“Oh, Violet, how stupid are you? Don’t you get it? I won’t allow people to think of her that way.”
Violet could barely breathe. Her voice was shaking. “I hear you, Mom. But you can’t control other people’s perceptions any more than you could control Rose. People have minds of their own. Life isn’t some big play where you get to direct, and orchestrate, and play set designer.”
Josephine howled. “I won’t have this whole town thinking your sister was this mopey weakling! Rose wasn’t a sad sap! Your sister was a star! She had all the talent in the world, even if she chose to throw it away!” Violet put a hand on her mother’s brittle back. “You’ll understand when you’re my age. I did her a favor. You and your brother too. When people hear the name Hurst, they think of the beautiful little girl who played Sandy in Grease. Not some tortured little beatnik.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “We can talk this out. Just breathe. Relax. Let go.”
“Oh Violet, I really don’t need your hippie shit right now.”
Violet was stung, but not daunted. She thought of Goya’s dog. “I know you feel like you’re drowning right now. But you’re not alone. I’m here.” She remembered what Edie said about narcissistic supply. It’s like a drug. When they’re high on it, you can trick them into thinking they’re getting their way. “I can help you. But first, I’ve got to understand. My mind works slower than yours. Start at the beginning. Start with Rose’s letter.”
“It was on the front seat, when I found her.” Josephine’s voice was high and pinched.
“Where did you find her?”
“In the garage. With the car running.” She sounded put out, as if Violet already knew all this and was wasting her time with unnecessary questions.
“The neighbors,” Violet said with a sudden rush of understanding. “They said our garage door was open all day. You were airing it out.”
“I told the police Rose must have left the door open.”
“I remember,” Violet said. Her head was rushing in time with the creek, but she tried to make her voice reassuring. “So the note …”
“I couldn’t read it. I was so angry at her, I couldn’t even bear to touch it. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. It just sat on the seat beside me while I drove Rose’s car to the station. The whole way, I just kept thinking Rose had no right to leave me. I could never replace her. Your sister was irreplaceable.”
Violet swallowed hard. Her mother was talking about Rose as if she were an object, a priceless object, but still … “You’re not alone,” she repeated. “People love you. Will loves you. You’re his whole world.”
A brittle little laugh. “I always knew Rose would leave me the way my mother did. Rose even looked like my mother. Rose looked at me every single day with those eyes—my mother’s big blue eyes—and I thought one day you’re going to realize I’m not the perfect woman you think I am. And when you do, you’ll toss me aside like I’m nothing. Like I’m garbage.”
The image made Violet shiver uncontrollably. Her mother mostly accused people of wrongdoings she committed herself: Will was “sick.” Violet was “crazy.” And now, Rose had “discarded” Josephine, when clearly, criminally, it had been the other way around.
“So you were the one who packed Rose’s suitcase? You took her computer and turned off her cell phone?” Violet’s voice wavered. “You paid for parking and a train ticket on Rose’s credit card?”
Silence.
“You lied to the police when you said Rose called you from her boyfriend’s house.”
“I should think that’s obvious.”
“There is no Damien. You made up that call. You made up that name.” It figured that her mother would choose something more dramatic than Joe or Mike. Even Koch had prestige; it was a hundred-billion-dollar name.
“You were the one who unenrolled Rose from school?”
“I forged her resignation letter. I had to. Your father had reported her missing. He’d done it without even consulting me first! Can you imagine? He left me no other option; I had to make it look like Rose ran away. I took out new credit cards in her name. I figured everyone would back off once they saw her credit report.” Even in the dark, Violet was almost positive her mother smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, you with your Buddhist ethics. I used the cards for theater tickets, mostly. I bought and did things Rose would have enjoyed. It was a tribute to her. I gave her the life she should have had. The one she would have wanted.”
Violet couldn’t hold back any longer. “You gave her the life you wanted for her.” She shook her head. There was something she still didn’t get. “But there was security footage of Rose at the MetroNorth station. You said the police showed it to you and Dad.” The thought of her mom reviewing the tapes brought a sudden, sick rush to her stomach.
“Oh, Violet.” The condescension had crept into Josephine’s voice again. “Those cameras are hung so high, and they only record one second out of every four.”
Violet put a hand to her mouth and spoke through it. “You wore her clothes. Her shoes, even. You pulled her suitcase.”
“That white down coat.” Nostalgia clung to her mother’s voice. “It smelled so strongly of Rose’s perfume it made me cry. You remember that perfume? All the vanilla? Your sister used to smell like this little sugar cookie. And when I pulled the hood over my head, I had a glimmer of what it must have felt like to be Rose—women rubbernecking, men drooling.”
More likely, people had been rubbernecking at her age-inappropriate clothes. “Okay, so you got on the train in Poughkeepsie disguised as Rose. How did you make it home?” The train to New York City was an hour and a half each way, and Josephine had been back at Old Stone Way when the bus dropped Will and Violet home from school.
“Use your brain, Violet. I didn’t go the whole way. I got off in Beacon and called a cab.”
“So where does Rose fit into all this, Mom?”
“What do you mean, where does she fit into it?”
“I mean where is she?” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, but Josephine’s silence demanded she say it: “Where is her body, mother? What the fuck did you do with Rose’s body?”
“She’s somewhere that brought her pleasure. That’s all you need to know.”
It was too much. “You don’t get to decide what I know! I know you don’t get that, and I have compassion for you, I do. I get that you had a tough childhood, and your brain didn’t cook right …”
Josephine rose and took a step toward her. “Violet, I’m warning you. I won’t accept being spoken to that way.”
“Just because you brought Rose into the world doesn’t make her your real estate! She was my sister! She was a human being! Not a puppet! And the second she stopped playing along, you did everything you could think of to destroy her! Rose did what she did because she was a good girl. She did it because she knew, deep down, that you wanted her to. She might have killed herself, but the blood is on your hands!”
“That’s ridiculous. I wanted your sister to be happy. That’s what all mothers want for their children.”
Violet turned the voice recorder off on her phone. “Some mothers. Not you. Those are empty words to you. Greeting-card words. Something you picked up from one of the other moms at the PTA and kept repeating because it sounded right. You don’t have the first idea who your children are. And you don’t even want to know us.”
“I love my children, Violet! Even you! I may not like you, but I still love you!”
“You love the images you picked out for us. You love Will when he’s playing the good boy because he fits into some fake-ass idealized version of your life. And you love me when I’m playing the bad girl because you can project all the twisted parts of yourself onto me. You don’t give a shit about anyone’s happiness but your own. And the irony is, you’ll never be happy!”
For a second, Josephine’s beauty-pageant posture collapsed. “I am your elder, Violet! How dare you say that to me?!”
&
nbsp; “It’s true! You won’t ever be happy because you don’t live in the world of other people. You can’t connect with anyone. You don’t feel empathy. Tell me, Mom, why did you really pose as Rose and ask me to meet you here?”
Josephine shook her head.
“Come on! Why did you send me that note in the hospital once you realized they weren’t going to keep me there for the rest of my natural-born life? Hi, it’s me Rose. I love you. Come live with me. You were going to help me get lost, good and permanent, weren’t you? Rose was a good girl. Once she felt how much you despised her, she killed herself for you. But not me. Not no-good Violet.” She spread her arms. Here I am. “If you want me gone, you’re gonna have to do it yourself, Mother. With your own two hands.”
“I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, just fucking own it for once in your life! You made it impossible for me to know Rose. And now I never will.” Rose was gone. That revelation, still sinking in, brought a rip of fresh pain.
Josephine stepped toward her. “So, Viola … We need to talk about what happens next.…”
Violet shook her head. “I’m not keeping this secret.”
Josephine reached out, gently, and touched the new growth on Violet’s scalp. “You know now, Viola. And what do I always say? I don’t burden you with unnecessary information.…”
The next second, her mother had hooked a foot around her ankle, and Violet was falling flat on her back, feet scrabbling, not getting any traction against the heavy leaf-fall and creek-washed pebbles. It happened so fast, and yet Violet experienced it all frame by frame: she gasped for air, clawing her mother’s hands as they closed tighter around her neck. The dog was still barking. Headlights flashed somewhere in the far distance. And there was Josephine straddling her hips, riding her in a way that was almost incestuous as she tried to wring every last breath out of her. Violet, who barely remembered a word from the King James Bible, had a spasm-thought of Job. He (or rather She) who giveth life can taketh away. Violet knew without a shadow of a doubt that her mother was thinking the same thing as she mashed her windpipe. Buddhism, Jainism, Catholicism, whatever. In the end, it didn’t matter. The only God Josephine let people worship was her.
Violet scooted her butt. She twisted and threw her hips. She wanted to scream, but she was too focused on the pressure behind her eyeballs and the immense underwater silence in her head. Blood pooled in her face. She blacked out and abruptly faded back in. It wasn’t like people said. There was no white light. Violet didn’t see her life flash before her eyes. She had only one super-salient thought: she did not want her final, dying image to be her mother’s face. It was worth living for that reason alone.
WILLIAM HURST
IT WAS THE first command decision Will had made in years. He hadn’t asked permission. He hadn’t consulted with his mother first. When he saw the stamp rolling around in his mother’s sewing box, he’d shoved it in his pocket the very second his head had stopped spinning with shock. He’d taken the stick of pink wax too and even realized with horror that he’d been with his mother when she bought it at the classy stationery store in Manhattan. She’d claimed it was a candle at the time, and Will had been too bored to pay closer attention. They’d been so close to Union Square, and Will had been watching the skater boys through the storefront window; they’d been mesmerizing, wearing the kind of tight low-slung jeans that Josephine forbade, tossing their flippy hair, doing boardslides and pop shove-its and landing on their appealingly feminine faces as if the pain were nothing.
As he stood at his mom’s desk, the past couple of months took on a whole new meaning. It was like the moment when you finally see the flip side of an optical illusion. Holding the treble clef in his palm was like seeing a vase come into shape where two chinless faces used to be. Will understood, at long last, why his mother—who was so quick to read Violet’s diary—had brought “Rose’s” letter to the hospital without steaming the envelope open first. He realized why, even as they were dressed in their opera best, Josephine had needed to drop outgoing mail in a blue sidewalk mailbox. Even his mom’s disappearance in Newburgh was suddenly accounted for. There had been a UPS store in the same shopping plaza. His mom was using “Rose,” someone Violet trusted, to spill the beans about their father’s abuse. If Violet knew who she was really corresponding with, she’d never trust their mother again. If Violet found the wax seal set, she’d ruin London for everyone.
And so, just like that, Will flushed them both down the toilet, even though he’d been warned a million times that anything other than toilet paper was bad for the septic. His mother wouldn’t mind. Will was sure of it. She was likely to thank him, even call him her hero.
But his mother had been irritated at bedtime. It wasn’t rage, exactly, and it wasn’t directed at him. It was just the low-level, distracted anger that she got from time to time, where her pupils seemed to dilate and she didn’t seem to hear a dang word he said. She’d found a string of tiny infractions to tell Will off about: dirty tissues in his pockets, crust behind his ears. When he tried to ask her about Rose’s letters, when she scolded him for the way he said “ask.” (“Ask! Not ax! We’re not chopping firewood! I swear Will, I am this close to sending you to a speech therapist!”) And so Will had given up asking. She’d brushed Will’s hair so hard that the wooden head of the brush kept knocking his skull. When she wrenched his pajama shirt over his head, she’d half-strangled him by accident in the process.
Will had gone to bed with self-hatred that cut deep. He’d lain awake long after the house had gone silent, softly practicing his diction, stressing out about the Regents exam, hating his weak disgusting parts—the needy little boy locked away inside him.
Finally, at some ungodly hour of the night, Will had done the only thing that helped when he felt that way. He’d softly closed his bedroom door, leaned his head against it, risen on tiptoe and slid both hands under the elastic band of his pajama pants.
Cacoethes: a bad habit or insatiable urge.
His breath was quiet, his hands unforgiving and desperate. He thought of skater boys, prep school boys, he thought of old men, adults like Dr. Martin and Mr. Razz. He even pictured Jake Greenberg who, in teasing him, had made a certain motion with his hands—a gesture that had first given Will this idea. Will had to do it this way, always the same way, leaning against the door that didn’t lock, the door that meant his mother could walk in at any time. But it was more than that.… Standing up, the door against his forehead, anchoring him, was the only way it felt right. Will fell into a heavy trance and he vowed, same as always, that this was the last time. Almost there, he promised himself he would never again succumb to this bizarre bedtime ritual. And then it came: the strong, righteous shudder and one bright, blissful second that blew his mind blank. He couldn’t think of anything at all, let alone how unacceptable he was, how ill-equipped he was to live in this world.
The inner calm didn’t last. It never did. Will pulled his hand away wet—something that had never happened before—and waddled back to bed, feeling more immoral and unnatural than ever before. Boiling with shame, he balled up his briefs, hid them under his bed, and got another pair, certain he’d betrayed both God and his mother.
It was still dark when Will woke. Engines grumbled in the driveway. Blue-and-white lights were flashing through his gingham curtains. Feet pounded the stairs, and his father was calling his name, sniffing Will out like a predator.
Will sat upright in bed, his bent knees making a teepee of his bulldozer sheets. His first instinct was to think about places where he could hide. In the closet. Under the bed next to the tighty-whities he’d planned to de-goo in the morning. Will’s stoplight alarm clock said 4:02 a.m. He didn’t know if he was still dreaming, whether his father’s voice was a night terror. Will just sat, still as death, frozen in fear and guilt. He didn’t know what to be scared of or what he’d done wrong, but those felt like the only two emotions Will had to pick from.
&n
bsp; The door flew open, and suddenly his father was standing over him, ripping back Will’s striped duvet, patting Will’s chest, snatching him forward off his small altar of pillows, shaking him too hard with his big, gruff hands, his face too close, his breath too meaty and hot, asking Will intrusive, aggressive questions like Are you okay? Every time Will squealed and shoved him away, there were more questions. Prodding begat pawing.
“Mom!” Will screamed, hurling himself out of bed. “Mom! Mom!” Will ran down the hallway to his parents’ bedroom and hollered his throat raw for her.
Douglas was hot on Will’s heels, dropping his hands down onto Will’s shoulders. “Will, is your mother here? This is important. Talk to me.”
Every time he spun Will to face him, Will twisted the other way. “Get off me! Don’t touch me!” Will realized he was wailing. And then there was a policeman mounting the stairs, square-shouldered, cinch-waisted, the only person in the whole world who could save Will at that moment. “Get him off me!” Will pleaded.
Will felt mutinous, inconsolable as he broke every unspoken commandment in the Hurst family rule book. He cried like a child and pleaded for help. Will knew it was embarrassing the way he went barreling toward that cop. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t respectable, but Will was too spooked and confused to care. He begged for help. He scream-detailed everything his mother had told him about Douglas’s abuses. “I want my mom! I want my mom!” he told the officer.
Mother, Mother Page 29
