The Perfect Mum. Janice Johnson Kay

as well. Dressed for work in brown slacks and a cream silk blouse, a rose and brown and rust scarf artfully knotted around her throat, she looked far from the timid and tired woman she had been when she came to look at the house seven months ago.

      “Kathleen! Is she all right?”

      They all crowded around while Kathleen told them what she’d learned. “I’ll need to make some calls, but first I’m going to see Emma. They won’t let anyone else in,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

      Ginny slipped behind her mother. Her expression anxious, Helen said, “Oh, dear. Ginny isn’t convinced Emma will be okay.”

      “I’ll ask,” Kathleen promised. “Maybe they’d let Ginny pop in just for a minute.”

      Emma lay in a curtained cubicle, a couple of blankets covering her up to her chin. For a moment, Kathleen stood unseen, and her heart seemed to stop. Lying like this, laid out on her back, eyes closed, Emma could have been dead. Her face, once piquant and a little chubby, was marble pale and gaunt. Not the slightest healthy color flushed her cheeks. Even her lips were bluish.

      How did I not see how near death she was? Kathleen asked herself in silent despair. How could I have kept pretending?

      Easily, she knew. Oh, how easily, because the alternative was too difficult, too painful.

      The curtains rattled when she stepped forward and Emma’s eyes, huge in her thin face, opened. “Mom,” she croaked.

      Kathleen pinned on a smile. “Sweetie, you scared us.”

      “I’m sorry. I must have slipped or something. Maybe I spilled some water.”

      The floor had been bone-dry when Kathleen sat at her daughter’s side. “Maybe,” she said, smoothing hair from Emma’s forehead. Her hair was brittle and colorless, too, a ghost of its former rich gold threaded with gilt and amber and sunlight.

      “Can I go home now?”

      Here came the hard part.

      Kathleen shook her head. “Dr. Weaver wants to check you into the hospital for the night. You do have a concussion, you know.”

      “But I’m fine!” Emma struggled to sit up. “If they’re worried about me passing out or something, you can watch me, can’t you? Or Ginny? She always follows me around anyway.”

      “It’s not so bad here.” Kathleen hesitated, but didn’t have a chance to continue.

      “Make them take this out!” Emma brandished her hand, in which an IV needle had been stuck and taped down. In agitation, she exclaimed, “There’s sugar or something in that! I’d already had breakfast, and now they’re, like, pumping all these calories into me! I’ll have to diet for weeks to make up for it!”

      Diet? The idea would have been laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic and even grotesque. How could she cut any more? She barely ate a few leaves of lettuce, non-fat Jell-O and unsweetened herb tea now.

      “Honey…”

      “I’ll take it out myself!” Emma began clawing at the tape.

      “Stop!” Kathleen grabbed her wrist and wrenched her hand away, surprised at frail Emma’s strength. Holding her arm down, she said, “You collapsed because you’ve starved yourself. You will not take this IV out!”

      “That’s not true!” Emma glared at her. “You know I’ve been eating. You see me.”

      Near tears, Kathleen shook her head. “No. I don’t. You don’t eat enough to keep a…a mouse alive. You’ve been doing your best to kill yourself, but I won’t let you. You’re not coming home. You’re spending the night in the hospital, and tomorrow you’re going into residential treatment.”

      Screaming in rage, Emma tore her hand from Kathleen’s grip. “You promised!” she yelled. “You said if I stayed above eighty pounds, I didn’t have to go! You’re a liar, liar, liar!”

      Kathleen drew a shuddering breath in the face of her daughter’s vitriol. “I’m not the liar. Dr. Weaver says you don’t weigh anywhere near eighty pounds. You’ve been tricking us somehow. But you knew the consequences, Emma. You’re not getting better. You’re getting worse.”

      “I hate you!”

      “I love you,” Kathleen said, eyes burning, and turned to leave.

      Emma threw herself onto her side, drew her knees up and began to sob.

      Kathleen’s heart shattered into a million pieces. She wanted, as she’d never wanted anything in her life, to say, All right, you can come home, if you promise to eat. She wanted to see incredulity and hope and gratitude light her daughter’s face, as if her mother could still do and be anything and everything to her. Of course she’d promise.

      And then she would lie and scheme to keep starving. She would exercise in the middle of the night to burn off calories she’d been forced to swallow, she’d take laxatives, she’d hide food in her cheek and then spit it out.

      She would die, if she had her way.

      Paralyzed, hurting unbearably, Kathleen didn’t turn around.

      This was harder, even, than leaving Ian, harder than facing her own inability to provide a decent livelihood, harder than facing the fact that she, too, was responsible for Emma’s self-hatred. But if she truly loved her daughter, she had to be firm now.

      “I’m sorry,” she said, pushed aside the curtains and fled.

      In the tiny, antiseptic rest room open to family members, Kathleen locked the door, sat on the toilet and cried until her stomach hurt and she’d run out of tears. The sight of her face in the mirror should have stirred horror, but she stared almost indifferently at the puffy-faced woman gazing dully back. She did splash cold water on her face and brush her hair before facing the world again.

      At the nurse’s station, she stopped. “I’m Emma Monroe’s mother.”

      Quick compassion showed in the other woman’s expression. “Are you all right?”

      Kathleen nodded, although they both knew she wasn’t. “I’m sure my daughter will take out the IV, if she hasn’t already. You’d better check it regularly.”

      “We will. Thank you.”

      Kathleen explained about Ginny, and the nurse came with her to get the child.

      Taking Ginny’s hand, she smiled kindly. “Let’s just go back and say hi to Emma. You can’t stay, because she’s getting ready to go upstairs to be checked into the hospital, but I know she’ll be glad to see you.”

      “Thank you,” Helen said, watching her daughter be led away. “She’s really scared.”

      Kathleen nodded. Her head felt disconnected to her body. Huge, and yet, eerily, weightless, as if it were a hot air balloon and she were the tiny wicker basket, dangling beneath, swaying in space.

      Jo’s arm came firmly around her. “You look awful,” she said frankly. “Is Emma mad?”

      Kathleen nodded again. Her head kept bobbing, as if it didn’t know how to stop. “I told her.” Her voice sounded far away, too, perhaps because it was being drowned out by the roar of the burners that kept the balloon inflated.

      “That she’s going into treatment?”

      Kathleen was still nodding. A dull throbbing suggested that a headache was building, a storm threatening her sense of unreality.

      Jo turned her so that Kathleen had to meet her eyes. “You’re doing the right thing. You know you are.”

      “Do I?”

      Once, she had been a confident woman who believed, the vast majority of the time, that she was doing the right thing. She had a perfect life, didn’t she? A handsome husband, a smart daughter, a beautiful home, and she worked hard for