Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  The Douglas of Old Stone Way—the evasive guy who had spent all day Sunday glumly going through the motions of church and an IHOP breakfast until he could slip away to the “gym” for close to five hours—was gone. He’d been replaced by the Douglas Hurst of IBM, the kind of chummy blowhard who made people flash squeamish smiles and avert their eyes. He wasn’t confident, exactly, but he had a fine-tuned schtick, composed of business-management-speak and comedic timing.

  Will briefly wondered which persona was real, and decided on neither. For a moment, he tried to look at his father from an outsider’s perspective—to see him as Douglas instead of Dad—but all he saw was an aging nerd with thick graying hair and his work shirt buttoned too high on his Adam’s apple. Will didn’t have the first inkling who his father was beyond the surface of his faintly smudged glasses.

  Maybe Douglas felt shy and awkward in Will’s presence too. He started rambling abruptly, out of nowhere. “Years ago, we had this PA who never liked to wear the same thing twice.… She was obsessive about it. So you know what I did? I built her a program that would help her track her outfits. She’d just input whatever she wanted to wear—polka-dot blouse with a tan blazer, you name it—and the computer would go ballistic and tell her she’d worn the same thing back on the fifth of December.” Douglas laughed and took a slug from his travel mug. “Will, don’t ever let anyone tell you that tech geeks don’t know a thing about women. We’re not all social pariah types. Well … with the exception of Don, here, of course.”

  Don, the co-worker who’d been leaning in the doorway, laughed a little too heartily and walked away clutching his chest as though he’d been shot.

  Women. That one word hit Will like a glass of ice water in the face. It brought him back to his real objective. Officially, the ringed notebook in his lap was for taking notes (his mother expected him to write a report about “Multinational Technology and Consulting and What It Means to Me”), but, unofficially, Will was using it to log his father’s interactions with the opposite sex. At 8:49 a.m., Douglas had held the elevator door open for a blond woman (Cindy) who was reasonably pretty, despite her wake-me-when-we-get-there eyes. Ten minutes later he had stopped mid-hallway to chat with another female (Marnie) who had a sagging, anxious face and curly gingersnap-colored hair that made Will imagine her in Ronald McDonald’s yellow jumpsuit.

  Yesterday, when Josephine had slipped away to the bathroom during a MathBusters computer lesson, Will had sneakily used the Internet to image-search the word mistress. He’d wanted to acquaint himself, in case he was looking for a certain type of woman, in case all home-wreckers looked the same. The results (Will had only ever seen cleavage, not actual unabashed breasts) gave him a guilty feeling in his stomach. But they also made him think he was looking for a very particular sort of cat-eyed woman encased in black latex. He had spent nearly every moment since trying to suppress visions of his father naked and shackled, licking some snarling woman’s feet.

  The phone on his father’s desk trilled.

  Douglas answered it with a jab of the speaker button. “Yes?”

  It was strange to hear the voice of his father’s secretary in stereo, coming at once through the phone and through the open office door. “Carrie’s on the line,” she said.

  For a fraction of a second, his father flushed.

  Carrie. The familiarity of that statement was not lost on Will. The fact that the secretary hadn’t used a last name meant this was a frequent caller. He scribbled the name, very discreetly, in his notebook and marked it with a star.

  Holding the receiver in one hand, Douglas fished in the pocket of his khakis with the other. “Here,” he said, opening his wallet and thrusting some singles at Will. “Take a walk to the vending machines and get yourself a snack.”

  “I just ate breakfast. And I’m supposed to shadow you for the whole day. I have a report to write. What’s Mom going to say when I tell her that you wouldn’t let me do my work?”

  Douglas’s cheeks were pinkening. He looked flustered.

  “Your need to observe my work doesn’t trump my responsibility to do my work.” Douglas paused for a second and softened his approach. “Just give me a few minutes. Please. I’d really appreciate it. When you get back you can sit in on a very important meeting.”

  Will gave a grunting sigh. As soon as he’d rounded his father’s door, he stuffed the small wad of cash into his pocket and bent to “retie” his firmly knotted shoelace, wary of anyone who might catch him eavesdropping.

  “Carrie,” his father said in a voice that gave little away. “No. I am glad to hear from you. I’ve been worried you might not call me back …”

  There was an agonizing pause. A pair of goateed men strode past and eyed Will with interest. The secret to being a good private investigator was blending in—not exactly Will’s forte, but he stood and flipped through his notebook in a way that he hoped looked purposeful.

  “I can’t tell you how much I want to,” Douglas said. “But I’ve got my kid here today. I was gonna take him out to lunch. Yes, I know. Well, that makes me a very sick man. Yes, I’ll call you later. I swear. I will. I won’t ever stand you up like that again. I do appreciate you. I know you worry.”

  Will’s ears roared. His horror was like an earthquake. The hallway walls around him swayed and liquefied. He felt the polished office floor swell beneath his Top-Siders, and he worried he was on the verge of a seizure.

  There was a woman in the world—even closer, in the state, the county, even—who felt close enough to Will’s dad to worry about him. Triumphant as Will was that his detective skills had paid off, he felt a crushing wave of anger and heartbreak for his mother. His father’s affair didn’t sound like a fling. It sounded powerful and devastating, like something destined to blow their whole lives apart.

  Later, Douglas went to a meeting, leaving Will to watch a video. The video was on YouTube, meaning Will really could have watched from the comfort of his mother’s kitchen desk. It said nothing about his father’s business associates. It gave little insight into the extroverted work persona Douglas appeared to slip on each morning along with his wrinkle-resistant dress shirt.

  On the upside, the video gave Will forty untroubled minutes to scroll through his father’s computer files.

  Will was no tech prodigy. His mother wasn’t exactly peppering his school curriculum with HTML lessons. Heck, she still thought WordPerfect was the industry standard.

  Still, Will managed to search his father’s hard drive for any documents that might mention sex, Carrie, affair, or love. When those resulted in no hits—aside from a PowerPoint presentation titled “Eight Reasons You’ll Love Using Lotus Notes”—Will dug into his burgeoning mental gutter. He searched for hotel (this only brought up a few ancient itineraries for his father’s work conventions). He hunted for divorce, lawyer, and even custody, before zeroing in on his father’s open e-mail.

  I’ve got my kid here today. Whoever Carrie was, she knew about Douglas’s family. Will decided to start with Rose. Eigne, a naming word, meaning “firstborn.” An in-box search of Rose’s name brought up dozens of e-mails.

  The most recent was a series of e-mail messages to a man his dad appeared to be considering hiring to sniff out Rose’s address. At least according to his signature box, this man worked at a “bonded and insured private investigations firm servicing greater New York City.” Will felt a touch competitive, knowing he wasn’t the only PI on the case. He couldn’t help imagining the man he was up against. Did he have real spy tools: voice changers and night-vision goggles? Did he turn up the collar on his black leather trench coat?

  In the first message, written a few months earlier, Douglas wrote that he “just wanted to verify” that his runaway daughter wasn’t stalking or harassing his wife and remaining children. There had been some incidents, he said. His wife was feeling jumpy.

  What kinds of incidents? the PI had written.

  Nothing conclusive, Douglas wrote. My car was keyed. A few pe
rsonal items have gone missing. There were some defaced photos in the family album, although my younger daughter might have done that.

  “Are you hanging in there?” When Will looked up, his father’s secretary was standing in the doorway, smiling the kind of exaggerated smile that made the tendons stand out in her neck.

  It took Will a second to figure out what she was talking about. He felt like he had chewed gum in his ears. “Uh-huh,” he said, and turned up the volume on the IBM school-spirit video.

  The assistant—Peggy was her name—nodded vigorously. A woman on the brink of retirement, she had large dangling pieces of jewelry and pictures of grandchildren on her desk. In the name of thoroughness, Will had added her name to his list of potential mistresses anyway.

  “Okay,” Peggy said. “You’re awful self-reliant, aren’t you? You’re just like your dad. Okay … If you need anything, give me a holler.”

  Will bit his lip. His ears were buzzing, and his fingers had turned so inexplicably cold that he had trouble moving the cursor across the computer screen.

  The defaced photos, things stolen … it was all news to Will. But he had felt something strange in the air over the past couple of weeks, even beyond Violet’s usual weirdness. Twice, bears had battered the garbage cans and made trash salad all over the garage floor (no Hurst would cop to leaving the door open). Once, he’d found his mother in her master bathroom, crying over the shards and puddles of her favorite perfume bottle.

  He did, of course, remember his father’s keyed car. He’d heard his parents fighting about it through their closed bedroom door:

  “You pissed someone off, Douglas!” his mother had wailed. “Just admit it! You cut someone off! Or you blocked a bike lane! Or you, I don’t know … You stole a parking space someone else was waiting for!”

  And his father: “It happened here, Josephine! In our garage!”

  “Well, it serves you right for leaving the garage door open!”

  “Could Violet have done this? Or one of her friends?”

  It went on and on and on.

  Also, there was the incident a few nights before Violet flipped her biscuits. It was a humid night, unseasonably sweaty. Will’s windows were open, and his striped blue drapes twitched in the barely there wind. He’d been waking every thirty minutes, playing WrestleMania with his sheets. His hair was drenched and his pillowcase was damp with perspiration. But when he reached a hand underneath to flip his pillow to the cooler side, his fingers had tripped over a sharp metal point. By the glow of his ancient Noah’s Ark night-light, Will had pulled out eight gleaming inches of his mother’s sewing scissors. He’d turned the orange handle over in his hand and thought of various reasons why they might have ended up one down-filled inch away from his face: Some chance Violet was playing a joke? Maybe his mother, midway through making Will’s bed, had left them there by mistake? Eventually, Will got up and returned them to the sewing box on his mother’s desk. When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t breathe a word about the scissors to anyone. He’d chalked it up to a very vivid dream.

  The last e-mail from his father’s potential PI was dated just one week before Violet’s breakdown. I feel very confident I can find your daughter. To begin with, I will need some information from you, including Rose’s birth date, a recent photograph, driver’s license number, social security number, a list of alternative names she might be using, as well as information on her electronic communication devices, such as known cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses. As far as Will could see, either his father hadn’t responded or, covering his tracks, he’d deleted that message and every one that came after.

  Will stared up the web of scribbles on his father’s whiteboard. He tried to will his brain into the same kind of organized algorithm, every arrow leading him from one logical thought to the next.

  There was no end of explanations, but only two immediately jumped out. One was that Douglas had changed his mind. Maybe he’d found another culprit for the hacked-up family photos and the car. Like his father said, it was fully possible that these were just a few more items in Violet’s à la carte rebellion. The other possibility was that Douglas had gone ahead and hired the investigator. In that case, he’d either spent the past few weeks talking to the PI exclusively on the phone, or else he’d begun deleting every trace of what he’d found.

  • • •

  Will’s train of thought was broken by the sound of Peggy transferring a call to Douglas’s voice mail. Will looked down at the red message light blinking on his father’s phone and felt a cold suspicion crash over him. Maybe, just maybe, his father had started being careful with his e-mail because the PI who’d gone looking for Rose had found her. There was a small chance that his father’s late nights and sly phone calls weren’t romantic at all. Sex, no. A secret connection with Rose, yes. After Rose ran away, Will’s father had been far more hopeful and forgiving than his mother. But then, he wasn’t the one Rose had called for one final F.U. once she got to the city. Rose and Damien had called Josephine, and Josephine couldn’t forgive the things they had said to her. “She told me we were dead to her, Douglas. She told me if I contacted her, she’d make me pay. She said we were toxic.”

  Will opened his notebook to his ongoing list of women’s names. Across the margin, in double-sized letters, he wrote ROSE.

  VIOLET HURST

  VIOLET’S BOSS, MRS. D, was beyond understanding when Violet called to apologize about missing her shift at Dekker’s Farm Stand. Work was winding down there anyway. In less than a month, they’d be closed for the season.

  “Take all the time you need, honey. The leaf-peepers are gone, and there’s not much work here anyway. The rest of the kids are out back doing popcorn shelling. I’ll tell them you called.” Violet smiled despite herself at the thought of her co-workers.

  “Listen, when you’re feeling better, drop by and visit me,” Mrs. D continued. “I’ve got your paycheck, plus a stack of pear tarts I want you to take off my hands. For some reason, the city-its aren’t buying them this year. They must all be on the same Sugar Busters diet. No one gave me the memo.”

  Violet had been working at Dekker’s for well over a year. It was fun, varied work: manning the cash register, helping plan the corn maze, arranging clumps of annuals in hanging baskets. Violet had been on staff there, literally, since the first moment she was allowed to work legally. Mrs. Dekker was the only person on the planet who could raise Violet’s appetite, no death threats involved. It wasn’t just that Mrs. D enjoyed feeding people; it was that she enjoyed people, all walks, enough to want to feed them. Any time of day, you could peek between the shelves of the baked-goods case—past the hand-punched donuts and oozing blueberry scones—and see Mrs. D laughing and bustling around in her apron, a lard smear on one lens of her glasses.

  One day in the later stages of sallekhana, when Violet was supposed to be sipping little more than clear broth or celery juice, she’d succumbed to the siren song of Mrs. D’s warm, thrumming kitchen. The smells of fresh-baked bread and apple butter had hooked Violet around the neck like an old-fashioned vaudeville cane, and she’d stuffed her sallow face with all of the above. It was the equivalent of a food bender—a gastronomical blackout. She had glanced up halfway through a bowl of Mrs. D’s black bean chili and didn’t remember ladling it.

  The Dekker’s gang referred to themselves as the box of broken toys. They were rejects, dropouts, freaks … and proud of it. Facial piercings twinkling, sorting new potatoes with bloodshot eyes, Violet and her co-workers knew how they must look to the Audi- and Beemer-driving crowd who took a wrong turn on the way to Dutchess County. One girl in the Dekker’s gang—a twenty-year-old single mother named Trilby—had the word Dickavore prominently tattooed on the inner slope of her thumb, and Mrs. D still let her work the register, even though customers were bound to see it as she counted their twenties.

  Violet imagined that Mrs. D had been a teenage wildebeest herself. The twinkle in her eye whenever she overheard so
meone talking about hitchhiking to Burning Man betrayed her tacit approval. Once, when someone asked Mrs. D what she majored in at SUNY, she’d winked and replied, “It was the seventies. I majored in peace.”

  After Violet had called Imogene and Dekker’s—the friends she considered family—there was the question of phoning her actual family. But what would she say?

  The question of Will was freaking her out. Actually, it was spacing her out, making it impossible to focus on the therapists who were trying to tease epiphanies from her tangled-up brain. Violet worried that her brother was badly injured. She felt guilty, not only for whatever she’d allegedly done to hurt him, but for leaving him all alone at home with their mother.

  Violet kept imagining an ER in the dead of night: Will’s shoulders raised to his ears, his teeth gritted and his nostrils flared, his brow knitted in suppressed pain. Serious damage to his right hand. That was the phrase the police officer had used, a phrase that made it impossible to gauge how badly he was hurt. Had things (fingers or parts of them) been severed and reattached? Would he be able to play the piano again? Violet visualized a round, white surgical light illuminating the space between Will and the doctor. She couldn’t bring herself to picture Will’s hand itself. Even the thought of blood—dripping from a tattered wound—made Violet’s throat constrict and her vision go shimmery. Her fear of blood went beyond your typical shut-your-eyes-during-a-horror-movie aversion. She’d had it ever since she’d seen the picture on her mother’s desk a few weeks before Rose ran away.

  At the time, Rose and Violet had been seated in the breakfast nook, where they sometimes did their homework in silence, sitting at opposite ends of the table as though competing in a head-to-head competition. On the other side of the room, Josephine had been browning stew beef while Satie’s Gymnopédies played on the stereo in the background. Violet had been memorizing a series of Spanish flash cards. Hermana. Madre. Amiga. Conocida. (The unit was “People and Family.”) Rose had been working on something for her human biology class at SUNY. Her assignment was to draw a picture of the brain and label where the three different kinds of human memory were stored.