Читать книгу Mother, Mother: Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM - Koren Zailckas - Страница 16

VIOLET’S BOSS, MRS. D, was beyond understanding when Violet called to apologize about missing her shift at Dekker’s Farm Stand. Work was winding down there anyway. In less than a month, they’d be closed for the season.

“Take all the time you need, honey. The leaf-peepers are gone, and there’s not much work here anyway. The rest of the kids are out back doing popcorn shelling. I’ll tell them you called.” Violet smiled despite herself at the thought of her co-workers.

“Listen, when you’re feeling better, drop by and visit me,” Mrs. D continued. “I’ve got your paycheck, plus a stack of pear tarts I want you to take off my hands. For some reason, the city-its aren’t buying them this year. They must all be on the same Sugar Busters diet. No one gave me the memo.”

Violet had been working at Dekker’s for well over a year. It was fun, varied work: manning the cash register, helping plan the corn maze, arranging clumps of annuals in hanging baskets. Violet had been on staff there, literally, since the first moment she was allowed to work legally. Mrs. Dekker was the only person on the planet who could raise Violet’s appetite, no death threats involved. It wasn’t just that Mrs. D enjoyed feeding people; it was that she enjoyed people, all walks, enough to want to feed them. Any time of day, you could peek between the shelves of the baked-goods case—past the hand-punched donuts and oozing blueberry scones—and see Mrs. D laughing and bustling around in her apron, a lard smear on one lens of her glasses.

One day in the later stages of sallekhana, when Violet was supposed to be sipping little more than clear broth or celery juice, she’d succumbed to the siren song of Mrs. D’s warm, thrumming kitchen. The smells of fresh-baked bread and apple butter had hooked Violet around the neck like an old-fashioned vaudeville cane, and she’d stuffed her sallow face with all of the above. It was the equivalent of a food bender—a gastronomical blackout. She had glanced up halfway through a bowl of Mrs. D’s black bean chili and didn’t remember ladling it.

The Dekker’s gang referred to themselves as the box of broken toys. They were rejects, dropouts, freaks … and proud of it. Facial piercings twinkling, sorting new potatoes with bloodshot eyes, Violet and her co-workers knew how they must look to the Audi- and Beemer-driving crowd who took a wrong turn on the way to Dutchess County. One girl in the Dekker’s gang—a twenty-year-old single mother named Trilby—had the word Dickavore prominently tattooed on the inner slope of her thumb, and Mrs. D still let her work the register, even though customers were bound to see it as she counted their twenties.

Violet imagined that Mrs. D had been a teenage wildebeest herself. The twinkle in her eye whenever she overheard someone talking about hitchhiking to Burning Man betrayed her tacit approval. Once, when someone asked Mrs. D what she majored in at SUNY, she’d winked and replied, “It was the seventies. I majored in peace.”

After Violet had called Imogene and Dekker’s—the friends she considered family—there was the question of phoning her actual family. But what would she say?

The question of Will was freaking her out. Actually, it was spacing her out, making it impossible to focus on the therapists who were trying to tease epiphanies from her tangled-up brain. Violet worried that her brother was badly injured. She felt guilty, not only for whatever she’d allegedly done to hurt him, but for leaving him all alone at home with their mother.

Violet kept imagining an ER in the dead of night: Will’s shoulders raised to his ears, his teeth gritted and his nostrils flared, his brow knitted in suppressed pain. Serious damage to his right hand. That was the phrase the police officer had used, a phrase that made it impossible to gauge how badly he was hurt. Had things (fingers or parts of them) been severed and reattached? Would he be able to play the piano again? Violet visualized a round, white surgical light illuminating the space between Will and the doctor. She couldn’t bring herself to picture Will’s hand itself. Even the thought of blood—dripping from a tattered wound—made Violet’s throat constrict and her vision go shimmery. Her fear of blood went beyond your typical shut-your-eyes-during-a-horror-movie aversion. She’d had it ever since she’d seen the picture on her mother’s desk a few weeks before Rose ran away.

At the time, Rose and Violet had been seated in the breakfast nook, where they sometimes did their homework in silence, sitting at opposite ends of the table as though competing in a head-to-head competition. On the other side of the room, Josephine had been browning stew beef while Satie’s Gymnopédies played on the stereo in the background. Violet had been memorizing a series of Spanish flash cards. Hermana. Madre. Amiga. Conocida. (The unit was “People and Family.”) Rose had been working on something for her human biology class at SUNY. Her assignment was to draw a picture of the brain and label where the three different kinds of human memory were stored.

Like Josephine, Rose was a gifted artist. It was one of few bonds they shared and one that made Violet jealous as hell, especially on the afternoons when they’d take their canvases to the Poet’s Walk in Rhinebeck and, presumably, spend the whole day in side-by-side conversation as they painted the mountain-framed Hudson River. No matter how hard Violet tried, she couldn’t seem to infiltrate their discussions about painting terms and techniques—endless communions about “scumbling,” “wet-on-wet,” or the color phthalo blue. Josephine claimed Violet’s landscapes lacked richness and her earnest portraits looked like carnival caricatures. (Eventually, Violet started playing to this. Although she’d never shown the drawings to anyone, she’d done a horrifically ugly charcoal series of the Hursts as a three-ring circus. In them, her mother was the ringmaster, and Rose was the kind of trained animal who jumps through hoops.)

Anyway, Rose had been doing just fine sketching out the brain with black ballpoint pen. It was for science class, after all. Not the National Art Honor Society. But the very second Josephine saw, she’d insisted Rose draw her brain in colored pencil.

“No, Mom,” Rose had said. “It’s fine like this, really. I still have an anthropology paper to write.”

But Josephine had made the most monumental deal about the colored pencils that she had upstairs on the desk in her office. “But they’re a seventy-two-color set of Prismacolors! I just bought them yesterday at Catskill Art Supply!” Josephine’s eyes danced with glee while she said it. Her mouth had been corkscrewed into such a strange expression, like she was desperate to suppress a smile.

Rose had finally trudged upstairs, muttering something about how her forthcoming masterpiece was going to be lost on her professor, Mr. Cadaver-Travers.

She wasn’t gone long. Not more than thirty seconds passed before Rose came whooshing down the stairs like a flying ghoul. Her face was a mask of melted eye makeup and tears.

“That’s why you wanted me to go up there?!” Rose screamed, her voice breaking in the middle. “You are sick! You know that?!”

“Oh, Rose, you’re too sensitive! It was an accident! I forgot it was there!” their mom shouted back, dropping her knife on the chopping board beside a piece of sinew.

“Like hell you did!” Rose cried. “How much longer are you going to torture me? For the rest of college? For the rest of my life?”

“I’m the one who’s tortured! I mourn that baby!”

“In that case, you put that paper baby in a box and you bury it!” Rose thrust her finger at Josephine, at which point Violet had seen that her sister was shaking clear up to her shoulder.

Violet had never seen Rose so wild with emotion. But while a part of Violet had wanted to peel her fourteen-year-old butt off the bay window cushion and go put an arm around her sister, another part felt like her spine was made of concrete. Violet had sat, frozen in place, naïve and baffled by the source of the argument.

In fact, Violet had only been able to mobilize after her sister stormed out the front door, Josephine trailing behind her, screaming: “Every day I have to face the knowledge of who you are and what you’ve done! You are lost, Rose! You are morally and academically out to lunch! There’s no point to living the way you do it!”

Violet could still remember what she was thinking as she’d mounted the stairs. She’d been secretly and unforgivably thrilled that someone other than herself was in trouble.

Josephine’s office was a little room at the top of the stairs. Inside, there was a drawing desk, a goosenecked lamp, and at least a dozen yards of bookmarked art books. Much as the style bored Violet, even she couldn’t deny that Josephine knew her stuff. Her mother had always been most in her element when she was talking about the X-shaped composition of The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew or the fact that Murillo’s Two Women at a Window were really common prostitutes.

That said, what Violet had seen upon approaching Josephine’s desk was no Francisco de Zurbarán or Jusepe de Ribera. It was a color photocopy of a dead and possibly dismembered baby, its neck wrenched at a broken angle, as though someone had angled its slashed and bloodied face toward the camera lens on purpose. Its bloated umbilical cord (still attached) was slung on the other end over a bucket that was three inches deep with blood. In fact, blood was what Josephine might have called the “major theme of the composition”: It was smeared across the table. It was the viscous red shadow on the towel under and around the dead baby. It was the sheen on the instrument almost out of the frame—the one that looked like an oversized pair of tongs. The caption read: What a proud society we are: killing the defenseless in the name of a woman’s right to choose. In the upper right-hand corner was a friendly message from the sponsor: The Mid-Hudson Pro-Life Coalition invites you to stop the abortion agenda.

That photo was the main reason Violet had gone vegetarian. Anytime she smelled beef, anytime she saw a bloody cut of meat, she saw that picture of the late-term abortion. As for the incident, Violet had never mentioned it to anyone. She’d let it sit—or rot, really—in the part of her mind that Rose had labeled the amygdala in her drawing of the human brain. Violet never again set foot in her mother’s office, and she actively avoided thinking about what she’d seen there—what it meant about her mother, who’d seemed to delight in the pain she’d caused, and what it meant to Rose, who’d gotten the hell out of Dodge because she couldn’t stand to have her personal struggles batted around for sadistic sport anymore.

Violet leaned her head against the phone box, and when the faintness passed, she dialed 411 for the number of Kingston Hospital. The woman on the switchboard said there was no one by Will’s name in the system and explained that he’d probably already been treated and released.

So Will had no complications. It should have been a huge relief, but Violet wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it. Did it mean her mother had just blown a small thing out of proportion? It felt ominous—yet not entirely surprising—that everyone was purposefully leaving her in the dark.

Violet pictured her brother at home on the couch in his girlish nightgown, their mother feeding him ice chips from the palm of her hand. The image was disturbing in more ways than one. Because as much as Violet resented pampered Will, she also wanted badly to protect him from the light of his life. It seemed like only a matter of time before Josephine betrayed him the same way she had betrayed Rose, in a way that was designed to seem “accidental” and utterly deniable.

Violet thought Will would one day self-fulfill his mother’s prophecy exactly the way the rest of the Hursts had. Josephine said Rose was “lost” and Rose had gotten lost. Josephine liked to accuse Violet of being “crazy,” and out of nowhere, Violet had flipped her shit. Josephine treated Will like he was an extension of herself, and it seemed only a matter of time before he started treating people the same way she did. He was a good boy, but there was no way he’d grow into a good man with their mother bearing down on him, teaching him how to punish and manipulate.

Violet had read about a deity who came to Buddha and asked, “Who is the best friend one has at home?” Buddha had answered: “Mata mittam sake ghave” (“Mother is the best friend one has at home”). But a shitty mother made either criminals or lifelong victims. The only real question, in Violet’s mind, was which one would Will become?

After phone time, Violet and Edie were sprawled on the floor of the dayroom, playing a game of bingo that the ladies’ auxiliary had recently donated.

“O twenty-four,” Edie said. “So what are you gonna do about Rose?” During afternoon group therapy, Violet had discussed Rose’s great escape and bizarre resurgence.

“Bingo!” Violet was too dignified for victory dances. “Ignore her, maybe. I’m not sure I trust Rose. It feels like she’s only doing this because she wants something.”

“Your turn to call …,” Edie told Violet. “So you’re not gonna write her back?”

“Have you noticed some of the numbers are worn off these balls? This set has to be fifty years old. How much do you think we’d make if we listed it on eBay?” Her attempt at a diversion didn’t work. There was a loaded silence; the other girls were staring slantwise at Violet while they stacked their bingo markers. “Pissed off as I was about the way Rose left, I was glad she got away. I always thought she was too. There’s something creepy about Rose coming back, especially now, at the height—the fucking zenith—of Hurst hysteria—”

“Hold up,” Corinna said, using her bingo card to form a T for time-out. “Do you think your sister is living under a fake identity?” She didn’t give Violet a chance to say she didn’t know before she added: “That shit is hard. I’ve tried that. Making up names and addresses. Always worrying someone’s gonna recognize you while you’re pumping gas and call out your name.”

“Why’d you run away?” Edie asked.

Corinna shrugged. “Don’t know. I like the idea of clean slates.”

Maybe it was Violet’s imagination, but everyone in the room seemed to exhale at once. Anyone who’d taken a whack at suicide knew that was a blank slate too.

In a way, Violet’s sallekhana wasn’t all that different from Rose’s decision to take off. Fasting to death was the only way Violet could think of to put space between herself and her mom. It was the only way she could conceive of ditching her post as beloathed daughter and beloved scapegoat.

Corinna wistfully twiddled her ID bracelet. “Seriously, though. Write that bitch Rose and ask her how she ran away without anyone catching on. After I leave here, I have to go back to sharing a trailer with my three-hundred-pound mother and her maggot-infested dogs. I need to know the methods of big sister’s magic. Please? I’ll even lend you a stamp.”

Violet still had no idea what she was going to do when she got discharged. She refused to go home, yet the idea of cutting herself loose made her feel guilty and terrified. Guilty … because wasn’t it heartless to disown your own mom? Terrified … because TV or, maybe, society at large had taught her a person couldn’t succeed in life without a loving, supportive family. But if life hadn’t handed you great role models or lessons, weren’t you obligated to go out and seek some for yourself?

Corinna had a point, though: How did a person do it? If it were summer, Violet could take a tent and live at campsites. But winter was coming, and Violet’s next-to-nothing savings wouldn’t cover a camper. She could hitch or take a bus south to warmer weather, but then what? Ironically, the only person who could teach Violet how to disappear completely was the same person she felt all too conflicted about. Very suddenly, all roads led to Rose.