Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  While the absentminded driver was trying to pry the bike off of his car and figure out how he could avoid any liability, Howard and Bud Watson showed up. This time Howard limited his temper to merely screaming at the driver, an act of self-restraint considerably abetted by the fact that his hand was still bandaged. He got the driver’s name and license number as well.

  “Then Howard and Bud picked me up and carted me off,” said Robert. “It was the only real big-brother scene I can remember with Howard. It made me feel like wow!”

  Usually, Robert was as ambivalent toward his oldest brother as every other member of the family. “Howard was one of the focal figures of my life,” he said. “His idea of being in charge was being a complete ogre authoritarian. I guess that was the only experience at being a father figure he ever had. He liked to yell and intimidate a lot.

  “One thing he didn’t like was crying in front of him. That would really set him off. He didn’t like cowardice, or maybe it reminded him of himself when he was younger.”

  Once, after eating a pile of magic mushrooms, Howard made a revealing confession to his friends gathered around the hookah in Howard’s bedroom, and Robert overheard it from the hallway. “He said, ‘It’s terrible knowing that there’s a world full of monsters and you hate the monsters. But then you wake up one day and you look in the mirror, you find out that you’ve become one of the monsters you hate.’ I remember that,” said Robert. “Howard has a lot self-hate concerning things that he did to his family.”

  Of all the children, Howard got along least well with Suesan. She hated him and the feeling was mutual. He had seen enough of her hocus-pocus and heard enough of her eerie incantations to believe what Theresa claimed: that Suesan was a bona fide witch. Suesan’s disdain for Howard did not lessen after she was brought back from the Receiving Home. When she went into one of her demon-possessed trances, Howard would leave in disgust. Nevertheless, her predictions of doom began to scare Howard as much as they did Theresa.

  “At one point Suesan said Howard was supposed to kill everybody in the whole family,” Robert remembered. “Suesan said she would be gone, everybody was going to die, Howard was going to kill everybody and be left sitting in the middle of the living room with a gun. When my mom asked Suesan where she would be, she said she didn’t know. She was just gone.”

  During her trances, Suesan saved her real venom for her mother. While cuffed to her bed or strapped to a chair, she related to Theresa in her most demonic voice how her mother would continue to grow obese while Suesan was transformed into a living goddess.

  “My mom said that Suesan was doing spells at night to get rid of her weight and put it onto Mom,” said Terry. “Suesan did absolutely nothing! My mom was just a sick pup. In the worst clinical sense, a sick woman. She just went berserk. She wasn’t pretty anymore. She was fat, she was ugly, she was getting old. She hated herself, and that’s why she took it out on her daughters, because we were all growing up and growing out.”

  Howard’s girlfriend, Connie Butler, heard the same story from Theresa that she planted in the minds of her children: that Suesan had some magical way of removing fat from her own young body and putting it onto her mother’s.

  Suesan managed to do this, according to Theresa, by slipping a sedative into Theresa’s food. While she was asleep Suesan would snip off strands of her mother’s hair and eyelashes and pieces of her fingernails. Like one of the hags in Macbeth, Suesan would put the hair and nails into some kind of supernatural concoction that allowed her to cast a spell over her mother.

  The proof of her suspicions, Theresa told Connie, was that Theresa had contracted a bizarre disease that caused her to gain weight and no doctor understood why.

  “She had intestinal problems, the weight gain, stomachaches, high blood pressure, headaches … you name it, she had it,” said Connie. “She always told me that Suesan was the one that gave her the disease, that she had the power to do these things because she had signed her name in blood, sold her soul.”

  Robert heard another version of how his mother got her disease that didn’t include Suesan or Chester Harris or the curse of the coven at all. In this version, Theresa was the victim of a government plot. “One night, she was out of the house and a black limousine pulled up,” said Robert. “Someone kidnapped her, drugged her, and she heard a guy with a Russian accent refer to himself as ‘Big Stuff.’ Obviously that meant to her that he was into highly classified things.

  “There was a scientist in a lab coat who came over to her bedside. There were several files, and one of them was open—her file. He injected her with something and they put a number on her file and said they would keep an eye on her and see what happened. She said the doctor’s features changed into those of a demon and then back into the doctor. She was drugged again and then put back on the street.”

  Theresa was not so taken with her government conspiracy theory that she was ready to abandon her witch theory, however. She continued to speak to the fiend occupying Suesan’s body for clues on how to lose weight. In her ongoing campaign to purge Satan from her daughter’s soul, she chatted with the demon almost every day.

  “Mom’s conversations with Suesan became like a debate between her and the demon as to what was going on,” said Robert. “It was a personal challenge to Mom’s righteousness to get these things out of her: what she was promised for her soul, what exactly the coven was doing, what disease was put into her.

  “It was her personal fight. It was her against hell, trying to save her daughter’s soul. She put herself in the role of hero while at the same time destroying the very thing that she said she was going to save. And she counted it all as righteousness. It became gratifying for her in three ways: she got to destroy the person she wanted to destroy, she felt good about it afterward, and she would go to heaven for doing it. And no matter what anybody told her, she was a martyr.

  “She was on the front lines of the war between good and evil and everybody was against her. She said she had dreams that all her kids were going to turn against her, so she was paranoid of all of us. Everybody. It just got progressively worse.”

  As the youngest Knorr, Terry tried desperately to play out her role as the baby of the family, even while events all around her conspired to make her grow up far more quickly than any child should ever be forced to. One of the ways she tried to make her own life more like The Brady Bunch than The Addams Family was to fantasize about her grandfather. “He was a good man. He was in the wheelchair most of the time I had known him and it got to a point where he couldn’t communicate, but he was a good man,” she said.

  In earlier years Terry remembered sitting on his knee during a Fourth of July celebration, playing with sparklers while Jim Cross watched from his wheelchair. When he was still able to do so, he spoke in halting tones about his college days and the years he’d put in as a cheesemaker for the dairy. When his speech became indecipherable, Theresa filled in the details for her daughter. Jim Cross, an educated man who had lived through tragedy to a ripe old age, became a beacon of hope to Terry and to her brother Robert.

  When she was in sixth grade, she finagled her teacher into taking her and other members of the class on a field trip to the nearby Orangevale Convalescent Home, where her grandfather lived. Her plan was to surprise him with her rendition of “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. When she arrived, though, disappointment was waiting. “I remember going to my teacher crying because they wouldn’t get my grandpa out of bed ’cause he had Parkinson’s disease and he was bedridden,” she said.

  “By that time his speech was pretty well unintelligible,” remembered Robert. “They were treating him like a child at the convalescent hospital, calling him Jimmy instead of James, talking to him like you would to a six-year-old. I felt badly that he was in there. Basically a convalescent home is a pretty depressing place for an eleven-year-old.”

  But Theresa managed to make it even more depressing for her children by telling them her own appalling fantasies ab
out what the nursing-home personnel did to her father behind closed doors. “Mom said that Grandpa was raped by one of the nurses while he was in there,” said Robert. “She said he was looking really yellow for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, he was back to normal. She was sure that it was because one of the doctors had forcibly taken a kidney away from Grandpa.”

  Theresa told her children that Rosemary had always been James Cross’s favorite, but she herself remained the dutiful daughter. She had loyally stuck by her father even after Rosemary ran off with Floyd Norris, a man whom Jim Cross loathed. Theresa made it clear that she cared very much for her father, but she was not so positively committed to the memory of her mother.

  “My grandma wasn’t all that nice to my mom,” said Terry. “I only knew of my mom going to visit my grandma’s grave one time, and that was real late at night. She was intoxicated when she did it. Afterward, she told us that she was followed home by a man dressed in black. She was talking crazy.”

  The crazy talk both bewildered and angered Terry. Her mother’s wild imagination plus her proclivity for finding the very worst in any situation made Terry retreat into her own imagination every time her mother opened her mouth. Terry created her own world, populated with dolls and dreams. Her persistent attempts to buck the odds and preserve some element of her childhood were finally halted when she was crossing the vacant lot near Skyridge Avenue one day after school and three boys blocked her way.

  When she came home hours later with a tear-streaked face and torn and dirty clothes, and told Theresa her story of being dragged into a shack and held down by two of the boys while the third raped her, she got no sympathy. Terry was stunned. There was no outrage. There was no call to the police. There was only punishment for coming home late in dirty clothes.

  In fact, the story she related to her mother was merely validation of Theresa’s long-standing belief that her youngest daughter was a liar. And if it was true that she had been raped, then she must be a slut who brought it on herself by teasing the boys. Either way, she was no more or less than her mother had come to expect.

  Besides, the last thing Theresa wanted to do was bring attention to herself and her family by calling the police. It was the same reason she did not call 911 the day that Suesan was shot.

  William and Howard weren’t at home at the time. It was just Robert, the girls, and their mother. As usual, the battle was between Suesan and Theresa. Theresa had her daughter cornered in the hallway, shouting at her for witching more pounds onto Theresa’s already bloated body. She had already belted Suesan a couple of times when Sheila and Robert moved up behind their mother to see what was going on. Terry stood a few feet off, across the hall.

  “Suesan was up against the wall between the bathroom door and my mother’s bedroom,” said Robert. “I was told to restrain Suesan. The next thing I know, there was a shot fired.”

  “There was a lot of screaming,” Terry remembered. “I just remember that everything was in slow motion after I heard the pop of the gun, and I watched my sister grab her chest, gasp, grab onto the door frame of the bathroom, and fall into the tub.”

  “A bullet had entered under Suesan’s left breast,” said Robert. “She was bleeding profusely at that point, or at least there was a lot of blood on her shirt because she was wearing a halter top and there was a lot of blood on that.”

  They watched in horror as Suesan sank back into the empty bathtub and their mother underwent a near-miraculous transformation, switching instantly from a deranged aggressor bent on beating the devil out of her unrepentant daughter to a concerned practical nurse. She quickly pulled her daughter’s clothes off, searching for the damage the bullet had done. She found the entrance wound beneath her daughter’s heaving left breast, but there was no exit wound.

  Much later, when Suesan allowed Terry to run her hand along the left side of her sister’s back between her spine and armpit, Terry was able to feel the lump where the spent slug came to rest, deep inside Suesan’s body.

  At the time of the shooting, however, Theresa was too busy stanching the blood to worry about where the bullet was. As a nurse, she was in her element. Having pilfered from convalescent homes for most of the previous decade, she had all that she needed to treat her daughter: restraints, gauze, surgical bandages, syringes, disinfectants, gloves, drugs.

  “We had a remarkably well-stocked first-aid kit,” said Robert.

  And yet she remained as leery of physicians and hospitals as she was of the police, or any other authority figure. She wouldn’t go to doctors herself and only took her children if she absolutely had to. A gunshot wound would raise questions. She was not going to take her daughter to any emergency room.

  Theresa had collected a large selection of pills over the years and came up with her own prescription for her daughter’s needs. “She gave her antibiotics for infection, to keep infection from going in,” said Terry. “I think she even gave her some ibuprofen and some Flexeril to kill the pain.”

  Theresa left her daughter in the tub for the next month, propping her up with pillows and covering her with a blanket. When Suesan needed to use the bathroom, she did so where she lay and the family simply washed her refuse down the drain. When it came to changing the dressings on the wound, Theresa became “Dr. Kildare” and wouldn’t let anybody watch what she was doing. The rest of the time, she left the convalescent duties to Suesan’s brothers and sisters.

  “My mom made us take care of her,” said Terry. “As far as changing the dressings on her wound and so forth, she did that, but as far as meals and stuff like that, we took ’em to her. I talked to her. My sister was my best friend. My sister Suesan was my best friend.”

  Years later, when she first gave her version of the long-suppressed details of that awful day, Terry was very clear about who shot her sister. Her mother owned a small two-shot derringer, and when the argument in the hallway hit fever pitch, Theresa aimed the gun at Suesan and shot her own daughter point-blank.

  “I remember my mother saying she was sorry and asking my sister to forgive her, and my sister looked at my mother, and with all her heart, she said ‘I forgive you,’” said Terry. “You know, I love you, and they cried and da, da, da, da, da, and so forth.…”

  But Robert remembered events quite differently. He recalled tempers flaring and shouting and slapping that put everyone in the hallway that day into a state of hysteria, whipped to a frenzy by his mother’s fury. He remembered hearing a loud pop come from behind him, and he turned to see what it was.

  “After I heard the shot, I looked over and I saw Terry with the gun, crying. The gun was shaking,” he said. “I took the gun out of her hand, ran down the hall with it, and for some stupid reason, wiped the fingerprints off. I took the bullet out that had been spent and threw the casing away, reloaded the gun, and put it away in its customary spot. Then I came down the hall again.

  “Terry was basically bawling. She was hysterical at that point. Mother was mad. But she was more mad that, if Suesan had died, how was she going to explain it? I was punished for wiping the prints off the gun because, had Mom wanted to tell the police what Terry had done if Suesan died, Mom wouldn’t have been able to prove Terry did it, because I had wiped the prints off the gun.”

  Upon hearing her brother’s account of the sequence of events—and who really fired the gun that day—Terry’s certainty that her mother did it grew hazy.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I really don’t remember.”

  But the wound was not fatal. Even though the bullet remained lodged deep inside her rib cage, it had miraculously missed any major arteries or vital organs. For a few days Suesan seemed to worsen, and then she got better. Within a few weeks she was up and walking. She was moved from the bathtub back to her bed, where Theresa visited her in a redoubled effort to talk the demon into dropping the weight curse that it had put on her.

  As she grew stronger Suesan also seemed to grow lovelier. Her wound had given her a pallor and an expression that
was almost beatific, and her scant appetite during her convalescence resulted in a thin fashion-model look: still big-breasted, but slimmer in the waist and hips. Far from wasting away from the small sliver of lead she carried inside of her, Suesan made a full recovery.

  She did not die. Yet.

  XII

  Theresa broke with her usual practice of isolation and answered the front door several weeks after Suesan had been shot. It was her old friend Cherise Kelly, who had commiserated with her after Theresa’s breakup with Bob Knorr. As in the days when they first became friends, Cherise and Theresa still shared an interest in the supernatural. Only now, Cherise was proselytizing as well as schmoozing. And Theresa listened.

  “She gave Mom this religious pamphlet which had a picture of Christ that Mom nailed to the wall in the living room,” said Robert. “Then Mom began sprinkling holy water all over the place and trying to bless the room. She used to sprinkle holy water on Suesan all the time, I guess expecting it to burn or something. Basically she did the same thing to everybody. I was blessed two or three times a day.”

  Nothing helped, though. Theresa kept gaining weight and Suesan didn’t, even if Theresa made her eat and hovered over her to make sure she finished every bite. And Theresa found other signs of demonic possession, too.

  “My mom got a hole in her water bed and it mildewed the foam mattress,” said Terry. “She said Suesan was evil because the hole was where Suesan had once slept. My mom said it was kinda like The Amityville Horror, one of the books she always read.”

  It wasn’t long after Cherise’s visit and the mysterious water-bed incident that Theresa decided to have Suesan exorcised.