Losing Faith by Adam Mitzner Page A

part weighed more than she could lift. She somehow made it to the bathroom a few times, or for a glass of water that she didn’t remember getting but that somehow appeared as if by magic on her night table, but otherwise stayed in bed. To this day she has no idea how long she persisted in that state. Her mother called campus security when she couldn’t reach Rachel forthe third day in a row. They brought Rachel first to the infirmary and then to Stanford House, a psychiatric hospital, where she spent the next month, some of it under a suicide watch, diagnosed with acute depression.
    Rachel never returned to school. After her discharge from the psych ward, she spent the summer at her parents’ home and arranged to submit papers for her spring-semester classes to get the necessary credits to graduate. Professor Gryzmala sent her an e-mail saying that she could submit her thesis in the same fashion and then defend it on campus whenever she wanted, but Rachel took the incomplete, deciding that it would be best if she never saw him again.
    Her second episode occurred the year after she graduated from law school, while she was clerking for Judge Norman Davis of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Like before, her breakdown was triggered by an older man . . . although this time it had nothing to do with rejection.
    Rachel met Lawrence Braithwaite, another judge on the circuit court, as part of her rotation to review habeas writs, the appeals that prisoners file by the thousands. One judge was assigned to hear such writs each quarter, and a different judge donated a clerk to assist in the review. The idea was to give the clerks an opportunity to work with different members of the court.
    Even before being assigned to him, Rachel was well aware of Judge Braithwaite’s reputation for sleeping with the clerks, and sure enough, he came after Rachel like a heat-seeking missile. Even though Rachel had never lacked for male attention, part of her found his advances flattering, as if she’d been specially selected out of the more than thirty female clerks on the court that year. Of course she knew full well the perils of a relationship with an older, married man in the workplace, but in this case Rachel saw it as a limited danger because Judge Braithwaite wasn’t her boss, and her clerkship was going to end in a few months anyway.
    Their affair lasted less than six weeks. Rachel ended it with him ona Friday and thought little of it until Monday morning, when Judge Braithwaite said that he’d asked his wife for a divorce so that they could be together. Rachel tried to let him down easy, explaining that was not what she wanted and that she was moving to New York when her clerkship ended.
    Judge Braithwaite wouldn’t take no for an answer, however.
    He called her incessantly, sent her flowers at the office, and dropped in to Judge Davis’s chambers unannounced, seemingly just to look at her. It all came to a head two weeks later when Judge Braithwaite’s wife called Judge Davis to inquire why he employed home-wrecking sluts as law clerks.
    Judge Davis assured Rachel that there would be no professional repercussions, and he saw no need to inform Cromwell Altman, with whom she had already accepted employment, to begin after the clerkship ended. But when Rachel asked if she could end her clerkship early, Judge Davis seemed only too happy to oblige her.
    At least this time, Rachel avoided the hospital. She retreated to her parents’ home for the summer, but once there, she could barely get out of bed again. She refused her mother’s plea to get help, with the promise that she’d start at Cromwell Altman in September, as planned. Much to her parents’ surprise, that’s exactly what happened. On the day that she was to begin at Cromwell Altman, Rachel showered, put on a dark blue business suit, and went straight to work.
    The next eight years went by without incident, so much so that Rachel believed the dark days were truly behind her.