Jersey Tomatoes are the Best (30 page)

“It took me almost an entire day to get here,” she continues. “Twenty-two hours, on the road.” She waits. I guess I’m supposed to say something about that, but I can’t think what. My mind moves sluggishly over all the possible things I might say. These drugs have shifted my head into slow motion. I tug at my wrists.

“Henry.” She looks at me expectantly.

“Help me untie my hands.”

Her face falls. Instantly I know. She doesn’t have to say a word. I can tell from her expression: she won’t do it.

She’s on their side
.

“Eva, I don’t think I’m allowed. But if you want, I’ll call the nurse and we can ask her.…”

“Forget it. Never mind.” The words sound snappish, despite my heavy, slow-moving tongue.

“Please don’t be mad. Your mother said you were pulling everything out, and that’s why they restrained you. I don’t think they’ll let me stay if I untie your hands.”

Rhonda. She’s been talking to Rhonda. Where is Mommy Dearest, anyway?

“You probably shouldn’t stay. There’s nothing for you to do here.”

Go. Go run around in the sun with your new friends. Just leave me here to rot, surrounded by psycho doctors and fat-pumping goons
.

“Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.” Tears in her voice.

But I do, Henry. I do mean it
.

Chapter Thirty-Three

D
ad’s taking me to the airport later this afternoon. I have a one-thirty flight out of LaGuardia, which should land me in Fort Lauderdale around dinner. Missy will pick me up.

Mom and I sit outside on the patio. She’s on her third cup of coffee. Necessary medication, after the late night we all had. We sit at the faux-French metal café table. The “Ray table.” Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Some pictures get burned into your mind permanently.

Like the picture of Eva in that hospital bed. I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready for the shrunken, birdlike size of her. The long, thin plastic tube that snaked from her nose to a blinking machine on wheels. Her complexion, which had always reminded me of freshly washed china, now like ashes. The skin under her eyes sunk into lavender half-moons. Her teeth protruding slightly, as if they’d grown. But, of course, they hadn’t. Her face had simply shrunk, the skin of her cheeks pulled back tight so that the teeth and jaws stuck out, skull-like. She
barely made a bump beneath the sheets. She could have been a fold in the blanket.

I’d wandered into that, straight off the road. Hadn’t called anyone, somehow sweet-talked my way past the guard dogs at the nurses’ station, even with the backpack I’d been hauling for the last twenty-four hours slung over my shoulder. One of the nurses led me to a corner of the ICU, with all these blinking lights and scary metal contraptions. To a bed where an old woman slept.

“Where’s Eva Smith?” I asked her. She gestured toward the old woman, who, you realized if you looked closely, was actually a fifteen-year-old girl, and this sound came from my throat.

It’s like I barked, the pain and surprise were that bad.

“Do you want anything else?” Mom asks. I shake my head. I’ve just polished off a stack of waffles layered with strawberry jam and drenched in maple syrup. We had a late breakfast.

She cradles her mug in both hands, staring across the lawn toward the tennis court. I’ve got my head tilted back, eyes half closed, face to the sun. It’s gonna be a scorcher. Heat bugs rasp in the hedges. Humidity must be ninety percent.

“I think this is the best thing, hon,” Mom says. “Until she’s stabilized, and released from the hospital, there’s not much we can do.” I open my eyes and stare frankly at my mother.

“She doesn’t want me here, anyway, Mom.” She sighs. She puts the mug on the table.

“That’s not Eva talking. It’s the eating disorder,” she says patiently.

“Oh god, not that again,” I mutter. I can’t help myself.

Eva’s been seeing a therapist … something else no one had bothered to tell me … and when Rhonda found out that I was at the hospital, having a mini freakout, she set me up with this woman Wendy. A crunchy-granola earth mother who talked psychobabble at me for half an hour. I think Rhonda paid her for her time.

“Think of an eating disorder as an emotionally abusive relationship,” Wendy said, in this maddeningly soothing tone. We were sitting together in the “family area,” this puke-colored, dimly lit room set aside for the family members of intensive-care-unit patients. As soon as the nurse saw me lose it in the ICU, she hauled me out of there and sat me down in Pukeville. Called the Smiths, who called the Lloyds … you can imagine. Henry, who’s supposedly in Florida, is actually in Jersey. Before I knew it, they were all at the hospital, with Wendy in tow.

“Imagine that abuser lives in your head,” she said. “He talks to you in a voice you might actually confuse with your own internal voice, but this one is extremely negative. Think of him as Ed. As in Eating Disorder. Imagine Ed is a snarky guy dressed in dark leather and smoky glasses. He whispers mean things to you all day. Tells you you’re fat. Calls you a loser. Undermines your confidence, convinces you that no one really likes you. And the only time Ed is nice is when you’re starving. He compliments that. Makes you feel virtuous for being disciplined and slim. Ed encourages the behaviors that hurt your body and isolate you from others.”

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to beat that Wendy senseless with her own Birkenstocks or fall into her arms, crying. She was comforting and infuriating at the same time, drove me crazy. Or maybe it wasn’t her at all. Maybe it was Rhonda. Who kept nodding, dabbing at her eyes, gazing at me earnestly as Wendy “explained” Eva’s eating disorder.

Worst of all, my own mother has bought into this crap. Now she thinks anorexia is a demonic possession by an abusive guy named Ed.

“I don’t think I can stomach the Wendy bull right now,” I say.

“Why do you think it’s ‘bull’?”

“Because Wendy is blaming Ed for Eva’s problems instead of laying the responsibility where it belongs,” I say angrily.

“And where would that be?” she asks gently.

“Oh, gosh. Let’s think hard. How about right smack-dab at Rhonda’s feet?” I say. She shakes her head at me.

“It’s not that simple,” she says. “I’ve been reading a lot about anorexia.…”

“Mom. Please. The woman
defines
the term ‘stage mother.’ ”

“So how come
you’re
not starving yourself?” my mother asks. “Is it because there’s no pressure on you? No difficult parent to contend with?”

Point to Mrs. Lloyd. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Well, for what I do, eating is encouraged. I spend hours in the weight room instead of hours in front of a mirror, in a leotard, comparing the size of my butt to the rest of the girls’.” Mom rolls her eyes.

“So we blame ballet?” she says.

“No, but it explains a lot. She needs to be wispy thin; I need to be muscular.”

“The differences between you and Eva go deeper than that,” Mom says. “Did it ever occur to you that part of her attraction to ballet
was
the look it required? The emphasis on perfection? It’s an art form that an obsessive, somewhat compulsive person might be drawn to. Which is also the very personality type most susceptible to an eating disorder. Just as certain people are more prone to becoming alcoholics or drug addicts, certain people, if the conditions are right, are more likely to develop anorexia.”

“I’d say life in Rhonda’s house provides the perfect conditions.”

“Honey, you have always been tough. You wear everyone’s expectations for you like wings: you fly. For Eva, success and the accompanying expectations are like stones she has to haul up a mountain. They burden her. Deep down, she doesn’t believe she’s worthy of the praise heaped upon her.”

“You’re wrong.
I’m
the negative one. The angry one. You know what the other players used to call me on the Jersey circuit? The bitch. That’s because I play mind games with my opponents. Mean mind games. My own boyfriend said it. But Eva? She’s the nicest person I know.” Mom shakes her head at me again.

“It’s not a matter of nice versus mean. It’s about strong versus vulnerable. Ed would never have had a chance in your head.”

Ed in my head. The words create a picture in my mind. I see a smarmy guy, a black-leather version of Jonathan Dundas, wandering onto my tennis court. Standing off to the side, a smirk on his rodentlike face. He watches me serve, and after I hit one in the net, he comments, “That sucked.”

I grab him by the scruff of the neck and kick him in the backside so hard he practically flies off the court.

Okay, so Henry Lloyd wouldn’t have put up with an Ed, real or imagined, for an instant. But who ever said Eva did? Who was ever negative to Eva? Rhonda, for all her faults, thinks her daughter is amazing.

Is it possible that someone as beautiful and extraordinary and kind as Eva, could, deep down, feel bad about herself? So bad that her negative feelings took on a life of their own and became an ugly voice in her head that she was willing to believe?

I don’t know. I’m so tired right now I feel like I’ve been wrung out. I don’t know who’s right, who’s to blame or what to do, for that matter. So I’m doing what I’m told. Heading back to Chadwick and my own great expectations. There’s a tournament on Friday, after all.

“You never told me you had a boyfriend,” Mom says quietly, interrupting my thoughts.

“He’s just some guy at the school,” I say shortly. “No biggie.”

She taps her head with one finger, as if she’s just remembered something.

“His name isn’t David, by any chance, is it?” My stomach does a 180-degree flip.

“And you know that how?” I ask.

“He left two messages on the answering machine. Sorry. With all the drama in the past twenty-four hours I forgot to tell you.”

“What did he say?” I ask. Like I couldn’t care less.

“He just asked you to call. He said he’d left messages on your cell phone.”

The screen door opens, and Dad steps out. He carries his own cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” I say to Mom. “I’ll call him back later.” She eyes me suspiciously.

“That’s a lot of messages for ‘no biggie,’ ” she says. Dad pulls up a metal chair.

“What’s no biggie?” he says. His hair is wet; he’s just showered.

“The David who’s been leaving messages is Henry’s boyfriend from Chadwick,” Mom explains. “Or … not,” she adds hastily when I flash her a murderous look.

Mark frowns.

“Did I meet him?” he asks.

“You could say that,” I reply. I barely hold back the sarcasm. “He was the guy you almost throttled the night you jumped out of the bushes.”

An uncomfortable silence follows. Finally Dad clears his throat.

“Henry, I’m very sorry if my behavior has cost you, in any way. If this boy broke up with you because he thinks your father is a nut job, then I’m sorry.”

“He thinks you’re a nut job, but that’s not why we broke up,” I say. Mark purses his lips. He knows he deserved that one.

I need to change the subject, fast. I do not want to discuss David with them. Right now they think I spent twenty hours on a bus from Boca to Newark, where I transferred to another bus for Ridgefield. Cabbed it to the hospital. End of story.

As far as they know, Smithfield, North Carolina, does not exist.

“Listen, no offense, but I don’t want to talk about David,” I say.

“You know,” Dad says briskly, “we have some time before we have to head out to the airport. What do you say I run you by the hospital once more?” I shake my head firmly.

“She doesn’t want me there,” I repeat. “We’ve been over this, okay?”

“I just spoke with Bob,” my father says. “Eva’s awake, and he says she’s been having a pretty good morning.”

“Well, how about we don’t wreck it for her?” I say. But he keeps talking.

“I’ll bet when she thinks about her visit with you yesterday, she’s going to feel bad. Because you’re her best friend, and she loves you.”

I stare at him. I cannot remember a time, ever, when he ventured a guess as to how someone else felt.

“Everyone deserves a second chance, Hen. Especially a good friend. There’s nothing better you can do for someone than give them a second chance.” His eyes are full as he looks
at me, and even though I realize he’s talking about a hell of a lot more than Eva … I get it.

Every once in a while I’m lucky, and something prevents me from making a complete jerk out of myself. Hard to believe, but right now, that “something” is Mark Lloyd. Go figure.

Is it possible, I wonder, to kill a thing with a word? Does just
saying
stuff, dragging it out into the clear light of day, make it better? I honestly have no clue. We three Lloyds were up until the wee hours beating ourselves over the heads with words. About Eva. About tennis. About Mom and Dad. And Ray. Yeah, even Ray got dragged out from his little hidey-hole in our hearts. That was fun.

These therapy types, the Wendys of the world, think all the talk helps. All I know for sure is that keeping secrets never helps. The things we don’t say are like slow-acting poisons, eating away at us from the inside. So I don’t know if it would have helped Eva to say how sad and scared she always felt. I don’t know, if I’d been brave enough to admit to her and to myself that she was too skinny, and that the calorie counting worried me, if it would have helped. But not saying it sure hurt.