An Act of Love (5 page)

Emily sipped her 7UP and did not reply.

“Through? Shall we go on?” Dr. Travis rose, showed Emily where to toss her trash and where the cart was for her plate and utensils, and then they walked on down the corridor.

“The smoking room.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Good. The small group discussion room. The crafts room. Exercise room. The kitchen. Wednesday evenings the patients usually make some kind of dessert to be eaten during Family Group.”

“Family Group?”

“Parents are invited to join us on Wednesday evenings, to discuss general problems, to ask questions about the hospital, and so on.”

“What if you don’t want to have your family come?”

“Let me answer that in a roundabout way. Tomorrow after you have a complete physical, you’ll meet with the adolescent team psychiatrist for some tests, and you and I will talk some more, intensively. We’ll see if we can discover what brought you here, what your special concerns are, what goals you’d like to achieve while you’re here in the hospital. On your pamphlet you’ll see we’ve left space for you to record your goals and the progress you’re making toward them. What you write won’t be judged; it won’t even be read. It’s for you to keep notes about what’s going on with you. We find it’s helpful for the family to visit, once a week, to remind our patients of the life they will be returning to, so they might start discussing and thinking of options for changing their lives, often in relation to their families.”

They had walked in a rectangle and now were back at Emily’s room, and Emily was glad, because suddenly she was exhausted. Dr. Travis was nice enough and certainly eager to help. It wasn’t
her
fault that no one could help, that nothing could ever fix Emily’s life.

“I’m tired.”

“Then rest. Someone will wake you for dinner. And you might have visitors this evening.”

“I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Your parents are going to return with some of your clothing and personal necessities. At that time you can ask them to bring you anything else you might need. And after Thanksgiving vacation, they can bring you your homework and school books.”

“You think I’m going to be here for a long time.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“Will I go home for Christmas?”

Dr. Travis looked at Emily for a long moment before replying, “Let’s not think that far ahead until we’ve done a more thorough intake on you, okay?”

Emily shrugged. Weak with fatigue, she sank onto the bed, put her hand over her eyes to block out the light, and hurried back into the protection of sleep. She heard Dr. Travis close the door.

They drove toward
Hedden, stunned.

“She looked pale, but otherwise all right. Not ill.”

“There’s so much we don’t know. So much they didn’t tell us.”

“Owen, she’s gained so much weight.”

“Perhaps she has an eating disorder.”

The entrance to the school was marked by a stone lion rampant with a plaque in its mouth inscribed
HEDDEN ACADEMY
. A private road wound through evergreens past a pond and over a rushing stream until it arrived at what looked like a miniature Oxford. The eight stone buildings were built around a courtyard and ornamented with corner turrets and gargoyles on the waterspouts. The chapel with its grand rose window and soaring spire towered at the front while the new plebeian gymnasium hunkered down at the far end of the campus.

“Where do you want to go first?” Owen asked.

“Emily’s dorm.”

It was early afternoon. As they parked in the visitors’ lot and walked across the fields toward Shipley Hall, students rushed past them toward the football field or the crew house. Others tossed Frisbees or stood talking in clusters beneath trees.
Occasionally a student stared at them, then glanced away, embarrassed.

“They’ve heard about Emily.”

“I’m sure they have,” Owen replied, and took his wife’s arm.

Shipley Hall was built especially as a women’s dorm in the late sixties when Hedden, formerly a single-sex school, went coed, and consequently it was cursed with the boring boxy lines of many institutions, but blessed with many large bathrooms.

Emily’s room was on the first floor. She shared it with Cordelia and Zodiac, and because they’d agreed to take a threesome, they were given the largest room on the ground floor. When Owen and Linda brought Emily in September to begin the new year, the room had been a mess of packing boxes, suitcases, and black plastic bags bulging with new linen and pillows and clothing.

Now it was neat, attractive. Using the modular desks and chests provided by the school, the girls had managed to divide the room into three areas. Zodiac’s was the most obvious because of the posters of constellations and astrological signs hanging above her bed, which was brilliant beneath a spread of purple silk sprinkled with moons and stars. A gleaming black CD player squatted on her shelf, portable cases of CDs next to it, and on her desk were a camera and a Macintosh computer. All the high-tech equipment was decorated with cosmological signs and surrounded by twists of herbs and clay bowls of what looked like old grass.

Cordelia’s area could have belonged to a much younger girl. Her bedspread was flowery, and several stuffed animals had been carefully tucked against the pillows. Her bureau top was littered with dainty perfume bottles, lipsticks, and small china bowls filled with rings and necklaces and bracelets. Romantic perfume and makeup ads were tacked to the wall.

Emily should have had posters of Jason Priestly and Brad Pitt on her walls; Linda remembered carefully rolling them and fitting them into a long cardboard tube for the drive down. Scarves should have been draped dramatically over the bedposts and lamp, and clothes should have been flung everywhere, because Emily was always in a hurry.

But her walls were bare, except above her bed, where from one nail a silver cross hung on a metal chain.

“What on earth?” Linda sank down onto the dark green duvet cover she had bought for Emily during a special trip to Boston the past summer. Emily had begged Linda to take her to a sale at Jordan Marsh. Emily had chosen a sky blue duvet cover and
matching sheets when she entered Hedden a year ago, but this year she yearned for “a whole new look.” She wanted to be “sophisticated.”

But her space did not look sophisticated. It looked, except for the rumpled bed on which earlier today she had lain, stark. Bare.

“Penitential,” Linda whispered. “Why?”

Last year Emily’s area had been a mess, a flurry of clothes, books, cassettes, journals in pastel notebooks, letters scented with perfume. Now her electronic typewriter and cassette player were lined up on her desk, right angles matching exactly those of her tidily stacked textbooks. Next to the typewriter lay three pens in rigid line. Her bureau top was bare except for—Linda rose to make certain—a Bible, bound in white leather, the one Linda’s mother gave Emily several years ago.

“Linda.”

Linda turned. Owen had lifted the duvet to expose, beneath Emily’s bed, boxes of cheese crackers, bags of chips, a pile of chocolate bars, a litter of empty wrappers.

“Owen. What’s going on?”

Grim-faced, Owen shook his head.

“Clothes,” Linda murmured. “She needs a change of clothes. Pajamas. Underwear. Toothbrush.”

Emily’s bureau drawers were so neat it was as if she had folded the clothes and lined them up with the edge of a ruler. The drawer of underwear, which just this summer Emily had begun to call her lingerie, was full of—underwear. Plain white waist-high, full-cut cotton briefs, the kind that were sold in packages of three or twelve. And sports bras. Only sports bras.

“Where,” Linda wondered aloud, “is Emily’s lingerie?”

She found it stuffed away inside a brown duffel bag meant for dirty laundry, all Emily’s pink, lavender, or flowered panties and bras, as well as some shirts and skirts Linda had thought Emily loved. Upending them into a pile on the closet floor, Linda took the duffel bag and filled it with underwear, white flannel pajamas, socks, sweatpants, and sweatshirts, noticing how large everything was. In the top drawer of Emily’s bureau she found her travel kit with toothbrush, deodorant, and soap. Clean hunter green towels and washcloths were stacked on a closet shelf; Linda took one of each.

“Should I take a book?” she asked Owen.

“Maybe a novel?”

Linda scanned the bookshelf and found only texts.

“Mrs. McFarland?”

Cordelia Analan entered the room, her large blue eyes dark with emotion, her brow furrowed.

“Oh, Cordelia,” Linda said, gathering the girl into her arms, “are you all right?”

Cordelia was the protected only child of two wealthy professionals who had had her late in life. A picture-book girl, as pale as a Botticelli, as sweet and sentimental as a Whitman’s Sampler, Cordelia played piano, dressed in flowing ankle-length dresses, and wore her blond hair to her waist, often tied up in elaborate braids.

Now her large eyes shimmered with tears. “Is Emily going to—be okay?”

“She’s out of physical danger. But she has to stay in the psychiatric ward for a while, until we find out what’s going on with her. Do you have any idea, Cordelia?”

“No.”

“Anything at all would help.”

Cordelia turned from Linda and sank onto her bed and with one hand twisted a strand of hair that had escaped from the braids. “She was different this fall.”

Linda sat down next to Cordelia. Owen quietly settled on Emily’s bed, leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees. “Different, how?”

“Well, like, this summer she was so much fun? And when school started she was all serious.”

“Were her classes difficult?” Owen asked, and Linda asked at the same time, “Were her teachers tough?”

Cordelia shrugged. “Kind of, I guess. They’re all hard.”

“What about boys?” Linda queried.

Cordelia’s eyes flew to Linda’s face. “Jorge Avila.”

“Yes?” Linda prompted.

“He liked her.” Cordelia shrugged. “But she stopped liking him.”

“Why?” Linda pressed. “Did he do something?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, she stopped talking to everyone, even to me. She just, I don’t know, she only wanted to be by herself.”

“Did you talk to her about it?”

“Sure. I tried to. But she wouldn’t talk. She was kind of weird. And she hid food and skipped study hall and sneaked back into the dorm and ate it. Sometimes we even
heard her rustling around in the Doritos in the middle of the night.” Cordelia blushed. “I’m sorry.”

“Cordelia, we need to know.”

Owen asked, “Did she talk about killing herself?”

Cordelia flushed and her eyes streamed with tears. “No! Never!” Sobbing into her hands, she cried, “She was my best friend and I don’t know anything!”

Linda reminded her, “You saved her life today, Cordelia.”

“I just came back for a book. It was so scary.”

Owen said, “We should go. We have an appointment with Lorimer.”

“Will you be okay?” Linda asked Cordelia.

The girl nodded shakily.

Linda flashed a look at her husband, then said, “I’m not sure which building is Tuttle Hall. Can you show us?”

“Sure.” Cordelia blew her nose and took a few deep breaths, then stood up. “I’ll take you there.”

The campus grounds
were still beautiful. Well-tended lawns swept down to tennis courts and playing fields while in the distance giant evergreens watched the campus like sentinels. Yellow mums in stone urns adorned the entrance to Tuttle Hall. The walk and the fresh air revived Cordelia and she said good-bye with a smile.

Bob Lorimer was waiting for them. After shaking hands, he gestured toward the chairs facing his desk.

“How is Emily?” he asked.

Linda answered, “Out of danger, physically. But she won’t talk to us. She won’t even look at us. They want her to remain at the hospital.”

Bob Lorimer was a kind man, well liked by the students and parents as well. Perhaps because he was so large, he spoke with a soft voice, and in that gentle voice he assured the McFarlands that this sort of episode was more common than they might think, especially among adolescent girls.