Elena Vanishing

Two months into treatment, Elena has started to gain weight but feels like it’s more of a burden than anything else. She misses her family and constantly thinks about the fact that she now has some fat on her body. Elena has a few friends at Clove House, one of whom is around her age and named Stella. Stella is a day patient and sneaks vodka into the center to share with Elena. They became close, but when Stella’s insurance ran out, she had to leave before she was ready. The same happened to a few of Elena’s other friends until only 13-year-old Sam was left.

During an outing to a manicure parlor, the girls stop at a nearby store and are told they can’t come in because of the possibility that they might upset other customers. The moment becomes a harsh realization and is discussed later in group therapy, where the therapist clarifies that people with anorexia don’t see their bodies the way everyone else does. Elena wonders if perhaps she is recovering slowly but doesn’t realize it because she cannot see it.

As part of treatment, Elena has to tell her parents about being raped and having a miscarriage, which she finds just causes more pain. When she is told that she has to start consuming 5,000 calories a day, Elena reacts with anger and frustration, already feeling like she’s eating far too much. Many of the other girls and women have feeding tubes to compensate for lack of calories, but Elena is unable to because purging has worsened her gag reflex. The nurses decide to try anyway, and when Elena throws up her tube moments later while talking to Sam, the nurse accuses her of doing it on purpose and yells at her to clean up the vomit on the floor. Before retiring to the dorms for the night, Sam passes Elena a couple packets of artificial sugar, a symbol of comfort in difficult times.

Elena no longer lives at Clove House, but she spends 10 hours a day there, seven days a week. She and her mother live in a lodge nearby. Elena is taking 11 pills a day now and feels constantly fatigued and jaded. She doesn’t find joy in anything and stops wishing for happiness, instead just wanting to find some sense of stability. Elena is seeing a new therapist named Brenda, who tells Elena that some of her patients have made full recoveries, but Elena is skeptical. When the best friend of one of the girls at Clove House dies of a heart attack because of her anorexia, Elena realizes that she doesn’t feel anything.

Brenda suggests that Elena become an outpatient and move into an apartment nearby, but Elena doesn’t feel ready. She gives Elena the rest of the day off, and Elena spends it with her mother. They go to a movie, but Elena can’t manage to pay attention to it. When they pass by a pet store, Elena finds a one-eyed cat that she knows would make a great companion for her, but she doesn’t want it. Next, they go to look at apartments, and Elena finds herself envisioning a lonely death there. Her mother becomes frustrated, but Elena insists that she just wants to go home and leave Clove House.

That night, Elena gets her period; it triggers memories of her miscarriage, and she starts thinking about that moment all over again. She uses a razor to cut her arm in order to calm herself, but she ends up in the ER when it won’t stop bleeding. Elena’s mother grows even more frustrated on the way home from the hospital and implies that Elena is ungrateful and spiteful. They argue back and forth until Elena feels like her mother is giving up on her. To lighten the mood, they go to Walgreens, where Elena buys some makeup for Sam, who has been asking Elena to teach her how to use it. She gives it to Sam, which brightens Sam’s day, but then Brenda tells Elena that doing so was a mistake. She informs Elena that she should distance herself from Sam. Elena finally feels something again, and it’s anger. She gets up and leaves, telling her mother she never wants to go back.

Two months after leaving Clove House, Elena is worse off than she was when she went in. She has lost 30 pounds, she purges after every meal, and she knows that her health is rapidly declining. People at school think Elena is using drugs or has cancer. One day, Elena gets a call from Sam, whose parents don’t want her anymore and who begs Elena to take her in. Elena knows her mother would never agree to something illegal. Moreover, Sam believes that she’s going to die before she turns 18. One of the girls that Elena knew at Clove House dies, and Elena spends two days sleeping.

When Elena wakes up, her parents present her with a contract that requires her to be a certain weight in order to have “privileges” like a phone or computer. The contract also threatens to kick Elena out if she doesn’t comply with it. Elena feels attacked and unloved and yells at her parents, accusing them of not caring about her anymore. She threatens to leave but loses the heart for it halfway through packing. When Elena finds out that her parents threw out all of her extra-small clothes, she rages at them, and Elena’s mother leaves. Valerie tries to talk Elena down, but Elena is convinced that her parents’ decision to send her to boarding school is the underlying reason for all her problems. She reads through old letters to prove this but finds instead that she appears to have loved boarding school—until she was raped. After that, her letters change tone, and the person that Elena was disappears.

Elena feels like she is trapped inside a skull that won’t allow anything good to pass through it. She has a dream in which all the loved ones in her life wrap around the skull and penetrate through it. It then shrinks until it fits in Elena’s hand, and she puts it on her back, where it sprouts wings. Elena gets a tattoo of a skull with wings to symbolize the feeling of knowing that the love in her life is what will set her free. She decides that she has to go back into treatment.

By the end of the year, Elena’s mental and physical health are beginning to improve. She is in day treatment at Sandalwood and takes on a big sister role for the younger patients there. Elena’s doctor notices this about her but also notices that Elena reacts with aggression and mistrust to older female figures. Elena’s doctor suggests that Elena’s mistrust of women stems from her early childhood, when her mother was sick and unable to care for her fully. Elena learned to live without that support, and by the time her mother was ready to take care of her, she no longer trusted her. Elena’s doctor encourages her to work with a female therapist to see if she can address some of these longstanding issues, and Elena reluctantly agrees. Later, Elena is with her mother and thinks about all the times her mother slept in the hospital with her or left her husband behind to be with her. She decides to read her mother a poem that expresses her acknowledgement of her mother’s efforts, and they cry together.

During a therapy session, Elena’s therapist encourages her to open up about being raped. Elena describes the experience in vague terms and remembers trying to defend herself unsuccessfully, as well as other people standing around laughing. Elena’s therapist explains that Elena blamed herself for being raped because the thought of something so awful being out of Elena’s control was more terrifying than taking (false) responsibility for it. Elena reflects on how she began having symptoms of severe OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) after the incident. Unpacking her emotions, Elena realizes that her anger is based in self-hatred, both for the rape and for her miscarriage. Elena’s therapist asks Elena what her baby’s name was, and Elena reveals that she would have called her Lilly Arabella. Saying the name out loud is a visceral experience for Elena, and she shares the name again during group therapy. At home, Elena plays with her pet snake and has a dream about the daughter she lost. Lilly Arabella tells Elena not to worry, and when Elena awakes, she feels a sense of calm. She also feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude to Sandalwood for helping her to heal from her past.

Two years later, Elena is at nursing school. She eats regularly but still struggles with her body image and with gaining weight. Elena goes to a Halloween party and manages to calm the atmosphere down by reciting a story about a witch named Baba Yaga and the glass cat she makes for a king. Before going to sleep that night, Elena looks through her Facebook at pictures of the people she has met along the way. Sam is in high school and doing well with a new family, and Gemma is now three years old. The next morning, Elena gets ready for nursing school and looks at herself in the mirror. She sees a “crisp and professional” woman (283), though the voice in the back of her mind still tells her she’s ugly. She knows she has a long way to go in her journey of recovery. At the hospital, Elena helps a woman who is panicked after surgery and Elena knows she is exactly where she should be.