family, even with the ones she considered friends. But I hadn't felt this kind of reserve toward Joe and me before.

And when we stopped for food, the change was even more pronounced.

“Where would you like to eat lunch?” I asked her.

“Nowhere yet,” she answered. “I'm still full from breakfast.”

I didn't see how this could be true since she'd eaten only a couple of bites of pancake before announcing that it was soggy.

“Breakfast was four hours and two states ago,” I said. “It's time to sample the charms of another roadside diner.”

Elena groaned. “They're all so fatty!”

“We could stop at a grocery store then,” Joe suggested, “and put together sandwiches.”

“Hmm. Nah, too much trouble.”

“Snack foods,” I suggested. “Nuts. Dried fruit.” And when Elena gave a disgusted mutter, I circled back around to the beginning. “Well, where
would
you like to eat, then?”

“I don't care. Look, Taco Bell's coming up. Dad likes Taco Bell.”

At Taco Bell, Elena suddenly turned on the chatter. She told us story after story from Drew Center with barely a break to catch her breath in between, as if it were her assignment to entertain and educate a supper club of two. Finally, Joe looked at his watch and said he'd better visit the restroom.

“Me, too,” Elena announced, jumping up.

“Hey, what are you doing with your tray?” I demanded as she swept its contents into a pile. “There's a taco and a half there still.”

“I don't want it,” she said.

“Well . . . You could save it for later.”

“A cold taco?
Please!
” And into the trash went Elena's lunch. Once again, she'd eaten about two bites.

Elena might pass up food when she was stressed, but I hadn't seen her reject or ration it when she was just relaxing with her family. She was a nervous, picky eater—but she did eat.

I worried over this as we drove.
It must be because it was so upsetting being ordered to eat
, I thought.
Thanks to Dr. Petras, she associates eating with being bullied now
.

So I changed my tactic. I decided not to comment if I saw her throwing away meals. The next time we stopped, I ransacked the gas station store for snacks I knew she enjoyed.

“Hey, a pecan roll!” she exclaimed in delight, looking into the bag I handed her. “I haven't had a pecan roll in years!”

But when I was cleaning out the car that evening at the hotel, I saw that the pecan roll hadn't been touched.

After two days, we arrived in our city, but we didn't have a place to stay. It was strange being back in our own hometown and being homeless. Before, whenever we had come home, we had stayed with good friends. But we didn't call anybody this time to tell them we were coming.

Joe drove down the highway access road, pulling into one hotel parking lot after another, and I hopped out of the car and checked rates. I wanted to find a weekly rate without having to go to the weekly hotels, which didn't seem very nice. But one front desk clerk after another quoted me the regular room rate.

“It's fixed in the system,” a clerk told me. “I'd like to give you a better rate, but there's nothing I can do.”

Here's what I didn't know then: many hotels offer a special medical rate, and that medical rate can be substantially lower than the regular room rate. Unfortunately, I didn't think to mention the reason we were in town.

The sixth or seventh time we stopped, I walked into a midrange motel, not fancy but not bottom-of-the-barrel either, and the man behind the counter asked what he could do for me. He had a strong accent, and his English was fluent but ungrammatical, like my German.

I explained that I was looking for a weekly deal but that we had been unable to find one. “It's fixed in the system,” I said.

“
I
can make you a deal,” the man told me with pride. “This is my motel. I own it.” And he named a very reasonable price for the week—more reasonable than I had hoped for.

Uh-oh
, I thought.
Maybe the furniture is old and shabby. Maybe none of the appliances work
.

But no, the room he showed me was neat and cheerful, with red curtains and red patterned carpet on the floor. I saw no stains, and I saw no scuffs on the furniture. The room was immaculate.

“My family does the cleaning,” he said. “I oversee the breakfast.” Again, I heard the pride in his voice. And I realized: This wasn't a motel. This was a home. It was this man's home!

My damaged, traumatized family wasn't going to have to stay in an artificial box. We were going to stay in a home—the home of this
man and his family. It didn't matter that we were paying him money. He loved this place, and he took pride in it. In his eyes, we were his guests.

It had been weeks since I'd been home, and when I realized this, I almost burst into tears. And throughout that week, as I saw his family at work around the place—as I saw him up on a ladder, changing light bulbs, or his wife sweeping up leaves while their children played nearby—I felt again that warm swell of emotion.

It did me good to have that connection to a home again. As fragile as I was, I felt it healing me.

Dr. Harris, the psychiatrist we had come to see, also made me feel at home. He had that gentle courtesy and natural discretion that used to distinguish a certain kind of well-educated Texan when I was a girl. He was the sort of person I had met many times, and the sort of person my old Texas family had raised me to be: the one who smiles at strangers and says
sir
and
ma'am
and opens doors and picks up things people drop without being asked to. Those old-fashioned Texas manners aren't so much a set of rules as a philosophy I've tried my best to live by, and I suspected that Dr. Harris lived by it, too.

We left Elena at Dr. Harris's office to meet with him for several hours, and Joe and I went to a nearby coffee shop. Joe said, “So, do you want to take the phone card and call anybody while we're here?”

I did want to call our friends. But at the same time, I didn't know how to. The trauma of the last three weeks was still too fresh. I couldn't talk about it yet. I didn't even want to have to say, “I don't want to talk about it,” because that would still be talking about it.

The only friends I'd seen since coming to the States on that medevac flight were a husband and wife whom we had known well in Germany. Phil had been Joe's boss, and I had become Jackie's partner in crime, as she put it. Phil and Jackie had left Germany while the girls were still at the boarding school.

When Jackie had learned through the grapevine that I was staying at the children's hospital, she had taken matters into her own hands. A nurse herself, she knew better than to wait for me to reach out. Jackie had
called Elena's hospital room, and when I had answered, she'd said, “I'm coming by to pick you up for lunch.” And her tone of voice informed me that she would listen to no excuses.

That had done me so much good I couldn't even measure it. Worlds of good. Entire worlds.

Jackie had swept by several times over the next week and dragged me out shopping with her. She had even taken me away for a “slumber party” at her house. It had been so wonderful to see her. She and Phil had been nothing short of a godsend. It would be wonderful to see our other friends, too.