Mother, Mother
Koren Zailckas

A family is a tyranny ruled over by its weakest member.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

through fog, it is impossible to perceive fiery eyes greedy claws jaws through fog one sees only the shimmering of nothingness … were it not for its suffocating weight and the death it sends down one would think it is the hallucination of a sick imagination but it exists for certain it exists

—ZBIGNIEW HERBERT,

“THE MONSTER OF MR. COGITO”

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

William Hurst

Violet Hurst

Q & A: Koren Zailckas

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

WILLIAM HURST

HER FACE WAS the first thing William Hurst saw when he opened his eyes from his not-so-sweet dreams. His mother, Josephine, was smiling down at him, her blue eyes misty-soft, sunlight streaming through her hair, the same way it did to the happy Jesus in Will’s Storybook Bible.

On this particular Saturday, mother was both a noun and a verb.

Behind her, at the end of Will’s bed, was the frog habitat he’d begged for all summer. It had a paddling pond for tadpoles and a rocky ledge where frogs could doze beneath a canopy of green plastic clover.

Will knew he should be jabbering with excitement. There she was, waiting for him to pump his fist and thrash with glee (not that he would ever dare jump on the bed). But something was off. The timing didn’t add up.

“Is today my birthday?” Will asked. “Did I do something to deserve an extra-special reward?”

“No,” Josephine said. “Today isn’t your birthday. And you, little man, are my extra-special reward.”

She reached for the boy’s face, as if to give his bandaged chin a playful pinch or tuck his too-long hair behind his earlobe. But then the phone rang and her freshly moisturized hand froze, suspended in the space. She pulled away and padded off in her slippers to answer it, a Velcro roller tumbling out of her hair and sticking, burr-like, in the carpet.

The house should have been quiet now that Will’s sixteen-year-old sister Violet had been banished. Oddly, the Hurst family home was louder. Even after his mother hung up her cell phone, her voice remained nervous, her actions rackety. Will followed her downstairs to the kitchen, where the radio was already on, cranked to WRHV. Cupboard doors slammed. Silverware barrel-rolled as she jostled the drawers.

The rotten-egg smell of his father’s morning shower wafted down the staircase. The well water was sulfuric. Violet liked to say that hell smells like sulfur. So do places infested with demons. If Will believed his mother—and he had no reason not to—demons were rebels like Violet. They fell from grace when they looked into God’s gentle eyes and announced they didn’t need him anymore.

At the kitchen table, Josephine asked, “Is a noun a doing word, a describing word, or a naming word?”

“A describing word,” Will told her between swallows of oatmeal.

Josephine’s smile—a bright sideways sliver of moon—made it impossible for him to know whether he’d answered right or wrong.

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “Which word is the noun in this sentence: ‘I always know what I am doing.’”

“What.”

“I said, which word is the noun in this sentence—”

“No, Mom. I wasn’t asking, What? I was trying to tell you ‘what’ is the answer.”

“Oh,” Josephine said. “Oh, I was expecting you to say ‘I.’ But I suppose ‘what’ is right in this instance too.”

The portable phone screamed in its cradle. Josephine picked it up and wandered out of the kitchen saying, “No, I told you. I have a twelve-year-old special-needs son. She’s a danger to him. I can’t have her here.”

Will had autistic spectrum disorder with comorbid epilepsy. To him, that always sounded like a good thing—the word spectrum being halfway to spectacular. But Will knew his differences secretly shamed his family, his father, Douglas, in particular. At Cherries Deli, Will was always aware of his dad’s gaze lingering on the youth soccer leagues eating postgame sundaes. Probably, Douglas longed for a sturdier and more social son—a buzz-cut bruiser who could shower and climb stairs unsupervised, without the nagging threat of seizures.

Will’s mother tried to put a positive spin on his health conditions. Once when Will was in a wallowing mood, he’d blubbered, “I’m not like normal people!” And Josephine had consoled him by saying, “No, you’re not. And thank God for that. Normal people are dim-witted and boring.”

Will had received his dual diagnosis nine months ago, and his mother had been homeschooling him ever since. A onetime academic, Josephine was every bit as good as Will’s former teachers. Plus, she custom-made his curriculum. She was patient with Will in math, where it took him ages to grasp square roots, and rode him relentlessly in language arts, where she prided herself on the quality of his writing and his ability to read above grade level.

Violet used to tell Will that he was blessed to have autism. She was studying Buddhism, and she said that Will must have been an exceptionally good person in a past life. A patient, selfless, saintly sort of person. So in this life, he’d been rewarded for his past goodness with heightened sensitivities. According to Violet, Will felt things more deeply and understood things most people overlooked, and this made his everyday more like Nirvana.

Josephine didn’t appreciate his sister’s interest in Eastern religion. She didn’t like the humming sound of Violet’s Tibetan singing bowl, her woodsy incense, the picture of Geshla in a glitzy gold frame on her bedside table.

The Hursts were Catholic. Whenever Violet sat cross-legged with a strand of mala beads, Josephine told her to put away her “faux rosary.” Back in August, Violet had shaved off all her hair with their father’s electric beard trimmer. Will remembered Douglas storming into the family room, a long brown wisp threaded through his fingers, shouting, “Violet! What is the meaning of this?!” Without so much as turning her bald head away from her guided-meditation DVD, Violet had said: “Meanings are the illusion of a deluded mind, Dad. Stop trying to squeeze reality into a verbal shape.”

Violet would not allow herself to be squeezed into anyone’s reality.

“Violet is unpredictable,” Josephine liked to say. “Just when a person thinks she’s got Violet pegged, she transforms like ice into water.”

That was when the trouble started, with one of Violet’s transformations. His sister’s “extreme personality changes” were one of the reasons Josephine had spent the last forty minutes on the phone, whispering about “crisis wards,” “involuntary commitment,” and other words Will couldn’t find in his Scholastic Dictionary.

“Violet is sick,” his mom had explained weeks earlier, after Violet had once again made her dissolve into tears. “You know how parts of our bodies get sick sometimes?” she’d added, dabbing at her eyes. “Like, we get stomachaches or sore throats? Well, Violet is sick in the part of her brain that controls her feelings.”

Will assumed Violet’s brain was sick because she had stopped eating food. Well, not all food. Violet had recently stopped drinking everything except pomegranate juice or milk, and stopped eating everything besides Uncle Ben’s instant rice or a stenchy combination of mung beans and sugar.

As her body got smaller, all of Violet’s clothes started to look like disguises. She wore long-underwear tops, Douglas’s dress shirts, and low-crotched pants that made her look like one of Ali Baba’s forty thieves. Their mother said Violet wore a gauzy kerchief because people at school made fun of her bald-headedness. But when Will asked Violet, she told him she was covering her head because she was doing sallekhana.

“Is that Buddhist?” Will had asked.

”No,” Violet said. “It’s Jainist.”

“But she is suicidal,” Josephine told the person on the phone now. “I’ve done some research, and this Jainist thing—or however you say it—is a ritual fast to death.”

Still in her bathrobe, Josephine was hunched on a stool at the kitchen island. The remaining rollers were gone from her Bambibrown hair, but she’d been too distracted to reach for her comb. Curls corkscrewed from her scalp at bonkers angles. “Presentation counts”: that was what she’d always taught Will. Seeing her unkempt disturbed him more than almost anything else, and that said a lot given the circumstances.

Will hovered by the stove, trying to feel the stitches beneath the surgical tape on his chin. He made no attempt to disguise his eavesdropping.

“I feel like you’re asking me to choose between my children,” Josephine told the mystery caller. “I love my daughter more than words can express, but I’m terrified of her. She critically injured my son. Uh-huh. Yes. I am afraid for our lives.”

Whumpa whumpa whump. Josephine’s ballpoint pen was the only sound while the person on the line spoke at length.

“I know we’re not the only victims here. Violet suffers the effects of her condition more than anyone. Uh-huh. I agree. We’ve tried to get her the medical attention she needs, but she flies into a rage at the very suggestion of it.” She paused and listened briefly. “That—” Josephine’s voice splintered. She jotted down 5150 hold on her notepad and framed it with stars. “That breaks my heart. But if you’re telling me this is her best chance at recovery, then I guess I don’t have much choice.”

Will’s chest twanged with pity and helplessness. He wanted to protect his mother every bit as much as she wanted to safeguard him. It was Will who got hurt last night, but their mother was the one Violet really wished dead.

Of all the crazy that had transpired the night before, Will had felt most unsafe when he saw the way his sister eyed his mother across the dining room table. How Violet-like she’d been, glowering with her hangdog neck and hooded eyes. Anyone else might have mistaken her for someone meek and self-punishing. But Will knew the truth: Violet thought she was proof of nature over nurture. She didn’t need their mom’s loving care to survive.

Will crossed the kitchen and put a supportive arm around his mother’s sashed waist.

Josephine cupped the mouthpiece with her palm and whispered, “Don’t worry, sweetie. You’re safe now. I promise. I won’t ever let her hurt you again.”

VIOLET HURST

ON HER FIRST night in the psychiatric ER, Violet found herself curled up on a stretcher in a hallway that smelled like a combination of dirty hair and Lysol. Her brain was still steaming like an engine turned off after revving, but thanks to the liquid charcoal she’d sipped earlier, she felt a little more coherent, a little less like the universe was a big holographic time loop.

On the stretcher opposite Violet was a thickset Hawaiian woman. She was sitting bolt upright, her eyes flitting around wildly.

“I feel a question,” the woman said. “Is it okay to be me?”

Violet’s first thought was for the woman’s privacy. She assumed the woman was praying aloud or having a heart-to-heart with a voice that she alone could hear. She tried hard not to look at her and instead stared down at the disposable foam slippers she’d received when she arrived barefoot.

At this time last week Violet had been registering by phone for the SAT. She’d been writing an English paper and trying to decide if she ought to go to the Halloween dance. All that seemed like it happened in a previous life. Less than three hours ago, Violet had been reincarnated as a mental patient. She’d walked through three sets of locking doors and a metal detector. She’d peed into a series of cups and had blood drawn from both arms. She’d been stripped of her clothes and handed a pair of pajamas that refused to stay snapped at the waist.

The Hawaiian woman continued her eerie chant. “Why can’t I be me? What’s so unlovable about me?”

“She’s talking to you, you know?” This came from the young Puerto Rican man on the stretcher to Violet’s right. He was lying on his stomach, a supermarket tabloid open between his propped-up elbows. From the looks of it, he was methodically tearing up the pages and Frankensteining the shreds back together in grotesque combinations, pairing Angelina Jolie’s mouth with John Travolta’s chin and Simon Cowell’s nose.

“Me?” Violet asked stupidly. They were the only three people in the hall, save for the constant flux of orderlies and nurses.

“She says she’s an intuitive,” the man said.

“Oh.” Violet didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what that meant.

“Oahu, over there? She’s got the gift. She gets possessed by the people around her. She feels what we’re feeling, get it? Like some Invasion of the Body Snatchers shit.”

Suddenly accusatory, the woman stopped flailing and turned to stare directly at Violet.

“Who’s controlling you?” she demanded.

Violet thought of Oahu again half an hour later, when the intake nurse asked her, “Do you hear voices or see things other people cannot see or hear?”

While the counselor ran through a series of questions, spitting them out like rapid gunfire, Violet wept convulsively, drawing tissue after tissue from the box balanced between her pajamaed knees.

“Do you have a history of mental health problems?” the counselor asked. “Do you know your clinical diagnosis?”

“No,” Violet said. “Neither.”

“Are you currently taking any drugs, legal or otherwise?”

“No.” She paused. “Well, after school today I ate some seeds a friend gave me. Flower seeds. Morning glories?” According to the Internet drug forum Violet and her best friend, Imogene Field, had consulted, the LSA the seeds contained was a cheap, legal version of LSD. LSA was supposed to bring euphoria, rainbow fractals, and what one user called “an overall feeling of pleasant fuckedness.” But what began as a fun afternoon with friends had turned into a train-wreck trip when Violet went home for dinner. Every moment since had been mental cannibalism. A strange thought, but that was exactly how it felt: like Violet’s brain had swallowed two-thirds of itself.

“How many seeds did you eat? How did they make you feel?”

“Five, I think? And the water they’d been soaked in. I felt nauseous, mostly. And my thighs cramped up. I guess I also felt giddy and, later, spaced out and trippy. But then my family came after me.” Violet felt her eyes fill and run over. “Or maybe I lost it on them?”

After school, she and Imogene had gone to the Fields’ house, where Imogene’s brother, Finch, and his best friend, Jasper, had shown them a mason jar filled with water, lemon juice, and the ground-up remains of the Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds that they had pulverized in the Fields’ coffee grinder. Mr. and Mrs. Field, who preferred to go by Beryl and Rolf, had been away at the studio apartment they kept in Manhattan, where they were meeting with a new oncologist.

Finch assured everyone that the seeds were organic.

Imogene suggested adding ginger, just in case the concoction made them feel nauseated.

Jasper questioned whether extraction was potent enough, so they spooned four or five seeds into each glass like a garnish.

The taste hadn’t been sickening. It had reminded Violet of wheatgrass. Jasper insisted it tasted more like very weak hot chocolate. It didn’t work at first.

“What happened when you lost it on your family?” the nurse asked.

“I was looking at my mom, and she was a different person. But it was also like she’d always been a different person. Like, at the end of every day, when no one else is around, she unzips her suit of flesh. I know it was just the acid distorting things, but as, like, an analogy it holds.” Violet rubbed her eyes. The sockets ached.

“How does your family get along as a whole?”

“We don’t.”

“Let’s go back to what happened tonight. I know you’re shaken up, but this is important. Do you think you can tell me more about the assault?”

The word assault made Violet feel turned upside down, kicked in the stomach, and orphaned at the same time. She was in mortal terror of her mother. She felt guilty about Will. She was scared she’d said something she couldn’t take back, and committed a crime that would fit her for an orange prison jumpsuit. Even trying to remember what happened felt like a threat to her physical safety.

“Have you ever attempted suicide?” the counselor asked.

“I suppose. Technically.” Still, Violet tried to explain that the Jainist fast to death wasn’t really suicide. “It’s kind of like a peaceful way to give up your body. Not an act of despair, but an act of hope. You’re not giving up on life, you’re just passing into the next stage of it.”

It made sense to Violet, but the counselor looked dubious.

“Do you consider yourself ‘eating disordered’?”

“Not really. It’s more like a detox gone too far. I just wanted to feel pure, like all the venom’s been sucked out of me.”

Sallekhana was gradual. First, you fasted one day a week. Then, you ate only on alternate days. Next, you gave up foods one by one: first fruits, then vegetables, then rice, and then juice. After that, you drank only water. Then, you drank it only on alternate days. In the final step, you gave up water too, erased your bad karma, and hoped to shit you weren’t reborn into another nightmare.

Violet looked down at her hands. This was a newly acquired nervous tic. A month into fasting, her hands went cold and her fingernails started to turn blue. Ever since, Violet had been hiding them under thick layers of Night Sky, a sparkly navy polish.

Within the hospital’s cinder-block walls, it was impossible to know whether it was dusk or dawn. “What time is it?” Violet asked.

“Ten p.m. Let me ask you again. Did you attack your brother with a knife?”

“I don’t remember. Everyone keeps asking me that. When are they going to stop asking? I keep saying, I don’t know.”

“Do you think you need to be admitted to the hospital?”

All the feeling trickled out of Violet’s arms. An old childhood fear—claustrophobia—set in.

“Please don’t make me stay,” Violet whispered.

“I know you’re frightened. People come here, and the idea of the hospital is scary. But you’re going through some difficult things, and the people here are trained to handle difficult things. You’re on a journey. The lights are out right now, but they will come on again. For the moment, I think we should give you a bed and a pill to help you get to sleep.”

“I’m afraid to go home,” Violet confessed. “But I don’t want to stay here.”

“I know, honey. But according to what your parents told us, you said and did some things that make you a threat to yourself or others. So we need to keep you here.”

The walls of the office seemed to constrict. Violet cast a helpless glance at the Audubon nature calendar that hung on the wall behind the nurse’s shoulder. October’s photo was a redwood forest—the kind of woodland scene that could make a person feel very awed and alone.

“For how long?” Violet asked.

“The next seventy-two hours.”

“There’s one more thing I haven’t told you.”

The counselor crossed her arms and blinked once.

Violet exhaled in a great gush. “I saw my sister last night.”

WILLIAM HURST

THEY DIDN’T USUALLY have school on Saturdays, but they’d fallen behind on account of prepping for Will’s coming math Regents exam. The state said students with disabilities only had to score fifty-five out of a possible hundred percent in order to pass. But it was important to both Will and his mom that he score at least a seventy-five. That was the grade that indicated “college readiness,” and it was Josephine’s endgame that Will graduate early and go on to Columbia in four years’ time.

“We don’t have to push ourselves too hard today,” Josephine said. “But a little bit of social studies will take our minds off last night. After that, I have to drive to Violet’s hospital and sign some forms. Does that sound okay?”

Will nodded. He adjusted his costume beard over the bruise on his chin. He fashioned his sister’s black bowed headband around his neck like a tie.

Ever since the controversy at Stone Ridge Elementary last fall, Will really had come to think of the breakfast nook as his new school. This had required some adjusting, of course. Gone were the familiar sights and smells of learning: pencil shavings, lunch-box rot, the stab-and-drag sound of chalk against a blackboard.

Sure, Will still nursed a few aching, phantom limbs: recess, book fairs, games of Heads-Up, 7-Up with lazy substitute teachers. When he confessed to missing weekly job assignments like “board eraser” or “math shelf helper,” his mom put him in charge of keeping her orchids evenly moist. When he got word of his former classmates’ field trip to watch Othello at the Rosendale movie theater, Josephine had, in her words, “done one better.” She’d driven Will to the city to see the real deal at the Met. She’d even bought him a new brass-buttoned blazer for the occasion.

When Will realized he’d never be in another school play, his mother had the idea to organize a one-man performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” He’d recited it in the Hursts’ formal sitting room, for an audience of Perrier-sipping ladies, mainly Josephine’s various girlfriends and golf partners from the Rondout Country Club. The verse had wormed its way into his long-term memory, and months later, Will still found himself crooning it under his breath:

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

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.

“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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