He made his way into the waiting room half an hour after I made the call, most definitely breaking multiple traffic laws to get there in that time. When he saw me sitting in a purple chair by myself, he raced up and wrapped me in a hug. In this moment, we forgot about the fight that had completely torn me apart this past weekend. Right now he was just my dad, the only other person who could take over the post of being strong while I crumbled.
“What’s her condition? Have the doctors been back out to talk to you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “There was a doctor who said they were running some tests when she first got here, but no one has come back since. I’m supposed to stay here so they can find me when there’s an update.”
“Do you need something to eat? Drink? I can go grab it,” he said.
I shook my head, but he went to find food. He had the type of nervous energy where you couldn’t possibly sit still. My nervous energy worked in the opposite way. I felt like I couldn’t process things normally, and I couldn’t get the image of Mom unconscious on the floor out of my head. What would have happened if I hadn’t come home from school early? Would she have woken up and gone on with her day? Was this the first time she’d passed out like this? I had a million and one questions for her.
I went back and forth on whether it was time to call Ashley. What if they came out and said she was anemic and that she just had a really low iron count that caused her to pass out? Deep down I knew that it was something more serious than that, but holding off my call to Ashley let me hold on to the hope that it wasn’t for a little bit longer.
Dad came back with a can of pop and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and I raised my eyebrows. He’d never liked spicy food. He shrugged at me before digging farther into the bag until he had to tip the Cheeto dust at the end into his mouth. Stress is handled differently by each person, I guess.
“I’m glad you called me,” he said, starting in on a bag of Doritos.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I snapped.
“Savannah,” he said. “I know that we’ve had a rocky few weeks, but you have to know that I’m always here for you, kiddo. Whenever you need me.”
“You know how empty that promise has been in the past, Dad. Don’t pretend like this has always been your mantra,” I said.
He set down his bag of chips and repositioned himself to be facing me head-on. “I’m trying to work on it, Savvy. My life made a complete one-eighty the moment your mom kicked me out of the house. We’d been living together since right out of college. I didn’t recognize my life without her anymore.”
“You made it very clear that you weren’t happy in the life with her,” I said.
“Neither of us was happy. And I know that’s not an excuse for what I did,” he said. “And that also doesn’t mean that it wasn’t difficult for me to adjust to a new lifestyle. To adjust to a life where my kids didn’t trust me anymore.”
“Weren’t you the one who taught us that trust must be earned?” I asked, my voice becoming louder in my anger. I looked around the waiting room to see if anyone was watching us, but thankfully, everyone seemed to be preoccupied with their own family dramas to tune into ours.
“I did,” he said. “And I still believe that. Savannah, I want to earn your trust back. I know saying this out loud won’t make it magically happen, but I’m ready to put in the work.”
“Savannah Alverson?” we heard from the other end of the waiting room.
When I heard my name called, I realized that this was the moment that I could no longer live in the “Mom’s going to be perfectly fine” bubble. I had to face whatever reality the doctor was going to tell me now. We stood up in unison and joined the doctor at the front of the room. The walk seemed to take eons, and I couldn’t complain. Right now, everything was still fine. Once he opened his mouth and told us the diagnosis, nothing would be the same again.
“Mr. Alverson?” the doctor asked. “Hi, I’m Dr. Jefferson. I met Savannah earlier.”
We both nodded in unison.
“I have some good and bad news for you both. The good news is she was breathing the entire time she was passed out, so there’s no sign of brain or organ damage. The bad news is, her blood work is showing that she is severely malnourished and has been effectively starving herself. We’ve put a call into our adult psychiatry unit that specializes in mood and eating disorders to see if there is a bed available for her. When patients come into my office with these signs and they are no longer able to make their own choices, we admit them,” he said.
“So … what does that mean? How does this transition happen? When does it happen?” Dad asked. All his questions blurred together in my head. From the moment the doctor said the words starving herself, I completely shut off. I’d seen it—I’d seen how different she was acting, and I didn’t do anything about it. I could have prevented this all from happening. She wouldn’t have to be in the hospital if I had said something earlier.
“We’ll keep her here for as long as we can and hope that a bed opens up within our own adult psychiatry unit. If not, we’ll put feelers out to units in the area until we can find a place for her to stay. In cases like these, it’s a two-week minimum stay with limited visiting hours in the first week. I’ll be able to give you more information once we know which facility she’ll be moved to,” he said.
Dr. Jefferson rested his hand on my shoulder and my head sank. Dad continued to ask the doctor more questions, but I couldn’t focus on the words coming out of either of their mouths. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that when I opened them back up this would be a terrible nightmare. But I was still surrounded by plastic purple chairs and sad people as far as the eye could see.
Dad thought that we should start calling family at this point, and he volunteered to call most of them. I insisted that I call Ashley, but I started sending him phone numbers of everyone else I thought might need to know.
I decided to take my call with Ashley outside, where the birds still chirped and the sun shined down on me. If someone had told me when I scrambled out of bed this morning that I’d end up calling my sister with really terrible news about our mom, I wouldn’t have believed them. But here I was, terrible news and all.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hey, Sissy! What’s up?”
“Ash, it’s Mom,” I said, my voice cracking.
“What happened?”
“I came home from school early, long story, and found her passed out on the kitchen floor and couldn’t wake her up. The paramedics had to come and take her to the emergency room.”
“Oh my God.”
“We just heard from the doctor that she’s going to have to be admitted to a mood and eating-disorder facility because she’d been starving herself,” I said.
She was silent for a few seconds on the other end of the line, I’m sure she was trying to figure out her route home and how to clean up this uncleanable mess. She didn’t have a car up at school, so either someone was going to have to come get her or she was going to have to find a Greyhound that came back this way.
“I’m going to see if I can borrow Yael’s car for a few days and make my way back home. I should be there by tonight. Are you there alone?” she asked.
“Dad’s here with me. He’s calling the rest of the family who I feel like need to know,” I said.
“Thank God for Dad,” she said. “Stay strong, Sissy. I know this is awful, but everything will work out. It always does.”
“It’s kind of hard to believe that right now,” I said.
“Just keep remembering that I will be there soon and it won’t all be on you anymore. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.
Our loved ones started piling into the hospital waiting room an hour after we started our phone train. Grace came first, and she sat beside me, holding my hand until the doctors would come out with more updates. They had been able to find an open bed within the hospital’s psychiatry unit and they were admitting her as an eating-disorder patient. They weren’t sure how to classify it yet, but based on her lab results and her extreme weight loss, they were confident that she should be admitted to that unit.
I’d been instructed to go home and grab a few things that she might need—a toothbrush, pajamas, a pillow—anything that you might bring to a sleepover. They did make one special request: no objects with sharp edges. Grace drove me home and helped me assemble the bag. We let Fiyero outside for a bit, but he kept looking around the house for Mom. I wished I could bring him with, even if it was just for a few minutes, to show him that she was okay. I knew he was worried about her, and it broke my heart that I had no idea how long he’d been trying to wake her up before I got there.
Ashley did end up borrowing Yael’s car, and she was already waiting in the hospital when I got back with the bag of things. She enveloped me in the biggest hug humanly possible, and I clung to her for relief. I knew that I would be able to get through whatever was thrown at me with my sister by my side now.
We gave the bag of her things to the nurse who was helping facilitate Mom’s transition, and she told us that we’d be able to see her tomorrow morning. She gave us directions to get to the unit and told us to check in with the front desk so they could let us in. It hit me then that she would be locked in this place with no way out. It would be so that she could heal and recover, but it felt very scary and final in that moment.
Ashley and I piled into Yael’s car and headed back home to let Fiyero out and attempt to sleep until we could see Mom again in the morning. Dad was close behind in his own car. We didn’t speak as we drove home, but I appreciated the silence. I’d been talking to people all day, reliving the horror that was finding my own mother unconscious on the floor, and I was ready to stop having to explain myself.
The house felt emptier than ever when we walked in. Fiyero tackled Ashley to the floor when he saw her, and I pretended not to hear her crying. She had been trying hard to be so strong for me this whole day, but I think it had all finally hit her in this moment. I went to the fridge and picked up a cup of yogurt. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I knew my body was hungry, but the thought of eating food right now made my stomach roil.
I sat quietly for a few moments, the only sound coming from my spoon hitting the bottom of the yogurt container. Ashley’s footsteps sounded up the stairs, followed by a fluffy poodle monster who was going to be incredibly happy to have his bed buddy back again.
In this moment I felt the most exhausted that I ever had in my entire life. I slunk up the stairs and collapsed onto my bed, too tired to even move the covers or take off my shoes.
It had to be an hour later when I woke up to the feeling of someone removing my shoes. My eyes fluttered open to find my dad standing at the end of my bed. He had a blanket in his hands and he was laying it on top of me. He paused when he noticed my eyes were open.
“Keep sleeping, kiddo,” he said.
I held out my arms to him and he fell into a hug, bringing me closer to him. I didn’t dare let go, because if I did, he might disappear. “Thank you for coming.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. He hugged me tighter as I started to cry. I didn’t know how many times I’d imagined that he was back in this room reading me a bedtime story or telling me a silly joke before I went to school in the morning. I missed this part of him that I’d shut out so firmly when I found out that he cheated on Mom. It had taken me this long to realize that even if they didn’t love each other anymore, it didn’t mean that he didn’t love me still.
Eventually I drifted off to sleep while he sat on the edge of my bed, drawing comforting circles on my back. That night I dreamed of the last time we took a trip as a family to California. We were all walking along the beach and picking up seashells when Dad pushed Ashley into the ocean, and I doubled over I was laughing so hard. She pretended to be angry, but she couldn’t help but laugh herself. Even Mom was joining in on the fun. I remember thinking in that moment that it was perfect, that it was my idea of complete happiness. Dream-Me took a seat on the beach, watching the rest of the scene play out. It no longer made me sad that this memory was the last one of us being happy as a family. Because now I realized there was a possibility of making new happy memories with both Mom and Dad, and even if the memories weren’t made together, eventually they would bring me just as much joy as this one did.