Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  Violet nodded. She was still reeling from her conversation with Matt. On some base level, his anger seemed like proof that anyone she opened up to would attack her. She couldn’t trust anyone.

  She really didn’t know where to begin. If she started with Rose’s letters, Detective Donnelly would probably say they supported the idea that Rose hadn’t been home. “Rose has started writing to me, but I don’t want to show you the letters yet.”

  Detective Donnelly looked surprised, but not annoyed. That was good.

  “You can begin the story wherever you’re comfortable.”

  “Well, when she ran away, the police interviewing me kept asking, ‘What do you think happened to Rose?’ ”

  “I’ve read the file.” Donnelly nodded. “If I recall, you told police you thought she ran away with her boyfriend. You said Rose was secretive about her relationships. There was lots to indicate that your mother was strict and overprotective. Your mom told the department she didn’t approve of sex before marriage, let alone living together. If a girl like your sister wanted to move in with a fellow, she’d all but have to elope in the night.”

  “My mom is strict, which is why I left something out.”

  Donnelly scratched his cheek with his pen, then slowly scratched at his notepad while Violet told him the story of Rose’s abortion and the photo on Josephine’s desk.

  “So I’m hoping you’ll ask me that question again … You know, ‘What do you think happened to Rose?’ ”

  The detective rocked forward and put an elbow on the table. “Well, what do you think happened to your sister?”

  “It’s only a theory …” Violet took a quick breath and prayed what she was about to say wouldn’t sound crazy. In the visiting room with its barred windows and DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS sign, it was hard to say anything that sounded sane.

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s your job to have the hunches. It’s my job to look into them.”

  “Well, Rose’s ex—”

  “This is Matt?”

  “Yes, Matt. His wife, Francesca, has cancer.”

  “Okay,” Donnelly’s expression was dubious.

  “Well, my best friend’s mother has breast cancer. She’s had chemotherapy, radiation, the whole ordeal. And I know all those treatments can damage fertility. Beryl always says if she’d known she was going to get cancer, she’d have spared herself the headache of having her tubes tied.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so it seems to me that a man who’s just found out he might never have kids with his wife might not be devastated to find out his girlfriend was pregnant. Maybe he was thinking he’d leave his wife and settle down with Rose. By the time the baby was born, Rose would have been just a few months from graduation.”

  “Is this guy really that selfish?”

  “I don’t know,” Violet shrugged. “I only talked to him the once. But he’s immature. Childish.”

  “Listen to you,” Donnelly smirked. “You’re all of what? Eighteen?”

  “Sixteen,” Violet laughed, the joke backfiring on him.

  “But hold on now, your sister terminated that pregnancy.”

  “She did. But that doesn’t mean that she wanted to. My mom made Rose’s life hell. If Matt—who was coming to terms with the idea that he’d never have a baby—suddenly had the chance to be a dad … And if Rose took that chance away from him on account of pressure from my mother … Well, it seems to me that Matt might have a huge ax to grind with my mom and our family at large. Maybe he’d even manage to turn Rose against us—to come after us for revenge.”

  “So you think Matt was lying when he told you he hadn’t spoken to Rose since he ended their affair?”

  Violet cringed inwardly; the word affair called to mind the soap operas some of the older patients watched—melodramas that featured lots of bitch-slaps and gauche close-ups. “I can admit I never knew my sister well. But the timing of these letters is weird.”

  “So your theory is Matt and Rose want to make your mother pay for the baby they think she took away. But how?”

  “By hurting my mother’s baby—Will.”

  While Violet was talking to Donnelly, someone had decided Edie’s party would have a talent component. Slap-dash rehearsals were under way. Jocelyn was going to play a bluesy version of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” on acoustic guitar. Corinna was going to unwrap a Starburst candy using only her tongue. Helen Keller continued to shock with plans to recite a Charles Bukowski poem.

  “What’s your special gift, Hurst?” Corinna asked.

  “Is slacking off a talent?” Violet asked.

  “Yes. But for the record, real slackers don’t bother asking. How did it go with the cop?”

  Violet shrugged and unwrapped a pink Starburst. “I told him what I know. He said when Rose first disappeared, the law respected her right to be a voluntary missing person. But now, because of everything that happened to Will, there’s at least some possibility Rose is involved in foul play.”

  “Does her taste in men count as foul?”

  “Said the pot to the kettle,” Violet laughed. “I’m trying to say, the police can check up on Rose again. Donnelly also said it’s worth making sure Rose didn’t disappear last year because she did something criminal.”

  It was beginning to seem like Corinna was one of the few people at Fallkill who didn’t think Violet’s fear of intimacy was making her overreact. She nodded knowingly. “Like she and the prof pulled some Bonnie and Clyde shit.”

  “It’s hard to picture geology geeks on a killing spree.”

  Jocelyn was in full-out Joni Mitchell posture, barefooted and cross-legged in the corner, flashing her turquoise rings as she did chords. She butted in to say, “Everyone is capable of murder. In the wild, it’s called nature. When governments do it, it’s called war.”

  “Besides,” Corinna said, pausing to pull an empty candy wrapper off her tongue. “Geology geeks probably know the best places to bury people.”

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

  “That’s not funny!” Josephine screamed. “Douglas, do something! Now! Make her stop!” And then, to Violet: “Your sister has disowned us. You need to come to terms with that. She doesn’t want anything to do with me or you, or you, or you!” She directed the last two yous at Douglas and Will. Violet’s father was pale, trembling. Will’s face was slick with tears.

  Violet had felt white light coursing out of her chest.

  Several seemingly profound insights had come to her that evening—for instance, that “reality” is just made up of layers upon layers of hallucinations—but few drug-induced revelations seemed as probable as this one: every atom in Violet’s body was borrowed from something else, whether it was oxygen, or sunlight, or food straight off Dekker’s farm. As a fetus, she’d been part of her sickly twisted mother, who had absorbed only the darkest, most rotten parts of her own environment.

  Whatever was wrong with Josephine, it was in Violet too. A very clear acid vision of her DNA whirled in front of her, and Violet saw the dark, diseased half of her personality helixed around the bright, joyous part. The two were impossible to separate. She couldn’t take one and leave the other, and yet she had a moral obligation to end her grotesque legacy. There was only one way to break the cycle:

  “Suicide,” she’d said. Violet had been amazed by the ease and joy with which the statement slipped out, simply coasted away on its own accord like it was filled with helium. It was the lightest word she’d spoken all night.

  She hadn’t stopped there. She’d said it three or four more times as she worked out the details. Suicide, suicide. It occurred to her with crushing disappointment that not even sallekhana would break the cycle because even if Violet killed herself, her atoms would just be fed back into a closed system of struggle and pain. There was no end. There was no way out. History would
just keep right on repeating.

  Reality came screaming back at high volume.

  “Guys! GUYS!” Will was pleading.

  Douglas was slurring, “Now, Violent. Violet.”

  Violet looked down and realized that she still held the Wüsthof knife in her fist. She had all eight gleaming inches of it pointed at her mother.

  “You are so sick!” Josephine wailed in a voice like a battle cry.

  The word sick had made Violet uncontrollably sad, thinking of Beryl. Violet had given herself a consoling hug, and as she did, she noticed a total absence of feeling. Violet couldn’t feel her body. Her throat was gone when she clutched it with her hand. Ditto her eyes when she tried to rub them.

  Violet might have followed through with her original thought—suicide, the old-fashioned kind; Violet might have been one of those acid freaks who carved up their arms or swan-dived out of open windows—were it not for the fact that she thought she was already dead. Her consciousness had been void. She hadn’t been aware of herself breathing. She’d worried that she would wake up in a hell that was even worse than the one she was trying to escape from. The time on the microwave oven looked like currency. It read $7.42.

  “Poughkeepsie!” her mom was shouting. “Not Kingston! Are you hearing me, Douglas? Violet needs to go to the hospital in Poughkeepsie.”

  Kingston was closer, but Poughkeepsie had an in-patient psychiatric hospital.

  When Violet and her father left for the hospital, the knife had been lying on the cutting board. Will had been standing by their mother’s side in silent support. He’d been wide-eyed and watching, overdressed in a cardigan and a clip-on tie. No blood. No tears. No seizures. No expression in his eyes. There hadn’t been a single mark on him.

  WILLIAM HURST

  WILL HOISTED HIMSELF onto the frilly bed and put a soothing hand on Douglas’s shoulder.

  Probably it should have been terrifying to see his robotic father’s long, intent stream of tears. But Will was grateful, even relieved. This was a role he knew how to play.

  “Shhh, Dad,” Will cooed. The gentle hand Douglas put on Will’s elbow urged stop.

  “You don’t need to rescue me, son,” Douglas said. “It’s my job to protect you. Not the other way around. Besides, as Kerry likes to say, if you try to help a butterfly out of its cocoon, it might die. The butterfly needs the struggle in order to be strong.”

  Douglas moved around the room, leafing through Rose’s yellowed Playbills, tearing down the few remaining snapshots that were Blu-Tacked above her desk. He went to Rose’s rack of handbags and chucked each one down onto the cabbage-rose rug. He tossed Will a pink striped beach bag. “Go through the pockets,” he instructed.

  Will ran his hands over the canvas. It was still sandy from Rose’s last trip to North-South Lake. He pulled out a pair of pink-lensed sunglasses. “The police already did this,” he said.

  “There must be something they missed. I’ve missed something. I’ve spent the past year ignoring the obvious. I didn’t want to give up the promise. I wanted so badly for it to be true.”

  Will nodded knowingly. “You wanted to think Rose left because she wanted to leave.”

  Douglas nodded. “It was all because of that fucking guy,” he muttered under his breath. So Will wasn’t overreacting. The hair dryer was proof that Rose’s no-good boyfriend hadn’t given her much warning or choice. For all the Hursts knew, he might have practically kidnapped her.

  Will decided it was time to bring his dad his best find: Rose’s pregnancy journal. He wanted to save it for his mother, but the last time he’d tried to show her, she’d refused him and then punished him. What use was super-sleuthing if there was no one around to appreciate your work? Sherlock had Watson. Frank Hardy had Joe.

  If his dad was impressed with Will’s fact-finding, he didn’t show it. Douglas only turned the pages delicately with the Ralph Lauren handkerchief he always carried in his front pocket. Will and Josephine gave him a near-identical one every Father’s Day. They were always silk, always tartan. “Who else has seen this?” he asked.

  “Just me, I think. There’s not much in there about her boyfriend. Even so, he doesn’t sound like a very nice guy.”

  “No. No, he doesn’t,” Douglas said. The sleepwalker quality had returned to his face. He was blank and unblinking, a million light-years away. After he’d read each page two or three times, he wrapped the journal in the plastic bag that had been sitting empty in Rose’s wastebasket.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Will asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Where are you taking it? Dad?”

  But Douglas just wandered out of the room. “Meet me in my office,” he called back, in a tone so grave it made Will gasp for air.

  VIOLET HURST

  IT WAS NEARING lights-out when Violet got a phone call.

  “You’ve got five minutes! Literally! Five!” a nurse shouted as Violet sidled into the booth.

  Violet nodded as she picked up the phone.

  “Violet? Detective Donnelly.”

  The nurse was still hovering. “I need verbal confirmation.”

  “I hear you, five minutes.” Violet waved the woman away. “Sorry about that,” she said, cringing.

  “No need for apologies,” Donnelly said, and there was a certain closed-off tone in his voice that hadn’t been there last time. “I just wanted to let you know I’ve had a word with Matt and Francesca.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes. Matt insisted he hasn’t seen Rose since he ended his relationship with her eighteen months ago.”

  Farther down the hall, nurses were laughing, likely at someone else’s expense. “Couldn’t he be lying?”

  “He didn’t give me that impression. And Francesca said she didn’t have any reason to suspect Matt had resumed the affair.”

  Of course these two—who paid property taxes and had matching simple gold bands—would have more clout with the police than a teenage mental patient. “But Matt wouldn’t exactly tell his wife if he was seeing my sister again.”

  The line rustled with wind, and Violet realized Donnelly was talking on his cell phone. “Both of them were very sorry to hear about your brother,” he said. “They’re eager to cooperate and put everything that happened with Rose behind them.”

  I bet they are, Violet thought.

  There was a brushing sound like Donnelly switched the phone to the other ear or rubbed his wearied cheek with his palm. “For that reason, they agreed to open their New York apartment to us. The landlord let one of my men in, and Rose wasn’t there.”

  “She’s not there right now. Rose said in her letters that she splits her time between there and upstate.”

  “Violet, there’s nothing to indicate she’s ever been here. My guy spoke to the neighbors. Only one of them thought he’d maybe seen Rose, and if so, it was well over a year ago.”

  “But it’s Manhattan! They say nobody in Manhattan knows their neighbors!”

  The nurse was back at Violet’s shoulder, aggression coming off her like heat and body odor. “Five minutes is up,” she barked.

  “Look, Violet. Nothing in those letters sounds threatening from what you’ve described. Nothing in here qualifies as stalking or harassment. They seemed pretty friendly to me. And if your sister is writing to you, well then, she’s not a missing person either.”

  The nurse pressed in behind Violet. “Last warning.”

  “Count of three before I hang up for you,” the nurse said. “One, two …”

  Violet felt her pulse surge. “But I’ve been thinking … Maybe Rose came back to extort my parents for money. Last year, she didn’t clean out her bank account ’cause she was planning to run away. She cleaned it out to pay for her abor—”

  The nurse plunged her fingers into the cradle and the line went dead.

  —tion. Violet’s shoulders fell.

  She spun around grimacing, and the nurse oh-so-sweetly said, “Three.”


  WILLIAM HURST

  WHEREAS EVERYTHING IN Josephine’s cozy, type-A office was organized into baskets, binders, and bins, Douglas’s was ice cold right down to its tile floor and cramped, in what the house’s previous owners had used as a laundry room. The nature of the small space meant Will had to stand uncomfortably close to his dad’s ergonomic chair. Will felt claustrophobic. Everywhere he looked there were computer cables, CD towers, and pollen-tinged dust.

  Much like in his father’s IBM office, there were no personal touches anywhere: no sentimental-value paperweight, not a single frame on the wall. What did his father like? Will had no idea. He could have written volumes about his mother’s preferences, but he didn’t know a thing about his dad’s.

  Douglas was powering on his computer.

  “So what do you need my help with?” Will asked.

  But his father, taking a sip of his (hopefully virgin) seltzer, already seemed too lost in concentration to answer. He steered his web browser to Rose’s e-mail provider and quickly entered her address from memory.

  “You know Rose’s password?” Will asked as the cursor leapt into the next blank box.

  “Not yet. You’re going to help me figure it out.”

  “Me? You’re the computer person. Don’t you have, like, some program that can hack into e-mail accounts?”

  “No. But most passwords are social in nature. People use passwords that are easy to remember. Or they reuse passwords. I’m saying they can be guessed.” His fingers tap-danced over the keys.

  “So what are you guessing?”

  “Figured I’d try the most common passwords to start with.”

  That password is incorrect, the site blipped back in red.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know … 12345. Jesus. Princess. Love. Letmein. A lot of people use the word password itself.”

  Will didn’t know. But he was shocked by his own interest in the subject. It was an aspect of language he’d never thought of. Computer language. The wording of privacy. Even to Will, who bludgeoned everything with vocabulary, it seemed dangerous to put words to something secret. Once he and his dad cracked his sister’s password—once they figured out, definitively, what was going on with Rose—they might be obliged to act. That was the thing about words: they were the stakes that pinned down reality. Occasionally, Will feared language even as he skewered things with it.