. . if you could . . .” Marilyn Cheevers took a shuddering breath. “If you could stay here with her, just for a while.”Loni’s mother was shaking all over. This had been a close one. He put his arm around her shoulders and she turned into him and started bawling, clinging to him.“This isn’t something I can fix,” he told her. Words he’d told her many times.They were on a slow moving seesaw together, down when Loni was down and wouldn’t come out of her room except to shuffle across the floor and maybe take too many pills, up when she was effervescent to the extreme, her brain popping with ideas and plans, her body wired and in constant motion.One or the other. A condition that had begun toward the end of high school, or maybe had just been too much for her to hide any longer, and then had progressively grown worse despite Loni’s constant claims to the contrary. “I’m better,” she’d told him. So many times he couldn’t count them. “If we got married, I know this won’t happen anymore.”He knew it for the lie it was.Marilyn knew it, too.“I know it’s a lot to ask,”
