Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM. Koren Zailckas
green plastic clover.
Will knew he should be jabbering with excitement. There she was, waiting for him to pump his fist and thrash with glee (not that he would ever dare jump on the bed). But something was off. The timing didn’t add up.
“Is today my birthday?” Will asked. “Did I do something to deserve an extra-special reward?”
“No,” Josephine said. “Today isn’t your birthday. And you, little man, are my extra-special reward.”
She reached for the boy’s face, as if to give his bandaged chin a playful pinch or tuck his too-long hair behind his earlobe. But then the phone rang and her freshly moisturized hand froze, suspended in the space. She pulled away and padded off in her slippers to answer it, a Velcro roller tumbling out of her hair and sticking, burr-like, in the carpet.
The house should have been quiet now that Will’s sixteen-year-old sister Violet had been banished. Oddly, the Hurst family home was louder. Even after his mother hung up her cell phone, her voice remained nervous, her actions rackety. Will followed her downstairs to the kitchen, where the radio was already on, cranked to WRHV. Cupboard doors slammed. Silverware barrel-rolled as she jostled the drawers.
The rotten-egg smell of his father’s morning shower wafted down the staircase. The well water was sulfuric. Violet liked to say that hell smells like sulfur. So do places infested with demons. If Will believed his mother—and he had no reason not to—demons were rebels like Violet. They fell from grace when they looked into God’s gentle eyes and announced they didn’t need him anymore.
At the kitchen table, Josephine asked, “Is a noun a doing word, a describing word, or a naming word?”
“A describing word,” Will told her between swallows of oatmeal.
Josephine’s smile—a bright sideways sliver of moon—made it impossible for him to know whether he’d answered right or wrong.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “Which word is the noun in this sentence: ‘I always know what I am doing.’”
“What.”
“I said, which word is the noun in this sentence—”
“No, Mom. I wasn’t asking, What? I was trying to tell you ‘what’ is the answer.”
“Oh,” Josephine said. “Oh, I was expecting you to say ‘I.’ But I suppose ‘what’ is right in this instance too.”
The portable phone screamed in its cradle. Josephine picked it up and wandered out of the kitchen saying, “No, I told you. I have a twelve-year-old special-needs son. She’s a danger to him. I can’t have her here.”
Will had autistic spectrum disorder with comorbid epilepsy. To him, that always sounded like a good thing—the word spectrum being halfway to spectacular. But Will knew his differences secretly shamed his family, his father, Douglas, in particular. At Cherries Deli, Will was always aware of his dad’s gaze lingering on the youth soccer leagues eating postgame sundaes. Probably, Douglas longed for a sturdier and more social son—a buzz-cut bruiser who could shower and climb stairs unsupervised, without the nagging threat of seizures.
Will’s mother tried to put a positive spin on his health conditions. Once when Will was in a wallowing mood, he’d blubbered, “I’m not like normal people!” And Josephine had consoled him by saying, “No, you’re not. And thank God for that. Normal people are dim-witted and boring.”
Will had received his dual diagnosis nine months ago, and his mother had been homeschooling him ever since. A onetime academic, Josephine was every bit as good as Will’s former teachers. Plus, she custom-made his curriculum. She was patient with Will in math, where it took him ages to grasp square roots, and rode him relentlessly in language arts, where she prided herself on the quality of his writing and his ability to read above grade level.
Violet used to tell Will that he was blessed to have autism. She was studying Buddhism, and she said that Will must have been an exceptionally good person in a past life. A patient, selfless, saintly sort of person. So in this life, he’d been rewarded for his past goodness with heightened sensitivities. According to Violet, Will felt things more deeply and understood things most people overlooked, and this made his everyday more like Nirvana.
Josephine didn’t appreciate his sister’s interest in Eastern religion. She didn’t like the humming sound of Violet’s Tibetan singing bowl, her woodsy incense, the picture of Geshla in a glitzy gold frame on her bedside table.
The Hursts were Catholic. Whenever Violet sat cross-legged with a strand of mala beads, Josephine told her to put away her “faux rosary.” Back in August, Violet had shaved off all her hair with their father’s electric beard trimmer. Will remembered Douglas storming into the family room, a long brown wisp threaded through his fingers, shouting, “Violet! What is the meaning of this?!” Without so much as turning her bald head away from her guided-meditation DVD, Violet had said: “Meanings are the illusion of a deluded mind, Dad. Stop trying to squeeze reality into a verbal shape.”
Violet would not allow herself to be squeezed into anyone’s reality.
“Violet is unpredictable,” Josephine liked to say. “Just when a person thinks she’s got Violet pegged, she transforms like ice into water.”
That was when the trouble started, with one of Violet’s transformations. His sister’s “extreme personality changes” were one of the reasons Josephine had spent the last forty minutes on the phone, whispering about “crisis wards,” “involuntary commitment,” and other words Will couldn’t find in his Scholastic Dictionary.
“Violet is sick,” his mom had explained weeks earlier, after Violet had once again made her dissolve into tears. “You know how parts of our bodies get sick sometimes?” she’d added, dabbing at her eyes. “Like, we get stomachaches or sore throats? Well, Violet is sick in the part of her brain that controls her feelings.”
Will assumed Violet’s brain was sick because she had stopped eating food. Well, not all food. Violet had recently stopped drinking everything except pomegranate juice or milk, and stopped eating everything besides Uncle Ben’s instant rice or a stenchy combination of mung beans and sugar.
As her body got smaller, all of Violet’s clothes started to look like disguises. She wore long-underwear tops, Douglas’s dress shirts, and low-crotched pants that made her look like one of Ali Baba’s forty thieves. Their mother said Violet wore a gauzy kerchief because people at school made fun of her bald-headedness. But when Will asked Violet, she told him she was covering her head because she was doing sallekhana.
“Is that Buddhist?” Will had asked.
”No,” Violet said. “It’s Jainist.”
“But she is suicidal,” Josephine told the person on the phone now. “I’ve done some research, and this Jainist thing—or however you say it—is a ritual fast to death.”
Still in her bathrobe, Josephine was hunched on a stool at the kitchen island. The remaining rollers were gone from her Bambibrown hair, but she’d been too distracted to reach for her comb. Curls corkscrewed from her scalp at bonkers angles. “Presentation counts”: that was what she’d always taught Will. Seeing her unkempt disturbed him more than almost anything else, and that said a lot given the circumstances.
Will hovered by the stove, trying to feel the stitches beneath the surgical tape on his chin. He made no attempt to disguise his eavesdropping.
“I feel like you’re asking me to choose between my children,” Josephine told the mystery caller. “I love my daughter more than words can express, but I’m terrified of her. She critically injured my son. Uh-huh. Yes. I am afraid for our lives.”
Whumpa whumpa whump. Josephine’s ballpoint pen was the only sound while the person on the line spoke at length.
“I know we’re not the only victims here. Violet suffers the