Sick

Today’s Mixed Bag is a fictional short story that includes self-harm, an eating disorder and panic attack. Please be careful reading.

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I answered my phone in the early hours of the evening. The sun was settling into the horizon but not quite down–the house was quiet, the other girls in their rooms or still at work, too early for anyone to be making dinner. Our tan couch was comfortable if not pretty, sat in a big upstairs family room with bedrooms on all sides. 

“Hello?”
A breathy silence filled the space where Leah’s voice should have been.
“Hello? Leah? Friend, are you there?”

The breathy silence turned to the startling sounds of someone gasping for air–made even more startling by the knowledge that a violent ex-boyfriend had been known to come around now and then without warning or welcome.

Leah and I had met at church, plopped into a Bible study because we were the same age. Our lives until that point could not have been more different. Although we would learn years later that we shared a hatred for our bodies–pacts made at the altar of thinness to stop feeding them.

“I’m here. What’s wrong? Where are you?”
A jumbled mess of gasps and garbled words were all I could gather.
“Friend, I need you to breathe. I can’t understand you.”
“I’m having…a panic…attack,” she got out between gasps.

I was not surprised. Leah wasn’t OK. She never had been. But the fear in her voice triggered a terror in me.

I shoved my heart into my feet–planting them, I braced myself. I entered the mode I knew better than I knew myself. When others were in crisis my job was to fight, and while my heart was growing more terrified by the second, my mind had already clicked into overdrive.

“Tell me where you are. Are you driving?”

I pushed the door open to Lilly’s room, ineffectively mouthing to her what was happening. I switched to speaker phone so she could hear.

“I pulled…over.”
“OK. Where are you? I will come get you. I can call an ambulance. They can probably get there quicker.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Her breathing had slowed slightly but now the sobs had begun.

“You were on your way home from work, right? Tell me what you see? What streets are you near?”
“There’s a pasture…”

A pasture. In Texas, I think. I need more.
 
“Leah, I need you to look at your GPS. I know you are scared. I am coming to get you but I need to know where you are. Put me on speaker phone.”

I heard the phone click over.

“Pull up your maps. You can do this. I’m coming for you.”

I was in the car and headed in the general direction of her work, hoping she’d taken the same route my GPS was taking me when I put in the name of the greenhouse she’d worked at for the last six months, growing microgreens which looked pretty much like baby weeds but were supposed to have more nutrients or something than regular lettuce.

“OK. My mmmap’s up.” She was still sucking air in, like a soprano trying to make it to the end of a cadence.

“Send me a pin. I’m already in the car. I’m coming. Everything is going to be OK. I’m coming. Stay on the phone with me.”

Everything is going to be OK. This was the lie I told the most in my life. Like when people ask you, “How are you?” and without fail you answer “Fine,” even if your dog just died and your arm is visibly broken.

“Everything is going to be OK.”

Was it though? Was her fucking asshole of an ex who lived with so much wealth and privilege that he’d never suffered a consequence in his life ever going to leave her alone? Would her courage to leave ever be enough to recover what he’d taken?

“Everything is going to be OK.”

What the hell did I know about the trauma she had from a mom who hated herself and tried to cope with her self-disgust with a rotating cast of shit men in their home for every year of Leah’s life that should have been filled with innocence and bedtime stories?

“Everything is going to be OK.”

Maybe this could have been true before her modeling career ended in a horrific moment of being told she had gained too much weight on national television, which caused years of already existing bulimia to hit new levels of self destruction–wrecking her body and mind. Leaving her a shell of self hatred and tooth decay.

Mercifully, I heard the ding of the text come through. I hit the pin. Only ten minutes from her.

“I’m coming, Leah. Keep breathing. I’m coming.”

“I am not OK. I need help. I need help.” Her sobs began again in earnest. The desperation more pleading and urgent than I had ever heard from her.

We’d been getting her help as she was willing and we were able for years now. Me and Lilly and Abbie and any other number of girls we lived with in a collection of houses and apartments like you do in your twenties. But this time was different. She sounded so sick on the other end of the line. I worried she was dying there on the side of the road.

Her small gray car was there. Two tires on the asphalt, two on top of the dead winter grass. She’d managed to put her flashers on. The driver’s side door was opened precariously, like she was trying to decide whether she should get out and run. The problem is there is no running from yourself. Her body knew that but now her mind had begun to catch up.

My door was open before I’d even come to a complete stop. As I ran to her, she was not curled in a ball, rocking back and forth–the way I always pictured panic attacks. Rather she was splayed out, as if she did not even have the energy to hold herself. I did my best to hold her. To steady her to my passenger’s seat. Running back to her car, taking the keys out of the ignition, grabbing her bag and locking the door.

“I’ve got her,” I texted the roommates. By the time we got home everyone was there. Now there were at least three ill-equipped, terrified girls to help Leah up the stairs.

She was inconsolable. She wanted to die. She wanted her dad. A forever non-existent figure. She wanted a dad. She was begging for help over and over and over. I had never seen her like that before, and I never wanted to see her like that again. We were all clueless and scared. As she screamed, wailed, I thought, This is what hell sounds like.

She said she wanted a minute to change. We all hesitated, hoping for one settling look between all of us. I think we all sensed that she shouldn’t be alone, but also the screaming was just so much and we were so young and so afraid, and so we let her go into her bedroom to change out of her dirt-covered greenhouse clothes with a warning that we wouldn’t leave her alone for long.

None of us sat down. In hushed tones we talked about what to do. I wanted to call my parents. I didn’t care that I was a grownup. I would call them once we had Leah resting. They would know what to do.

It had been too long. We knocked on the door but Leah didn’t answer. We paused only briefly, knocked again, instant panic crashing between us.

“Leah, we are coming in.” We didn’t even wait to finish the sentence before we pushed the door open.

Her legs were tucked underneath her. Her bare shins on the plain bathroom tile, she rested back on her feet, forearms facing palm up, laid neatly on each of her upper legs, blood running from each wrist–almost poetically mirroring the quiet tears streaming down her face. The razor blade lay neatly on the floor beside her.

She was finally rocking back and forth.