Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM
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.
Violet was still occasionally starstruck in the presence of her exotic and blasé friends. Imogene’s rainbow-dyed hair resembled a Neapolitan cookie. Finch had heavy blond bangs hanging over his horn-rimmed glasses. Jasper was wearing a coonskin cap and a T-shirt that bore a quote by the street artist Banksy: A lot of parents will do anything for their kids except let them be themselves. How they hadn’t realized they were too cool for Violet was beyond her.
A full hour had gone by with no effect. Finch sat in front of his MacBook, watching a bunch of short, surrealist films by the Czech artist Jan Švankmajer.
“Fuck botany,” Jasper said. “Those seeds are worthless.”
“Maybe we should have fasted before we ate them,” Finch said, and Violet had felt a little trill of excitement. She had been fasting, in secret, for reasons she hadn’t shared with her friends.
Something happened while Violet was racking her brain for the answer to 40-across (“motherless calf”), and the boys giggled over Švankmajer’s Meat Love. On-screen, two slabs of beef grunted and thrust against each other on a floured cutting board.
“Ha!” Finch cried. “He de-floured her!”
Jasper laughed. “Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase slapping your meat.”
The sight of all that rare, glistening steak sent a prickling sensation spreading up Violet’s legs. Her empty stomach spasmed. She stood up to go to the bathroom and felt the room jump very close to her, almost as though she had taken five steps forward instead of just one. When she stepped backward, the same effect happened in reverse.
“Are you okay?” Finch asked.
“Hurst looks like she just hit a wall of fucked-up-ness,” Jasper said.
“I’ll go with you,” Imogene told her. “I’m not feeling pitch-perfect either.”
Violet felt like she was spinning along a slanted axis. In the bathroom, she lifted the toilet lid to puke and saw a steak, blue-rare and bloody, in the bowl. Hot on the heels of that hallucination came an auditory one. She heard shrieking laughter. Then, her mother’s voice whisper-hot in her ear: It’s the food chain, Viola. Shut up and eat it.
Now she crept across the hospital linoleum (frigid) to the bathroom (unlockable). Inside, she was greeted by a twelve-inch shatterproof mirror. The image reflected back at her was far more Martian than girl. Voluntary starvation had yellowed her skin. Her pupils—although not the full lunar eclipses that they’d been earlier at Imogene’s house—hadn’t shrunk back down to normal, nonwasted size. She ran her palm, neck to widow’s peak, over the hedgehog bristle of her scruffy head. Even in her tolerant locale—the Hursts lived only seventeen miles from Woodstock—Violet’s peers regarded her hair and diet as a little extreme.
There had been a couple of love interests back in freshman year, when Violet had sported a loose ponytail (not just stubble). Troy Barnes had given her a Vicks VapoRub massage the first time she took Ecstasy. Finch had kissed her in the Rosendale caves and sent her hilarious text messages for weeks after, things like, You have soiled my soul. I feel swollen and ashamed. But after Violet shaved her head, lesbian rumors swirled and those two backed off, along with the rest of the male species. Finch just wanted to be friends. Troy called her cue ball, when he called her at all. For all the social troubles that zealotry had caused Violet, she couldn’t seem to give up fasting, meditating, or reading books with lotus blossoms or cumulus clouds on the covers. After Rose ran away, Violet had needed something to disappear into too. Religion seemed as good an escape route as any, plus it was conveniently compatible with psychedelics.
After her sister left, Violet discovered that she could no longer pray to their mother’s god—the divine bully Josephine had called upon to justify her actions, especially the way she had treated Rose.
Violet had always sensed that Josephine wasn’t like other mothers, but in the past year, she’d finally been able to put her finger on the weird behaviors that made her different. Once Rose was gone, Josephine snatched Will and Violet from their places at the back of the family shelf. That was when Violet realized just how much Josephine had seen Rose as her favorite doll: someone to dress up, show off, and manipulate. Violet had always been more resistant to that kind of one-sided play: Violet wore what she wanted, tried to say what she felt, and mostly recognized the differences between herself and the stifling, spoiled woman she called Mom.
Even though Violet could sympathize with Rose now, that was one of the main reasons they didn’t get along as sisters: Rose could grin and bear Josephine’s demeaning comments, and Violet couldn’t. Rose kept censoring what she did and said even when Josephine wasn’t around, and Violet swung the other way; Violet developed an almost pathological need to point out whatever the rest of the Hursts wanted to sweep under the rug and parade it around like a skull on a stick.
Unfortunately—as Violet quickly found out—being your own person only increased Josephine’s claim on you. Josephine took credit for your good traits with her cream-of-the-crop genes. Your school or social successes were proof of her careful child-rearing. And if you veered the other way—if you became a freak and a flunky, like Violet, if you self-sabotaged so Josephine couldn’t use your achievements to build herself up—well then, the matriarch turned hate-riarch and pawned off her own evil qualities on you. She’d say you manipulated people (which she did). She’d say you were vengeful (which she, above all people, was). The game worked because the more Josephine played the victim, the more a person wanted to victimize her. The more she told you you were angry, the more pissed off it made you.
Hazy as Violet still was on the details, she knew her outburst in the kitchen had been a last-ditch effort to tell the truth about her mom to Douglas and Will. She’d never once considered that they might hear her out and still opt to believe that Josephine was just some benign mom, packing lunches and kissing boo-boos. Of course, Violet’s delivery might have also played a part. Tripping, she was no stellar speechmaker. Her main points might well have been howls and expletives.
Violet pictured Josephine at home, cracking a bottle of victory champagne. So she’d driven Violet to attack her own brother, proving at long last that she was invincible and Violet had terminal piece-of-shit-itis. All hail Josephine. Josephine had won.
WILLIAM HURST
TEA AT THE White House was drawing to a close. It was time for Will’s grand finale. He told Josephine that on April fourteenth, he’d gone to see a play called Our American Cousin.
“During intermission, my bodyguard left the playhouse to get trashed with my driver,” Will said.
“How do you know that word?”
“What word? Trashed? I don’t know. Violet says it. It means you’ve drunk so much alcohol that you spin without moving.”
When Josephine didn’t approve of something, her eyes went as slitted as Will’s old plastic dinosaur toys.
“Anyways, while my driver was drinking alcohol, an actor-slash-spy shot me in the back of the head. Right here.”
Will staggered to the floor. All tea parties at the White House ended this way: with Will gasping, moaning in unimaginable pain, clutching his wound, and letting his eyelids go fluttery. Like Rose before him, Will relished his acting skills. Usually he could make his mom laugh, no sweat. But this time, Josephine didn’t crack a smile or teasingly try to catch him breathing in the grave. No matter how much she claimed she wanted to return to their routine, last night hadn’t loosened its hold on her. She might have cleaned up the splattered risotto and mopped the blood off the floors, but the kitchen still had an air of something not quite right.
Will opened his trying-hard-not-to-quiver-because-he-was-dead eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I do a bad job?”
“You were fine,” Josephine said. “Although you might have placed more emphasis on repealing slavery and the Gettysburg Address. Tea at the White House is a school lesson, remember? It’s not an acting exercise. We don’t just do this for the drama of it all.”
Will was crushed. He let his beard fall to his chest like a hairy necklace. “Sorry, Mom. Maybe I shouldn’t die next time?”
“It’s all right if you die.”
“I don’t need to.”
“William, I don’t have the energy for this today. You can die, okay? It’s fine by me. Maybe just don’t make such a big to-do about it.”
His mom’s gaze drifted to the window. Outside, the mailman idled in his doorless truck. He had a third-trimester-sized belly and wore shorts, regardless of season or weather. Will noticed he always left the mailbox ajar.
“People on the Internet say Abe Lincoln used marijuana.”
“Marijuana?”
“People said he was a homosexual too.”
“Oh Will, don’t be ridiculous. I really don’t have the time for this today. If we don’t get in the car now we’ll be late for the hospital.”
Ridiculous. A describing word, reserved for people and things you didn’t have to take seriously.
What was wrong with Will? He thought about that question as he climbed into the backseat of his mother’s burnt-red sedan. Ultimately, he came back to his autism, the root of his wrongness. All the Asperger’s books his mother left lying around the house said that people like Will lacked empathy. But Will didn’t think that was his problem per se. If anything, he picked up too many signals from other people. So much like a crowded radio spectrum, he was, that it was hard to get a clear reading on any one person (including himself). Every human interaction was static-ridden. Each conversation crackled.
In the rearview mirror, Will glanced at Josephine’s profile. He studied her hooked lashes and the perfect brushstroke of her nose. It was probably hard for her, faking a distant and controlled expression for the sake of Will’s comfort, but he saw her white knuckles on the steering wheel.
She sighed as she reversed past the mailbox. “So he did leave it open again. Will, will you jump out and grab the mail for me?”
The stack of mail in hand, Will noticed a seal on the back of an envelope for Violet that caught his attention. There was a musical symbol—a treble clef, he knew from his mother’s piano instruction—pressed into the dark pink wax. There was little else on the envelope, except for Violet’s name, the Hursts’ address at Old Stone Way, and a nameless New York address in the upper left-hand corner: 130 Seventh Avenue, #123.
When she slowed for the tollbooth at the Poughkeepsie bridge, Will glanced at the passenger seat, where the mail stuck out of his mother’s boxy ostrich-skin purse. It suddenly became clear to Will why the envelope looked so familiar: Missing could be either an adjective or a verb. And the New Yorker Violet knew was his lost sister, Rose, who used to put a wax kiss on everything.
VIOLET HURST
THE NEXT MORNING, when the head nurse (even this seemed like a double entendre) appeared in the doorway, Violet asked her a series of questions:
“Is it possible to get a toothbrush? Am I allowed to use the phone? Have you heard anything from my family?”
“Later,” the nurse said. “Right now, I need you to come with me. There are some officers here who’d like to speak with you.”
Violet trailed her down the hallway to the visitors’ lounge, where two uniformed police officers were drinking black coffee.
So this was the moment of truth. Violet imagined the sound of handcuffs clinking around her wrists.
The two men stood as she approached. They looked like linebackers.
It was hard for Violet to remember a time when she’d ever associated police with safety. Faced with a blue uniform, Josephine would fall all over herself, offering to buy policemen gas-station coffee and asking them how to organize a neighborhood watch. But Violet’s fear of authority ran deep. Even when she didn’t have red-wine lips or a one-hitter pipe in her pocket, the sight of a badge made her blood run cold.