The Perfect Mum

“I’m Dr. Weaver. Emma wants to see you, but I’d like to speak to you first.”

Kathleen nodded dumbly and followed her, leaving Jo and Ginny in the waiting room.

Dr. Weaver stopped in the wide corridor where they were alone, and said quietly, “Emma tells me she’s been in counseling for her eating disorder.”

“For the past year.” Kathleen told the doctor Emma’s history, the name of her therapist and internist.

“Ah.” Dr. Weaver’s face was compassionate. “Well, I suspect she’s been conning them somehow. She weighs seventy-seven pounds.” The doctor talked about electrolytes, liver and kidney function and the danger of heart damage, concluding, “Emma needs to be in a controlled, residential setting where her food intake is monitored. She should gain as much as ten pounds before she can safely be discharged.”

Kathleen seemed able to do little but nod. The lump in her throat made talking difficult, but she said, “We’ve discussed putting her in a residential program, but she seemed…” She bit her lip, breathed deeply. Don’t cry. A semblance of control regained, she said simply, “I kept telling myself that she was doing better.”

The doctor nodded. “People with eating disorders are some of the best liars and manipulators in the world. They’re a little like drug addicts. They’ll do anything to protect their habits.”

“Has she suffered permanent damage?”

“We’ll need to run further tests to have a better sense of where she is. I think she can recover. Her youth is in her favor. The odds of complete recovery diminish the longer someone with her problem goes without effective treatment. You did the right thing getting her into counseling so soon.”

“For what good it’s done,” Kathleen said bitterly.

The doctor gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “Unfortunately, resisting is also part of the process. Teenagers with this problem don’t listen to you or a counselor and say, ‘Oh! I see the light.’ They kick and scream and dig the trenches deeper. That’s what she’s been doing. It doesn’t mean she hasn’t been hearing more than she is willing, yet, to accept.”

Kathleen nodded again, teeth worrying her lower lip. “Does she have a concussion?”

“Certainly a mild one. This may be good for her, Mrs. Monroe. A wake-up call even she can’t ignore.”

Kathleen had to laugh, if without much humor. “Oh, I don’t know. Emma can ignore quite a lot.”

They agreed that Emma should be checked into the hospital for the night, giving Kathleen time to make arrangements for her to enter a treatment program for eating disorders. Fortunately, Emma’s counselor and internist were associated with the program Kathleen had chosen—and hoped never to have to use.

She went out to tell Jo the news and found Helen, her other roommate, there as well. Dressed for work in brown slacks and a cream silk blouse, a rose and brown and rust scarf artfully knotted around her throat, she looked far from the timid and tired woman she had been when she came to look at the house seven months ago.

“Kathleen! Is she all right?”

They all crowded around while Kathleen told them what she’d learned. “I’ll need to make some calls, but first I’m going to see Emma. They won’t let anyone else in,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Ginny slipped behind her mother. Her expression anxious, Helen said, “Oh, dear. Ginny isn’t convinced Emma will be okay.”

“I’ll ask,” Kathleen promised. “Maybe they’d let Ginny pop in just for a minute.”

Emma lay in a curtained cubicle, a couple of blankets covering her up to her chin. For a moment, Kathleen stood unseen, and her heart seemed to stop. Lying like this, laid out on her back, eyes closed, Emma could have been dead. Her face, once piquant and a little chubby, was marble pale and gaunt. Not the slightest healthy color flushed her cheeks. Even her lips were bluish.

How did I not see how near death she was? Kathleen asked herself in silent despair. How could I have kept pretending?

Easily, she knew. Oh, how easily, because the alternative was too difficult, too painful.

The curtains rattled when she stepped forward and Emma’s eyes, huge in her thin face, opened. “Mom,” she croaked.

Kathleen pinned on a smile. “Sweetie, you scared us.”

“I’m sorry. I must have slipped or something. Maybe I spilled some water.”

The floor had been bone-dry when Kathleen sat at her daughter’s side. “Maybe,” she said, smoothing hair from Emma’s forehead. Her hair was brittle and colorless, too, a ghost of its former rich gold threaded with gilt and amber and sunlight.

“Can I go home now?”

Here came the hard part.

Kathleen shook her head. “Dr. Weaver wants to check you into the hospital for the night. You do have a concussion, you know.”

“But I’m fine!” Emma struggled to sit up. “If they’re worried about me passing out or something, you can watch me, can’t you? Or Ginny? She always follows me around anyway.”

“It’s not so bad here.” Kathleen hesitated, but didn’t have a chance to continue.

“Make them take this out!” Emma brandished her hand, in which an IV needle had been stuck and taped down. In agitation, she exclaimed, “There’s sugar or something in that! I’d already had breakfast, and now they’re, like, pumping all these calories into me! I’ll have to diet for weeks to make up for it!”

Diet? The idea would have been laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic and even grotesque. How could she cut any more? She barely ate a few leaves of lettuce, non-fat Jell-O and unsweetened herb tea now.

“Honey…”

“I’ll take it out myself!” Emma began clawing at the tape.

“Stop!” Kathleen grabbed her wrist and wrenched her hand away, surprised at frail Emma’s strength. Holding her arm down, she said, “You collapsed because you’ve starved yourself. You will not take this IV out!”

“That’s not true!” Emma glared at her. “You know I’ve been eating. You see me.”

Near tears, Kathleen shook her head. “No. I don’t. You don’t eat enough to keep a…a mouse alive. You’ve been doing your best to kill yourself, but I won’t let you. You’re not coming home. You’re spending the night in the hospital, and tomorrow you’re going into residential treatment.”

Screaming in rage, Emma tore her hand from Kathleen’s grip. “You promised!” she yelled. “You said if I stayed above eighty pounds, I didn’t have to go! You’re a liar, liar, liar!”

Kathleen drew a shuddering breath in the face of her daughter’s vitriol. “I’m not the liar. Dr. Weaver says you don’t weigh anywhere near eighty pounds. You’ve been tricking us somehow. But you knew the consequences, Emma. You’re not getting better. You’re getting worse.”

“I hate you!”

“I love you,” Kathleen said, eyes burning, and turned to leave.

Emma threw herself onto her side, drew her knees up and began to sob.

Kathleen’s heart shattered into a million pieces. She wanted, as she’d never wanted anything in her life, to say, All right, you can come home, if you promise to eat. She wanted to see incredulity and hope and gratitude light her daughter’s face, as if her mother could still do and be anything and everything to her. Of course she’d promise.

And then she would lie and scheme to keep starving. She would exercise in the middle of the night to burn off calories she’d been forced to swallow, she’d take laxatives, she’d hide food in her cheek and then spit it out.

She would die, if she had her way.

Paralyzed, hurting unbearably, Kathleen didn’t turn around.

This was harder, even, than leaving Ian, harder than facing her own inability to provide a decent livelihood, harder than facing the fact that she, too, was responsible for Emma’s self-hatred. But if she truly loved her daughter, she had to be firm now.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushed aside the curtains and fled.