Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

  Here were the charges Josephine couldn’t escape: Criminal obstruction of breathing (class D violent felony) for strangling Violet. The prosecutor tried to argue attempted murder on the grounds that Josephine had lured Violet to the rec fields for exactly that purpose, and claimed Will’s mother would have completed the act if only Imogene hadn’t interrupted. But the silver fox assured them no jury on the planet would convict her of that. He was right. They didn’t. Not even when the plane tickets came to light; Josephine had bought herself and Will two first-class tickets (not to London, but to Croatia, where the cost of living was cheap and the United States had no extradition agreement). One of the jurors was even quoted saying, every mother feels the occasional urge to wring her teenage daughter’s neck. Josephine got two years for cutting off breathing and blood circulation, and she’s likely to be out much sooner.

  Obstruction of justice (class A misdemeanor) for covering up Rose’s suicide. Will’s mother’s confession—voice-recorded on Violet’s Android phone—was inadmissible in court. And even though Josephine told more or less the same thing to police, there was simply no legal precedent. They tried to nab her for digging an illegal grave. But the cadaver dogs found Rose’s remains on the Hursts’ property, exactly where Josephine told them they would. Will’s mother hadn’t dug anything. She’d lowered Rose down into one of the deep fissures in the bedrock in the woods just beyond the backyard (the Hursts’ property literally put the “ridge” in Stone Ridge). After Rose had transferred to geology, she’d been fascinated by them: these deep twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cracks in the ground, made from years of ice expansion, the slit-openings not more than two feet wide in some places. Josephine argued that it was a natural burial, green, and she would have thought Violet would have appreciated that. Still, something of the details—the tarp, the wheelbarrow—put everyone off. “It was the way you’d bury a dog,” the prosecutor spat. “Not the way you’d honor a human being, a beautiful young woman and unique individual.” That last part had made Will’s mother lift her chin and smile through her tears.

  Secretly, Will thought he would have liked to see Rose preserved. In the funeral of his dreams, his sister would have been laid out in a glass casket, perfect as a fairy-tale princess or a boxed prom corsage.

  Douglas, on the other hand, had Rose exhumed and cremated. Her memorial service, packed though it was with the friends she’d thought had forsaken them, featured mangy combinations of cheap flowers—sunflowers and cosmos in sad little Ball jars. The photo that he chose to blow up was a snapshot of Rose in full hiking regalia, her nose sunburned and peeling.

  Will sat in the pews and thought how much better his mother would have done it. There would have been pink satin, white peonies (roses were too obvious), a soft-lit Vaseline-lensed head-shot, and something from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. “Nimrod,” probably.

  But it was Douglas and Violet’s deal. So instead there was a candlelight vigil and a folk version of “This Little Light of Mine,” as rendered by a few flanneled idiots who couldn’t be bothered to shave for the occasion. Will, on the other hand, was smooth as a Ken doll. Sweaty peach fuzz gone from his upper lip. The silver fox had given Will a lesson just before the trial and even confided the secret to shaving around your Adam’s apple (swallow and hold). The advice turned out to be similar to other lessons the boys in Will’s boarding school were teaching him; turns out “swallow and hold” also applied, more or less, to marijuana smoke and shots of Jameson.

  That’s right. Will had made it to boarding school after all.

  The idea had come to him during those first few months when it had seemed like things couldn’t possibly get worse. Douglas had just served Josephine with divorce papers. Josephine was awaiting her trial in jail. Violet was living with the Fields because she could, because she could shit on her own doorstep and then breeze on to her next location—the whole world was Violet’s commode. CPS had claimed to take Will’s claims against his father seriously, but the case was hard to prove without Violet’s collaboration, and ultimately, custody was restored after a few short weeks in foster care for Will and a few laughable parenting classes for Douglas.

  Will’s foster home had been so dull and consistent it made his head swarm. There were no dramatic exits, no outpourings of rage or devotion. Will had an almost-allergic reaction to the tranquillity. He stayed out at a farmhouse in Pallenville, where there were acres upon acres of nothing, just zagging squirrel tracks on white fields and bronze sprays of deer piss in the stale snow. Will’s barren foster parents, Sally and Larry, had no cable and no reading material save for the Lehman’s catalog and a survivalist magazine called Pioneer Living. It had made Will stir-crazy, short-tempered, and concupiscent.

  What’s worse, Larry and Sally had been too kind. They were the kind of understanding that made Will feel boxed in and made his fellow foster brothers up the ante on their attitude problems. The boys Will lived with, Carson and Bodean, would destroy their clothes explicitly so Sally would buy the brands and styles they wanted (mostly camo-colored ensembles from Gander Mountain). They would demand to go to the ER if their stomachs hurt, just for the hell of it, just because they knew the law required Larry to take them.

  Will had called up Bodean after CPS had sent him back to Old Stone Way, after he’d spent four long days feeling like a heretic, living with the man, Douglas, who’d talked slanderous trash about his mother to the press, calling her a “master of manipulation” and “the human equivalent of a burning building.”

  Will had needed Bodean’s help. Will had needed Bo to hit him in the face as hard as he could. Will fantasized about that punch for weeks until they could finally meet up at Forsyth Park and make it happen. The blow, when it came, did the job in more ways than Will had ever imagined. It left him with a juicy black eye and a lust for pain. Will had gone home that night and informed Douglas that he had one week to cut a tuition check to a year-round, coeducational boarding school on the Massachusetts border. Otherwise, Will said, he would tell CPS his father had given him the shiner. He threatened to hurt himself all day, every day and blame it on Douglas, unless his dad sent him to live in the foothills of the Berkshires. At the time of the dramatic confrontation, Will had actually held the CPS complaint number in one hand and the school brochure in the other. Eenie, meenie, he’d told Douglas. Take your pick. If Will’s father had even bothered to peruse the latter before agreeing to it, he would have seen lustrous foliage, boys in lacrosse shorts, snowy towers, brick arches, and the great-looking offspring of the power elite.

  Will wore his uniform (red tie, blue blazer) to Rose’s ceremony, and he could feel Violet’s eyes boring into his school crest. She had been hounding Will for weeks, sending him letters very similar to the ones “Rose” had sent her, trying to get him to stop being furious with her for pressing charges, living at Imogene’s house, doing what she, quote, “needed to do” in order to live a “peaceful and productive life.” Will never responded, but he liked being pursued, and he took some solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only one who struggled with peace and quiet. Just like him, Violet seemed addicted to family showdowns and tear-jerkers. Unlike Will, she didn’t have the petty jealousies and backstabbings of boarding school to keep her appetite for drama sated.

  Before Rose’s ceremony, Violet had cornered Will by an edible arrangement and tried to make him see all the ways Josephine had come between them.

  “I want to try to relate to each other directly,” Violet had said. “Without Mom coming in between us. I’d like to think we can go to one another.… You know, just you and me. No pretending. No script. No more inauthentic representations of ourselves.”

  In response, Will just smirked and asked how her xerophagy was going. Violet didn’t get it and Will didn’t give her the satisfaction of a definition (diet of bread and water). She’d torched his family, burned it like every other bridge she’d ever crossed. And who knew if the word even applied anymore? Violet’s messy bob haircut made her look r
ounder in the face. Chipmunk-cheeked. Oil, sugars, flour: all vegan.

  Will’s only input to Rose’s memorial was the poem he selected to read. He picked Victor Daley’s “In Memory of an Actress,” and recited it with all the polish he’d once brought to his one-boy Edgar Allan Poe show:

  Say little: where she lies, so let her rest:

  What cares she now for Fame, and what for Art?

  What for applause? She has played out her part.

  Her hands are folded calmly on her breast,

  God knows the best!

  Mourning Rose felt a little bit like mourning a celebrity. He was moved by the collective grief, the community outpouring, but he didn’t know her well enough to feel deeply moved on a personal level. Rose had been a princess, but not one of the people. To Will, she was so privileged, so glamorous, and so very old that she’d never seemed fully human. As the years passed and Will entered his late teens, he’d come to see her like one of those passé symbols of good times everyone liked to talk about. Rose was like an SUV or a zero-down mortgage. She’d been their status symbol, something attractive but unsustainable, something the Hursts had paid heavily for.

  After the memorial service, Will visited his mother in her orange jumpsuit and they gossiped like two bitchy soap opera vamps. She updated him on the divorce and her late-in-life romance, and he gave her a professional-grade manicure (cuticles, base coat).

  Chirocosmetics: the art of manicure.

  As always, they talked about London. (Josephine: “The British value eccentrics like you and me.”) They were still moving there, she promised, once her release date arrived, and their life abroad would be all the better with her alimony money when it came. They would rent a place in Marylebone. She’d buy Will a tailor-made suit made of fine English fabrics. She’d send him to Fortnum & Mason, where they sold butter biscuits made of crystallized French violets and rose petals. “What about William cookies?” he’d joked, but she didn’t get it. She just looked at him like he’d belched without excusing himself, and asked to see the printouts of her latest newspaper and Internet mentions.

  Her mug shot pleased her, even if the headlines didn’t.

  Still, she grabbed his hand and said, “Will, never forget what I’m about to tell you. Promise?”

  He promised.

  “It’s better to be hated than it is to be ignored.”

  He believed her. Mostly, when he called or visited, they talked about Violet. How selfish Violet was. How Violet had wronged Josephine. How Violet had defamed Rose and her memory. Josephine never asked Will about his seizures, which he’d apparently outgrown, or about his maybe-maybe-not Asperger’s syndrome. If she ever did, Will liked to think he might confide in her about his struggling academics—the way he was at least two grades behind in science, geography, and math—about the way boys sometimes shoved him in the hallways and called him faggot and pervert, about the way he’d finally had blah, awkward girl-sex with a Korean exchange student to try to prove them wrong. He liked to think she would reassure him like a woman on a sitcom or a Mother’s Day card: that she’d tell him to be himself, to surround himself with people who didn’t just put up with the way he was but actually loved him because of it. Once, when Will was crying on the shower floor—crying because the closeted, conservative WASP he was in love with had thrown a flying fist in his ribs—he imagined his mother cradling him, telling him his life would unfold in a brilliantly beautiful way. Because he was worth it. Because he was special.

  These days, Will’s head swam with unusual words:

  Gorsoon: a boy servant.

  Teen: a homonym, which could mean either young person or injury; grief.

  Hiraeth: grief for lost places. Homesickness for a home you can’t return to. A home that maybe never was.

  But William Hurst’s favorite word, hands down, was still eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious. It meant good. Will didn’t expect other people to understand it, this complicated word for such a seemingly simple thing. But to Will, good was precisely that complicated. Good job. Good boy. Good point. Good heart. Those were the kinds of words he’d been waiting to hear all his life. They never came, but Will never stopped waiting for them; he just kept throwing all his strange, clever words at the world, hoping that one day they would.

  VIOLET HURST

  TO BEGIN WITH, the media interest seemed like poetic justice. It gave Violet a secret thrill to see her mother—the woman who’d committed a pick ’n’ mix of heinous crimes because her self-worth was so dependent on outside opinion—mentioned on Anderson Cooper 360 and written up in the Strange Crime section of The Huffington Post, where the reader comments included:

  Mother of the Year Award goes to … #sarcasm.

  Articles like this one make me think the U.S. needs to institute the old Chinese practice of issuing birth permits before allowing reproduction.

  And, Karma’s a bitch!

  But in the end, karma wasn’t a bitch. Violet only had to watch her mother’s manifold TV interviews from the courthouse steps to realize Josephine was flattered by the attention instead of shamed by it. Violet’s mother didn’t recognize the difference between fame and infamy. It was Violet who carried her mother’s shame. She was the one who had to go back to Stone Ridge High School and hear the whispers as she walked by.

  She’d only planned on staying with the Fields for a couple of weeks, but it turns out they needed her just as much as she needed them. Violet’s anger and sarcasm had a place and purpose at the Fields’ house, especially with Beryl, who had decided to take a new, Western-thinking “fuck cancer” approach. Beryl’s new motto was: chemo, not sea kelp. At the girls’ suggestion, she named her boobs Knuckle and Knobby and charted their progress, forcing them to compete with one another in order to be healthy again. When they failed to improve at the same pace, Violet, Imogene, and Finch would take turns berating them in low, authoritative voices: Listen up, cancer, we’re not mad. We’re just disappointed.

  Come March break, Rolf sent the three of them to apprentice at a permaculture farm site in Hawaii, while he and Beryl got some rest and relaxation at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel. Imogene, in particular, didn’t want to leave Beryl, not even for a few weeks, a day, a second; she considered it lost time, precious mother-hours she might never get back. But once they were there, sleeping in the open air at thirteen hundred feet, the subtropical forest teeming with feral pigs and night-chirping coqui frogs, they could all three agree it was exactly the change of scenery that they needed. There is no time for quarter-life crises when you are mulching coconut hulls, boiling taro root, and doing your business in the dank, rank composting toilet.

  Violet faced her camping hammock west because she’d read in one of Beryl’s New Age books that it was the direction of endings. “What do you need to finish?” the author wrote. “To whom do you need to say good-bye?” The Hawaiian sunset was all cotton-candy pinks and good-weather clouds, but something raged blacker than ever in Violet’s chest. There were too many things she needed to say “so long” to and couldn’t.

  She couldn’t say good-bye to Rose, the sister she’d known better than she ever thought. She kept going over the past couple years in her head, kept trying to imagine places—various moments in time where she could have built a bridge, done or said something that could have united the two of them over the dividing presence of their mother. (Josephine. Ugh, Josephine: dirty, and powerful, and quick-moving as the Hudson.) Violet kept having flashes of Rose with a telltale palm over her lower belly. She kept picturing Rose highlighting her latest script at the dining room table. What if Violet had gone with her to Planned Parenthood? What if Violet had offered to help her run lines? Each scenario seemed cheap and implausible. But it was impossible to stop brainstorming ways that it might have been different. Her brain kept envisioning alternate realities where Rose was alive, and she and Violet could feel close in each other’s presence, a place where closeness wasn’t painful or treasonous.

  Violet couldn’t stop feel
ing guilty about Douglas either. Douglas, financially drained, extorted by Will, pacing around the big, lonely, historically significant house he couldn’t sell until the divorce was finalized. Violet went over most Sundays and let him cook her something from Ottolenghi. He was watching too much Food Network, checking out cookbooks from the Stone Ridge library in stacks and splattering them with soy sauce and oil. His sobriety seemed to be going well, even in spite of his shit-ton of stresses, but Violet founded him much too exhausting to live with full-time. He spent too much time convincing her that he was coping, and too little asking whether she was. His gaze was needy, childlike. Sometimes he looked at Violet as though she were his mother. Others, he lavished her with strangely chosen compliments as though she were his wife. Violet had heard rumors that he was getting friendly with the spin-class teacher at his gym—a tanorexic, sports-braed woman with echoes of Josephine in her willful black eyes. When Violet woke up nights, dreaming about her mother’s hands around her neck, she often stayed up worrying about the woman Douglas would choose when he remarried. Violet never doubted for a second that he would remarry and quite quickly at that. Even as he quit drinking, he was a man who clung rigidly to the familiar. He didn’t want bonding, he wanted bondage.

  You’d think Will would have been the easiest Hurst for Violet to let go of, but as it turned out, he was the hardest. In Will, she saw something of the children both her parents must have been. She wanted to give him a close, trusting, respectful relationship. It was only after Rose’s funeral that she realized closeness panicked Will. Trust pained him to the point of torture. Her brother didn’t want to be loved; to him, love felt like a gunnysack over the head. Will wanted more than anything to stick to the script he’d been born with and try out all the parts. Will would go his whole life rotating through the Hurst cast of characters—alternately playing the abuser, the victim, the bystander, and the hero—but he’d never, ever exit the theater. Sometimes, in sunnier moods, Violet held out hope for him. Maybe one day, down the road, Will would meet a decent boyfriend or a patient shrink—someone who’d free him from his mother’s death-grip one small inch at a time.