Skin and Bones (21 page)

He thought about love and fear and how closely they were related. Love takes your breath away. But the fear of losing someone you love is a barbed arrow that pierces your heart, and it hurts so much it takes your breath away too. Bones had to force himself to breathe. He got up slowly, filled the watering can, and gave everything a good soak.

He used to feel the same way Alice did, like the hospital was a prison controlled by a ruthless warden and his minions. But now, here on the roof, the EDU seemed more real than the outside world. More real than high school and grades and who’s doing what with whom on a Saturday night. More real than all his insecurities and his incurable loneliness.

He had to say it aloud. “You know I’d be with you if I could…”

Talking like that kept him weirdly calm.

He imagined her snarky voice. “Cut it out!”

Bones blew out the candle and, as lame as it seemed, he made a wish. Then he turned the front of his T-shirt into a sack, filled it with ripe vegetables, and aimed his miserable self down the stairs to tell Lard he didn’t mean what he’d said earlier.

The next day Bones leaned over the bathroom sink to examine the damage to his face in the mirror. A condor egg filled the space where his eye should have been. It hurt like hell.
Twenty-twenty vision is probably overrated
, he thought.

Bones kept insisting he ran into a door. “I swear.”

Dr. Chu didn’t buy it.

Nancy brought him an icepack.

Lard liked everyone thinking he’d done the deed.

Bones stumbled through the rest of the day. Literally. Only having one good eye messed with his equilibrium. He couldn’t seem to make his legs track in a straight line. He’d sideswiped enough walls to make his shoulders ache.

He wandered to the dayroom to see if anything was happening. It was empty but the TV had been left on. One of those prison dramas where bad-asses swore on their grandmother’s grave that they’d never be back once they got out. But after release most of them would return to the same crime-ridden, drug-infested neighborhoods as before—hang out with the same lowlife scum and fall into the same destructive habits. They’d be back in prison within a year.

Bones thought about what he’d learned the last couple of weeks. Sometimes he didn’t think it was much. Other times it felt like volumes. He knew this much: someone who did the same thing, the same way, over and over, and expected a different outcome was kidding himself. It might even be a form of insanity. If a person wanted his life to be different, to be better, then he had to do things differently.

Dr. Chu’s office door was open. “Excuse me,” Bones said.

Dr. Chu glanced up from a mess of papers on his desk. “How’re you doing, Jack?”

“I had a question about the outpatient program.”

“Sure, come on in.”

Bones collapsed into the chair. “Is it okay if I try it while I’m still a patient? Or do I have to wait until I check out?”

Dr. Chu rearranged his smile. “That’s unusual but not a bad idea. As a matter of fact, I just signed off on your bathroom door.”

“Bathroom?” Bones asked.

“It’s okay for you and David to close your door to conduct your personal business in private. It’s not a privilege we extend lightly, believe me, and only after a lengthy discussion with the staff.”

That meant they trusted them not to throw up in the shower or whatever.

“The decision was nearly unanimous,” Dr. Chu said.

“Can we hook up the fan?” Bones asked.

“These bathrooms don’t have fans,” he said. “Hospital policy.”

Dr. Chu, seeming to have exhausted his compassion for the moment, returned to his papers.

The next night after a dinner of unidentifiable meat, half a baked potato with low-fat sour cream, steamed vegetables, and the usual brick-and-mortar roll, Bones followed Dr. Chu and Lard to the elevator to a conference room.

“Nancy will come down after the meeting to take you back,” Dr. Chu said and left.

The door to the conference room was ajar. “Follow me,” Lard said.

Bones took a deep breath. “Where have I heard that before?”

Six or seven people milled around a card table crowded with a coffee urn, pitcher of pink lemonade, and a tray of cut-up fruit so uninteresting Bones knew it didn’t come from Gumbo’s knife. A long conference table exuded power and took up most of the room. The leather chairs around it looked sturdy enough to hold whatever was about to be dumped on them.

One guy looked like someone Bones would cross the street to avoid. His shaved head had some scary tattoos. “I’m Ramon,” the guy said, extending his hand. He was ripped, probably an athlete. “But I used to be Rake.”

“Lard.”

“Bones.” He tried to match name tags with body types: Elizabeth (cute and chubby—probably a recovering bulimic), Daphne (ditto), Cynthia (obviously ex-anorexic), Christy (impossible to tell), Phil (definitely a snacks-in-front-of-the-TV-over-eater).

Bones had hoped to see Eve, posing in pearls as the poster girl for recovery. “I never would’ve been brave enough to come down here while I was in the program,” Daphne said, smiling. “Does Dr. Chu still wear those lame ties?”

Bones smiled back. “With gravy stains.”

He reminded himself why he was here and tried not to act nervous while he poured lemonade into a Dixie cup and looked for a saltshaker. He noticed a whiteboard with a diagram of the human brain. An area was shaded in and labeled body awareness. Oddly enough, it was larger than the parts of the brain that controlled speech, taste, smell, and hearing.

“Hey, Julia.” Phil waved to a girl in the hall. “We’re about to get started.”

The girl frowned and pushed her walker into the room like she was in a bizarre six-legged race. “My dad drives like an old lady,” she said.

The walker reminded Bones of the one his mom used after knee surgery. Only this one was a swirl of color. Julia’s hair looked like charcoal briquettes, black with red tips. She wore paisley high-tops sans laces, electric blue socks, and plaid board shorts. A mermaid snaked up her calf. Bones liked it.

Julia stopped at the first chair and shrugged out of her backpack. She fiddled with the zipper and took out dangerous looking knitting needles and camouflage-colored yarn.

Ramon told everyone to take a seat, opened a worn-looking pamphlet, and read guidelines about respecting each other’s points of view. Then everyone introduced himself or herself: first name; particular disorder, anorexic, bulimic, compulsive overeater; how they were coping with life on the outside by trying to ditch their former world of extremes and navigate the much more difficult road of middle ground.

When the regulars finished, Bones realized the ice cubes in his cup were rattling. He set the cup on the floor and wiped his damp hands on his jeans. This was going to be tougher than he thought. “I’m still trying to make sense of it,” he began slowly. “I was only trying to lose a few pounds…”

“It might sound like a cliché but it really does get better.” Daphne again. “You’ll never have to go back to the dark side.”

Bones nodded, somewhat grateful, because even though it was the usual banter, it was what he needed to hear at this particular moment. The next twenty minutes was lost to horror stories about recovery, battles big and small, won and lost. Problems with insensitive families or friends who just didn’t get it.

Ramon raised his hand halfway. “I’m having a hard time with dates.”

“Dried or fresh?”

“Pitted?”

“Packaged?”

Everyone laughed, which helped take the edge off.

Ramon stared past them until he remembered whatever it was he was about to say. “So I like this girl, and I take her to a nice place downtown, but all she does is pick at her food,” he said. “I don’t eat much either, ’cause I don’t want her to think I’m a pig.”

“Restaurants are tricky,” Julia said, laying yarn across her lap. “Movies are worse, all that greasy popcorn.”

“Artificial flavorings give me the runs.” Lard knew when to go for a laugh. “You might as well ask for Pennzoil.”

“Quaker State,” Phil said managing a straight face.

Julia’s hands were busy working her knitting needles. “There are tons of things to do on a date that don’t involve food,” she said. “A stroll in the park at sunset. Take stale bread for the ducks.”

The room waited for more.

“Check the newspaper for openings at art galleries,” she said. “Sometimes they have live music.”

“Girls like that stuff?” Ramon asked.

“I’m not the only female who cozies up to a little ingenuity.” Julia’s needles were on fire. She’d added another foot to her long, skinny scarf. Who was it for, a giraffe? “Someone start a phone list for Bones and Lard, and any of you can call me if you get stuck for ideas. Anytime, any weather. I’m freakin’ brilliant when it comes to thunderstorms.”

Bones listened. This was the sort of meeting he’d hoped for. Where people didn’t just make excuses for binging on pizza or obsessing on M&M’s. Where people did more than communicate through sighs and sobs, zoning in and out of self-absorbed unhappiness. A group where everyone felt safe enough to be him or herself, talk about their issues, and share ideas that were actually helpful.

“I hated Dr. Chu when I was upstairs,” Cynthia said. “But that was the first time I was in EDU. The next time he made me realize everyone looks at themselves on a shitty day and wishes they were different.”

Julia set her knitting aside, moving around in her chair like her bones ached. “I was sixty-four pounds the last time I blacked out—I didn’t wake up for twenty-two days. It was crazy. I mean, I kept hurting myself even when I was dying.”

She stared at her walker with a kind of quiet shame. “Now I’m stuck with this for who knows how long? When I woke up I knew I didn’t want to be one of those pathetic people who becomes her disease. I knew I wanted to live.”

Bones glanced at her sideways. She frowned at her last five minutes of stitches and began ripping them out. Then she looked up at him and smiled. You could almost swim in her eyes they were so clear and blue. When she went back to her knitting he let thoughts of Alice fill him up. His insides swelled, like he was drowning in this daydream of pleasant pain.

Thirteen days had passed since Alice had run away. But he didn’t know how long she’d been in a coma. Would she wake up slowly? Or all at once? One thing he knew for sure, Alice would rather die than be stuck with a walker and not able to dance.

Ramon drained his coffee, crushed his cup, and picked up the pamphlet. “Take what works for you and leave the rest,” he said. “And keep coming back.”

Bones looked at Julia who looked back at him. She pushed her walker across the carpet, her pack pulling down a shoulder. Her eyes fell on Bones again, like they had a little secret. “If you’re having a problem, someone will have a solution. Usually me.”

Bones couldn’t say anything back.

Lard had tacked his poetry assignment on his bulletin board. It seemed a perfect, though an admittedly flippant way, to follow Mary Oliver’s opening lines,
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting…
Dr. Chu required everyone to finish the line.

Lard had written,
Sure I could shout back if I wanted to and be louder than everyone else because I’m bigger and could shatter a wine glass with a sneeze if I wanted to but I just don’t care that much anymore about what people think of me
.

Bones took out his journal and chewed on the end of his pencil. He’d never come up with anything as real as that, and not just because he still cared too much about what people thought of him. He’d never known anyone as comfortable in his own skin as Lard.

…Voices around you kept shouting…
Bones knew only too well about voices. They’d been running the same circles inside his head for years, starving little dogs trapped in a boneyard. It was time to let them out to explore the neighborhood.

One day you finally knew what you had to do…
Instead of finishing the line, he got up and went to the window and began shouting until his ears rang and his throat was raw and the voices were little more than a leaky valve. He smiled to himself, then laughter kicked in. He laughed so hard he was coughing up fur balls of irony when Unibrow stuck his head in the doorway.

“This is no-joke Tuesday,” he said.

Bones dabbed his sore eye with his sleeve.

“Er, just kidding.”

“I figured.”

“Gumbo says dinner’s in the kitchen tonight,” Unibrow said. “Don’t be late.”

After Unibrow unplugged his bulk from the doorway, Bones hit the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Instead of weak, pale, and helpless, he thought the shiner made him look like a formidable fighter. A great yearbook picture.

Dinner in the kitchen could only mean one thing: Dr. Chu wanted to evaluate their cooking skills. If anything he was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner and hoped the recipes wouldn’t be too complicated. He passed through the dayroom, catching up to Sarah and Mary-Jane, strolling with their arms linked. He wondered why girls were always doing something weird with their hair. Sarah’s bangs were spiked, like porcupine quills.

“Who won the fight?” she asked.

Bones knew she meant his black eye. He stepped in front of her and opened the door to the stairs. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

Mary-Jane stalled, her knuckles embedded in a mass of hips. “What’s wrong with the elevator?”

Bones took a stutter step; the word
elevator
was loaded with meaning. “I bet you’ve never gone this way,” he said.

“Why would we?”

“Because it’s against the rules,” he said.

That was good enough for them.

“Dr. Chu probably wants us to document our relationship with a dead animal before and after eating it,” Sarah said like she’d rather lap gravy from a pig trough.

Mary-Jane panted, taking the stairs slowly. “Maybe it isn’t about cooking.” Clearly the idea was beneath her. “Maybe it’s some sort of art project. We made gingerbread men in kindergarten. Stupid Harry Pitts bit the head off my cookie.”