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.