Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM

“Objectively, no. Subjectively, God yes.”

When Will first started having seizures, he was desperate to know what he looked like in their midst. He’d imagined all the terrifying eppy clichés: flopping around like a fish, his tongue gyrating around his gaping mouth. But Will’s fits were what his doctor called “absence seizures.” During them, his mom said he just stared at her as though she were a stranger. It sounded pretty underwhelming, and the doctor said Will ought to be seizure-free by the time he was eighteen, but each attack still scared Josephine and physically drained Will.

Things had barely come back into focus before Will conked back out in a drooling crash-nap.

Will woke up starving, his exhausted brain craving nourishment.

“Are there any snacks in the car?” he croaked.

She passed him half a roll of Life Savers from the glove compartment. They wouldn’t do a thing to kill the gnawing pain in his stomach. He was so hungry he could eat a city block and still have room for a foot-long sandwich.

“Any water?”

She shook her head and killed the ignition.

Will’s head rang as he righted himself. The car was idling in front of a brick building with arched windows and fortressy turrets. It looked as sad and complicated as the people Will imagined pacing its halls.

Josephine reached across the seat for her purse. “Wait in the car,” she said. “I just need to go inside and sign those forms.”

Will slipped one arm through his coat. “I’ll come with you,” he said. He didn’t want to be alone. Seizures were like earthquakes; sometimes there were aftershocks.

“I’ll be in and out. I promise. I don’t want you to be involved in this any further. It’s bad enough what Violet did, but the stress, setting off your seizures—No. Just stay still and I’ll be right back.”

The horn beeped twice and Will realized she’d hit the lock button on her keychain.

He returned his cheek to the seat fabric. His mind flitted back to the letter in his mother’s purse. He wished he’d had the good sense to copy down the return address before she took the envelope away. He wondered if his mother was thinking the same. Why had she delivered it to Violet without opening it first?

His mother’s cell phone interrupted his train of thought. It was vibrating between the two front seats, smacking its silver head against the plastic cup holder, the whirring sound threefold. Will reached over and inspected the screen. DOUG, read the caller ID. Maybe Will should have pressed Ignore. Instead, his thumb wandered to the green Talk button.

“Dad?” he said.

On the other end of the line was the swishing sound of a pocket call. There was a loud, social din. A restaurant, maybe. His father’s lunch hour?

A woman’s giggle cut through the racket like a clinking teaspoon. It was followed by the unmistakable sound of his father’s voice. “You’re a remarkable woman,” Douglas said. “A few of us are heading down to the Bull and Buddha. Any interest in joining us?”

As the call cut out, Will made a vow to himself: if he could not help his mother by bringing Rose home to apologize for the hurt she’d caused them, he would save her by finding out the whos and whys of his father’s indiscretions.

“See? That didn’t take long, did it?” Josephine said later, sliding behind the steering wheel and slinging her purse onto the passenger seat. “And now we’re safe. We really don’t have to worry. There won’t be a big, Violet-shaped cloud hanging over us any longer.”

Will glanced up at the spiky-looking building with its too-dark windows. “What’s it like inside?”

“Don’t worry about her, Will. It’s one of the nicest hospitals money can buy. The Roosevelts once owned all this land. And these buildings—they’re called high Gothics, by the way—are a national landmark.” She said it in the same tone he’d heard her use to help sell his sisters on colleges she liked.

Will felt a pang of guilt when he realized Violet might fall behind in school and not get into her first-choice college, Bard, now.

His mother seemed to read his mind. “Will, either she’ll get better or she won’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with us now.”

Will was still starving when they arrived at home and found a car idling in the driveway at Old Stone Way. He expected his father, but the car in question didn’t belong to Douglas. It was as compact and green as a lime. At the rear dash, a scrum of stuffed animals begged for rescue.

At the Hursts’ front door, a wide woman in a trench coat looked casually up from her clipboard.

“Can I help you?” Josephine asked, opening the driver’s-side door.

The woman hobbled over on a bad hip and thrust out her hand. “Mrs. Hurst?”

His mother nodded. “And you are?”

“My name is Trina Williams. I’m from Child Protective Services.”

VIOLET HURST (#ulink_e6d692de-f2f9-5a87-b44b-b871f5026dc0)

IT WAS BARELY lunchtime, and Violet was already tired of being cooped up all morning. She’d always felt sanest in the great outdoors, especially when there was compost in her cuticles and maple pods in the ends of her long-ago hair.

Even during Violet’s bad trip, her mood had instantly improved after her friends brought her outside. The Fields’ eco-contemporary sat on ten enchanted acres, the Mohonk mountains guarding it from the south side like a high garden wall. The wind pulled the leaves across the lawn in crested waves. Violet saw vortexes and patterns in the hellfire sunset. This, she decided, was all she ever needed or wanted in life. She wanted only to wrap herself up in the misty red-gold dead of autumn. She wanted to make these three enchanted creatures—Imogene, Finch, and Jasper—her permanent family.

Imogene rode Finch’s BMX bike around the driveway while Violet stood on the rear pegs. Finch smiled beatifically behind the twirling flames of the copper fire pit. His face bloomed red and gold with reflected flashes.

“Hurst, you remind me of that Inuit story about the Stone Child,” he’d said.

“What?” Violet had asked. By that time, she had been lying on her back, her cheek in the overgrown grass, doing a slow improvised backstroke through a pile of dead leaves.

“So there was this orphan, right? And his mom and dad died in a bear attack. He lived by himself, angry and starving to death. All he had was a rock the same size as he was. He wrapped his arms and legs around it and refused to let go.”

Violet had a thought that it sounded like her parents’ relationship: doting Douglas clinging to an ice-cold hunk of rock.

“That’s how he got the nickname the Stone Child,” Finch continued. “The villagers thought he was out of his fucking mind. But that bat-shit little boy didn’t let go. He just kept clinging to the thing, until one day, the big rock broke in two. And inside was the most perfect girl he could ever ask for. She gave the Stone Child bows and arrows and a harpoon. They got married and had kids.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?!” Jasper cried.

“And what does that have to do with Violet?” Imogene asked, shrieking with laughter.

“I was just trying to say Violet is intuitive. She reminds me of some of the great healers.”

Violet felt all her organs flush hot and pulse.

Her cell phone had squirmed uncomfortably in her pocket. It was a text message from Josephine:

WE NEED YOU AT HOME. YOUR FATHER AND I HAVE DIVORCE ON THE TABLE.

After passing her phone around the group—Violet had to make sure she wasn’t tripping hard enough to imagine that—she texted the wary response: WHAT??? ARE YOU OKAY?

“It’s about time,” she’d told her friends. Her parents’ relationship wasn’t like Beryl and Rolf’s, or anyone else’s she knew. It was like a business arrangement, where her father provided the capital and her mother funneled money out the back. The only “business” they were in was denying reality and their true natures, and business had been failing ever since Rose ran away.

Violet’s phone buzzed with Josephine’s reply: YES, I’M OK. DINNER. I MEANT WE HAVE DINNER ON THE TABLE. MY PHONE CHANGES MY WORDS. COME HOME NOW.

They’d practically pissed themselves laughing. Violet rode her bike home via the town rail trail. The clouds on the horizon had darkened, and the bent trees looked a bit like they were clawing for her.

As Violet pedaled, she’d hatched a plan to fake a migraine and duck out on family dinner. She rehearsed everything she was going to say under her breath. She thought of the mantra for peace of mind—asato ma sadgamaya—which meant roughly, “lead us from darkness to the light / from knowledge of the unreal to the real.” Maybe she’d been having auditory hallucinations, but the bike’s spinning wheels had sounded like a sitar.