Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  Violet reached for the piece of scrap paper on the corner of the desk. It looked like an old homeschool worksheet, something no one would miss. She flipped it over and copied the addresses (both town and country) onto the back, and gave the letters to her father as per his request-slash-demand. It wasn’t until she was sitting at dinner, chewing her beans, that she realized what it might mean for her and Rose.

  • • •

  During dinner, Violet could feel Will sneaking wounded glances at her as he balanced his spoon, awkwardly, in his nondominant hand.

  “How about soup in a mug?” she whispered. “Will, do you want me to get you a mug?”

  “Aw, your sister’s so concerned for you,” Josephine said through a sip of ice water. If she was mocking, her voice didn’t let on. The butt of her glass smacked the table. “So you got your paycheck then, Viola?”

  “I did, Mother. Thank you.”

  “And Doreen wasn’t at all bothered by your little trip to the hospital?” Doreen was Mrs. D’s first name. Double D, Mrs. D joked. It’s a wonder I made it through middle school.

  Violet licked her spoon. “Mrs. D was really understanding about it all.”

  “That’s lucky. I would feel so badly if anything jeopardized your job there. We all know how much you get out of it.”

  Douglas looked up from his chard.

  Josephine lifted her fork and knife. Her sharp glare clashed with the casual tilt of her head. “Fulfilling work, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Violet said obligingly.

  “Some might say, the work is so good it’s practically addictive.” Violet rolled her eyes. “I guess so. Dad, could you pass the water? Is that a new pitcher?”

  “Don’t skirt the issue, Viola.”

  “What issue, Mom? Dad. Water. Please.”

  “The issue is: You, trading prescriptions with that pack of losers. I’ve read your diary, Viola. The pharm stand? With a P.H.?”

  The kitchen phone trilled at her mother’s kitchen desk.

  “It was you wasn’t it? You called the police on Mrs. D.” Violet’s head was pealing in time with the portable phone. “You’re trying to ruin her business, her livelihood, because you’re jealous that I like her better than you?”

  Josephine tossed her lapped-napkin onto the table. “William, get the phone. Douglas, back me up here.”

  “If there are drugs there, Violet … And minors …”

  “Mrs. D doesn’t sell drugs, Dad! She sells beetroot!”

  “Good evening, Hurst residence. William speaking.” His usually wide eyes popped a millimeter more. “My sister?”

  “Damn it, Viola, what did I say about telling your friends you’re grounded?” Josephine crossed the kitchen and pried the phone from Will’s hand. “This is Viola’s mother. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  Will muddled to his chair and stared at his plate.

  “Excuse me? You know. You know what?” Josephine turned her back to the table. “I’m warning you— You don’t know who you’re dealing with. How dare you—”

  Douglas’s fork clattered to the floor as he shoved back his chair. “Who is it, Jo? Is that Rose?”

  “She’s gone now, Douglas. Everything’s fine. She hung up.”

  Violet felt her jaw clench. “Who was it?”

  “A friend of yours, evidently.”

  “What friend?”

  “Francesca-someone?”

  A heavy quiet ensued.

  Violet crossed her arms.

  “She said she knows all about your sister. What, exactly, does she think she knows about Rose?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Viola. This is a family matter. It concerns me. What have you said to this person?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Who is this Francesca? Why haven’t I met her before?”

  “She’s a friend.” Violet shrugged and rolled a bean across her plate.

  “What have we talked about all week, Violet?” Douglas jumped in. “About the dangers of keeping secrets? If this Francesca has information about Rose—”

  “Violet always does this!” Will shouted, lifting his acorn squash and smashing it bean-side down into his plate. There were tears of pent-up frustration in his eyes. “Violet only cares about herself!”

  “Viola, go to your room,” Josephine ordered. “I won’t have you upsetting Will.”

  “I haven’t done anything to Will! I mean, what have I done to Will? Dad, a little help here?”

  “Violet, what did you learn in meetings, over and over, this week? You’re only as sick as your secrets.”

  “God, Dad! This isn’t about your fucking disease!”

  “Wow, Viola,” Josephine said with sudden composure. “We sure have missed you. We’ve certainly missed all of this. Go to your room. Get out of here now. Don’t even bother with your plate. I can’t even look at you.”

  Violet went to bed at nine, and spent the following three hours with her eyes glued open, her mind running laps as she watched the splintered numbers on her bedside alarm clock. She heard her mother speaking in low, frustrated tones as she flossed Will’s teeth. Violet kept waiting for someone to shine a light inside her room and check that she was still breathing, they way they had in the hospital, but she was all alone with her second-guessing and mounting fear.

  At thirty minutes to one, she crept downstairs through the darkened house and stole her father’s headlamp. Theft didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered now. Whatever happened tonight, Violet was snipping family ties. Violet had always thought her mother’s rejection was a sentence close to death, but now it seemed like a lucky break. She didn’t share her family’s mass psychosis or magical thinking. She was free to seek answers and she wanted to find them, deranged as the truth was likely to be.

  In a way, she had the Dekkers to thank. Mrs. D had taught Violet the three Ds of pruning: “Cut off everything that’s diseased, dead, or damaged.” And the Hursts were all three. Violet didn’t have any hope for straightening out as long as they were bearing down on her.

  Violet’s bike caught air as she took the steep turn down into the Little League fields, and for a second she worried that she was going to lose control, skid on pebbles, go crashing sideways into the boarded-up hot dog stands where she’d loitered at many of Will’s old T-ball games. But she didn’t. Her tires caught and gripped, and she cruised on her brakes down past the baseball diamonds to where the rec fields met the creek.

  The night was clear, the full moon starting to wane, and Violet’s hands were stiff from the cold. She blew on her fingertips as she dismounted and went to light the last of Edie’s cigarettes. According to the time on her cell phone, she was still ten minutes early, so she turned off her headlamp and followed the sound of gushing water into the sparse woods.

  The creek was pumping high on account of all the rainfall. The current completely engulfed the rocks where, in the summer, she and Imogene liked to read and smoke trees, Finch usually farther downstream twirling around on a raft and getting what he always called an “inner tube tan,” where every part of him sunburned but his butt and the backs of his legs. She tried to console herself with the thought that she hadn’t seen the last of her friends. Somehow, some way, there’d be lots more summers of creek swimming, tangled hair, geeky river shoes. She didn’t have to give up growing things and working the land: having dirt under her nails and that particularly satisfying deep muscle ache that came from pulling weeds and lifting shovels.

  A dog barked high up on the hill on the opposite bank, and Violet started from the sound. The pit in her stomach was growing, and when she looked down at her phone, it was two minutes past one. Her anxiety had changed. Now, instead of fearing what would happen, she was worried that she might get stood up. What if no one came? What if she stood there for hours in the frigid cold, only to ride home? What if she was always left wondering where Rose really was?

  The dog broke into another fit of rabid bark
ing, and Violet saw headlights through the trees. She stomped out her cigarette and walked quietly toward them, hoping to maintain her distance and get a view of the car. But she didn’t have to. She heard the running engine, and then the sound of the car stereo. It was a song Violet knew well: the fifteenth string quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich. As she got closer, she saw her mother’s face under the interior light. She was shoving Violet’s bike into the back of her car.

  Violet, soft-footed in her Converse sneakers, was able to sneak up from the rear and yank the back tire.

  The handlebars came sailing backward into Josephine’s torso, and for a moment she was wedged between the bike and the open car door. Violet pulled harder and the bike careened into the dirt on its side, the brake lever loudly scratching the side of the car as it fell.

  For a fraction of a second, her mother looked frightened, but then her face sprang back into the same expressionless mask as always. It was a face that never changed, not with age or wisdom and certainly not with concern.

  “I know what you have planned, Violet. And I can’t allow you to do it.” Her voice was as calm, cool, and controlling as it had ever been. “We can repair our relationship. Today made me realize that. We had a good day today, didn’t we? Didn’t today prove we can talk, laugh, and enjoy each other’s company?”

  Violet wanted to say she’d never seen her mother laugh unless it was at someone else’s expense. Josephine never talked with anyone, she talked at them or she forced words into their mouths like ball gags; she found a way to make people say what she wanted to hear. “I don’t want a relationship, Mom.”

  “You can’t live with Rose, Violet. You just can’t.”

  It was like her mother had set up the shot, and all Violet had to do was bring the whole game crashing down. It was the moment Violet had been both dreading and obsessing about, ever since she found the piece of paper on her mother’s desk. Every muscle in her body clenched. She felt a shiver, like an electric current pulse through the bone-cold autumn air, and it took her a minute to realize it was her own primal scream. “No, I can’t go live with her!” She was shrieking. “I can’t go live with her! Can I?! And we both know why that is!”

  “I don’t have the faintest clue what you’re talking about. Have you gone crazy again, crazy girl? Cuckoo?” She rolled her eyes and twirled her index finger. “Get in the car now. We’re going home.”

  Violet’s hand tightened around the cell phone in her pocket. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  She moved closer, and Violet instinctively backed away. “Violet, I am your mother. And you will do as I say.” Violet pressed the call button on her cell phone and held it to her ear. “Violet, put that phone away. I’m warning you. Who are you calling? I asked you a question.”

  Violet put a hand up. Just wait. When the line began to ring, she said, with dripping sarcasm, “I’m calling Rose. Let’s wait and see what happens when I call Rose.” For a second, there was silence and Violet thought she had it all wrong. She thought maybe she was crazy, paranoid, schizo/bipolar. She was almost ready to let her mother load her bike back into the car, when she heard the small ring in the front seat.

  Her mother stepped in front of her as she moved for the passenger door. “What do you think you’re doing? Answer me. Violet? I am talking to you!”

  But Violet just shoved her aside and made a grab for the handle. Inside, she followed the sound and slammed the glove compartment open. Inside was a cell phone. Cheap. Prepaid, probably. Violet held it up inches from her mother’s face. Her anger was as pure and electric as any drug high. “Wasn’t it bad enough?!” she screamed. “Wasn’t it bad enough you came between me and Rose while she was here?! Did you really have to keep doing it after Rose was gone?!”

  Her mother’s face went smug, and Violet knew she was about to break into the overenunciated near-whisper she always used when she was actually in a blind rage. “What makes you think Rose is gone? Aren’t you the one who said you saw her the other night?”

  Violet waved the cell phone again, and Josephine tried to grab it from her hand. They ended up bent over and grappling over the cheap piece of plastic. The keys bleeped repeatedly under their fingers, and Violet couldn’t help thinking her mother didn’t know how to set the thing to silent mode. Josephine was tech-stupid. The snail mail was case in point.

  In one fast vicious movement, her mother’s fingers were in Violet’s face, clawing her left eye with her freshly manicured tips. The pain brought glittering red stars, bad as any acid trip, to Violet’s eyes. It was instinctive: Violet let go of the phone and clutched her stinging lower eyelid, at which point Josephine took off running into the woods.

  Violet followed her. She pointed herself in the direction of snapping branches and swooshing leaves and ran as fast and quiet as a fox. She was better in the woods. She was like her namesake that way. Whereas her mother was proudly prissy, divorced from everything outside herself. All of nature, all the world was Josephine’s blind spot.

  She found her mother sitting on a downed log down by the water, legs crossed girlishly at the ankles, as though she were waiting for a lover to show.

  “Where’s the phone?” Violet asked sharply.

  Josephine turned around to face the sound of her voice. “Wanna guess?” she asked with the lilting, impish voice that made Violet sick. To think she’d let her mother convince her for all those years that she was a problem child. If anyone was the enfant terrible, it was Josephine.

  “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t really throw it in the creek.”

  Her mother threw up her hands. “Whoopsie.”

  Violet tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. She still had “Rose’s” letters. And Violet still had the piece of paper she’d found on her mother’s desk. At first she’d thought it was a homeschool exercise. But those letters … Violet had seen so much of that anal-retentive handwriting recently. It only took her a few moments to realize it was a handwriting key. Josephine had used something—probably Rose’s old school notebooks—to trace the shape and style of every letter of the alphabet as rendered by Violet’s sister.

  Violet’s own phone was in her hand. “I know it was you who’s been writing me, Mother.”

  “Oh, will you just …” Her mother looked up at the moon and made a grunting sound like Violet was spoiling the scenery. “If you know so much, why did you come here in the first place?”

  “I came to confront you. Like I would really have this conversation at home with Dad and Will jumping in. As if I need you all ganging up on me the way you did at dinner.”

  “They were defending me. Because I’m right, Viola. Because you’re the one who needs to be put in your place.”

  “They don’t love you, they’re afraid of you! I was excited to see Rose! Don’t you get that?” Violet, who hated and feared her mother more than just about anything, had never suspected Josephine was as heartless and conniving as this, not when she ran her fingers over that first wax seal, not when she drafted all those painstaking replies. Deep down, deeper than anything, she’d honestly believed her sister missed her. She’d believed it through giving her notice at work. She’d believed it through packing her backpack and saying goodbye to the only people in the free world who gave a shit about her. “Why the fuck did you start writing to me in the first place? Why now?”

  “Because of what you wrote in your diary.”

  Violet gritted her teeth in frustration. “Why are you still reading my diary?!”

  “Oh Viola, stop playacting. You and I both know you want me to read your diary. After we argue, you write things like, ‘I feel so bad for the way I treated Mom’ and leave it out in plain sight for me to read.”

  Now was not the time to argue that under her mattress was not in plain sight. Neither were any of the other hiding places Violet had tried: in her pillowcase, in her sock drawer, in a box of Lightdays sanitary napkins.

  “So what did I write that was worth all of this?”

 
“All those things about me being overbearing. You said it probably made Rose want to kill herself. You said it was why you were starving yourself.”

  Violet remembered the entry now. She’d been writing about sallekhana, saying her only reservation about it was the thought that her mom might be the one who found her dead in her sleep. I can’t imagine her crying over me, Violet had written. More likely she’d redress me in an outfit she liked. That, or she’d slap me a dozen times, knowing I couldn’t tell.

  “You were so insensitive,” Josephine said. “So vicious. I felt like you needed reminding … Rose loved me. Even when we didn’t get along, she loved me. She was never like you.”

  It took Violet a second. She had been thinking her mother had sent her to Fallkill because of the way she’d shouted, Rose is here! Did you see her? I saw her! And then it hit her, one word with the force of a freight train.

  “Suicide. The other night, in the kitchen … I said the word suicide.” Of course, Violet had been thinking about her own when she said it, and her mother, ever the narcissist, had put the word into a context that was meaningful to her.

  “Yes.”

  “And you had to make it look like Rose was still alive because you hid her suicide from us.” Violet took a deep breath. Her cell phone trembled in her hand. “Rose’s good-bye letter was a suicide note, wasn’t it?”

  Josephine had turned away to face the water.

  “Hello? Earth to Mother? Answer me. It was a suicide note, wasn’t it?”

  “Shhh,” Josephine hissed. “Keep your voice down.”

  “What? Who’s going to hear us? The ragweed? The fucking deer? Was Dad in on this, too?”

  Her mother said nothing. So Douglas didn’t know. It would never occur to Josephine to think of anyone else. She’d never considered that the rest of the family might want to say good-bye and grieve. She’d never thought they’d need closure.

  “I just don’t understand. Why would you do that?” Violet moved closer, though every muscle in her body urged her to run the other way. She had to lure her mother the way Edie had said. If she wanted any answers, she’d have to flatter and feign concern for the monster—who was sitting in front of her, even as she wanted to plunge a stake through her heart or scream like a little lost kid for police. Violet tried to keep her voice even. “I mean, everything else”—she wanted to say legality—“aside, hasn’t it been hard on you? Dealing with that kind of tragedy alone? I could have helped you. Other people too.”