Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  Will put down his sandwich. “The night I got hurt, Violet said Rose was there.”

  Douglas’s head jerked back slightly. He stopped chewing.

  “Don’t you remember?” Will continued. When it came to controlling his emotions, Douglas was a Jedi. Will thought his dad looked taken aback but wouldn’t bet his life on it. He was going to have to apply some pressure, hint at Douglas’s drinking. “I mean, I know it was after work and you were groggy—”

  “Will, Violet wasn’t in her right frame of mind. She’d taken drugs. You’re old enough to know that. She took the kind of dangerous, illegal drugs that make people imagine things. Some people see snakes or flying monkeys. Violet thought she saw Rose.”

  A tingle ran up the back of Will’s arms. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done something to upset his dad. In truth, he’d never really thought it was possible.

  Douglas flexed his jaw. The flicker in his eyes was almost anger. His gray eyes looked hard and dark as asphalt; they pinned Will to the curlicued back of his café chair. “Rose had nothing to do with that night, Will. And I won’t let you or anyone else try to bring her into this. I won’t stand by and let her become a convenient scapegoat. Are we clear, here? Are we? I need an answer.” Will nodded, his eyes downcast. “Excellent. Now excuse me while I make a phone call.” Douglas’s water glass jittered as he slammed down his fisted napkin. He strode out the restaurant door, bumping into people as he dialed his cell phone.

  “How is everything?” the waiter asked with impeccable timing.

  “Exceptional,” Will said, because it was the kind of answer his mother usually gave.

  “Well … great.” The waiter looked a little stunned. Will had a talent for bringing out the awkward in people. His mother told him it was because people found his intellect intimidating.

  Through the window, Will could see his father pacing the parking lot. His collar was turned up against the wet wind and his phone was pressed to his head, cowlicking the hair above his ear. Whoever was on the other end of the line seemed to be doing a decent job of calming him down. Douglas’s shoulders had slumped back, and he seemed to be primarily listening, opening his mouth only to make short, desperate blurts that could be either questions or complaints.

  Will touched his splinted hand. Carrie or not, he knew, just knew, in his Gruyère-filled guts, that his father was protecting Rose. Rose was the one person who could hurt Will’s mother, and thus him, the most.

  VIOLET HURST

  FOR THE PAST two days, Violet had been pining for Internet access, but now that it was finally time for computer lab, she was stuck with the rather unsympathetic problem of having eight billion websites and no place to click. She was hardly going to be changing her Facebook location to “psych ward” or tweeting I’m sitting next to a woman who ripped off her ears because she thought there were bugs in her head. In fact, she couldn’t think of anything to do besides draft a reply to her sister.

  “Violet?” Edie leaned back in her Velveeta-colored plastic chair. “What are you doing over there? It sounds like a swarm of cicadas.”

  Violet hadn’t been fully aware of the way she was nervous-ticishly abusing the computer mouse, highlighting what little she’d written over and over. “Sorry. I was trying to think of something to say to Rose.”

  “You’re e-mailing her?”

  “No, just typing a letter. I’m not sure she checks the e-mail address I have. She’s never answered any of the messages me or my parents send her there.”

  “You think she put blocks on your e-mail addresses?”

  “That’s what my dad thinks. There’s no real way of knowing.”

  “I don’t get it. Don’t the messages bounce back to you?”

  “No. Dad says if Rose blocked us, her e-mail just deletes them automatically. Anyway, why do you care so much if I make up with my sister?”

  Edie shrugged. “I just thought it might be good for you to have someone you can go to when you get out of here.”

  Farther down the row of monitors, Corinna groaned. “Glad to know I’m not missing out on much out there in the sane world. Abby has ‘some serious eighties hair going right now.’ ‘Crystal just joined the group YES, I’M A GIRL AND I DON’T LIKE PINK.’ Oh, well done! You fucking imbeciles. I hate Facebook. It’s just a bunch of stupid asses jumping up and down saying, ‘Look at me! Look what I’ve done!’ ”

  Violet laughed. “Wow. And how many times have you been defriended today?”

  “More like how many people have I defriended.”

  “No, she’s right,” Edie said. “Ever since social networks, the number of people with narcissistic personality disorder has doubled. There are way more narcissists than there used to be.”

  “I can always tell a narcissist,” Corinna said. “She’s the one who puts up pictures of herself in her new bikini. She’s the one posting Marilyn Monroe quotes and saying most guys are intimidated by her.”

  “That’s just teenage exhibitionism,” the monitoring nurse said, hovering over them. “Girls of your generation with your low self-esteem. Flashing your privates because you need validation.”

  The phrase flashing your privates gave them all a moment’s pause.

  “I don’t even wanna know what sites you’re looking at.” Corinna turned her attention back to Edie. “Narcissists are always posting about how they learned to looove themselves.”

  “No, narcissism’s different from exhibitionism,” Edie said, a dead serious look on her face. She was an autodidact of abnormal psych, given she’d spent so much time in the ward. “And narcissists don’t love themselves. They hardly have any selves to begin with. They put all their energy into the fake image that they wear like a mask. Only there’s nothing but dead space behind it.”

  “Like sociopaths.” Corinna’s eyes were bloodshot behind her raccoon liner, and her hair looked like it needed washing.

  Edie made a wishy-washy motion with one hand. “Eh, they’re like halfway to sociopaths. Sociopaths have no conscience. Narcissists have no empathy. Neither one thinks other people are real. Narcissists think other people are just ego food, tools or extensions of themselves. So like, to a narcissist, you’re either the steak, or the steak knife, or the hand that cuts the meat.”

  Violet’s stomach did a little somersault at Edie’s choice of analogy.

  “Either way, narcissists aren’t seeing Corinna,” Edie said. “Instead of seeing you, they’re seeing what they can get out of you. Sometimes it’s attention. Sometimes it’s someone they can order around. Sometimes, if they can’t control you, they’ll just make you fear them. It’s like a drug to them.”

  “P.S.,” Corinna said. “I just sent a friend request to both of you.”

  “Is Rose on Facebook?” Edie asked suddenly.

  “Last time I checked. Unless she’s deleted it. My parents used to check it every day and try to see if she’d posted anything they could use to find her. But I don’t think she uses that account anymore.”

  “Maybe she set up a Facebook account only her close friends know about,” Edie said. “You know, fake name. No picture. Set to private. That’s what I did.”

  “Your real name isn’t Edie?” Corinna asked.

  “Well, it is now. I changed it when I turned eighteen. Let’s see Rose,” Edie said. “Pull up her old profile?”

  After all this time, it was strange to see Rose’s online version of herself. The pictures weren’t recent, but Violet had only ever glanced at them in passing. For instance, she’d never noticed the photo of Rose at some kind of garden party, dressed in blue gingham and one of Josephine’s wide-brimmed hats. The family resemblance was so eerie, Violet had to look twice. At first glance, she’d actually thought it was their mother hugging Rose’s friend Amelia. It was all Violet could do to keep from shuddering.

  “She’s mad pretty,” Corinna said.

  “But kind of avoidant, huh?” Edie added.

  “What makes you say that?”

&nbs
p; “The comments in her timeline. When did she move away?”

  “A year ago. Give or take.”

  “Well, look. Even before that, her friends were posting things about how much they missed her.”

  Edie was right. The general theme was: Miss you or Call me sometime, we need to catch up. One guy—his name was J.C. and his picture showed him cuddling a French bulldog—had even written Lovely Lady … Where are you living right now? Wish I wasn’t missing out on all the big parts of your life!

  “It’s hard to tell who her close friends are,” Edie said.

  “There … Amelia. Other than her, I don’t know.” According to Rose’s relationship status, she was “in a relationship,” but Damien Koch wasn’t listed among her Facebook friends. “Rose was one of those people with lots of acquaintances, but not many really close friends. She could be a social butterfly, or she could just as easily drop off the face of the earth. You know, stay in her room for days. With Rose, there was no in between.”

  Violet scrolled through the pictures again. Each one had a strange, posed quality. In every shot, Rose’s head sat at the same leftward sixty-degree slant, as though she’d decided that was her only lovable angle. Also, there was something incongruent about her face. Her features never seemed to meld into one coherent mood. Even when she was smiling over a birthday candle, her blue-gray eyes seemed vacant and the popped vein in her forehead showed strain. The emotional disconnect was even more obvious in Rose’s “silly,” “spontaneous”-style photos, wearing a turquoise wig or striking a disco pose; her eyes were deer-in-headlights and her smile looked gritted in anticipation of pain.

  “Dogs never bite me, just humans,” Corinna said, reading Rose’s very last post aloud. There was a small, uncomfortable silence. It was a quote from Marilyn Monroe.

  Later, in the dayroom, Violet sat in the windowsill and resumed her stalled letter.

  This time, she was writing with Edie’s sketchpad and a purple colored pencil. Colored pencils were one of the few writing implements that weren’t forbidden as a kill-yourself tool, and purple seemed less aggressive than red. The official color etched down the pencil’s side was “Violet.” “Here you go,” Edie had joked, pulling it from the pack. “This one has your name written all over it.”

  Violet went through the various things she knew about her sister. Rose was living in Manhattan with Damien, who had likely knocked her up. Their mother had known about said pregnancy, and probably the termination of it, based on what Violet had witnessed when she confronted Rose. A year after disowning her family, Rose had returned to acting. Maybe it was an attempt to regain her mother’s approval, but to Violet’s knowledge, Rose wasn’t in contact with the rest of the family.

  Unless, of course, her sister really had been lurking on the night Violet swerved into the mental-breakdown lane.

  • • •

  Violet had been in the kitchen, preparing her own makeshift dinner, something that didn’t include beef stock. The flashing knife left tracers in the air above the chopping block. Wheels of cucumber rolled off the counter.

  When Violet looked up, her father had joined the commotion her mother was making about the mess in the dishwasher. He and Josephine were wildly pointing their fingers at each other, each one looking like a maestro conducting the orchestra of the other’s anger.

  Then, between and behind her parents, down the darkened hallway, in the foyer, Violet distinctly saw her sister. Rose looked a year older, or maybe just far more serious, with her hair half obscuring her face. Her eyes were unreachable, her mouth set in a determined line. She padded past on quiet dancer’s feet, not looking at any of them—neither Violet nor her oblivious parents—and ascended the steps to the second-floor bedrooms.

  The fact that her sister had come home, at that moment of all times, hit Violet in a wave of dizzying confusion and heat. “Rose!” She’d gestured toward the foyer. “Rose is here! Rose!”

  High out of her megamind, it felt like the single most exciting experience of Violet’s life. She’d wanted to shout about it in the streets like Paul Revere. She wanted to call every person in her phone’s address book. She wanted to interrupt the news broadcast and let everyone know their prodigal daughter had returned. The sensation that followed felt like reliving the past Rose-less year through a telescope of thirty seconds over and over again, until she heard the piercing sound of her mother screaming.

  I’m sure you understand why I’d rather visit them on my own terms.

  In her letter, Rose had never definitively said that she wasn’t in contact with their mother. But for all Violet knew, Josephine was meeting up with Rose in private, helping her run her lines like old times. That would also explain why their usually snoopy mother had delivered Rose’s envelope unopened.

  Violet rubbed her temples, as though this might massage her tense brain. Fuck it. She began to write.

  Rose,

  Glad you’re well. I am not, as you can see by my return address.

  I don’t really blame you for getting lost. I used to keep a book of Post-it notes, counting down the number of days until I turned eighteen. I used to tear one off every day. I finally threw it away because Mom interrogated me about it constantly. It pissed her off because she couldn’t figure out what it was for.

  Bit confused about a few things in your letter:

  A) Are you in touch with Mom? Dad?

  B) What are you doing for work?

  C) Have you been back to Old Stone Way since you left?

  Also …

  D) About Damien? Are you living with him? I’ve spent a full calendar year thinking of a sensitive way to put this, but there really doesn’t seem to be any way aside from straight-up prying … I’m assuming you were pregnant for a short time last year? And that Mom (who, regardless of whatever she has to say is not “pro-life” but pro-whatever-causes-other-people-maximum-misery) became a one-woman abortion protest after the fact? Is this the reason why you left?

  E) Why did you decide to get back in touch now?

  Then she origamied an envelope out of another sheet of art paper, borrowed the stamp Corinna had promised, and dropped the letter at the nurses’ station.

  WILLIAM HURST

  WILL OVERSLEPT AND was two hours late for home school—one sign that his mother was still peeved that he’d chosen his homegrown Take Your Kid to Work Day over her.

  Another was the fact that she hadn’t been in to lay out his clothes for the day. He walked to his closet and tried to imagine what she’d want for him based on the weather. Stumped, he picked an outfit much like he’d worn the day before: belted gray pants and a collared sweater that toggled around the neck.

  In the kitchen, his mother was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a delighted look on her face.

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” she said, bending down to kiss the gap where his forehead peeked through his bed-headed bangs. “My word, what are you wearing?”

  Will glanced down, wondering if he was overdressed or under.

  She turned up the radio at the precise moment he started to apologize for sleeping late.

  “I said I’m sorry I overslept,” Will repeated over a loud, brassy overture.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You didn’t oversleep. I let you sleep. I have a surprise for you today.”

  Will’s stomach pretzeled. The vanilla extract hanging in the air brought a vomity taste to the back of his throat. After the week he’d had, he couldn’t handle any more surprises.

  “Do me a favor and don’t look so nervous. Really, Will, I don’t know where I went wrong with you. You have no spontaneity. You’re such a killjoy.” She sifted confectioner’s sugar over a smeary chocolate stack.

  He took the plate she passed him. It was so heavy in his hand, he imagined it hitting his chest like a wrecking ball.

  Josephine leaned over and began cutting Will’s pancakes into small bites. “So aren’t you curious about your surprise?” she asked. “It’s a big one.”

&n
bsp; The scene at the Rosendale Community Center was babies with rabies. The decor was childish—pre-K, really. There were train tables and hobbit-sized basketball hoops. The toy boxes overflowed with decades’ worth of Happy Meal toys, most of which “transformed” into robots or Hot Wheels cars, all of which looked like they had been infected with three decades’ worth of norovirus and whooping cough.

  Yep, this was the surprise: a “play group” for homeschooled children. Perhaps Josephine was preparing for the CPS investigation, or bolstering her case against Douglas-like arguments that Will was too “isolated.” Or maybe she really did want him to make new friends. Or she was punishing him for going to work with Douglas, like he thought.

  The mothers—it was mostly mothers, with the exception of one bald dad sporting a wind-energy T-shirt and hairy, bare feet in flip-flops—were gathered around a snack table. They were munching raw Brazil nuts, dehydrated green beans, and other virtuous fare from the local food co-op.

  It was the kind of nouveau-hippie crowd that usually drove Will’s mother crazy. She smiled politely and made efforts to break through the cliquish conversation.

  “When Will was in public school,” Josephine said, “I noticed there were two types of teachers. The first were idiots who didn’t care. The second were decent teachers who seemed to know that most parents are idiots.”

  Will ached to sit beside his mother, but whenever he went near her, she nudged him off with an instruction to “go play.” Then she’d turn to whatever alpaca-sweatered woman she was mingling with and explain how her autistic son had terrible separation anxiety: “At this point, even if I wanted to send him back to public school, he wouldn’t stand for it. I swear, he barely lets me go to the bathroom alone.”

  So instead Will watched his mother from afar, trying to make at least some show of “meeting new people.” He knew he should find someone—some other kid—to latch onto before he embarrassed or disappointed her, but he could barely remember how to talk to kids his own age. But he owed it to Josephine to try.