fireplace because if I didn’t keep busy, I felt like I would explode out of my skin.” She gazed at her hands as if searching for telltale signs of that frantic scrubbing, grimaced, then went on.
“I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t stop imagining horrible things happening to Clary, to my family. I tried to anticipate every disaster, every tiny little mistake. I couldn’t bear to let her out of my sight. Then the anxiety would fade—though it never went away—and the depression would come back. I wouldn’t bathe, wouldn’t eat. It was too much effort to even open my eyes most of the time, but even then, there was a little voice in my head, warning me of all the ways I could lose Clary. I didn’t have the ability to act on it, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.” Her voice trembled, her breath catching. Across the street, Clary called to her, and she looked up, smiling tightly, waving to her daughter.
“Finally, in a rare lucid moment, I asked my parents to hospitalize me, so they did. They committed me to a psychiatric hospital in Columbia.”
Stephen wanted to look away, to close his eyes, to take some time to process her bleak words, but he kept his gaze on hers. The shadows in her eyes were haunted, sad enough to make him need to gather her into his arms and never let go. He settled for tightening his fingers around hers.
“You’d been through a lot, Macy. Your husband’s suicide, losing your baby, Miss Willa’s death, all in a month. It’s no wonder your brain shut down for a while. You needed time to deal with it.”
“I wanted so badly to just go back a few months, a year. To wake up and find myself back in Copper Lake, still happily married to the man I knew in college, because he was definitely not that man at the end. But instead the doctors forced me to move forward—and Clary. She was a powerful incentive. I got out of bed for her. I took medications for her. I sat through hundreds of hours of therapy for her. I knew by then that she might not need me, but I damn well needed her.”
He wanted to argue the statement that Clary didn’t need her. She was her mother; she adored her; of course Clary needed her. But the girl had been barely one and a half when her father died, when Macy was hospitalized. She would have adapted to being raised by her grandparents, or to being Brent and Anne’s daughter.
Watching Macy stare into her coffee cup, he tried the whole scenario on in his mind. Macy, suffering such cripplingly severe depression and anxiety. On the one hand, it wasn’t such a surprise. Millions of people relied on antidepressants to get through the day. He could rattle off a dozen names of family or people he worked with in a dozen seconds.
On the other hand, the profound depression and anxiety she described... He looked at her and couldn’t quite imagine it. She struck him as gentle, yes. A little insecure. Maybe even a bit fragile. But he also thought she seemed strong, capable, on an even keel most of the time. Wasn’t that the best any of them could claim? That they were okay most of the time?
He glanced up as a couple of his clients, dressed for church in summer-weight suits, said hello, then went inside the coffee shop, and he wondered if they, like Will Calloway, had skipped out on the boring part of the sermon. When the door swung shut behind them, he said, “I’m really sorry for everything that happened, Macy. The words don’t do justice to the way I feel. I am overwhelmed and so very sorry you had to go through this, and I think the way you’ve come out of it is amazing. But just for the record, you’re not losing it again. You’re not crazy. Being back in that house, doing what you’re doing, is enough to give the most analytical person in the world the creeps.”
Her fingers squeezed his just slightly, and her wan smile reappeared for a moment. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, Stephen, but you’ve haven’t heard the rest of the story.”
Chapter 10
Most people had a rest of the story. Macy’s was a worst of the story. What she’d said already had been hard enough. She didn’t know if she had the courage to tell the worst. But the