just Jamie and me at the kitchen table, locked in mortal combat with our starving daughter. Kitty’s eating about a thousand calories a day now—not much, nowhere near enough, but probably twice as much as she was eating before the hospital. What will happen now that we’re going home again?
On our way home we stop for groceries, the first of the nearly daily shopping runs we’ll make over the next year. Kitty rests in the car with Jamie while I blow through the store at top speed. Just last week I wished I could shop without Kitty’s intrusive presence. Be careful what you wish for.
As I steer the cart through the produce section, I’m reminded in a curious way of what it feels like to begin a diet: the special preparatory shopping trip, the sense of hopefulness undercut with past experiences of failure. The sense of wiping the slate clean. The feeling that this time, things will be different.
Will they, though? I want to believe Kitty’s hospitalization will change things, though I don’t, yet, understand how. I can’t see my way from where we’ve been to where we need to go. And I’m a person who needs to be able to see the path ahead, to see what I’m up against and what I have to do, no matter how tough. Right now, not only is there no clear path, there’s no suggestion of one—just a seemingly infinite slog through the darkness that has swallowed up our daughter.
If she was ill with something else—if she had diabetes, or pneumonia, or strep—her doctors would prescribe medicine, bed rest, fluids, and we would give her all those things. But this—this is like battling a many-headed monster in the dark. It’s like fighting darkness itself, a darkness that is inside my daughter, that’s somehow part of her. To fight it feels like fighting her.
Dr. Beth has explained to us that we need to increase Kitty’s calories by about three hundred every couple of days. And that’s why I’m here, to prepare for the battles that are coming. I rip up my shopping list and any concept of a budget and speed-walk down the aisles, piling the cart with cookies, Muenster cheese, alfredo sauce, ranch dressing, buttery crackers, ice cream, potato chips, candy bars—all the foods Kitty used to love. Before anorexia, I didn’t buy much processed, packaged food. I was a conscientious and health-conscious mother in twenty-first-century America, where we all understand the words healthy food to mean low-fat, low-calorie food, and not too much of it. Standing in front of the Pepperidge Farm display now, I have the sense that the world as I know it is tipping, elongating, growing as strange as an image in a funhouse mirror. I grab an armful of Milanos and keep going.
At the far end of the store I stop at the shelves of high-protein and high-calorie supplements, which Kitty drank in the hospital with every meal. I tried one once; they taste nasty, a revolting cocktail of chemicals and artificial flavors. But each Ensure Plus packs 350 calories, more than a quarter of Kitty’s daily requirement right now, and Kitty has perfected a way to drink it: she holds her nose and pours it down in less than five seconds. I load the cart with chocolate-flavored Ensure Plus and move on.
Kitty’s asleep in the backseat when we get home. As a toddler, the only way we could get her to nap was to drive her around until her eyes slid shut and her head drooped. Then we’d carry her into the house, car seat and all, tiptoeing so as not to wake her. Now Jamie unbuckles her seat belt, scoops her into his arms, and carries her upstairs to her room. He looks at me, and I know what he’s thinking: it’s been years since he could lift her this easily.
I call the friends who are keeping Emma today to let them know we’re home and to talk to Emma, who says she’s been invited for dinner and wants to stay. Over the last few weeks, she’s found ways to avoid all of us as much as possible, and I don’t blame her. Emma’s world has been turned upside down. She’s watched her sister suffer and starve and her parents morph from reasonably functional adults into obsessed, irritable wrecks. I wonder if we should send her to stay with my sister for a while, to get her out of the house. Not yet, I think.