Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  “Suicide attempt? It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I mean, come on”—Edie gestured to her scar—“Have you ever seen anything more embarrassing than this?”

  Later, Violet would find out Edie had strung herself to a curtain rod with a length of electrical wiring. Instead of killing her, the rod had snapped and the wiring had gashed a four-inch wound in her neck. Her Vassar roommate had found her, bleeding nearly to death, making a second attempt with a plastic shopping bag over her head. One hundred stitches and a six-pint transfusion later, Edie ended up at Fallkill Psychiatric. This was her second stay in two years.

  “Psychedelic crisis.” For simplicity’s sake, Violet added, “LSD.”

  “Wow,” Edie said. “You look all right, considering. Was it bad?”

  Was it bad? High on seeds, Violet had joined Imogene in front of the mirror and been surprised by the size of her own widened pupils. They looked like dark holes in a Violet-featured, rubber Halloween mask.

  “Do you feel really heavy?” Imogene had asked. “I feel like gravity is working triple-time.”

  Violet hadn’t felt heavy. Just the opposite. She was having a bad trip, and after hearing her mother’s voice, she felt weightless, like not even her friends could ground her in the moment. Some invisible current was already pulling her back across town to the very last place she wanted to be: her parents’ house, where her mother was destined to ambush her with another accusation. Damn it, Violet! Just admit it! You were angry with us and you broke the window! Your friends keyed your father’s car! You came home drunk again and tipped over the trash! Violet could defend herself all she wanted, but no one ever believed her. Not with her mother in the other corner, spinning stories like rows of knitting and crying on demand. Violet couldn’t explain these freak events, but she knew they weren’t her fault.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. That was the reason she’d taken the seeds to begin with. Her mother had come into her room Friday morning and (falsely, homophobically) accused her and Imogene of being lesbian lovers, to the tune of, “I’m not some clueless mother, Viola! You with your buzz cut! And that little dyke with her rainbow hair!” It might have been comical, were it not for her mother’s lecture about dressing like a “sloppy lesbian” and the mention of some gay-be-gone camp in Sullivan County. When Violet had screamed at Josephine to get her bigoted ass out of her room, her mother had laid into her harder than she ever had: “You are sick, Violet! I wish other people could see this anger you reserve just for me! You’re so superficial! So false, with those big cow eyes you lay on your father! And the phony compassion you lavish on Will! I feel sorry for you, you know that? All the natural fibers in the world can’t hide how artificial you are. Keep doing your Buddhist chants all day long, little girl. They won’t hide the fact that you’re a selfish bitch. You’re ugly, Viola. You’re ugly inside.”

  That was the speech that had sent Violet seeking out oblivion one last time. Seeds crunching between her molars, she’d been thinking she just wanted to melt her face off. She’d needed Love, Salvation, Deliverance. LSD, for short. Violet thought, under the circumstances, she deserved at least that.

  WILLIAM HURST

  “MOM?” WILL ASKED, as the car shot under the tollbooth’s rising yellow arm.

  “What?” she said, with an undisguised tone of annoyance.

  “You know that letter that came for Violet?”

  “What about it?”

  “It has that thing on the back. The same thing Rose used to use.”

  “You mean a wax seal. You need to call things by their proper names, Will. How many times do I need to tell you that thing isn’t descriptive? Neither is stuff, by the way. Or neat, or cool, or amazing.”

  “Sorry. The wax seal. Rose loved those.”

  “Yes, she did. You’ve always been such an observant boy.” Her eyes in the rearview mirror crinkled with sad warmth. “Even when you were a baby. When you were eighteen months old, you’d walk into a room and immediately home in on what was different. You’d fixate on it. Even if it was just the smallest detail: someone wearing a new brooch, or a book someone had moved onto a high shelf.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. You’re like me that way. We have an eye for detail. If you apply yourself, that kind of watchfulness could make you a very famous writer one day.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Of course. You’re so observant. That’s why I know you already know what I’m going to tell you …” The wiper blades did a screeching arch, and her shoulders started shaking. She sobbed gutturally and choked on the words: “Your father is cheating on me.”

  Will hesitated. Even from the backseat, he could see tears pouring down her face in the mirror. “I didn’t know-know,” he said.

  The car swerved the slightest bit as she groped inside the door pocket for a tissue. “But you suspected.”

  “Well, he went into work on a Saturday. Plus, I heard him talking on the phone.”

  “Your father and that goddamn phone! He thinks nobody notices him whispering in the dark, pouring his heart out.” She took one hand off the wheel and sarcastically clutched her chest, as if the contents of Douglas’s heart couldn’t fill a teaspoon.

  “Have you checked his call history?”

  “Yes! He wipes it clean! The man is so devious.” The line of traffic in front of them slowed for construction, and it took Josephine a few terrifying seconds to notice and brake.

  Will made a supportive but vague sound. The dashboard heater was cranked too high, but this was not the time to ask whether she could turn it down.

  “Maybe I should have kept all this to myself. But it affects you too. Your dad uses you too. On the one hand, he likes how we reflect on him. We’re the perfect family he never had growing up. But he also hates the way we restrict him. He hates sitting down to dinner when he could be off somewhere, talking programming with other megabrains.”

  Below them, the Hudson River was the same slate-gray color as the overcast sky. It made Will feel disconnected, like he was flying or falling. His skin crawled inside his sweaty sweater.

  “What are you going to do?” He wondered if he ought to brace himself for divorce. His head swam with the idea of a joint-custody agreement. He couldn’t handle spending half the week away from his mom.

  “I don’t know,” she said, audibly wiping her nose. “Before I can even think about that, I need him to admit it. As if I don’t have enough going on with your sister going off the deep end.”

  Will leaned forward to crack his window and had a full-body pins-and-needles sensation. An upward jolt shot through him, tail-bone to head, and the dreaded tightening returned to his chest. Recumbentibus: a knockout punch. That was the word Will had copied into his unusual-word notebook a few months ago. In Will’s experience that was how epilepsy felt: like getting hit by an opponent much bigger and more depraved than him. Every time—every single flipping time—was a filthy sucker punch to the head.

  He came to in a fast-food parking lot, where his mom had pulled into a handicapped space. The handicapped plates on her car were new—another weak upshot of Will’s health conditions.

  The neurons in Will’s brain were still firing every which way, mostly in directions he sensed they really shouldn’t. His head was cradled in his mother’s lap. After pulling over, she’d moved into the backseat, unbelted him, and rolled him onto his side. She’d also balled up her cashmere coat and put it under his head. The fur collar tickled his ear. The smell of her Shalimar perfume brought the world roaring back to him.

  “Are you okay?” Josephine asked.

  Will responded with a groan.

  “Oh honey, I shouldn’t have stressed you out,” she said.

  When Will was teetering on the edge of a mini-seizure, a big dose of worry could cause him to seize. Now that he was awake, he felt more stressed out than ever. Every seizure was a reminder that he’d lost the ability to lead a normal life, and it usually took Will a day or
two to pull himself out of the downward spiral of frustration and shame.

  “It’s not your fault,” Will said. If anyone had stressed him out, it was his dad.

  Josephine draped her watch over her wrist and redid the clasp. Presumably, she’d taken it off to time his seizure.

  “Did it last long?” Will asked.

  “Objectively, no. Subjectively, God yes.”

  When Will first started having seizures, he was desperate to know what he looked like in their midst. He’d imagined all the terrifying eppy clichés: flopping around like a fish, his tongue gyrating around his gaping mouth. But Will’s fits were what his doctor called “absence seizures.” During them, his mom said he just stared at her as though she were a stranger. It sounded pretty underwhelming, and the doctor said Will ought to be seizure-free by the time he was eighteen, but each attack still scared Josephine and physically drained Will.

  Things had barely come back into focus before Will conked back out in a drooling crash-nap.

  Will woke up starving, his exhausted brain craving nourishment.

  “Are there any snacks in the car?” he croaked.

  She passed him half a roll of Life Savers from the glove compartment. They wouldn’t do a thing to kill the gnawing pain in his stomach. He was so hungry he could eat a city block and still have room for a footlong sandwich.

  “Any water?”

  She shook her head and killed the ignition.

  Will’s head rang as he righted himself. The car was idling in front of a brick building with arched windows and fortressy turrets. It looked as sad and complicated as the people Will imagined pacing its halls.

  Josephine reached across the seat for her purse. “Wait in the car,” she said. “I just need to go inside and sign those forms.”

  Will slipped one arm through his coat. “I’ll come with you,” he said. He didn’t want to be alone. Seizures were like earthquakes; sometimes there were aftershocks.

  “I’ll be in and out. I promise. I don’t want you to be involved in this any further. It’s bad enough what Violet did, but the stress, setting off your seizures—No. Just stay still and I’ll be right back.”

  The horn beeped twice and Will realized she’d hit the lock button on her keychain.

  He returned his cheek to the seat fabric. His mind flitted back to the letter in his mother’s purse. He wished he’d had the good sense to copy down the return address before she took the envelope away. He wondered if his mother was thinking the same. Why had she delivered it to Violet without opening it first?

  His mother’s cell phone interrupted his train of thought. It was vibrating between the two front seats, smacking its silver head against the plastic cup holder, the whirring sound threefold. Will reached over and inspected the screen. DOUG, read the caller ID. Maybe Will should have pressed Ignore. Instead, his thumb wandered to the green Talk button.

  “Dad?” he said.

  On the other end of the line was the swishing sound of a pocket call. There was a loud, social din. A restaurant, maybe. His father’s lunch hour?

  A woman’s giggle cut through the racket like a clinking teaspoon. It was followed by the unmistakable sound of his father’s voice. “You’re a remarkable woman,” Douglas said. “A few of us are heading down to the Bull and Buddha. Any interest in joining us?”

  As the call cut out, Will made a vow to himself: if he could not help his mother by bringing Rose home to apologize for the hurt she’d caused them, he would save her by finding out the whos and whys of his father’s indiscretions.

  “See? That didn’t take long, did it?” Josephine said later, sliding behind the steering wheel and slinging her purse onto the passenger seat. “And now we’re safe. We really don’t have to worry. There won’t be a big, Violet-shaped cloud hanging over us any longer.”

  Will glanced up at the spiky-looking building with its too-dark windows. “What’s it like inside?”

  “Don’t worry about her, Will. It’s one of the nicest hospitals money can buy. The Roosevelts once owned all this land. And these buildings—they’re called high Gothics, by the way—are a national landmark.” She said it in the same tone he’d heard her use to help sell his sisters on colleges she liked.

  Will felt a pang of guilt when he realized Violet might fall behind in school and not get into her first-choice college, Bard, now.

  His mother seemed to read his mind. “Will, either she’ll get better or she won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with us now.”

  • • •

  Will was still starving when they arrived at home and found a car idling in the driveway at Old Stone Way. He expected his father, but the car in question didn’t belong to Douglas. It was as compact and green as a lime. At the rear dash, a scrum of stuffed animals begged for rescue.

  At the Hursts’ front door, a wide woman in a trench coat looked casually up from her clipboard.

  “Can I help you?” Josephine asked, opening the driver’s-side door.

  The woman hobbled over on a bad hip and thrust out her hand. “Mrs. Hurst?”

  His mother nodded. “And you are?”

  “My name is Trina Williams. I’m from Child Protective Services.”

  VIOLET HURST

  IT WAS BARELY lunchtime, and Violet was already tired of being cooped up all morning. She’d always felt sanest in the great outdoors, especially when there was compost in her cuticles and maple pods in the ends of her long-ago hair.

  Even during Violet’s bad trip, her mood had instantly improved after her friends brought her outside. The Fields’ eco-contemporary sat on ten enchanted acres, the Mohonk mountains guarding it from the south side like a high garden wall. The wind pulled the leaves across the lawn in crested waves. Violet saw vortexes and patterns in the hellfire sunset. This, she decided, was all she ever needed or wanted in life. She wanted only to wrap herself up in the misty red-gold dead of autumn. She wanted to make these three enchanted creatures—Imogene, Finch, and Jasper—her permanent family.

  Imogene rode Finch’s BMX bike around the driveway while Violet stood on the rear pegs. Finch smiled beatifically behind the twirling flames of the copper fire pit. His face bloomed red and gold with reflected flashes.

  “Hurst, you remind me of that Inuit story about the Stone Child,” he’d said.

  “What?” Violet had asked. By that time, she had been lying on her back, her cheek in the overgrown grass, doing a slow improvised backstroke through a pile of dead leaves.

  “So there was this orphan, right? And his mom and dad died in a bear attack. He lived by himself, angry and starving to death. All he had was a rock the same size as he was. He wrapped his arms and legs around it and refused to let go.”

  Violet had a thought that it sounded like her parents’ relationship: doting Douglas clinging to an ice-cold hunk of rock.

  “That’s how he got the nickname the Stone Child,” Finch continued. “The villagers thought he was out of his fucking mind. But that bat-shit little boy didn’t let go. He just kept clinging to the thing, until one day, the big rock broke in two. And inside was the most perfect girl he could ever ask for. She gave the Stone Child bows and arrows and a harpoon. They got married and had kids.”

  “What the fuck does that even mean?!” Jasper cried.

  “And what does that have to do with Violet?” Imogene asked, shrieking with laughter.

  “I was just trying to say Violet is intuitive. She reminds me of some of the great healers.”

  Violet felt all her organs flush hot and pulse.

  Her cell phone had squirmed uncomfortably in her pocket. It was a text message from Josephine:

  WE NEED YOU AT HOME. YOUR FATHER AND I HAVE DIVORCE ON THE TABLE.

  After passing her phone around the group—Violet had to make sure she wasn’t tripping hard enough to imagine that—she texted the wary response: WHAT??? ARE YOU OKAY?

  “It’s about time,” she’d told her friends. Her parents’ relationship wasn’t like Beryl and Rolf’
s, or anyone else’s she knew. It was like a business arrangement, where her father provided the capital and her mother funneled money out the back. The only “business” they were in was denying reality and their true natures, and business had been failing ever since Rose ran away.

  Violet’s phone buzzed with Josephine’s reply: YES, I’M OK. DINNER. I MEANT WE HAVE DINNER ON THE TABLE. MY PHONE CHANGES MY WORDS. COME HOME NOW.

  They’d practically pissed themselves laughing. Violet rode her bike home via the town rail trail. The clouds on the horizon had darkened, and the bent trees looked a bit like they were clawing for her.

  As Violet pedaled, she’d hatched a plan to fake a migraine and duck out on family dinner. She rehearsed everything she was going to say under her breath. She thought of the mantra for peace of mind—asato ma sadgamaya—which meant roughly, “lead us from darkness to the light / from knowledge of the unreal to the real.” Maybe she’d been having auditory hallucinations, but the bike’s spinning wheels had sounded like a sitar.

  High on seeds, Violet would have much rather slept on the rail trail if she’d had her choice. Climbing off her bike, she found the front door locked. The more she tapped the brass door knocker (nobody answered), the more she began to feel like a stranger. Pacing back and forth on the personalized doormat (HURSTS, it read in severe, serifed letters), she’d started to feel like a home intruder.

  Finally, knowing full well that her mother hated the sound, Violet hit the doorbell and listened to the dissonant electric sound of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  The door had snapped inward, and Josephine’s grimacing face popped out.

  “Why did you ring the doorbell?” she asked. “I hate that sound. That’s no exaggeration. I hate it. Douglas! Haven’t I told you to reprogram that thing?! It’s not your fault, Violet. It’s that father of yours.”

  Violet had stepped into the foyer, where the chandelier seemed to bloom open like a crystal chrysanthemum, and felt like she’d crossed a psychic threshold that could never be uncrossed. Violet had wanted to retreat to her bedroom, but she couldn’t seem to vocalize anything. “It’s locked,” she finally said, tapping her temple with one finger.