CHAPTER 7
When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other hand reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his eyes. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
My mother has found me.
My mother’s condition is not as consistent as some might think. The intensity of her insanity waxes and wanes with no predictable schedule or trigger. Of course, it doesn’t help that she’s off her meds. When it’s good, people might not guess there’s anything wrong with her. Those are the days when the guilt of my anger and frustration toward her eat away at me. When it’s bad, I might walk out of my room to find a dead-man-turned-toy on the floor.
To be fair, she has never played with corpses before, at least, not that I’ve seen. Before the world fell apart, she’d always been on the edge and often several steps beyond it. But my dad’s desertion, then later the attacks, intensified everything. Whatever rational part of her that had been holding her back from diving into the darkness simply dissolved.
I think about burying the body, but a cold part of my mind tells me that this is still the best deterrent I could have. Any sane person who looks through the glass doors would run far, far away. We now play a permanent game of I-am-crazier-and-scarier-than-you. And in that game, my mother is our secret weapon.
I walk cautiously toward the bathrooms where the shower is running. My mother hums a haunting melody, one that I think she made up. She used to sing it to us when she was in her half-lucid state. A wordless tune that is both sad and nostalgic. It may have had words to it at one point because every time I hear it, it evokes a sunset over the ocean, an ancient castle, and a beautiful princess who throws herself off the castle walls into the pounding surf below.
I stand outside the bathroom door, listening to her hum in the shower. I associate this song with her coming back from a particularly crazy phase. Usually, she hummed it to us as she patched up whatever bruises or slashes she had caused during her crazy phase.
She was always gentle and genuinely sorry during these times. I think it might have been an apology of a sort. Never enough, obviously, but it may have been her way of reaching back to the light, of letting us know that she was surfacing out of the darkness and into the gray zone.
She hummed it incessantly after Paige’s “accident.” We never did find out exactly what happened. Only my mother and Paige were in the house at the time, and only they will ever know the real story. My mother cried for months after, blaming herself. I blamed her too. How could I not?
“Mom?” I call out through the closed bathroom door.
“Penryn!” she calls out through the shower splashes.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Are you? Have you seen Paige? I can’t find her anywhere.”
“We’ll find her, okay? How did you find me?”
“Oh, I just did.” My mother doesn’t usually lie, but she did have a habit of being vaguely evasive.
“How did you find me, Mom?”
The shower runs freely for a moment before she answers. “A demon told me.” Her voice is full of reluctance, full of shame. The world being what it is these days, I might even consider believing her, except that no one but her sees or hears her personal demons.
“That was nice of him,” I say. The demons usually took the blame for the crazy, bad things my mother did. They rarely got credit for anything good.
“I had to promise I’d do something for him.” An honest answer. And a warning.
My mother is stronger than she looks, and when given the upper hand of surprise, she can do serious harm. She’s been contemplating defense all her life—how to sneak up on an attacker, how to hide from The Thing That Watches, how to banish the monster back to hell before it steals the souls of her children.
I consider the possibilities as I lean against the bathroom door. Whatever it is she’s promised her demon is guaranteed to be unpleasant. And quite possibly painful. The only question is who the pain will be inflicted upon.
“I’m just going to collect some stuff and hole up in the corner office,” I say. “I might be in there a day or two, but don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want you coming into the office. But don’t leave the building okay? There’s water and food in the kitchen.” I think about telling her to be careful, but of course, that’s ridiculous. For decades, she has been careful about people and monsters trying to kill her. Since the attacks, she’s finally found them.
“Penryn?”
“Yeah?”
“Make sure you wear the stars.” She’s referring to the yellow asterisks she’s sewn on our clothes. How I can not wear them is beyond me. It’s on everything we own.
“Okay, Mom.”
Despite her star comment, she sounds lucid. Maybe that’s not the healthiest thing after desecrating a corpse.
~
I’m not as helpless as the average teen.
When Paige was two years old, my father and I came home to find her broken and crippled. My mother stood over her in deep shock. We never did find out exactly what happened or how long she stood frozen over Paige. My mother cried and pulled almost all her hair out without saying a word for weeks.
When she finally came out of it, the first thing she said was that I needed to take self defense lessons. She wanted me to learn to fight. She simply took me to a martial arts studio and prepaid in cash for five years worth of training.
She talked with the sensei and found out that there were different kinds of martial arts – taekwondo for fighting when you have a little distance, jujitsu for up close and personal, and escrima for knife fighting. She drove all over town signing me up for all of them and then some. Shooting lessons, archery lessons, survivalist workshops, Sikh camps, women’s self defense, anything she could think of, everything she could find.
When my father found out about it a few days later, she had already spent thousands of dollars we didn’t have. My dad, already grey with worry about hospital bills for poor Paige, lost all color in his face when he learned what she had done.
After that rush of manic activity, she seemed to forget about ever having signed me up. The only time she asked me about it was a couple of years later when I found her collection of newspaper articles. I’d seen her cut them out of the newspaper now and then but never wondered what they were. She saved them in an old-fashioned photo album, a pink one that said “Baby’s First Album.” One day, it was out on the table, open and inviting me to glance at it.
The bold title of the article carefully pasted on the open page read, “Killer Mom Says the Devil Made Me Do It.”
I flipped to the next page. “Mother Throws Toddlers into Bay and Watches Them Drown.”
Then the next. “Child Skeletons Found in Woman’s Yard.”
In one of the news stories, a six year old kid was found two feet from the front door. His mother had stabbed him over a dozen times before she went upstairs to do the same to his little sister.
The story quoted a relative who said that the mother had tried desperately to drop off the kids at her sister’s place only a few hours before the massacre, but the sister had to go to work and couldn’t take the kids. The relative said it was as though the mother was afraid of what might happen, as if she felt the darkness coming. He described how after the mother snapped out of it and realized what she had done, she nearly tore herself to pieces with her horror and anguish.
All I could think about was what it must have been like for that kid who tried so hard to make it out of the house to get help.
I don’t know how long my mother stood there watching me looking through the articles before asking, “Are you still taking your self defense classes?”
I nodded.
She didn’t say anything. She just walked past with wooden boards and books stacked in her arms.
I found them later on the lid of the toilet seat. For two weeks, she insisted we keep it there to keep the demons from coming up through the pipes. Easier to sleep, she said, when the devil wasn’t whispering to her all night.
I never missed a single training session.