Mother, Mother

by Koren Zailckas

And then Will heard the words that hit him like a bullet hole to the stomach: “We’re looking for your mom, buddy. I promise you we are. The trouble is, we don’t know where to find her right now.”

  VIOLET HURST

  SHE CAME TO at the sound of Josephine’s voice. “Yes,” she thought she heard her mom saying at some distance. “Once I realized what was happening, I was concerned too.”

  The moon wavered in the sky as Violet focused her eyes. She sipped a small lungful of near-frozen night air. Her throat hurt so badly she could barely swallow, and her legs were so limp she could barely bend her knees. She strained her ears. There were more running engines. Other voices said things Violet couldn’t make out.

  Then came her mother’s voice, too loud. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that child. Sneaking out alone to meet Lord knows who. [inaudible] You’d think I’d taught her nothing.”

  In conversations outside their family, Josephine always spoke one notch louder than normal people. It was only her mom’s appearance—the twill jackets and bleached white teeth, the meticulous grooming and TV news anchor hair—that lent her some illusion of sanity. The voice doesn’t lie, Violet thought, as she sprawled in the dirt. And her mother’s steeply-pitched voice was Grey Gardens. If only people closed their eyes when Josephine spoke, maybe then they’d hear it: cat-woman crazy, fueled by sadism and bottomless need.

  Violet heaved herself onto one elbow, bones zinging. She realized swallowing wasn’t the only issue. It hurt to inhale. Breathless as she was, each gasp brought hot pain. It felt like someone shoving a cleat down her throat. She rolled over, teeth chattering, and puked lukewarm soup onto the pebbled ground.

  Violet probably should have been scared, but her only thought was to get to whoever her mom was talking to before she sent them away. Cautiously, she pushed herself up to a position that approximated standing. Her heart was pulsing. Through clumped trees, she could see headlights, four of them, like eyes staring off into the middle distance, exhaust rising around them. Violet held the gaze of those cars while she staggered headlong back through the woods, feet flopping through leaves littered with trash. Her ankles turned on tree roots, hidden rocks, crushed cans. Each fresh breath choked her.

  It was claustrophobic pain, the kind that held her inside it instead of vice versa. Still, she focused on the voices and the engines, the headlights in the distance. The conversation had died down, and Violet could hear car doors closing. She quickened her step, starfishing her hands against tree trunks for balance. As long as there were four headlights—not two—she wasn’t alone with her mother. As long as there were four, she wasn’t alone in the woods, in the world.

  A car door swung open and music, Van Morrison, pooled into the parking lot.

  “Violet?!” It was Imogene, running wild-eyed toward her through the pale exhaust.

  Josephine was coming at Violet too. Her public face was back in place. She had her hands clasped over her mouth. “Violet! Honey, thank God! We were so worried!” Her eyebrows were twitching around, trying to strike some expression that might pass for maternal concern, but her panicked eyes didn’t know where to look. They kept sliding back toward Imogene. Josephine, ever the performance artist, trying to get a read on her audience.

  How hard Violet tried to say, I’m not going anywhere with you. All she could manage was a painful wheeze. She just kept propelling herself forward, toward Imogene, even as Josephine started pulling on her jacket, trying to usher her into her red sedan.

  “Get in the car,” Josephine said. “Come on, let’s get you home! Then we’ll talk about the trouble you’re in!”

  But Imogene saw something, Violet’s tattered eye, or the vomit on her jeans, or the expression on her face. Something. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “Oh my God, Violet. What did Rose do to you?”

  “Thank you, Genie. I have this covered. Viola, get in my car now.”

  It took so long for Violet to make herself understood. Shaking her head NoNONO. Desperately pulling her mother’s hands off her, only to have Josephine latch on again, holding tighter than ever with spidery fingers that made Violet’s flesh crawl.

  Imogene had a scared, polite look on her face: “Mrs. Hurst, I don’t think she wants to—”

  Josephine tightened her death grip on Violet’s wrist. “This doesn’t concern you, Genie. Stop speaking for my daughter. As a matter of fact, stop talking to my daughter, period. We wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for you.”

  Imogene, mouth gaping, put a hand to her sternum. “Me?”

  “Yes. You and your brother and your bad influence. The marijuana. And the sex and the sacrilege. It’s unseemly! If I were your mother—”

  “You’re not her mother, Josephine.”

  Violet looked up, light-headed, and saw Beryl Field. She was standing between the parked cars, pashmina knotted around her head, earrings softly swinging, headlights blazing through the big holes of her crocheted poncho.

  “I think it’s probably best if Violet spends the night with us,” Beryl said, flat and definitive. “Come on, honey. Imogene, please help Violet put her bike in our car.”

  A shiver shook Violet’s spine. She threw a side eye at Josephine. She was prepared for more moralizing, waiting for her mother to launch into her well-worn diatribe—the one she always uttered in private about Rolf and Beryl’s spineless, indulgent parenting. Instead, she walked with measured steps to her car. Before she pulled away into the huge black night, her rear wheels sending up a faint waft of dust, she turned back once to say: “What’s your prognosis these days, Beryl? I’d tell you drop dead. But Violet tells me you’re nearly there.”

  Beryl drove straight to the Kingston emergency room. Imogene sat in the backseat, crying and holding Violet’s hand as she quietly, literally, coughed up the story of the past week, along with everything her mother had confessed to at the creek. She was shell-shocked at least three times over, but the details spewed out anyway. She couldn’t keep them to herself. She had to talk about things before Josephine found a way to put a spin on them, before the crazy could be rationalized away.

  “I almost didn’t come!” Imogene kept saying. “But I got worried when you never called me. The whole ride over, I just kept saying, I know this is stupid. I know I’m thinking crazy. Didn’t I, Mom? But I wasn’t thinking crazy enough. What would have happened if we hadn’t come?”

  Beryl kept the journey short, the music cheerful and low-volume. She put her foot down and drove fast through the tiny, one-way streets of Kingston. Dark ivy and old stone houses sucked up the headlights, and Beryl flashed on her high beams. She let the girls have their moment, and only let on how freaked out she was once, when she shuddered horribly at a four-way stop, Violet telling them about the way Josephine had dressed in Rose’s clothes.

  “She must have been sick with grief,” Beryl whispered. “Temporarily mad.”

  It was a mistake, attributing normal human emotions to Josephine. But Violet didn’t blame her. Beryl was an empath, and she mothered the same way she lived—trying to put herself in other people’s shoes, trying to experience the world as her children and their friends and their friends’ families did. Violet’s mother was the opposite. If anyone refused to accept Josephine’s fantasy as their reality, Josephine rejected them, hurt them, or hid them from view. Stuffed with the full-time narcissistic supply Will gave her, she must have felt bold and invincible. She’d probably imagined she’d never get caught.

  “Not a chance,” Imogene laughed through a sob. “Josephine is permanently mad.”

  Beryl shushed her. “Violet, honey, I’m sure she can get help. Therapy. Something.”

  Violet nodded noncommittally, but she wasn’t so sure. Beryl had cancer. Beryl knew she was sick. She did research, she listened to medical professionals, and she actively, desperately wanted to get well. Josephine, on the other hand, wouldn’t entertain for a second that she was hurting herself or the rest of the Hursts. Called out by a court of law, Violet knew her mom wou
ld swear up and down that she was no more controlling or manipulative than any other woman on the planet. If a therapist tried to help Josephine, she would intimidate and shame them until they felt worse than she did, until they were too broken to look down on her. Being cured first required admitting you were ill, and Violet knew Josephine would never, ever do that. Her mother would much rather go on pretending she was flawless and edit out anything (or anyone) that proved otherwise.

  At the hospital, they photographed and fingerprinted the purpled-yellowed bruises that wreathed Violet’s neck. They patched her tattered lower lid and cheekbone. The doctor shined a light in her eyes and down her throat, and asked if they felt painful. It all felt painful. But nothing hurt more than the knowledge that Rose was dead and still lost, her body in some sick, secret spot of her mother’s choosing.

  Violet let her friends take care of her, even though her mind and body fought her every second of the way. Imogene sat beside Violet in the hospital bed, one arm around her and the other controlling the bedside TV remote, conscientiously avoiding channels and emotional triggers the same way they’d done for Edie in the hospital (no reality court shows, no talk shows that trafficked in toothless family dysfunction). When the cafeteria opened, Beryl brought them hot coffees and big, oily Danishes that tasted of nothing but lard. She wrapped them up in the patchwork quilt she kept in the trunk of her car for summer picnics and winter roadside emergencies and sat in the corner blowing on a paper cup of green tea, never once letting on if she was dismayed to be back in a hospital so soon after her lumpectomy. Violet lay back and tried to avoid the ever-present voice in her head, the one that incessantly told her: If you need help, don’t ask for it. Do it yourself. Do everything yourself.

  Finch was the angry one. He drove to the hospital in the Fields’ VW Vanagon and immediately began pacing around the cold, neutral room, raging at no one in particular, pulling aside the doctor and the cop, demanding more answers in a manner that was flattering and spouselike if not entirely helpful. He just didn’t get it. It just didn’t fit into the science of humanity. That was what he kept saying over and over: “A mother attacking her own kid! That’s logical, maybe, in the American South during slavery. Save your daughter from the horrors that you were forced to endure—I get that. That is some Toni Morrison shit. But Josephine wasn’t trying to spare Violet from a lifetime of rape and poverty. She is a privileged white woman living in the modern first world!”

  “It’s not logical to us,” Imogene said. “Wherever Josie is, it makes sense to her. The psychologist on call told us it was probably the culmination of long-standing patterns.”

  Actually, she’d said long-standing patterns of relational dysfunction. Violet had hated every second of her psych evaluation. Another therapist in a week jam-packed with mental health professionals. This one had stayed too long and sat too close to the bed, with her understanding brown eyes that willed Violet to cry. But Violet hadn’t cried, not once. She’d still felt like she was down in a deep old well, and everyone else was calling down to her from the surface. They avoided sharp sudden movements and mouthed reassuring things. They thrust statements and medical forms at her. They filled dark vials with her blood. It took all the energy Violet had to respond, sign her name on the line, thrust her inner elbow out for the needle.

  Finch left after Beryl asked him to drive home and make up the guest room for Violet, at which point a woman from CPS, Trina Williams, came in. She claimed to be a colleague of Nicholas Flores, and when Violet asked why Nick didn’t come himself, she said something poignant about some things being easier to discuss in female company. What followed was a whole arsenal of questions about Douglas: Was he an alcoholic? Did he ever hit any of the Hurst children? Was it true that he took an unhealthy interest with Rose’s sexuality? She asked the questions apologetically, and her kind brown eyes said she knew Violet would rather be thinking about anything else. Violet answered truthfully: Yes an alcoholic, but a recovering one. No, no hitting. It was their mother that used to scrutinize Rose’s underwear.

  The morning sun was exploding through the window, lighting it up all pink and orange like the stained glass Violet had stared at in church so many times growing up. And Violet could not stop thinking of places her mother might have dumped Rose. That was how she thought about it: dumped or even chucked away, like trash lobbed out a car window at high speed. No doubt her mother would have argued some figment like she’d laid Rose to rest. But wherever Rose was, there was no chance it was the tranquil place she’d envisioned when she put the key into her car’s ignition that final time. She wasn’t resting, she was rotting in an unmarked grave, or else she’d already been eaten and composted by a family of black bears. That was the unpleasant truth of it. There was no death certificate. No burial records. There were three passable elements out of the four—earth, fire, water—and Josephine must have picked one and run with it.

  A few hours before discharge—Violet’s toxicology results came back clean—Detective Donnelly came by. He apologized. Last night was all his fault, he’d said. He’d been planning to get in touch. Douglas had shown up at the station yesterday afternoon with a diary he said proved Josephine had been harassing Rose, but when police reviewed it, they’d found a number of pages had been ripped out. Violet’s father had said he’d always had a nagging feeling about last year’s surveillance tape from the train station. There had been something of a stiffness missing from Rose’s gait. He thought, at first, freedom had relaxed her a bit, but ever since he’d quit drinking he’d been asking more questions and paying closer attention to the timing of things. Rose went missing from the family photos shortly after he’d first suggested trying to track Rose down through a private investigator. His car was keyed, supposedly by Rose, around the same time Josephine began accusing him of having affairs. Once Rose “resurfaced,” Douglas noticed Josephine started treating her like the family dog; if something was missing, “Rose” took it for collateral; if something broke inexplicably, “Rose” did it in a vengeful rage.

  In light of his conversations with Douglas, Donnelly had driven down Rose’s old missing-person flyer to Newburgh, where the UPS store manager had said he’d never seen Rose in his life. According to one of the clerks, the owner of the box was a middle-aged brunette who tended to talk on her cell phone and bitch about the prices as though he were personally trying to rip her off. “I considered your mother,” Donnelly told Violet. “But I knew her as a blonde. When she last came to our station, your mother was blond.”

  “Her letters came so regularly,” Violet said. “When I wrote her, she got back almost immediately.”

  “It’s a service they have. Whenever an envelope arrived for her, the store called the number she included in her letter to you.”

  “That number went to a disposable, I think,” Violet said. “She threw it in the creek.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Beryl said. “Do you have Josephine in custody?”

  Donnelly nodded. “She went back to Old Stone Way early this afternoon. She’d spent the morning shopping in Rhinebeck. Said if she was going to be arrested, she wanted to be wearing a new a dress. She’d even been to the beautician. She told the mug shot photographer she’d had her makeup professionally applied. Excuse me if I say that gave the boys a laugh. They’ve been calling her Maybelline. You know, Maybe she’s born with it …”

  Violet was too tired to smile. “Whatever it is, she was definitely born with it.” But the second she said it, she wondered if it was true. Was it abuse or genetics that made her mother the way she was? Maybe Josephine’s genes were the match and her own mother’s abuse was the thing that struck it. Whatever the cause, Violet couldn’t do much but stand back and watch the flames twirl.

  At the very least, Violet was more certain than ever that she wasn’t her mother. No matter what horrors happened in her life, nothing short of a brain transplant could make her see the world the way Josephine did.

  WILLIAM HURST

  HE
RE ARE THE things Will made dead certain the prosecutor couldn’t charge his mother with:

  Manslaughter 2 (class C felony) for intentionally causing Rose to commit suicide. There was still Violet’s testimony, in which she claimed their mother had accosted Rose with a photo of a dismembered baby in all its burgundy gore. But Josephine’s defense lawyer—a gorgeous, if paunchy, silver-haired fox, who professed his love for her the second their trial was over—was quick to remind the jury that Violet was a druggie who regularly saw things that didn’t exist: Aztecs, Hindu symbols, messages from the mystical “beyond.” During the trial, he brought up what he called Violet’s “schizophrenic breakdown.” He pulled out her junior-class yearbook and pointed to a picture of Imogene and Violet, above the caption: Psychonauts. Will’s mother had destroyed the latter portions of Rose’s pregnancy journal herself, and Will swore on God’s holy Bible that he’d never read anything along the lines of the incriminating passages his father had described. Technically speaking, it was a false, purposefully misleading statement. But Will was pretty certain God placed a much higher priority on honoring one’s mother. Will still had it in his heart: ChristLove. As soon as it was safe, Will had logged in to Rose’s e-mail and wiped her whole history clean. In-box, outbox, everything.

  Identity theft and criminal possession of stolen property (class E felony and class A misdemeanor) for possessing and using credit cards in Rose’s name. Before Will left for the police station early that morning, he’d dressed in the clothes his mother had left out for him. It was casual for a change. A sweatshirt with submarine appliqués and a pair of cuffed jeans. Sliding them over his hips, he’d felt something stiff and rectangular in the pocket. Credit cards. Four of them in Rosette P. Hurst’s name. Sure, Josephine might have put them there to frame him; in one moment of sacrilegious thinking the thought had crossed Will’s mind. But he liked to think she’d left them there because she trusted him, and she knew he would do the right thing if everything were to go wrong. With a policeman waiting outside the Hursts’ one locking door, Will had chopped them up over the toilet with the same razor-sharp scissors his mother used to trim his hair. Gone forever in a couple stuttering flushes. (Sorry for the holdup, officer! My nervous stomach goes crazy when I’m alone with my monstrous father!) There were no incriminating goods. Will’s mother had used the cards entirely on museums, haircuts, and lunches at the 21 Club. She’d bought tickets to Come Back Little Sheba and Legally Blonde: The Musical.