Page 143 of Woman on the Verge

“They do?” I ask.

“Are you serious?” he asks. He really does think I’m batshit crazy. “Of course they miss you.”

I go back to my room to find Marie moving clothes from her drawers to a suitcase that’s open on the bed.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I’m leaving. Patrick said he’s had enough of this, doesn’t think it’s helping.”

Patrick is her husband. They’ve just started having joint sessions like the one Kyle and I just had.

“So you’re just going back home?”

“No,” she says, not looking up at me. “I’m going to rent an apartment nearby. Patrick will have custody of the boys. I’ll visit sometimes.”

I try to hide my shock.

“Okay,” I say. It’s all I can manage.

She looks up. “I know it’s awful of me.”

I don’t know what to say. I do think it’s awful—not thatshe’sawful, but that it’s awful it has to be this way.

She sits on the edge of her bed.

“It occurred to me that I’m basically your mother,” she says.

I’ve told Marie my whole story—all the ugly little bits.

“No,” I say on impulse. Though as I think about it, she is right. She is resigning from motherhood, not as completely as my mother did, but a resignation just the same.

Crystal and I have talked some about my mother. I’m sure we’ll discuss her more in coming sessions. Crystal has given me space to admit my anger at my dad (and Merry) for keeping the truth from me. She’s enabled me to come around to see my dad’s deception as an attempt to protect me from pain. He was a papa bear that way. He wouldn’t have ever wanted me to feel abandoned.

“Deception of self or others can have the sweetest intentions,” Crystal said. “Not that the intention makes it less painful ... but it’s important to hold both feelings—the pain of being lied to and the gratitude for his desire to care for you.”

My eyes welled up when she said that. Hers did too.

I have this fear that Iammy mother. The whole thing with Elijah was an escape, just a different kind than hers. Crystal asked me if I envied what she’d done in running away. And I don’t. I pity her. She missed out—on me.

“You attempted to escape without ever really leaving,” Crystal said. “It’s much different from what she did.”

“Maybe.”

“But for forgiveness to be possible—and it’s totally up to you if you want to seek that within yourself—you may need to have compassion for what she did.”

I scoffed. “I don’t think I’ll ever get there.”

But now, looking at Marie, at the anguish in her face, I think maybe I will get there. Or close to there.

“You’re not awful,” I tell Marie. “Life is just ... hard.”

She smiles. “Well, that’s true.”

“I’d like to keep in touch, if you want,” I say.

“Really?” She looks surprised. Perhaps she was expecting me to shun her.

“Of course.”