Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM

“I have Viola for you,” the nurse told the officers.

Viola was her real name, after the wild yellow variety Viola pubescens. But she’d insisted on going by Violet since kindergarten. “I don’t know why you’d possibly want to be a shy little Violet,” Josephine said. “That’s as bad as being a common Rose.” This dig was directed at her sister, whose Christian name was Rosette.

Violet held her pajama pants closed with one hand and tried not to look mental. She was so nervous she barely heard the cops’ introductions. Their names went in one ear and out the other without so much as a whistle, leaving her to think of them as one beast with two heads and two guns. They were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, only armed.

“I should begin by saying you’re not being charged with anything at this time,” Tweedle Dee said. “I understand you’re an unemancipated minor, is that right?”

Violet must have given a zombie stare because the other cop translated. “You’re under eighteen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And your parents are still your legal guardians?”

“Yeah.”

Officer Dee crossed his rib-roast arms. “You see, Viola, we’re here in response to a domestic violence complaint. Your brother arrived last night at Kingston Hospital with serious damage to his right hand. There were other minor injuries too. Injuries your mother said he sustained from you.”

“I’ve never hurt Will!” Violet cringed at her own ugly adolescent whine. She took a jagged breath and tried with mixed success to mellow out her tone. “I didn’t try to stab anyone. I can’t remember everything, but I know that for sure. If it’s her word against mine—”

“You’re talking about your mother?” asked Officer Dee.

“Yes, my mother.” Secretly, Violet preferred the term wombdonor. Convinced as she was that her mom was lying, she still wasn’t sure if she could trust her own mind’s version of events. Most of what had happened in the kitchen felt like some strange half-reality. The drugs had fragmented things and forced them back together in ways that didn’t entirely fit. Violet’s memory had kaleidoscoped. Every time she tried to examine the details, the whole scene shattered. She wanted to say something about Rose, but every time she brought up her sister’s name it seemed to get her in more trouble. When she’d mentioned Rose back in the kitchen, her family had turned against her. When she’d mentioned Rose during her intake, she’d come off like someone grasping at straws.

“Look,” said Officer Dum. He was the one with the rounder face, the softer eyes. “We weren’t there. We didn’t see whether this was an assault or what. We’ve given your mother a notice of her rights, and she’s trying to decide whether to press criminal charges. Your mom did say she was going to pursue a protective order unless you agree to admit yourself here.”

“Like, a restraining order?” Again, Violet hated herself for sounding so young.

Dum cast a look at the head nurse, who had been hovering in the corner like a Crocs-clad warden. “Your mother says you’re a threat to yourself and your family. It’s in everyone’s best interest if you stay here.”

She gritted her teeth, but figured she’d rather be in the hospital than at home. And so, without knowing her clinical diagnosis, Violet Hurst voluntarily committed herself to a facility that treated serious mental disorders with the help of psychotropic meds.

Back in the intake office, the counselor on duty read her the riot act: “You can go home if and when the doctors agree to discharge you. If you insist on being discharged, you can write a three-day letter asking for your release from the hospital. The hospital has three working days—Monday through Friday, weekends and holidays excluded—to give you a decision. We will either release you or we will file an affidavit and you will receive a court hearing. Do you understand all that?”

“I think so.”

“Sign here, please.”

Her heart pounded. The pen felt too thick in her cold fingers. The name Violet scrawled on the line began with a headstrong V but soon after collapsed into a mousy grade-school script. Her last name, Hurst, looked like a blight on her first, which, by this point, it was.

After she signed away what precious little agency a sixteen-year-old girl has, Violet took her first shower in days. She had to sign out a showerhead at the front desk—a strange procedure, born of the fact that past patients liked to unscrew them and throw them at the staff. After drying off with a rough white towel and stepping into a fresh set of the standard-issue pajamas, she wandered into the dayroom. As she walked down the hallway, Violet felt her distended stomach flip. For the first time since intake, she felt like a detainee. She had no ID, no cell phone, no clothes, no escape. A terrifying thought cut through her façade of couldn’t-care-less. What if I never get released? Relieved as she was to get away from her mother, she wasn’t eager to spend her teens and twenties in lockup. What if they gave her drugs? The antipsychotic kind that left her slurry and diabetic, grimacing at walls?

In the dayroom, two girls brawled for control of the channel button. They looked roughly the same age as Rose. One had a tumble of dyed red hair and thin, eyeliner-drawn brows. The other was tall and angular with eyes that were almost aggressively blue, piercing through the overgrown bangs of her Mick Jagger haircut. A fresh-looking scar, pink and terrifying, curved from her earlobe to her voice box. Violet couldn’t help thinking the girl had a sad majesty. She was scrappy-beautiful. A beam of sunlight picked up the rusty highlights in her otherwise clove-brown hair.

After the nurse broke up the squabble, the screen was smeared with fingerprints. Violet grabbed a tissue from the box on top and gave it a quick buff.

“Thanks,” the brunette said. “And sorry. I’m Edie. This is Corinna.”

Corinna eyed Violet like a target, then aimed her sniper gaze back toward the TV.

“Violet.”

“Did you just get here?”

Violet tensed and nodded. “Last night,” she said.

“Was it pills?” Edie asked.

It took Violet a few beats to catch her drift. By then the girl was already elaborating.

“Suicide attempt? It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I mean, come on”—Edie gestured to her scar—“Have you ever seen anything more embarrassing than this?”

Later, Violet would find out Edie had strung herself to a curtain rod with a length of electrical wiring. Instead of killing her, the rod had snapped and the wiring had gashed a four-inch wound in her neck. Her Vassar roommate had found her, bleeding nearly to death, making a second attempt with a plastic shopping bag over her head. One hundred stitches and a six-pint transfusion later, Edie ended up at Fallkill Psychiatric. This was her second stay in two years.

“Psychedelic crisis.” For simplicity’s sake, Violet added, “LSD.”

“Wow,” Edie said. “You look all right, considering. Was it bad?”

Was it bad? High on seeds, Violet had joined Imogene in front of the mirror and been surprised by the size of her own widened pupils. They looked like dark holes in a Violet-featured, rubber Halloween mask.

“Do you feel really heavy?” Imogene had asked. “I feel like gravity is working triple-time.”

Violet hadn’t felt heavy. Just the opposite. She was having a bad trip, and after hearing her mother’s voice, she felt weightless, like not even her friends could ground her in the moment. Some invisible current was already pulling her back across town to the very last place she wanted to be: her parents’ house, where her mother was destined to ambush her with another accusation. Damn it, Violet! Just admit it! You were angry with us and you broke the window! Your friends keyed your father’s car! You came home drunk again and tipped over the trash! Violet could defend herself all she wanted, but no one ever believed her. Not with her mother in the other corner, spinning stories like rows of knitting and crying on demand. Violet couldn’t explain these freak events, but she knew they weren’t her fault.

She couldn’t take it anymore. That was the reason she’d taken the seeds to begin with. Her mother had come into her room Friday morning and (falsely, homophobically) accused her and Imogene of being lesbian lovers, to the tune of, “I’m not some clueless mother, Viola! You with your buzz cut! And that little dyke with her rainbow hair!” It might have been comical, were it not for her mother’s lecture about dressing like a “sloppy lesbian” and the mention of some gay-be-gone camp in Sullivan County. When Violet had screamed at Josephine to get her bigoted ass out of her room, her mother had laid into her harder than she ever had: “You are sick, Violet! I wish other people could see this anger you reserve just for me! You’re so superficial! So false, with those big cow eyes you lay on your father! And the phony compassion you lavish on Will! I feel sorry for you, you know that? All the natural fibers in the world can’t hide how artificial you are. Keep doing your Buddhist chants all day long, little girl. They won’t hide the fact that you’re a selfish bitch. You’re ugly, Viola. You’re ugly inside.”

That was the speech that had sent Violet seeking out oblivion one last time. Seeds crunching between her molars, she’d been thinking she just wanted to melt her face off. She’d needed Love, Salvation, Deliverance. LSD, for short. Violet thought, under the circumstances, she deserved at least that.

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