"I'm releasing Joe," Dr. Ziv, announced, visibly bracing herself.
"You can't!" Frank, Fenton and Laura shouted at once.
"I'm sorry. I have no choice. He's resilient to treatment. He's been purging and skipping meals and supplements. He's non-compliant. There's nothing more we can do. Someone who wants to recover can take this spot."
The three were seated in the Doctor's office, eagerly awaiting what they had anticipated would be a bleak progress report; however, they had never expected such terrible news.
"But…" Laura's eyes filled with tears. "If he comes home like this, he'll just keep right on starving himself until…until…" her voice broke, and the strain of the past few months caught up with her. She lowered her head to her hands and sobbed. Fenton leaned forward and drew his wife into his arms, holding her tightly.
Frank felt his own eyes burning. He couldn't stand seeing his family this hurt, couldn't stand the pain they were all in.
Because of you, Joe. Godamnit, why can't you see it? I could almost hate you right now.
"I'm very, very sorry," the doctor said softly. "I do recommend that you put him in another treatment center, and keep him in them as long as you can, before Joe turns eighteen. Once he does that nothing can be done without his consent."
"How much weight has he lost while he's here?" Fenton said, his voice wavering only slightly.
"Sixteen pounds."
The three jolted; far more than he'd lost at home.
"We were trying to help him," Laura whispered, wiping her eyes and sitting up straighter.
"What about feeding tubes?" Fenton murmured.
"Dad!" Frank almost shouted.
"What do you want me to do Frank? Let him go on starving himself, vomiting it up?"
"We don't really believe in feeding tubes anymore, Mr. Hardy, not unless the patient is near death," Dr. Ziv explained.
"I see," the detective murmured, a bit too calmly, "so in a couple weeks, when my son is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty pounds below a normal body weight, and so emaciated he can no longer walk, it would be all right to have him brought back, strapped to a bed, and tube-fed?"
"Fenton!" Laura cried.
"No, Laura, I'm trying to understand how these people can release my son when he's obviously so ill, as if they expect us to come up with some break through when that's what we've been paying them to do, because obviously we haven't come up with anything that works!"
Fenton, in uncustomary violence, suddenly slammed his fist down on to the arm of his chair, got to his feet, and began pacing the office.
"Honey," Laura murmured, "please calm down."
"Calm down? Calm down? My son is ill and they're telling me that there's no help for him and you want me to calm down?"
"I didn't say there was no help," Dr. Ziv said firmly, fixing the detective with an authoritative stare, "but you have t understand, Mr. Hardy, when a patient is this convinced that there isn't a problem, they often are resilient to treatment. It's unfortunate, and I work against seeing it happen, but sometimes the patient needs to…bottom out, so to speak. Become so physically debilitated that they have no choice but to admit that there's a problem and accept treatment."
"And," Laura drew a deep breath, "what if they never accept it?"
"We don't need to discuss that—"
"Doctor, are you a mother?"
Dr. Ziv sighed and leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs. "Mrs. Hardy, I think we both know the answer to that question and since yes, I am a mother, I don't want to be the one to tell you."
Frank was acutely aware of the entire conversation, his instincts perked as if he were working a case, hoping for something—a fact, a slip, a look in the doctor's eye, some sign that this was not hopeless.
"Are there any…more intensive programs out there?" Laura went on quietly.
Dr. Ziv sighed. "Yes, there are specialized centers. The problem is most of them won't take men. It's a very new policy that we do. There's different issues between men and women, or so we have come to believe. Women are more conscious of how there body looks, while men are often more conscious of what it can do. That's why there's often more steroid abuse among men then women. In the case of anorexic males, there's a belief that losing the weight will allow them to do more. Like wrestling, for instance. But above all, it's a defense mechanism. It's almost a perverted way of the body caring for itself. The emotions, whatever they may be, have become too much for the mind to deal with, and so it switches its focus to food, to losing weight, all the while letting the patient believe that they are fixing the pain on the inside by eliminating more and more of the body on the outside."
"But what pain is this?" Fenton growled, "what, suddenly hurt my son so much that he couldn't deal with it? Why would he choose this? Just because of wrestling?"
Dr. Ziv placed a file on the table and looked, suddenly, sad.
"Ask your son," she murmured. "He won't tell us."
Laura reached for her husband's arm and pulled him back toward her chair, rubbing her fingers along his hand soothingly.
"Frank," she said after a moment's hesitation, "has Joe…I don't want you to give anything away or betray his trust, but he has spoken to you. Has he said anything? Given you any hints?"
The elder Hardy brother, instincts still up, was exceedingly uncomfortable as he realized all eyes were on him, each pair hoping for an answer, hoping he'd produce some brilliant insight or secret, give the therapists something to work with, give his parents the much-needed hope they desired.
"No," he murmured, the word breaking something inside him: the knowledge of the gap, ever widening, between the brothers, as Joe drifted farther and farther into the abyss, unaware of Frank's desperation on the other shore.