She turned around, and when I saw her face, my stomach dropped. It was just like all those years ago: her face so tired, eyes swollen from crying, her very features haunted. A sudden panic made me want to wrap myself around her, putting myself between her and the world and everything it could do to her, to me, to any of us.
And then it happened. My mother started crying. Her eyes welled up, and she looked down at her hands, which were trembling, and then she was sobbing, the sound seeming so loud in the quiet of the kitchen. I stepped forward, not knowing how to handle this. Luckily, I didn't have to.
"Grace." My father was standing in the doorway to the hall that led to his office. "Honey. It's all right."
My mother's shoulders were shaking as she drew in a breath. "Oh, God, Andrew. What did we—"
And then my father was moving across the room toward her, taking her in his arms, his big frame encompassing hers. She buried her face in his chest, the sobs muffled in his shirt, and I stepped back, over the threshold, out of sight, and sat down in the dining room. I could still hear her crying, and the sound was awful. But seeing it was worse.
Eventually, my dad got my mother calmed down and sent her upstairs to shower and try to get some rest. Then he came back down and sat across from me.
"Your sister is very sick," he said. "She's lost an extreme amount of weight and apparently hasn't been eating normally for months now. Her system just shut down last night."
"Is she going to be okay?" I asked.
He ran a hand over his face, taking a moment before answering. "The doctors feel," he said, "that she needs to go immediately to a treatment facility. Your mother and I…" He trailed off, looking past me, out at the pool. "We just want what's best for Whitney."
"So she's not coming back?"
"Not right away," he told me. "It's a process. We just have to see how it goes."
I looked down at my hands, which I had spread out in front of me on the table, the wood cool on my palms. "Last night," I said, "when I first saw her, I just…"
"I know." He pushed his chair out, standing up. "But she's going to get help now. Okay?"
I nodded. Clearly, my dad was not up for discussing the emotional impact of what had happened. He'd given me the facts, what prognosis there was, and that was all I'd get.
After a couple of days in the hospital, Whitney was transferred to a treatment center, which she hated so much she initially refused to speak to my parents when they visited. Still, it was helping her, as she began gaining weight, bit by bit, day by day. As for Kirsten, she arrived on Christmas Eve to find my parents exhausted and stressed out, me just trying to stay out of the way, and any hope of holiday cheer completely out of the question. Which did not prevent her from dropping a bomb of her own.
"I've made a decision," she announced as we sat at dinner that night. "I'm giving up modeling."
My mother, at the end of the table, put down her fork. "What?"
"I'm just not into it anymore," Kirsten said, taking a sip of her wine. "Truth be told, I haven't been for a while. And it's not like I've been working that much anyway. But I just decided to make it official."
I glanced at my mom. She was already so tired and sad, and this clearly was not helping. My dad was watching her, too. He said, "Don't do anything rash, Kirsten."
"I'm not. I've thought about it a lot." Of all of us, she was the only one still eating, scooping up a forkful of potatoes as she said this. "I mean, let's face it, I'm never going to be a hundred and five pounds. Or five-ten, for that matter."
"You've gotten plenty of work just as you are," my mom said.
"Some work," Kirsten corrected her. "It's by no means a living. I've been doing this since I was eight.
I'm twenty-two now. I want to do something else."
"Such as?" my dad said.
Kirsten shrugged. "I don't know yet. I've got the hostess thing at the restaurant, and I have a friend who owns a salon who offered me a receptionist job. So the bills will be covered, for the most part. I'm thinking I might sign up for some classes or something."
My dad raised his eyebrows. "School," he said.
"Don't sound so surprised," Kirsten replied, although I had to admit, this was shocking to me, as well.
Even before she'd stopped taking classes in New York, she'd never been much for academics. In high school the classes she hadn't missed because of modeling she skipped, usually preferring to spend her time with whatever scruffy, free-spirited boyfriend she had at the time. "Most girls my age have already graduated and have real careers. I feel like I've missed out on a lot, you know? I want to get my degree."
"You could take classes and still model," my mother said. "It doesn't have to be an either/or situation."
"Yes, it does," Kirsten replied. "For me, it does."
Under different circumstances, maybe my parents would have pushed to discuss this further. But they were tired, and while Kirsten might have been known best for her directness, her stubbornness ran a close second. It shouldn't have been all that surprising anyway, as she'd hardly been committed to modeling for years now. Coming so close to Whitney's collapse, however, it meant more. Especially to me, although I didn't realize it at the time.