What Anna Did

Nothing you say will ever convince me that Anna was not the most beautiful girl in the universe. She had everything in the world: she was pretty, smart, funny, kind… Why it happened to her will always baffle me. Why did you do it, Anna, why? Was it my fault? Was there anything I could have done to keep it from happening? Something I could have said? Maybe I could have told her how beautiful she was. Maybe I could tell her how special she was, that I never wanted her to change, or maybe I could have told her how much I loved her just one more time…
My name is Jake Heart, and Annabelle Lee was my girlfriend. We had been together for three years before something about her started changing. She had always been so alive, so free... She had hair black as raven’s feathers that came to her shoulders and smooth, perfect ivory skin like a porcelain doll. Her cheeks were rosy, and her face was just slightly rounded in a way that I found to be just right for her. She was Chinese, and stereotypically, she would be rail thin, which, while she wasn’t, I never liked girls too skinny anyway. She was perfect for me.
Every Friday night, we would go to the movies. I would tie a scarf over her eyes, one I had bought for her on her birthday the first year we were together, and spin her around, then point her at the list of movies showing that weekend and that would be the one we went to see. During the summer, we always went to the drive-in movie, in our pajamas, and sat in the back of my pick-up truck wrapped in quilts while we watched the movie, huddling close together with our hands in each others.
Our love was a simple one, innocent, never too over-the-top, but sometimes I wonder if I should have been a little more… romantic. Or maybe I should have just been more… Maybe if I would have gotten her something a little bigger for her last birthday, or for Christmas, or just to remind her I loved her. But, money wasn’t something I had. She knew that, and she said she loved me anyway. But maybe she had been lying about that, too.
I could tell something was wrong with Anna in our third year of dating. Her appetite began to dwindle and she didn’t seem as happy as she had been just the day before. I had asked her if she was hungry, and she just smiled lightly and said no. She would eat a little, never too much, and seemed withdrawn from everything we had always done together. She stopped wanting to go to the movies, saying that she just wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to seem clingy, so I gave her space. I should have known what was wrong.
One Friday night, when she had decided to go to the drive-in theater with me, I held her hand in mine, and was a little surprised at what I saw.
“Anna, what happened to your fingers?” I asked.
Her fingers were red and chafed, and almost raw-looking. It wasn’t all her fingers, either. It was just the first two on her right hand.
“Oh.” She pulled her hand back into her lap, “Nothing.”
I wanted to ask, to press on, but the distant look in her eyes told me she didn’t want me to, and so I didn’t. I wanted to make her happy. I didn’t know that I had to put that aside and do what was best for her instead of making her happy.
Not saying anything was the worst mistake I ever made. I cry every night, asking myself how I could have been so stupid, sometimes blaming her for doing this to all of us, but deep down, I can’t help but think it’s not her fault, it’s mine.
A few months later, Anna was found dead in her bathroom because of a ruptured stomach. She had binged and purged herself to death. Why hadn’t I seen that Anna was bulimic?
At her funeral, I brought a DVD that I put with all the pictures of her. It was a copy of Live Free or Die Hard, her favorite movie. She had loved all of the Die Hard movies. She had said she loved me…
Anna tore me apart, leaving little left. I thought of what could have possibly made Anna want to puke her guts out every night, thinking about someone who may have called her fat, maybe some movie she had seen that made her feel insignificant… Did she not love me enough to tell me how she felt? I wonder, could she not stand to look in the mirror, to see the girl looking back? The girl that I loved? The girl that I always will love? Did she really hate mirrors that much?
After Anna died, I broke all the mirrors in my house.