A/N: I swear I have a life outside of writing (ask the dog who just got groomed for the show ring in the ninety-degree heat)
I'm touched that so many of you like the relationship between Emma and Scott. I truly love writing them.
Chapter Four
Emma's POV
Their meetings had become a cherished routine over the weeks. He would always linger, no longer so awkward as the others left, piling into their parent's cars or heading off to their next after school activity and Emma would supply the tea that he had grown to enjoy with time, accepting it not because of some self-imposed obligation, but because it had become a source of comfort for both of them. A safety net they could turn to, sip at delicately, when the words they were trying to speak were too difficult, lodging in their throats as if afraid of being released after having existed for so long within the confines of their own unspoken fear.
"I miss the locusts that sing through the evenings in the summer." He began without a prompt, like his thoughts were deciding their own path and he was deciding to follow. "My dad and I used to go camping when school got out. I used to fall asleep to their droning. Now, when I hear them I think about those nights." He paused, momentarily clutching at the fabric of the t-shirt he was drowning in, hiding in, pulling it forward at the neck so the bottom no longer rested against his stomach.
It was a gesture the world would have overlooked, but she caught it, and understood it, and it gained the voice he had neglected to give within her mind.
I know I'm fat. Please don't look.
"And if I close my eyes, and I stop breathing, because nothing smells like that campfire, then I can forget who I am, and what I'm doing for these few glorious seconds, until my mind forces its way back in, and I remember." He continued as though he hadn't breathed that cautious sigh of relief when the material had straightened, his fingers toying absently with a string that disrupted the outline of his shirt, the outline of his life.
With a heavy sigh that was destined to be defeated before it filled the room he took a sip of the tea he had been studying as though, maybe, if he wished hard enough it could produce the answers he sought. The same ones she had sought, still sought, would always seek, she secretly feared.
He was losing weight. His paranoia increasing as hers had. Now, when she placed a hand on his shoulder or went to hug him good-bye his body would stiffen beneath her fingertips and he would jerk away, forever trying to mask his terror with a grin, never looking at her after, as though he was convinced she might see his weight written in the shame held captive within his eyes.
Every week she had started the question, always the same way, with his name, because by doing that she could morph her inquiry into anything and he would be none the wiser. Today, as she noted how pale he had become, the result of more than just the disappearing sun, and the way his cheek bones, chiseled beyond the counterpart of health, demanded her attention, she tried again.
"Scott, if I asked, would you tell me how much you eat a day?"
His expression turned hard in the glow of question she could almost touch it was so dense, and she could picture it, the ground she had just relinquished, the trust she had so carefully cultivated these last few weeks crumbling into a sea of suspicion that she herself had almost drowned in.
"Would you?" He fired back. His tone sharp, accusatory, ominous in the pitch that had no intent of returning to its tonic, and he didn't have to say it, she knew what he meant.
Would you tell me how much you ate?
His eyes sliced through her, shredding her confidence and the stream of air that spilled from between his lips, infused with a disgusted disbelief she longed to push away, back to the place where it had bubbled up from, was like a slap to the face.
"I thought not." He spat harshly, blindly groping for the book bag he had carelessly shrugged to the floor at the start of group. "I'm not that stupid you know." His voice rose as his fury gave way to a defensive rage that was both dissonant and harmonious, the octave after the perfect fifth in the Surprise Symphony that only those who had listened before, knew to expect.
Emma jumped as the mug of tea hurtled towards the ground, swallowed by the carpet that its contents discolored easily, like the weighted words that now stained their relationship permanently.
"Tell them, whoever the hell you are reporting back to, that I eat twelve pizzas a day!" And he was gone, his retort seeping into her soul like the heat that transferred from the mug still resting between her palms; immediate and scorching.
The door slammed behind him, leaving her buried in the aftermath of the scene that had just unfolded as she tried to tell herself that the glint of light in the track of moisture she had glimpsed on his cheek was just a stray drop of splattered tea.
She didn't talk much as Will carried on about his day while they trudged into the blustery wind that burned at her face, like the anger she still felt for what she had said to Scott, still burned at her soul.
"Hey," Will grabbed at her forearm lightly, applying a gentle pressure that wasn't necessary because taking another step seemed overwhelming. "What's wrong?"
A breeze picked up around them and she angrily tucked the hairs it loosened behind her ear, scowling at nothing and everything but the man who was patiently standing in front of her, waiting like always.
He reached out, placing his hand beneath her chin, raising her face to meet his and she blinked rapidly against the tears that had been building with every playback of her conversation with Scott, where she conjured up ways she could have prevented the fallout, and felt sick knowing that it was just a torturous game she hard partaken in since she was a child; rewriting words she didn't have the right to rewrite.
"I really messed things up with Scott." Emma paused, taking a deep shuddering breath. "I asked something I shouldn't have and he got mad and stormed out. I'm so worried about him Will…and I thought that maybe because he knew I had been there that he would tell me, and I was wrong."
His silence, followed by a sad smile meant to be reassuring was the response she hadn't realized she had been hoping for and his arm finding its way around her waist as he wordlessly kissed her cheek and started walking was the comfort she hadn't realized she so desperately needed.
Will's POV
"Do you want to talk about it?" He offered softly as he sat down across from Emma at the kitchen table, the meal she had only picked at lying foreboding and intrusive between them.
He had watched from afar as Scott had gradually opened up to Emma sometimes for an hour and a half after the actual group had ended. They had grown close in the way only those who shared a mutual understanding of something the world collectively swept under the rug could and he had refrained from offering his own advice on anything until she asked for it, preferring to let her navigate this on her own.
Now, because she was poking her way through the second bowl of Macaroni and Cheese she usually ate without a problem, he felt the need to intervene. "Emma, talk to me, please. Maybe I can help."
"He's getting so sick Will." She glanced up, her eyes boring into him, searching his soul for answers he felt exposed for having given up on finding. "I feel so helpless, like all I can do is watch and that's the worst feeling in the world." She sniffled, jamming another bite of noodles into her mouth even though he could tell she didn't want to.
"I know." He whispered, reaching out to grab her free hand, rubbing his thumb across the back. "You don't have to eat that if you don't want to. Sometimes when I'm upset I don't want to eat."
The comment took him off guard as well, existing outside the realm of things he had ever thought he would say to her. Perhaps, it was a piece of the foundation of their relationship that wasn't built on the disorder but on her recovery. Perhaps, he only wanted to offer comfort and repeating the words his mother had imparted to him after he had learned about Terri's deception seemed fitting, even if in the light of everything Emma had been through, they sounded wrong.
Emma shook her head in a silent refusal of his offer, withdrawing her hand to take a sip of water before returning her attention to the food in the bowl in front of her. "I don't know what to do. How did you know what to do?"
Will leaned away from her question, away from his answer, pressing his back into the chair behind him while he contemplated what she had asked, trying to come up with some informed response that would give her everything she was looking for. But a variation of the same tired sentence he had uttered so many times in therapy sessions was the only thing that came to mind, because it was the truth as much as he wanted to reject it.
"I don't know what to do Em."
Saying that to her, admitting the defeat that had plagued his body and mind as he had aimlessly drove through Lima in silence that had seemed to twist back on itself until it too had become as deafening as the sounds of her forcing herself to be sick that had looped in his mind's ear through his entire night in the motel, only choosing to leave him alone four days later.
"After I left you at the hospital, I don't even remember the walk back to the car. What I do remember," Will shifted his gaze from her to just above her shoulder, "is completely losing it in the parking lot."
Emma's mouth fell open, shock and guilt warring for dominance in the creases that had appeared on her forehead. He had never told her much about that day. That would have been too close to reliving it.
"Did you cry?" She implored softly, timidly. The words falling from her lips as though they had merely been waiting for someone's permission, his or her own he wasn't sure, to be spoken.
"God yes," His voice cracked and he attempted to offset the raw emotion he hadn't been intending to reveal with a small smile. "I cried, I yelled. I hit things." He confessed the latter knowing it would affect her but needing to say it, almost able to feel the searing pain as his elbow had connected with the driver's side door.
Her face crumpled, the apology he didn't want her to feel she had to make cut off by the sob muffled in the sleeve of her sweatshirt. The sob that he knew wasn't solely evoked by what he had just imparted but had been waiting in the wings of her emotions since they had gotten home. Either way, regardless, he was on his feet in an instant, drawing her into an embrace he longed for just as much as her, swaying them gently back and forth to a nameless rhythm, holding her as tight to him as he possibly could.
"I can't ever apologize enough for what I put you through." Emma gulped against him, tears beginning to soak their way through his shirt like her words, the guilt she still harbored, soaked into his heart.
"It wasn't your fault. Please don't think that it was." He whispered, backing them both away from the table, steering her towards the hall and into the bedroom, away from the dishes, the mess, that they could deal with in the morning.
He woke to find her missing, the sounds of running water in the kitchen informing his mind before his other senses truly caught up that she was doing the dishes he had decided to purposefully let slide. Every once in a while she could break one of her own rules, more so now than she had ever been able to do before, but if she was stressed, or upset, or nervous than that reprieve was denied.
Rounding the corner to the kitchen he watched silently from behind as she tirelessly scrubbed at a fork in the dim overhead light from the stove. He had become somewhat of an expert reading her behavior and this, he could tell, was not the frenzied act of a compulsion, but rather, an attempt to drive herself to distraction.
"I asked him how much he eats." She laughed bitterly, surprising Will because he hadn't been aware she had known he was there.
"That's what made him angry." He stated rather than clarified, watching as Emma let the utensil sink the beneath the soapy water, her shoulders lowering.
"I should have never asked him that." She turned, snatching up the towel that was draped neatly over the handle of the stove, drying her hands, then her eyes.
"It needed to be asked." He said simply. "Maybe it was good it was you. Someone he trusts, because we all have noticed and it's only a matter of time before someone says something."
What he didn't say, that they were all hypersensitive after having dealt with Emma was something he couldn't say because it seemed incriminating somehow. She fidgeted, shifting her weight from foot to foot and he could tell she heard the other words, the other silent words that rested just beneath the spoken ones. That, as teachers, they were required to act if they felt a child was in danger from others or themselves. Briefly he flickered back to the girl in his Spanish class that had been so sickly thin, the one he had pegged as a diet freak, and his remorse for his own ignorance, and the action he had not taken, tripled.
"Come on," he yawned, stretching out his arm. "Let's go to bed."
She listened, trailing obediently behind him, crawling in beside him for the second time that night and he wasn't sure how long she stayed on her back but the stray moonlight filtering through the blinds illuminating the room just enough that he could make out that her eyes were still open, was the last image he saw when he closed his.
Emma's POV
The tea sat untouched on the desk in front of her, adding its heat to the room that seemed barren without his slight form hovering over the various posters along the far wall. She hadn't expected him to come but she had made the tea anyways.
Gathering the pamphlets she had yet to sort through she flicked the light off, forgetting the tea wouldn't dispose of itself as she stepped out the door, locking it behind her, the click finalizing her decision that waiting an hour was long enough.
As she pushed her way into the brisk late afternoon air she caught sight of him, of his loose clothing and shaggy brown hair that so often fell into his face, hiding the blue eyes that spoke so loudly even when he said so little.
"I brought you tea." He said sheepishly, producing a worn traveling mug from within his book bag and she noticed that his own traveling mug was sitting at his feet, open to the elements, the cold that would punish him by denying his body the sustenance provided by warmth.
Emma smiled, wrapping her fingers around the insulated container, closing her eyes briefly as it radiated life against her skin. She didn't ask why he hadn't come inside, or attended group. That was his reason, not her knowledge.
She didn't apologize and neither did he. Neither of them were really to blame for what had happened and the tea, peppermint, was different from the flavors she usually brought for him, refreshing, comforting and an appetite suppressant she remembered reading once.
He looked so pitiful, uselessly brushing the hair out of his eyes only for it to fall back with a vengeance a second later, his lips chapped probably from dehydration, his fingernails tinted blue, imbued with the sickness that seemed more evident now than ever before. She caught him, flipping his hand palm up, curling his fingers, studying the nail beds and her eyebrows creased because the action was so heartbreakingly practiced and she found herself mimicking him, glancing at her own hands, the fingernails that were normal in color, despite the bitter air.
There had been a time where she had become obsessed with her fingernails, compelled to check them whenever she could, always searching for the symptom she had read online one night. That often, the fingernails of an anorexic turned blue when the disease had progressed far enough. Many wore nail polish but she never had because that would have covered up what became an indicator of progress, strength and discipline. Once, walking through the halls, engrossed in the lines of her own hand, devoid of jewelry, a faculty member had joked 'can't get enough of that ring can ya?' like they assumed she had been admiring some trinket of feminine beauty. She had only smiled, neither confirming nor denying, and vowed to examine her fingernails in private from then on.
"There's someone I want you to meet." Emma began, treading a dangerous line on the foundation still heavily cracked from the week before. "Someone you can talk to." 'Someone trained,' she didn't say.
"I like talking to you." He countered in confusion but she could see on his face that he wasn't writing her off, not yet.
What she wasn't revealing was that Sue had informed her earlier on in the week that someone was going to be contacting his parents and Emma didn't want those people, the ones Scott had often spoke so reverently of, to believe that their son was doing nothing, sitting idly by while wasting away. She had made the phone call that afternoon, scheduling an appointment she wasn't sure she would keep because she didn't know if he would listen.
"We don't have to stop talking. I just want you to talk with her too. You would like her, she's nice." And she saw it, the briefest flicker in his resolve to seek no one's help, the tiny crack she was shamelessly exploiting because she didn't want someone else, someone who wouldn't understand how fragile he is, doing it for her.
"Will you come with me?" He asked as though he knew she had already set up the meeting, like he was already aware that a stranger was waiting in the teacher's lounge, present at her request, because she wasn't sure how the school would view her driving a student to another location.
"Of course." Emma assured, smiling and beckoning him through the double doors she had just exited, placing a comforting hand on his back, wincing when the outline of his shoulder blade met her palm.
It was Kristen's idea to move from the teacher's lounge to the environment that already had lent itself over to confessions, the classroom that still contained the mugs of tea, sitting dejectedly atop the large desk at the front. They all folded themselves into the student's desks, creating a triangle and Emma longed to reach out and tell the young man who was clearly second-guessing his decision that it would be alright.
"Don't hospitalize me." He blurted and Emma's eyes closed involuntarily as she recalled thinking that very line in the presence of the blonde, she had simply been too afraid to voice it.
"We're just going to talk." Kristen reassured him gently, throwing a glance in her direction, silently asking if she was going to be okay staying in the room. Emma nodded, she was in this, for better or worse she was in this.
Tears pricked at her eyes as she watched Kristen interacting with Scott, wording questions in such a way that if answered, it didn't feel like a betrayal or a confession, but simply a stating of what was. By the time she asked a variation of what Emma asked only seven days earlier Scott was talking freely, clearly relieved and that was how she learned that he had a meager bowl of cereal in the mornings, the same kind every time, made with water instead of milk, hiding out in the sanctuary of his bedroom, pretending to sleep while his parents got ready for work. He would grab a handful of carrots from the school cafeteria at noon if he thought he could get away without eating anything at dinner time.
As with most families, everyone was left to fend for themselves in the evenings, and he could often get by with stealing a granola bar, one hundred and ninety calories of failure, he had confessed. When they did sit down to a meal he pushed his food around the plate, creating the illusion that the portions were becoming smaller. Some nights, when he was restless, he would raid the fridge, usually for slices of bologna he would fast for two days later to punish himself for. His disorder, it seemed to Emma, was slightly more extreme, a bit more dangerous, and at one time that would have angered her, now it just left her worried.
"Do you think the number will ever be low enough?" Kristen asked and Emma distinctly remembered being where Scott was now, curled up on a plush couch instead of seated in a hard chair.
"It tricks you into thinking you're going to stop. Maybe one-hundred and twelve becomes the weight you want, and one-hundred and seven sounds exhausting and far too extreme but then one day the scale reads one-hundred and twelve, and suddenly one-hundred and seven sounds perfect and one-hundred and four becomes the line you won't cross. And the funny thing is, it works every time, and every morning just before you read that number, you think that if its down just one more pound, that you can stop."
She wasn't sure where he got the numbers, whether they were life examples or arbitrary constructs construed for the question he was answering without answering. They sounded different to her now than they would have. At one point, one-hundred and twelve would have seemed unfathomable and weak. Now it transcended into the realm of disordered because if she weighed one-hundred and twelve, while not dangerously low she would still be underweight and she would definitely be sick.
Kristen slid the conversation into things Scott enjoyed, trying to lessen the effects of the heavy material they had spoken of in manner Emma was all too familiar with from her classes in counseling. That was how Emma came to know that he loved to paint and that he could spend hours in front of a canvas creating pictures he held only within his mind. As he left, shyly agreeing to schedule an appointment with Kristen the next week after Emma had assured him that the school would cover the cost, he promised to bring some of his artwork, to show her after group.
Topics transferred to her as she had been expecting, having not been attending weekly but rather monthly appointments after the dietician had said that she thought she could handle it. That had been a day of conflictions. She had felt relieved that she would no longer be seeing a dietician 'every' week but she had also been terrified of what the cessation of the appointments meant, that she was growing independent of something that had held her hand for over a year.
They caught up on her life as of late and Emma discreetly mentioned Hannah but Kristen caught on when she was explaining how animated Will had been and before she left she placed a hand on her shoulder and told her it wouldn't be easy, because it never was, eating disorder or no, but she would be a good mother.
That evening as Will hooked a twenty-five foot red nylon lead onto Moritz' blue nylon collar, a color he had chosen on purpose just to bother her, Emma thought about the websites she had bookmarked weeks ago, the ones that were now resting heavily in a three-ring binder and wondered how she would ever bring the topic up with her husband.
"Okay take these," Will plopped a pile of slimy hot dog slices cut into fourths into the palm of her hand. "Now go hide somewhere easy to begin with and drop a slice or two every few feet."
Emma laughed shaking her head at her husbands' antics. He was so excited, having read a blog about training a dog to play Hide and Seek, something he apparently had never been able to teach his Golden Retriever because no one had wanted to help.
She watched as her feet crushed the blades of grass, littering hot dog slices in her footsteps until she ducked behind a nearby bush, still slightly visible, as Will had called out to her. He jumped up excitedly, overly-enthusiastic for the sake of the retriever at his side, pointing at the ground reminding Emma of a study Will had once told her about.
Dogs, not wolves, and not chimpanzees were born with the ability to pick-up on human social cues such as pointing gestures. When tested, all variables controlled for, domestic dogs, including puppies, successfully selected the correct bucket, containing the meat the researcher had pointed at. Tame wolves, raised in the company of humans, physically turned their head as if bored and consistently went to the wrong bucket as did chimpanzees raised in captivity. All of this, Will had excitedly told her over dinner one night, meant that dogs have evolved with a mechanism for deciphering human social cues. The dogs that learned to interpret what people meant when they moved in funny ways got more scraps, and in doing so, lived to breed.
Moritz got confused after a few seconds of fruitless sniffing, whipping his head around so that he was facing Will as if demanding to know why the man had asked him to do something so pointless. That was another things dogs did that wolves did not, they turned to humans for assistance when they couldn't figure something out for themselves.
In a way Emma wished she had been like that with the eating disorder, but part of the disease is a steadfast reluctance to not only forgo asking for help, but to fail to see that anything was wrong with their behavior. At the time, she had known her behavior was odd and she had gone out of her way to conceal it, her isolation fueled by her distorted perception of being overweight.
She had once heard a psychologist say that the human sensory perceptual system, if working correctly, gave misinformation, distorted things. Hers, she surmised, under his definition worked a little too correctly.
Moritz nose bumped her hand and Emma opened it, letting him have a 'jackpot' as Will called it. A really big, tasty reinforcer for a really good job. They continued the game until the sun began lowering in the sky and the locusts started singing and instantly Emma thought of Scott.
She closed her eyes, seeing what memory might come to her as she listened to their rhythmic pulsing but the only thing she saw was his face as he had discussed endless nights of star-gazing with his father. As she and Will headed back to the house she paused at the mailbox, unable to recall if she had gotten the mail or not.
There was a pile of envelopes inside, one stiff and larger than the rest and by the way Will's eyes lit up she had a sneaking feeling that it was the win shot from the show. Another envelope, plain with disjointed block-letter print caught her attention. Using the house key from the ring in her pocket she opened it and gasped.
A picture fluttered to the ground, landing right side up and Emma's heart melted as she took it in. It was the picture Hannah's mother had taken of her daughter and Will. Hannah kneeling next to Will, behind the Beagle she had stacked all by herself and Will was standing just behind them, off-centered so that he was clearly visible. In one hand, held the way she had seen the judge's do for the win shots, was the fourth place ribbon Hannah had earned in Junior Showmanship. He wasn't staring at the camera, but rather his head was angled down towards the beaming girl and her dog, his grin a mile wide.
It could have been his little girl, he looked that proud.
Will's POV
Dabbing the last of the water from his hands, his futile attempt to get rid of the smell of hot dogs, he made his way over to Emma, peering over her shoulder at the glossy eight by ten photograph of her and Moritz. Her smile was genuine and anyone who saw would have thought she was used to posing for such things.
Hannah's twinkling eyes smiled up at him, just visible beneath the cell phone bill they hadn't bothered to open yet. For a few moments, as he had clapped and cheered when she was awarded fourth place he had imagined what it might be like if he had a daughter, and she showed dogs.
He hadn't mentioned anything to Emma yet but he had been late to class one morning because of her. More accurately, because of the kindergartners that had been flooding the halls for a play that the drama group was presenting that afternoon. A young boy, blonde with red and white striped t-shirt, and dark blue jeans had dropped his glasses and a classmate had stepped on them.
A side of Emma he had never seen became visible to him then and he had stood in the center of the squealing children simply watching her as she had knelt before the boy, her face sympathetic yet cheery as she scooped up the pieces and gently took his hand, dropping her hand to rub in small circles along his back when he latched onto her leg in a tight hug. He held her hand all the way to the office, Emma speaking animatedly as the boy wiped furiously at his tears, laughing at something she pretended to whisper, as though a secret.
He had imagined her being pregnant many times and he had entertained daydreams of doing most of the work on a school science project while their son or daughter fell asleep at the table, or teaching scales on the piano, but he had never once truly allowed himself to imagine her in the role of mother.
Now he did.
A/N: You should feel very well infomred, the two studies I mentioned about dogs are very important in the world of canine psychology...right, like anyone aside from me cares! I hope you enjoyed this chapter!