Scars

It was Nell’s turn to visit Coral, who was spending the holidays in the hospital, recovering from a breakdown. (“Better here than with my family,” Coral said. “At least here, people admit they’re not normal.”) It was her second hospitalization in three years. She had had one other breakdown—her worst, in fact—the summer following her high-school graduation. By then her mother was on her third marriage; her father, twice her mother’s age, was on his fifth. Both parents were dead now, and among Coral’s several siblings and half siblings were none with whom she was close and some with whom she had never gotten along. She had been married once, pitifully young, to a man whose whereabouts she’d lost track of decades ago. Even younger, unmarried, she had had a baby that she gave up for adoption. She had no other children, which she came to count as a major reason for the depression that often incapacitated her, though she had suffered from depression even as a child.