By then she was his nurse, cook, and therapist, showering a grown man and stripping his sheets after accidents. Her hands were raw from bleach, and she hadn’t slept through a night in over a year. In February her MIT adviser called, kind but firm, and told her this was her final chance to show up by fall. That night Nora told Rick she was leaving, and his face went white, his breathing turned shallow, and he said he needed the hospital.
The Voice Through the Bathroom Door
Something felt off. He kept glancing at her face between gasps, and the panic seemed timed to her announcement, like a performance she’d watched before. While he was in the bathroom, she opened the medical folder in the kitchen drawer and flipped through his recent test results. His heart was fine, and the cardiologist’s notes said it had been fine for six months.
Then she heard him through the door, calm and clear, with no wheezing at all. “She’s staying,” he said into his phone. He’d bought it again, he told whoever was listening, and in a few more years she’d age out of the college programs and have no choice but to stay and take care of him forever. She doesn’t suspect anything, he added. She actually thinks I might die.
She must have made a noise, because he stopped talking. When he came out he was wheezing and clutching his chest again, and Nora smiled and helped him into bed as if nothing had changed. Over the next few days she searched his room while he slept. She found weight-gainer supplements hidden in the closet, browser searches about gaining weight fast and staying obese for disability benefits, and a notebook full of weight goals, target dates, and meal plans. The last entry was from that week and read: she almost left, need to hit 350 by March.
Forty-Three Missed Calls
She didn’t scream or cry or ask him why. She packed a bag while he slept, called her aunt Cara, who lived three states away, and walked out the front door. Rick phoned forty-three times on the first day, moving from begging to threats to sobbing, and she blocked him after the tenth. Her bag held three shirts, two pairs of jeans, a toothbrush, and a laptop, which was everything she had to show for two years.
At Cara’s apartment the silence felt wrong. Her body kept bracing for his voice demanding food or help to the bathroom, and she checked her phone fifteen times to make sure he was really blocked. Cara never pushed. She left sandwiches and fruit and room to breathe, and one morning over coffee she offered to help with enrollment and even co-sign loans. Nora cried into her mug, because in two years no one had offered her help without wanting something back.
The state university confirmed her deferred spot, and a kind admissions counselor named Landon Shaw had the paperwork in her inbox within minutes. A new phone number gave her a small, fierce feeling of control. Then Rick’s sister, Winter, called Cara’s landline and tore into her, saying she’d abandoned family, that her mother would be ashamed, that Rick might die without her. Nora hung up, slid down the kitchen wall, and sobbed until Cara knelt beside her. Cara called it what it was, abuse, and then she unplugged the landline.