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.”