Mother, Mother Read online

  “What happened when you lost it on your family?” the nurse asked.

  “I was looking at my mom, and she was a different person. But it was also like she’d always been a different person. Like, at the end of every day, when no one else is around, she unzips her suit of flesh. I know it was just the acid distorting things, but as, like, an analogy it holds.” Violet rubbed her eyes. The sockets ached.

  “How does your family get along as a whole?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Let’s go back to what happened tonight. I know you’re shaken up, but this is important. Do you think you can tell me more about the assault?”

  The word assault made Violet feel turned upside down, kicked in the stomach, and orphaned at the same time. She was in mortal terror of her mother. She felt guilty about Will. She was scared she’d said something she couldn’t take back, and committed a crime that would fit her for an orange prison jumpsuit. Even trying to remember what happened felt like a threat to her physical safety.

  “Have you ever attempted suicide?” the counselor asked.

  “I suppose. Technically.” Still, Violet tried to explain that the Jainist fast to death wasn’t really suicide. “It’s kind of like a peaceful way to give up your body. Not an act of despair, but an act of hope. You’re not giving up on life, you’re just passing into the next stage of it.”

  It made sense to Violet, but the counselor looked dubious.

  “Do you consider yourself ‘eating disordered’?”

  “Not really. It’s more like a detox gone too far. I just wanted to feel pure, like all the venom’s been sucked out of me.”

  Sallekhana was gradual. First, you fasted one day a week. Then, you ate only on alternate days. Next, you gave up foods one by one: first fruits, then vegetables, then rice, and then juice. After that, you drank only water. Then, you drank it only on alternate days. In the final step, you gave up water too, erased your bad karma, and hoped to shit you weren’t reborn into another nightmare.

  Violet looked down at her hands. This was a newly acquired nervous tic. A month into fasting, her hands went cold and her fingernails started to turn blue. Ever since, Violet had been hiding them under thick layers of Night Sky, a sparkly navy polish.

  Within the hospital’s cinder-block walls, it was impossible to know whether it was dusk or dawn. “What time is it?” Violet asked.

  “Ten p.m. Let me ask you again. Did you attack your brother with a knife?”

  “I don’t remember. Everyone keeps asking me that. When are they going to stop asking? I keep saying, I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you need to be admitted to the hospital?”

  All the feeling trickled out of Violet’s arms. An old childhood fear—claustrophobia—set in.

  “Please don’t make me stay,” Violet whispered.

  “I know you’re frightened. People come here, and the idea of the hospital is scary. But you’re going through some difficult things, and the people here are trained to handle difficult things. You’re on a journey. The lights are out right now, but they will come on again. For the moment, I think we should give you a bed and a pill to help you get to sleep.”

  “I’m afraid to go home,” Violet confessed. “But I don’t want to stay here.”

  “I know, honey. But according to what your parents told us, you said and did some things that make you a threat to yourself or others. So we need to keep you here.”

  The walls of the office seemed to constrict. Violet cast a helpless glance at the Audubon nature calendar that hung on the wall behind the nurse’s shoulder. October’s photo was a redwood forest—the kind of woodland scene that could make a person feel very awed and alone.

  “For how long?” Violet asked.

  “The next seventy-two hours.”

  “There’s one more thing I haven’t told you.”

  The counselor crossed her arms and blinked once.

  Violet exhaled in a great gush. “I saw my sister last night.”

  WILLIAM HURST

  THEY DIDN’T USUALLY have school on Saturdays, but they’d fallen behind on account of prepping for Will’s coming math Regents exam. The state said students with disabilities only had to score fifty-five out of a possible hundred percent in order to pass. But it was important to both Will and his mom that he score at least a seventy-five. That was the grade that indicated “college readiness,” and it was Josephine’s endgame that Will graduate early and go on to Columbia in four years’ time.

  “We don’t have to push ourselves too hard today,” Josephine said. “But a little bit of social studies will take our minds off last night. After that, I have to drive to Violet’s hospital and sign some forms. Does that sound okay?”

  Will nodded. He adjusted his costume beard over the bruise on his chin. He fashioned his sister’s black bowed headband around his neck like a tie.

  Ever since the controversy at Stone Ridge Elementary last fall, Will really had come to think of the breakfast nook as his new school. This had required some adjusting, of course. Gone were the familiar sights and smells of learning: pencil shavings, lunchbox rot, the stab-and-drag sound of chalk against a blackboard.

  • • •

  Sure, Will still nursed a few aching, phantom limbs: recess, book fairs, games of Heads-Up, 7-Up with lazy substitute teachers. When he confessed to missing weekly job assignments like “board eraser” or “math shelf helper,” his mom put him in charge of keeping her orchids evenly moist. When he got word of his former classmates’ field trip to watch Othello at the Rosendale movie theater, Josephine had, in her words, “done one better.” She’d driven Will to the city to see the real deal at the Met. She’d even bought him a new brass-buttoned blazer for the occasion.

  When Will realized he’d never be in another school play, his mother had the idea to organize a one-man performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” He’d recited it in the Hursts’ formal sitting room, for an audience of Perrier-sipping ladies, mainly Josephine’s various girlfriends and golf partners from the Rond-out Country Club. The verse had wormed its way into his long-term memory, and months later, Will still found himself crooning it under his breath:

  The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

  Went envying her and me—

  Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

  In this kingdom by the sea)

  That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

  Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

  “Where’s the tea?” Will asked his mother.

  Social studies usually began with a game called “Tea at the White House.” They would both dress up as famous people from history, and together, in character, they talked about how they grew up, how they died, and what made them famous. There was usually iced tea in a heavy crystal pitcher.

  “There’s no tea today,” Josephine said irritably. “Just pretend.”

  “Okay.” Will rose from the table, trying to make himself six feet, four inches tall. “I grew up in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky …” He trailed off. He asked his mother why she wasn’t in costume. She was supposed to be dressed like Florence Nightingale.

  Josephine didn’t seem to hear his question. Her gaze lingered over a patch of condensation on the windowpane.

  Will insisted on running upstairs to his parents’ bedroom to fetch a lace doily for his mother to wear on her head.

  He pushed the door inward to reveal his father sitting on the bed, wearing only a towel. His cell phone was cupped to his ear. His pleading voice was unfamiliar, so very different from the managerial tone that he had used to persuade Will to join the Boy Scouts.

  “I made a mistake,” Douglas said. “I need to see you. When I’m in a place like this I just can’t see the light. Are you hearing me? I can’t see the fucking light.”

  Somewhere toward the end of his father’s plea, the doorknob hit the closet door with a clatter.

  Douglas startled at the sound. His rimless glasses were
off and his eyes were tear-swollen.

  “Sorry, Dad,” Will said, swiping the doily from the top of his mom’s mahogany jewelry box and swiftly closing the door behind him.

  “Did you know Dad’s on the phone?” Will asked his mother when he went back to the kitchen.

  “So?”

  “So it sounded like a funny conversation, is all.”

  Josephine’s crossed arms and knitted brow put Will on edge.

  “What do you mean, funny?”

  Will scoured his brain for the right word. He needed something accurate, but also something that was sensitive to his mother’s feelings. Words meant a lot to his mother, so they meant a lot to Will. He spent a lot of time trekking through the dictionary. He filled notebooks with long and unusual nouns that might impress her (rastaquouère: a social climber; widdiful: describes someone who deserves to be hanged).

  “Not funny, ha-ha,” he said. “More like funny, strange. Maybe Violet called him?”

  “Oh, Will,” Josephine said. “You’re still really worried about Violet, aren’t you? I told you, she can’t hurt anyone where she is now. They won’t let her call anyone for quite a long while. Now, let’s get back to tea at the White House. You were telling me about yourself, Mr. Lincoln?”

  Will, as Abe, cut straight to the part he knew his mother would like best. “When I was nine, my mom drank bad milk and puked herself to death,” he said. “I used to tell people, ‘All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.’ ”

  Josephine’s eyes went slushy and sad in the corners. She gave a weak smile and touched the hand splint Will got at the ER last night. Then she leaned in and kissed the bandage on his chin. Somehow, it made Will’s stitches hurt less.

  Will decided to leave a few things out of that morning’s tea. He didn’t tell his mother about Abe Lincoln’s older sister, Sarah, who raised him after his mother died. He also omitted the part about Abe’s younger brother, Thomas, who died in his cradle. No one likes to talk about dead babies. And his mom definitely didn’t like to speak about older sisters.

  Shame and defensiveness hung, like skunk spray, around Josephine whenever someone mentioned Will’s oldest sister, Rose. Most people in town wouldn’t touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, knowing precisely how much pain it caused the Hursts. But every so often, one of the well-meaning but half-demented old ladies at Saint Peter’s Church would ask whether thespian Rose was in the latest production at Ulster Performing Arts Center. Josephine usually responded with something polite and evasive like, “No such luck,” and quickly moved on to praise the play’s actual female lead. But Will knew she wished the rest of Stone Ridge would get with the program and forget Rose at least half as quickly as she’d forgotten all of them.

  A little more than a year ago Rose had run away with her boyfriend and disowned the Hursts. “Just give her space,” Violet had said when Josephine told the family about the hateful details of Rose’s final phone call. “You all talk about Rose like she’s so much younger than she is. She’s twenty. When you reach adulthood, ‘running away from home’ is generally known as ‘moving out.’ ”

  Rose was so self-absorbed or cowardly (or both) that she hadn’t even told the Hursts she was leaving. Will’s parents had reported her missing twenty-four hours after she didn’t come home from her morning class at SUNY New Paltz. A week had gone by before Rose could be bothered to call her mother, and the Hursts had been painfully aware of every passing hour and what it said about the chances police would find her alive. Josephine had organized ground searches of the creek. Douglas had created a “Find Rose Hurst” Facebook group. Will had helped his mother post flyers in the storefronts around town; they featured Rose’s angelic face beneath the pleading question “Have You Seen This Girl?”

  The details read:

  Hair: Brown

  Eyes: Blue/Gray

  Rose was last seen wearing jeans, a peach sweater, and a fur-trimmed white puffer coat. Other identifying characteristics include a mole under her right eye and a dime-sized birthmark behind her left ear.

  At the time, Will thought his mother should have given a different photo to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  “Why?” Josephine asked.

  “Because Rose’s smiling in it,” Will had said. “No one will be able to recognize her.”

  These days, wherever Rose was, she was probably grinning. Whereas Will’s mother was the one who wore the frown Will couldn’t erase no matter how hard he tried.

  These days, monanthous was a word that seemed to apply. It meant having only a single flower. And that was all the Hursts had. One Violet. No Rose.

  Now, during tea, Josephine, with a middle part and her doily bonnet in place, was much too convincing as Florence Nightingale. With tired, downcast eyes, she read the words that supposedly proved Flo’s bipolar disorder. It was an open letter to God, in which she asked him why she couldn’t be happy no matter how hard she tried. “Why can I not be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people?” Josephine croaked. “Why am I starving, desperate, and diseased on it?”

  The real answer, which Will didn’t dare say, was Rose. Before Rose ran away, Douglas hadn’t worked odd hours. Will hadn’t been bullied. Violet hadn’t been nearly as vengeful and nuts. Rose had left Will’s family with a deficit, and every single day she seemed to drain more out of them. The gap between what the Hursts were and what they’d once been was widening by the day. Will knew the difference pained Josephine most of all. Rose had turned their mother’s perfect family into a perfect wreck, and Will couldn’t shake the feeling that she wouldn’t stop there.

  VIOLET HURST

  THE NURSE WHEELED Violet into a stark room containing a grated window, metal lockers, and a roommate, a corpse-still back-sleeper who made her cot look more like an autopsy table.

  Violet had barely choked down a pink sleeping pill and laid her head on the mattress when a flashlight beamed across her still-teary face. “Check,” said the orderly silhouetted in the door. When it happened again fifteen minutes later, it dawned on Violet that she was on the kind of suicide watch she had read about in Girl, Interrupted.

  For the first time, Violet wondered if she really was crazy, not just deliriously hungry and high. Maybe morning glory seeds had brought out some kind of latent schizophrenia. Where acid was concerned, some people—maybe Violet included—left reality and never quite made it back. Was that why she had no recollection of what she’d done to Will? She sometimes had difficulty remembering all the insightful parts of an acid trip, but she’d never had an entire memory slip through her fingers. LSD didn’t make people black out. Maybe schizophrenia or some other mental disorder did.

  Violet knew, of course, that there was a chance she’d hallucinated Rose. Her sister could have been a trick of the light, a trick of Violet’s drugged or possibly diseased mind. Even before morning glory seeds, Violet had been ill-fed and ill-rested. The thinner she got, the more sitting or lying down hurt, so she’d been spending most nights doing walking meditations, pacing around and around her room, trying to drum up some forgiveness for Rose. Sleep-deprived, Violet had been having basic distortions. Colors seemed brighter. She’d been feeling like she had less control over her angry thoughts, which just kept returning to the Hurst who got away.

  In the final months before Rose fled the scene, Violet had watched her sister closely. She’d seen Rose say no to drugs, no to dating, no to saying no, and she’d thought, What if I pick the opposite for myself? Because what’s the point of being good when Rose ended up miserable all the same? Although the Hurst daughters had never been close, their mother had made life equally difficult for them. Violet believed that her sister left because it was the only solution to a long-standing problem. The problem was this: Josephine had made it very clear that no man, woman, or child should be more important to Rose than her family. That was why Rose rarely dated. That was why she was withdrawn. That was why Rose ran off with a mysterious stranger
named Damien. Damien, like an Omen joke. Like the devil’s son.

  But no one was going to swoop in and help Violet start her independent life. Every day, she had to plow through her controlling household like someone machete-whacking her way through a jungle that grew right back thicker and thornier every night. That was what she’d been thinking in the kitchen as she gesticulated with her mother’s chef’s knife.

  The knife. Violet could remember lots about the knife. She could recall how brilliant the blade looked in her hallucinated gaze. She could remember the feel of it rocking back and forth against the cutting board. She even remembered how empowered she felt, aiming the tapered tip at Josephine. But she could not remember practicing her knife skills on Will. What in the hell had she done? Butterflied his palm like a chicken breast? Grabbed and pared his thumb? Why?

  Violet laid still and searched her mind for any reason she might have hurt her brother. Had he tried to intervene on their mother’s behalf? Had he said something in defense of Josephine that had pissed Violet off? She couldn’t ignore the possibility that she’d hurt Will—odd little yes-man that he was—because she envied the way their mom’s love came easily to him.

  The longer Violet brainstormed on the subject, the woozier she felt.

  Her most lucid memory so far was a premonition—the moment she realized just how bad her trip was going to be:

  They’d been sitting, sipping their algae-green cocktails in the casbah comfort of the Fields’ vaulted living room. The Fields’ house always made Violet feel pleasantly stoned from the moment she walked in the door. Stained-glass lanterns cast fractured rainbows over the leather pouf ottomans. Ceilings were painted lagoon blue or blazing saffron. The air smelled like cedar. Josephine called the Fields “platinum card hippies.” Beryl and Rolf had met when they were both enrolled at Bard College, but when they found out they were pregnant with twins, Rolf had shaved his Fu Manchu and swapped his burgeoning art career for one in finance.