Crazy Love You by Lisa Unger Page B

settled into our seats on the train. We sat in the quiet car on the Acela, but some jerk a few rows back was talking loudly into his cell phone. “Well, we haven’t had the returns we expected and it might be time to dump, yaknowwhatImean, Chuck?”
    Megan wore a little frown as she pulled her laptop out of her bag. Then she looked at me, giving me the full light of her eyes. “I think it’s the measure of who you are. Your devotion to her moves me.”
    She talked like that; she really did.
    â€œI mean,” she said, “people don’t get it, how much courage it takes to not only forgive, but to love. You love her. I can see that.”
    â€œShe’s sick,” I said. “She needs me.”
    Megan smiled, and her smile was so warm and loving that I bowed my head. I wished I could crawl inside that smile and live there for all of my days.
    â€œI know she does,” she said. “And you need her because she’s your mother, no matter what she’s done.”
    â€œIt wasn’t her , Megan. She had postpartum psychosis,” I said to the ground. My voice sounded urgent and pleading to my own ears. “She was someone else then. My real mother, before she got sick . . . I wish you could have known her.”
    â€œI do know her,” she said. She put a warm and gentle hand on my leg. “I know her through you.”
    I still couldn’t meet her eyes. She was too sweet, too earnest. I didn’t deserve her. Instead, I looked out the window at the platform. A woman was rushing for the train. A homeless guy slept on the bench, covered with sheets of newspaper. A little girl stared at me with a curious tilt of her head while her mother chatted on her cell phone.
    â€œThank you for doing this,” I said, finally turning back to her. I don’t know how much time had passed since she’d spoken. But she was okay with me being awkward and reticent. I never had to talk with Megan. She seemed to understand me without words.
    â€œI want to help you take care of her,” she said.
    â€œI’m not doing a very good job,” I admitted. “I don’t go see her as often as I should.”
    â€œI think you’re doing what you can. Let me help you do a better job,” she said.
    And I agreed because it was a relief to have Megan in my life. And there had been no one to share this with, not since my father died. Even when he realized that my mother would never get better, that he couldn’t fix the thing that had broken inside of her, he didn’t turn away from her. But he wasn’t a man who could handle the idea that some things stay broken and you have to carry the pieces around and forget that you ever thought they might be mended. After he was gone, I carried them alone, even though I wasn’t any better at it than he had been.
    And so we took the train up north, and got a cab from the station, and I took Megan to the place where I grew up: The Hollows. As we pulled through town, and out onto the rural road that led to my childhood home, I waited for her to be horrified, for her to ask me to take her back to the train station.
    I was prepared to never see her again after she knew what I came from. How could someone who came from such a good, clean life want someone who came from so much ugliness and misery?
    But all she said was, “It’s so beautiful up here. So peaceful.”
    She was looking at the sky and the trees, and the quaint little town center that had been gentrified and grown wealthy in recent years. People had moved from the city, bringing with them a taste for fine restaurants and money to shop at trendy boutiques. And it was actually kind of a nice place to live now. That is, if you liked living in the middle of fucking nowhere, where the woods were haunted and people went missing, died mysteriously, or killed their own babies with, what seemed to me, unusual frequency.
    But anyway, as far as