Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM. Koren Zailckas
thought Will. It was October.
He knew he shouldn’t push his luck, but this might be his only chance, and time was of the essence. “It just feels like another thing I’m missing out on since I’m not in a regular school anymore.”
His mother’s blue eyes narrowed. Will tried a different approach. “It’s just—I remember Tyler McCastle saying how cool it was going to his dad’s office in the city. His dad has two secretaries and an office with a sofa in it. His office looked right out over Radio City.” Tyler McCastle was an old friend from Stone Ridge Elementary. Will hadn’t seen or talked to him since June.
“Tyler McCastle’s father sells print ads,” Josephine sneered. “And magazines are dying. I wonder if he’ll be able to see Radio City from the unemployment line.”
“Tyler says his dad is a genius.”
Josephine’s eyes rolled. “Your dad is a genius. Your dad holds five patents. Your dad knows everything there is to know about computer science, engineering, programming. Tyler McCastle’s dad is a salesman. He doesn’t make anything. He doesn’t contribute to society in any way. He just profits off other people’s contributions.”
“So I can’t go to work with Dad?”
“You really want to spend a whole day at your father’s office? Can you say, boring? Do you have any idea what your father’s work colleagues are like? Do you really want to spend a whole day around smug little men in smudged glasses, talking about platforms and interfaces when you could be here with moi?”
Will held his breath. He didn’t want to say yes.
Josephine’s face changed. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “All right,” she said. “I’ll have a talk with your father.”
Later at bedtime, she changed Will’s sheets. She gave him his nightly bath, the water near scalding, and the bath puff foaming with the peppermint soap that didn’t so much clean the skin he had but stripped it away to reveal a redder, subaqueous layer. Next came the part where Will lay faceup, across her lap, in his hooded bath towel. From that angle, she brushed and meticulously flossed his teeth.
After that, they were nearly there. Will’s night-light was in sight, and he got to sink the lower half of his body under those bulldozer sheets. His head swam with exhaustion, but he knew he still needed to take his final round of pills—vitamins and bedtime medication—which Josephine lined up in an ant trail across his nightstand. She sang little songs of encouragement as he struggled to gulp them down in order of size and color. “Take the big ones first,” she always said. “Everything after will feel like Easy Street.”
But tonight nothing felt like Easy Street. Will couldn’t shut his brain off. He could not stop thinking about his appointment with Trina the social worker. Wednesday, 2 p.m. He was destined to come off too emotionally flat. The very cold, logical way Will presented himself caused enough megadisasters with normal people, let alone a people person like Trina, someone who presumably went into social work because she considered herself a warm, caring, demonstrative lady. She was bound to think Will was detached to an unhealthy degree.
And there was so much he and his mother hadn’t rehearsed. Was he or was he not supposed to tell Trina about the way Violet had been talking in circles when she left—saying the same things over and over and making the same strange, jerking series of gestures? Whooping. Flapping her hands. Saying, “Boom! Agh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”
At the very least, he knew he wasn’t supposed to talk about Rose. He wouldn’t say a word about the moment Violet had widened her eyes and announced: “Look! Rose is here! Did you see her? I saw her!”
IN THE HOSPITAL cafeteria, Violet cracked open her sandwich and let the pink flesh curl out onto her tray. But it was too late. The meat had sweated and sogged the bread, exactly like a living creature would.
Violet’s stomach spasmed. Friday night’s dinner had been mushroom risotto.
“Especially for my Violet,” Josephine said, slopping a ladleful into Violet’s bowl.
From Violet’s stoned perspective, the dome of rice swarmed like a maggot colony. Each grain seemed to move, burrowing inward or climbing onto the twitching backs of others. Violet had known her mom made it with Fleisher’s beef stock because she hadn’t bothered hiding the empty carton, and because the rice was as dark as gravy.
“Oh dear, I wasn’t thinking,” she said when Violet called her out on it. “Beef stock was just what the recipe called for. What’s the big deal anyway? It’s just broth, not meat.”
Eating had been beyond Violet’s comprehension. She marveled at the way her family moved their jaws, and all the while she couldn’t remember how consumption actually worked, couldn’t picture the mechanics of it, the tongue-smacking up-down of it all, couldn’t remember what chewing was called.
Everyone was staring at her.
“Mom,” Will said. “Violet’s not eating her food. Does that mean I don’t have to eat my food?”
Josephine threw down her fork with a clatter. “Violet is eating her food. Aren’t you, Violet? Because I’m not making two separate meals every night. One for the Dalai Lama and one for everyone else.”
“Now, Josephine. Josephine,” Douglas said. Violet had long ago figured out why he repeated himself so much during dinner—it was so he’d have a second chance to repeat what had slurred the first time around. In this case, his first stab at Josephine had sounded more like “Juicy-fiend.”
“Has it ever occurred to you this is just a sage?”
Josephine sighed. She spoke in the gritted voice of someone who imagined she had a lot of patience. “You mean a stage, Douglas?”
“She’s just doing it for attention. It’s just a fasting phase.” Possibly, he had meant “a passing phase.” His head wobbled at an unnatural angle.
Violet had glanced at Rose’s empty seat and wondered why, in her unaltered life, she let herself get so upset about her family. It didn’t matter how much stress, fear, or even enlightenment Violet brought to the table—it didn’t even matter if she took off just like Rose—the Hursts would continue their long downward spiral, and everyone would remain exactly as they were. Violet had stood up without a word. She carried her untouched plate to the dishwasher and put it in, risotto and all.
Josephine appeared behind her screaming something at the top of her lungs, but in Violet’s ears, her voice was like an infomercial playing in a far-off room: distant, agenda-ed, predictable. In any other company, this audio hallucination—selective deafness—would have been unsettling, but given the circumstances, it was bliss. Nirvana on earth.
Even though Violet still hadn’t been able to bear the idea of eating, she’d flung open the refrigerator door and its related plastic drawers and begun pulling out every piece of produce she could find: a jalapeño, a flaccid cucumber, a quartered onion in a ziplock bag, a lacy bunch of kale, a bruised apple, half a lime. She dumped it all out on Josephine’s epicurean cutting board, grabbed the biggest conceivable knife from the slotted block, and set to work making her own goddamn dinner.
She looked up just in time to see Edie’s red tray hit the table. Sitting down opposite Violet, she twisted what little hair she had at the base of her long neck. The blue pen she stuck through her bun was printed with the word ZOLOFT.
“In group this morning, didn’t you say you have a sister who ran away? Do you think she’d let you go and crash at her place?”
“I don’t know.” Violet paused and considered. “I don’t know if I’d even want to.”
“You