Crazy Love You (17 page)

“I know.”

I rose to take her into my arms, and in my embrace she felt like bones in a leather sack. If I squeezed hard I could crush her. She was so weak from years of medication and inactivity. She was rotting inside her own body, though she had only turned fifty-five last year. She was punishing herself; she'd never lived another second after Ella died. Maybe she didn't have a right to—plenty of people would say that she didn't. But depression or postpartum psychosis or any kind of mental illness is a rabbit hole. It's a whole other world down there. The decisions you make in that place don't hold up in the real world. No one understands that.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's get you back. Everyone's worried.”

“Who's worried?”

“The staff,” I said. “They don't know where you've gone.”

She pulled away from me and looked up into my eyes.

“Why did you call me? Why did you want me to come back here?”

I didn't know whether I should tell her that I hadn't called her. I didn't want to frighten her but I didn't want to lie either. When Priss was up to her tricks, people started getting hurt. I was angry, but I was afraid, too. How furious she must be to start playing these games, hitting me where it hurt the most. What would she do next?

“You didn't call me, did you?” she said.

I shook my head, and some battle played out on her face—embarrassment, confusion, sadness. She put her hands on top of her head and rubbed. It was something she did when she was distressed or feeling confused, a self-comforting gesture. I touched her arm; if I had wanted to, I could completely encircle it with my fingers.

“Someone called you,” I said. “Just not me.”

She looked at me, relieved. “It sounded like you,” she said. “A mother knows her son's voice.”

“Let me take you back,” I said. “I'll tell you all about it on the way.”

“Can we stay a little while?” she asked. “It's such a beautiful day.”

And so we sat among the graves, with the birds and the butterflies. And I tried not to think about Priss and what she had done. But I was starting to get a sense of what her wrath might look like when it was directed at me. She had a special gift for finding your tender places and making them ache.

•  •  •

As I was leaving the hospital, after getting my mother settled, I saw Megan sitting in the passenger seat of the Scout. I'd left the door unlocked. The beautiful, warm day had finished cold, and she was shivering. I turned on the ignition without a word and cranked up the heat. I was happier to see her than I'd have imagined. A kind of relief washed over me in Megan's presence—she smoothed out the jagged places inside of me.

She moved over close and I took her in an awkward embrace, hitting the horn and startling us both. She pulled away, pushed her dark, thick hair behind her ears. She looked tired and sad and I knew it was because of me.

“You found your mom,” she said. “Is she all right?”

“She's okay,” I said. “Someone called her and told her to meet me at the house. So she went there and waited.”

She gave me a frown and a little tilt of her head. “Who would do that?”

I found I couldn't look at her.

“Priss?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. I let out a sigh of fatigue and frustration I'd been holding in. “Maybe.”

“Why?” she asked.

I was looking out into the night. The parking lot was nearly empty, and the trees were bending in a wind that had kicked up. For a second I thought I saw someone standing by the trees that edged the lot. But the moon passed behind the clouds and darkness settled into the shadows.

“She's angry,” I said. “Angry that I'm getting married, that I'm in love—that I don't want her in my life anymore.”

Priss was angry that I was trying to tear down the house, to move on from this place once and for all. But I didn't tell Megan that. She'd have been angry, too. Another decision I'd made without her.

I felt Megan's eyes on me, and I turned to face her. She wore a worried, uncertain expression. I spilled my guts about everything else. I told her that I'd been taking Adderal in order to finish my book and how I'd passed out last night, woke up to find I'd missed my meeting, and my appointment with her. I apologized for lying, for not bringing her up here with me, for taking drugs when I'd promised I wouldn't. I told her about my falling sales, and the end of
Fatboy and Priss
, about the trouble I was having with the project.

She didn't interrupt me, not once, just let me pour it all out. When I was done, she waited. She had her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on her knees.

“So that's it, right?” I said. “You're done with me.”

If she were my friend, and not the girl of my dreams, I'd tell her:
Run. Get away from this guy. The drug problem, the crazy ex-girlfriend, the psychotic mother, the unstable psyche of an artist-slash-writer? None of it makes him husband material. You throw in with this guy, and he's going to ruin your life.

She pushed out a little laugh then held up her ring and looked at it. If I was honest, I was disappointed that she hadn't wanted the big one. This one seemed too small to adequately express my love for her. Add vain and shallow to my list of bad personality traits.

“Do you want me to be done with you?” she asked.

The moon moved from behind the clouds, casting the night in silver blue. Now there was definitely someone standing there on the edge of the lot. Or was there? My head was swimming, with stress, fatigue, and a pill hangover. How much abuse can your body take? I was well on my way to finding out.

“No,” I said. I took her hands. “
No
, I don't want you to be done with me. I love you—like I've never loved anyone. I'm my best self with you; I really am.”

Did it sound hollow? Or was I just a hollow person, with little access to any true or deep feelings?

“Then let me be here for you and your mom,” Megan said. “Let me help you. We have to be partners in this life; we have to hold each other up and lean on each other. Otherwise, it won't work, you know?”

I could tell that she was thinking about Binky and Julia, about how special, how strong and real, their relationship was. Sure, they bickered and argued. But they had something; anyone could see it. They were solid, the foundation of Meg's life. She wanted that with me. Could I give it to her?

“I know that,” I said.

I didn't know, though. My parents loved each other, and my father stood by my mother when others wouldn't have. Even when she shut us out, he took care of her. Still, I'd never had a good model, really. I wasn't even sure what a normal, healthy relationship looked like. Meg was young, younger than me, but she'd had other relationships, good ones. She knew what people were supposed to do for each other.

“I need to tell you . . .” she said. “I've had a couple of bouts with clinical depression.”

This came as a bit of a surprise. I had seen the darkness moving within her in fleeting moments, a specter of sadness. But mainly she was a bright light, leading the way for anyone who needed it. I tried to imagine this practical, positive-energy girl in the throes of depression. I couldn't. “Really?”

“Yeah, once in high school,” she said. She rubbed at her forehead, then wrapped her arms around her middle. “And again toward the end of my senior year in college.”

“What brought it on?”

She shifted in her seat, glanced out the window. I followed her eyes. Did she see someone out there, too?

“Oh, I don't know. I guess I felt a lot of pressure. I told you about my brother.”

I'd learned the last time we discussed it how her brother, Josh, walked out onto the beach, just a toddler, unseen by Binky and Julia. He'd walked into the Atlantic and apparently drowned. His body washed up a few miles down the shore.
They got over it, in some ways. But they never did, really. I think you can see it in my mom especially. There's this sad place inside her and she can fall into it if she's not careful.

“I just felt all this pressure to be perfect, to never hurt my parents, never give them anything else to be sad about,” she said now.

“I get it,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

I knew all about that, about holding yourself responsible for things that had nothing to do with you. It was a terrible burden, especially for a kid.

“I'm just saying,” she said. “I know that place, how dark it is, how all the colors drain from the world. How there are dark thoughts, really dark, that make perfect sense when you're there but nowhere else. Like, once you've passed out of it, you can't believe you were ever in that place, thinking those horrible things.”

I wasn't sure if she was talking about me or my mother, or both of us. But it was a relief to hear the words from her, that she wasn't perfect, that she understood the darkness in me.

“I'm sorry you had to go through that,” I said. But she waved her hand. She was not one of those people who asked “why me?” when a bad thing happened. She was more a “why
not
me?” kind of person.

“A lot of people battle depression,” she said. “And they get help and it's okay. Both times I talked to someone, got the right meds. I worked through it, you know? I owned it and took responsibility for it. And I moved on.”

She moved to put her hands on my face. “When you're stressed and things are really hard, I want to be there for you. That's what people who love each other do.”

“Okay,” I said. I put my hands on hers and bowed my head in gratitude. I didn't deserve her and I knew that. But I was keeping her just the same.

“Let's start by getting you some help for the drugs.”

“Yeah,” I said. Some of the tension in my body released. “Okay.”

I swung the car around the lot and passed the place where I thought I had seen someone standing. There was nothing but a stump of a tree that looked as if it had been hit by lightning. My eyes were playing tricks on me.

We barely spoke on the long drive home, each of us lost in thought. I looked over at her, and took her hand. She let me, but she didn't look at me and smile, as usual. She kept her eyes focused outside, on the passing night landscape.

Then things started getting worse.

Megan was coming home from an extra-long day with Toby. She was tired as she walked up Broadway to the subway, not in the greatest mood. She'd had a hard night with me the night before, hadn't gotten much sleep after we returned to the loft from The Hollows. I'd convinced her that I'd turn my attention to my problems once the book was done. But it wasn't sitting easy with her. She was worried that I was putting off dealing with my issues, and that there would always be a reason I couldn't pay attention to them.

She had a lot on her mind—my stuff, the wedding, an agent she'd queried had asked to see her novel, and Toby had been acting up all day. He hadn't had school, was coming down with something, and was just intractable and cranky from the minute his mom left for work. He never napped, so Megan didn't have time to work on the pages she wanted to send to the agent. She was remembering how her mother wanted her to focus on her writing and give up her job, but she didn't want to do that. She was anxious and frustrated.

Plus, she'd just had the weirdest feeling. A kind of nervous, unsettled vibe, she told me.

All day, I was jumping at shadows. I felt like someone was watching me.

But she was inside her head, not really paying attention to the world around her like she should have been. She had her earphones in, too, listening to Indian flute music and trying to get Zen amid the chaos of the city and her life.

The platform was crowded, and the train was delayed. She waited the better part of half an hour, getting ever more tired and impatient, like all the rest of the commuters after a long day. She got too close to the edge of the platform, leaning over to see if the train was coming. That's when she felt it, a nudge, a little push, someone's body pressed against hers. She pushed back; she was a New Yorker after all. She knew how to claim her space in a crush.

“Hey,” she said. But when she turned around, she couldn't tell who had been nudging her.

More people streamed down the stairs. And still the train didn't come. The platform was growing louder, hotter, and people were agitated. There was a kind of throb, a tension that was building. And she felt so exhausted, so annoyed. She closed her eyes and thought of the beach house, imagining her parents cooking dinner, a fire going, the surf crashing outside. It was her happy place, her secret garden. She'd told me that early on. The city stressed her out, as much as she loved it—or the idea of it. At heart, she was a beach girl, quiet on the inside, enjoying quiet without. Sometimes Manhattan felt like an assault on her senses; she shut herself down, went elsewhere when it got to be too much.

One train raced by the station, packed with passengers, but didn't stop. There was a collective groan. She could see the platform across the tracks on the downtown side, and it was equally crowded. Her jacket felt heavy, too hot; she was sweating. She was considering going back up top, just hopping in a cab. But she'd already paid for the ride. Megan was frugal.
Every penny counts
, Binky was famous for saying. She waited.

She sidled close to the edge again, leaned over just a little. She saw the white of the approaching headlights. And that's when it happened. A body pressed against her. She pushed back but it didn't give this time. In fact, whoever it was kept pressing in.

“Hey,” she said for the second time.

But it seemed like the crush of the crowd on the platform kept moving forward. On the track in between the two platforms an express train raced past and the station filled with its roar. For whatever reason, the conductor blared his horn. Megan tried to turn around, but then she felt the force of one hard push.