Authors: Meg Haston
“Who?”
“It doesn't matter,” I said. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.” I felt like my insides were going to spill out of me at any second, and I would never ask her to hold me together.
“You're very thin,” she said. Her lips twitched.
“Thanks.” I looped my fingers around my wrist. “When are you going back?”
“Tonight, I think.” She reached into her suit pocket for a tube of lipstick and applied a fresh coat. Before she put it away, she tilted it toward me and smiled a little. I tapped my ring finger against the rich color and dabbed it on my lips. We'd never done this kind of thing when I was nine. I felt greedy, having this kind of moment when my girl self never had.
“You're a beautiful girl, Stevie,” she said.
Before she left, she bent over the toilet and pressed her cheek to mine. Then she kissed the top of my head. I imagined her lip print there, branding me.
“I'm sorry, Mom,” I whispered. “I'm sorry.”
“He made a mistake,” she said. “There was nothing you could have done.”
I didn't look at her. I just sat there, letting her blame him like that, because he wasn't here and it was easier. And I thought I deserved for something to be easy. Just this once.
“SHE didn't cry.” When Shrink repeats the words out loud, I'm so ashamed I can't look at her.
“Not during the funeral, either. And neither did I.” What was wrong with us? People cried at funerals. People cried at their dead brother's funerals; that was just how the world worked. But I couldn't. It was like my body refused to acknowledge his death that way. Maybe if the tears never came, he wasn't gone. Maybe this was all some horrible misunderstanding.
I stood at the mouth of the church until the last possible second. It was fullâstanding room only. I didn't recognize most people, and I wondered how many were here for the novelty of it. How
many were just strolling by, and the marquis out front lured them in: Promising Teenager's Untimely Death! A hot ticket. If anyone knew that I costarred as the sister assassin, there would be a line down the block.
The organist played John Lennon's “Beautiful Boy,” which made it hard for me to breathe. Hearing it on the organ was a terrible mismatch, just like the words
my brother's
and
funeral
. Like having the funeral in a church, instead of outside by the lake, where we could all read passages from his favorite books and then make sand angels on the bank. But my mother had insisted, and my father had obeyed. Josh's dying wasn't enough to change that.
A friend of Dad's stood by the door handing out programs. He had the good sense not to offer me one as I passed. I should have processed in with my family, but I couldn't stand the thought of walking behind my mother's reedy body, her fists clenched tight around a starched white handkerchief.
I could feel everyone's eyes on me as I walked, and I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn't supposed to be here, that I'd stumbled into the wrong classroom after the bell. It wasn't my brother who was dead. It couldn't be.
My parents sat in the front pew together. They'd never had anything in common except Josh and me. Now they had death, which was so much stronger. I sat on my father's other side. Without looking over, he patted my thigh, the unscarred one. He would never touch me if he knew this was my fault. I bit the inside of my cheek until I couldn't stand the pain. It felt good, knowing exactly where the hurt was, knowing that if I wanted to stop it I could.
When the song ended, Ben walked to the pulpit and adjusted the mic.
“I'd like to read from Philip Larkin's poem âThe Trees,'” he said. A sound came out of my father, but he sucked it back in again. My mother's jaw pulsed.
“
The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said; their recent buds relax and spread; their greenness is a kind of grief.
”
Behind me, shuddery sobs. I recognized them almost before they started: Eden's. Fury burned under my skin. Josh wasn't her brother. He wasn't her anything. He was just the next guy at the bar. After the service, a bunch of people I didn't care about came to the apartment. They stood in clusters and talked in low voices and shook their heads over plastic plates of ham biscuits and potato salad. I went to my room and got into bed, shoes and all. I pulled the covers all the way to my chin. My mother's scent clung to the fabric, stubborn.
“Stevie?” A knock, and then Eden was next to the bed. She looked stonedâred eyed and there but not there. For once, she was wearing something appropriate: a sleeveless black dress that fell to her knees and was even a little too big. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I told the ceiling.
“I saw your mom out there, I think. She's pretty.” When she sat on the bed, I turned on my side, toward the wall. “I've been trying to call, sinceâI've been trying to call.” She sounded smaller than I'd ever heard her. Good.
“I have nothing to say to you.” I scrunched my toes up tight and thought,
Oh, shit, what if I forget what he looks like?
and I shut my eyes and found his face in my memory: pixelated at first, then
sharper. I would never have opened my eyes again, if it meant I could keep him like that.
Eden slid in next to me and matched her body with mine. Knees bent, head bowed. She raked the damp hair from the back of my neck and pressed her lips to my skin and left them there. I could feel my face collapsing, like my body just couldn't hold itself up anymore.
“It's okay,” she whispered, rocking me slowly. Her breath was even, and it felt like she was breathing for me. “It's okay. I know.”
But she didn't know, because her brother hadn't died. And I didn't know, either. Not really. Not yet. I only understood what his death meant later, in small life moments that piled up like rubble. I understood more every day.
When your brother dies, everything is different. You watch whatever you want on TV because he's not there to hog the remote, but you could give a shit about TV, so mostly you sleep. It's quiet all the time. No one wants to speak his name or laugh out loudâat least, not too soon. People take their Josh stories and their Josh memories and fold them gingerly, stack them high on shelf for “a more appropriate time.” You play Scrabble alone. You stare at the tiles for so long the letters become meaningless.
And when your brother dies, everything is exactly the same. Your father asks you to go to the grocery store and he's too clueless to see the irony in it. You ask him for cash to buy your binge supplies and then you wander the aisles, wondering how people can buy frozen pizzas and read tabloids in the checkout line when your brother is dead.
We curled up in the hot sheets while the sounds of grief rose
and fell outside my door. My mother's perfume and my dead brother slowly faded away. When I woke, Eden was gone and the space next to me was cold. My room was almost dark.
“Sweetness?” my mother's shadow said from the door. “Wake up, love. I have a flight to catch.”
I am puddled on the love seat next to Shrink, empty. My face is hot and stiff; my scar is throbbing.
“Feeling feels like shit,” I bleat. I press my cheek against the beaded pillow and stare at her office sideways.
“It does sometimes,” she agrees. “But you're doing really important work. So what was the predominant feeling for you that night, after the funeral?”
“Anger.” I don't even have to think. “Always anger.”
“Anger is pretty easy for you to access, right?”
I sit up too fast, and the room spins. “You don't think I have a right to be pissed? My brother is dead and my mother left and Eden just wants to feel like she's part of the whole big dramatic show, and you don't think I have the right to be pissed?”
“Of course I do. I would never tell you not to be angry. Anger is important. Anger is part of grief. Have you ever heard the phrase, âThe truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off'?”
I shake my head.
“You have to speak your truth before you can heal.” She gets up and settles back in her seat. Then she flicks the lighter on the side tableâonce, twiceâand lights the candle. I focus on the flame.
“My truth,” I say. “My truth is that I killed my brother?”
“That's not what I heard you say, Stevie. I heard you say that you and Josh were in a fight. I heard you say that there was a tragic accident. And then I heard you say that he died as a result of that accident.”
If she wants to see it that way, she can. But I have carried the weight of his death for almost a year, for so long that it is part of me, fused in my bones.
I am the girl who killed her brother.
I don't know how to let it go, even if I wanted to.
“This is something that happened to you. A terrible event in your life. It is not who you are. And it does not have to define who you become. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I hear you.”
“If you let this disease take you, you're giving up all the power you actually do have. Just giving it up, without a fight.” She's quiet, but it sounds like she's yelling.
“I
have
been fighting.”
“You're right. You've been fighting. You've been at war. Only you've been at war with yourself. All that anger, all that grief, you're funneling it right back into your body. Is it working?”
“It will,” I snap.
“When? When you're dead?”
I say nothing.
“Will it be enough, dying?”
“I don't know yet. I don't know if it'll be enough. But it's all I have.”
I think she's going to argue, but she says, “So ask him.”
“What?”
“Ask him. Josh. Ask whether your death will be enough to pay for his.” She drags her chair closer to mine, so that we're knee to knee. “What would he say?”
I close my eyes to escape her. And I search for him, because it's been so long and I just . . . miss him, in millions of the smallest ways. I miss how solid he was when we used to hug, and how he didn't let go right away. I miss how when he ate cereal, he scooped the flakes out first and then drank the milk. It kept the flakes crunchy and made the milk sweet, he said.
Most of all, I miss the biggest thing, the most important, enormous thing in the world: that he knew how to love me, and did. He wasn't selective like my mother, didn't hand out his affection in lean portions. He didn't thrive on drama like Eden. He just loved me, quietly when he could and angrily when he had to. And suddenly I'm so sad that I didn't understand this when he was alive. And I want to tell him how sorry I am, but my mouth can't even form the words.
“Stevie?” Shrink prompts me. “What do you think he'd say to you, if he could speak to you now?”
“Enough.” Eyes still closed, I make strangled sound. The words flatten themselves inside my throat. “He'd say
enough
.”
“Enough . . .”
“Enough . . . dying and leaving. Enough of this eating disorder bullshit. But he wouldn't say
bullshit
. He didn't curse.”
“So he wouldn't accept your death as some sort of sacrifice. A penance for his.”
“That's not the point.”
“You're right. The point is not whether Josh would or wouldn't want you to die. He wouldn't, Stevie. He
wouldn't.
Do you know that?”
I swallow. “Yes.”
“The point is whether you, yourself, want to die.”
“I don't know what else to do.” The truth comes rattling to the surface, and my eyes pop open. I don't know anymore. I've been working so hard to disappear that right now, at this moment, I can't imagine succeeding. And I can't image deciding not to. I only know this way of being, not quite alive, not quite dead. Not quite. “There's nothing else to do.” I need to lie down. I need to sleep.
“Wrong.”
“Don't you know you aren't supposed to say
wrong
?” I rake my hands through my cropped hair.
I must look like a boy
, I think. Suddenly, having Eden cut it seems like the stupidest thing.
“When something's wrong, I'm supposed to say
wrong
,” she argues. “And I'm telling you that you have other choices. Like allowing yourself to grieve, and feel sadness. Like giving this whole treatment thing a real shot. Like living, Stevie.”
“You make it sound easy,” I say.
She shakes her head. “It's the hardest thing you'll ever do. But I am asking you to try, Stevie, knowing that you can always go
back to your way if you want to. Would you be willing to try? If not for yourself, for Josh?”
“Iâ” I'm reaching for him, desperate to hear his voice. But he's gone, and without him, I am spinning and directionless. “I don't know if I can. I think it might be too late.”
I walk to group alone. Moving through the desert is like trying to run through water, the heat an invisible current. I'm tired. So tired I could curl up here, in the dust, and sleep while it blows over me like a thin, earthy blanket. I'm tired of Shrink telling me how to feel. I'm tired of hating my mother. I'm tired of being an only child. And I'm tired of being this pissed all the time. Only I don't know how not to be.
I've been thinking about what Shrink asked me yesterday, about trying treatment. And there's this miniscule part of me that thinks that nothingânot even treatmentâcould be harder than this: gunning full-speed toward total destruction.
I picture myself in the driver's seat: windows down, eyes closed, accelerator pressed to the floor. My lids frantic and twitching, my
knuckles whitened as the Anniversary nears. And before I can stop it, my brain thinks,
I'm not sure I want to do this anymore
. I could blame it on Josh, say that he wouldn't want me to kill myself. But that would be a cop-out. I think maybe I'm scared to die.
Help
, I plead silently. A prayer to my brother.
Help.
I stop and wait, stupidly hoping I'll hear him. But all I hear is the wind.
When I get to the house, everyone is already there: Shrink, Jenna, the girls from Cottage Three, and a new girl from Cottage Two with bleached-blond hair, a nose ring, and full tattoo sleeves. Tempest, or Skye. Something weather related.
“We're going to have a group snack today.” Shrink pushes herself onto the counter in the kitchen. Her bare feet swing like a careless girl's in summer. She's not wearing the toe ring today. “How does that sound to everybody?”
“What's the snack?” Teagan pinches the ends of her hair, then crosses her arms over her chest.
“Cinammon rolls,” Shrink says.
My heart bats in my chest. So many questionsâ
the kind in the tube? I only know the numbers for the kind in the tube! Do we have to spread the icing on top? All the icing on top? I don't remember the numbers for the icing
âand I try to slow my breathing, like Shrink taught me. Practice theâwhat did she call them?âgrounding exercises.
My name is Stevie Deslisle. It is Thursday, and I am in a treatment center in New Mexico because I have an eating disorder. I smell: the sharp, dry smell of desert dust settled in the cracks of the kitchen floor. Ashley's sugary-sweet body spray and Teagan's hairspray. I
hear: the whirring of the ceiling fan above me, the other girls swapping cinnamon roll horror stories. I feel: the solid floor below me, holding me up. The sweaty canvas bottoms of my sneakers. I taste: the grainy icing coating my tongue. Wait. Not yet. I taste: my own sticky breath. I see: Shrink's small pink smile. Three tubes on the counter. Three.
Shrink says, “I'll preheat the oven, and, Ashley, if you'd grab the baking sheets? We can take some time to process before we eat. Stevie, why don't you pair up with Rain?”
Rain.
Right.
Rain from Los Angeles. Thin but bulimic, like me.
“Uh, sure,” I say, wishing I could be with Ashley or one of the other girls instead. None of them has mentioned my midnight dash the other night, but Ashley is dying to talk about it. Last night before sleep, she tossed and turned for almost an hour, clearly bursting with questions. Shrink probably told her not to bring it up to me until I was ready.
Ashley shoots me a
that sucks
look on her way to the oven. I cut my eyes at the new girl, who is squinting at my tattoo. I slap my palm over my mother's face.
“I'm not eating a bun,” she says loudly.
The fizzy chatter in the kitchen goes flat.
“Whatever,” I say. My face is getting hot. “You don't have to eat it all. We just have to make them and then you eat what you can.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “Do you have any idea how much
fat
is in those things? How many
calories
?”
“Rain, no numbers talk, please,” Shrink said sharply. She whips her hair into a too-tight bun and cages it with a rubber band. “I'd encourage you to talk about your feelings about the challenge, but not about the numbers.”
Rain shoves back her chair and mumbles something that sounds like
give a fuck
. I catch Ashley's eye, and she grins and rolls her eyes. When Shrink isn't looking, I roll mine back.
“So what's up her ass?” Rain mutters under her breath. She stuffs her hands in her pockets before we get our tube of cinnamon rolls, which means I am the one to unwind the wrapper from the tubeâslowly, slowlyâand the one to press my thumbs just so against the perforated cardboard until
pop!
The dough oozes from its prison.
“Up whose ass?”
My name is Stevie Deslisle. It is Thursday.
I take in Rain's shoulders, her elbows. She has the perfect sharpness of the still sick. I can feel my belly hanging over the waistband of my jeans. I suck in, hard.
“Her. The therapist.” Rain nods at Shrink, who is murmuring something to Cate in low tones on the other side of the kitchen.
“Nothing. She's fine.”
I am in a treatment center in New Mexico.
I twist the canister open and slide out the doughy discs. They hit the slick, greased cookie sheet with a sickening thunk.
Help me, Josh. Help.
I wonder if Rain will even try to eat. Of course she won't. If I try, I may be the only one in my group to do so.
Because I have an eating disorder.
“She seems like a bitch.”
“She's not,” I snap. “Put these in the oven?” I slide the cookie sheet in her direction.
The smell starts slowly at first, then overcomes the room in one big whoosh, like a fire spreading. Maybe it smells like Sunday mornings to some people, but to me it smells like the kitchen of
Le Crâpeau
in the dark. Josh and Dad are out somewhere, but I don't have much time so I yank the cookie sheet from the oven
before the timer's gone off. Swallow them almost whole, sucking from a jug of milk in between. I almost want them to come home early and catch me, fat lips glazed with sugar and fear. It would make it easier. It would end this faster.
“Stevie?” Shrink ushers me to the table, where a frosted cinnamon roll sits on a plate. The other girls are already seated. Rain glares down at her plate with her eyes and mouth pinched. I know that look.
My name is Stevie Deslisle.
I sit down at my place. I pick up my fork. I take a bite. And I swallow.