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detect. I went upstairs and grabbed my cell phone to call 911. This is what I remember:
    “I think I just killed myself.”
    “Where are you? What happened?”
    “I’m at La Casa. I swallowed facewash and OD’d on Prozac.” I didn’t have access to Prozac or any other medications, and the facewash had been the night before. I just wanted them to come and, as I envisioned, rescue me because I knew something was medically wrong or very off with me and I simply did not feel safe.
    Then they were there, and then there were handcuffs. I said, “No, I didn’t mean it. I’ll be okay. Just let me stay here.”
    We were supposed to go to the beach on Saturday.
     
    sheila: I was planning to take Lisa to the beach on Saturday. After six weeks of recycled ventilation in a concrete hospital built in 1959, she could use some ocean atmosphere. Psychiatry patients who were stable enough were allowed to sit outside on the deck or shuffle down to the patio for half an hour, but Lisa rarely earned that privilege. She hardly even looked out the window. Most of the time when we arrived, her room’s curtain was closed, and she hadn’t noticed or cared. She was very depressed, and shaky on an antipsychotic medication, but she was capable of sitting in the car for the one-hour drive to the coast. I calculated the possible restroom stops in case of beach traffic.
    We were supposed to have an entirely different spring, summer, and fall. This felt like the Lifetime movie version of somebody else’s life. Lisa needed two more classes to graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she was able to walk with her class in June 2007. By now she would have been enjoying the summer; working at O’Neill, an upscale surfer-style clothing shop; and starting to think seriously about her future. She’d still have a couple of classes to finish up in the fall to get her degree in American Studies. She’d considered careers in teaching and in counseling, but needed time away from school before applying to graduate programs. It was a miracle she was even close to graduating with her class. Considering how horrible her freshman year had been—at least one quarter lost to bulimia—Ned and I were thrilled. And we’d been primed not to expect a four-year bachelor’s degree at the University of California. Lisa’s brother, Jake, spent seven years in and out of UC Berkeley.
    I’m trying to make the case that Lisa wasn’t under the parental gun when she fell to pieces and lost more than three seasons of her life at age twenty-three. Public school tuition helped us dither. I know parents who carried through on threats of “Four years and you’re out!” with regard to college. Was it our permissive parenting that put Lisa on the road to extremely serious eating disorders in the first place? Lisa could have used stricter expectations, for sure. Maybe she felt lost. But I don’t know that stricter parents have fewer anorexic kids. Was the attraction to anorexia that it was a way to set limits that we should have been setting? It was also a powerful way to get attention and to manipulate.
    During Lisa’s last year in college, she was working too many hours at the store, with a full academic load. But she kept saying that she liked to keep busy. She didn’t like to have time on her hands. What was that about?
    As a young child, Lisa liked to tell us, “I love you to pieces that will never break again!” Now we were even analyzing Lisa’s version of Humpty Dumpty. If there had been a fall and something had broken, how could we not have noticed?
    Our family had medical history, depression on my side and weight on Ned’s. Not just weight. Craziness about weight. Ned’s sister started taking diet pills when she was ten and has been on diets ever since. Ned got a little portly and then lost it, but his sister’s torture stayed with him. He feared for any child of his, especially a daughter.
    Genetics, then, gave Lisa two strikes, but