I FALL ASLEEP. A FEW HOURS LATER OREN WAKES ME, POKING A LONG umbrella in the space between my nose and my eye. I slap it away and open my eyes. Oren is wearing a mustard-yellow newsboy cap and a dark beige raincoat. He has an unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth. “It’s nearly two o’clock in the afternoon,” he says. “How are you feeling?”
I quickly assess this by patting the bandage; it’s not throbbing as much. “I’m okay.” It’s dark in the room. I pull open the curtains. Rain is pattering against the window.
Gavin comes in carrying a silver tray with a croissant, soft butter, little jars of jam, and a glass of orange juice. I take the tray from him and set it on my lap; he smiles at me sympathetically and leaves the room. I bite into the croissant.
“Eat fast,” says Oren, opening one side of his raincoat and checking—for real—a gold pocket watch on a chain. “I made this happen for you today. We need to get going.”
“Mmm,” I say, my mouth full of buttery croissant, as I step gingerly out of bed. I’m still wearing what’s left of my rumpled, muddy, damp devil costume. Oren flips open a red embossed notebook, intently studying whatever’s inside. “What are those, clues?”
“Directions to Kingside Park Hospital,” he says.
“Why don’t you just use Google Maps?”
Oren looks up at me with an uncomprehending expression on his face.
“Never mind.”
Ten minutes later, Oren is driving us through the rain-soaked hills in his old pimento-colored Volkswagen Beetle, which I didn’t know was still in existence. I’m momentarily disoriented by the fact that I have no idea how long it’s been since I left the grounds of the castle. Time plays tricks on you at Moldavia. Days turn into weeks into months. I know it’s still early June. Plenty of time to still call Harvard and tell them I’m postponing for the year. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.
I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t done that yet. Maybe part of me needs Harvard as some kind of insurance; so I don’t get trapped at Moldavia if things continue to go sour.
I let myself be hypnotized by the squeaky sound of the windshield wipers as they whoosh the world into view for brief semicircular flashes before the dashing rain blocks it out again. Oren takes his pipe out of his mouth as he turns onto a long stretch of road, steering with one hand. The Beetle’s jaundiced headlights barely pierce the lowlying fog. I watch the misty scenery passing outside. “So you stopped seeing Mom, huh?”
“Not entirely,” he says, in a clipped, slightly defensive manner.
“Okay. . . .”
“As Dad got sicker, I was in more demand at the castle. Hayley was much better at these visits anyway. She has a soothing presence on Mom. I don’t.”
It seems as if Oren has been avoiding our mom just like I have.
“It gets frustrating,” says Oren.
“Mom?”
“The anosognosia,” Oren replies.
I look at him. “Sorry?”
“Mom is a paranoid schizophrenic, Dar. Mentally ill people don’t always realize they’re ill . . . so they stop taking their medication. Mom has a history of not complying with her medication regimen. She cheeks her pills.”
I guess that would explain how she seemed to get worse so suddenly when I was a kid. “In those letters, Mom talks about a kid Dad fathered at Moldavia.”
“Mom is delusional,” he responds, in the impatient manner of having to repeat the same fact to someone who’s tragically slow-witted.
“Well . . . what do you know about Gavin?” I keep thinking about this kid.
“The intern? He grew up at Moldavia. Remember Yolanda Deir Nasterfeld?”
“Conjoined Connie? Who OD’ed? You’re not going to tell me she’s his mom.”
Oren clears his throat and nods.
“But Gavin thinks his mom is coming back for him!”
“There’s no point in breaking a kid’s heart,” says Oren. “Franklin became Gavin’s legal guardian. Gavin just doesn’t know that.”
I lay my hand on the window and sigh. Gavin, who’s just a kid, will find out the truth eventually, after years of building up hope. No one at Moldavia has the time for inconvenient truths, it seems. Everything just gets shoved aside, hidden, relegated, shelved until later. Mean little decisions keep getting made.
“Even Hayley agreed not to tell Gavin about his mom?”
“Oh, Hayley doesn’t know about all that,” says Oren.
I fiddle with the glove compartment. “Who is Gavin’s dad, then?”
Oren chews on his pipe. “How would I know?”
“Don’t you think it’s all a little suspicious?” I say.
“What’s suspicious?”
“That Dad took so much interest—”
“What if Dad just wanted to do something decent and kind? You always see the worst in him—”
“And you always look the other way!”
“I do not! Dad wronged us both,” says Oren, gripping the wheel. “He just hurt you faster and deeper. But the damage he did to me was slower, subtler, spread out over time. You weren’t the only victim.”
“I know,” I say quietly. I get that I wasn’t my dad’s only victim. I definitely get that now. But that doesn’t make any of the pain go away. It doesn’t lessen anything.
Oren removes the pipe from his mouth. “We’re here.”
Oren pulls into a parking lot. There’s a sign covered with wet leaves that says Kingside Park Hospital. I only vaguely remember coming here. It’s been so long.
The sound of unsnapping seat belts and opening car doors becomes a rush inside my ears as my pulse quickens. Suddenly, I’m facing the entrance to the hospital, super-nervous and unsure. I have no idea what I’m going to say to my mother after all this time.
The rain has let up, leaving only this pesky drizzle in its aftermath. The main administration building we’re facing is a converted yellow-brick mansion with a curved driveway in front. More modern-looking glass buildings are attached to this main one like careless cosmetic surgery. I can tell right away this is going to be one of those places with musty air, muted voices, every footstep audible, the sadness trapped inside the paint.
“Hold up a beat,” says Oren.
I turn around. He’s leaning against the car, lighting up his pipe. Tiny bursts of flame and then a question mark of smoke. Behind him, in the near distance: pine trees, wisps of fog circling around their tops. His cap shadows part of his face, making him look almost debonair. I stop walking up the cement stairs to the entrance and grip the metal railing tightly. The smell of the tobacco is making me feel sick.
“When did you start smoking a pipe?” I ask. Oren looks at the pipe like he didn’t expect to see it in his hand. Then I get it. “That’s not normal tobacco, is it?”
“Noooo,” he says, with a little laugh. “This is my own blend.”
“Do you always have to be on something?”
“This is my Visiting Mom blend. I have different blends for different occasions. I can’t face certain situations . . . without seeing them through a slightly softer lens.”
“Well, maybe you should man up a bit. See the world as it is, you know?”
“Sorry. Not for me. I can’t face this world alone.”
But I’m standing right here, I think.
“Would you like some?” He extends the pipe out to me.
My lips are tight. “I want to go in now.”
He nods. “Dar. Mom is chronically ill. It’s been a rough road. If she doesn’t stop taking her medicine altogether, sometimes the meds stop working, and no one knows why. She gets better, but then she gets worse again. I just want you to be prepared.”
Suddenly, I don’t feel prepared at all.
“Also, because of her medication, she may not look like how you remember.”
I frown. “Like how?”
Oren knocks the pipe against the heel of his burgundy-colored riding boot. He looks at the sky, adjusts his cap. “I’m glad it stopped raining. I enjoy the first thirty minutes after a long rainstorm.”
“Why the first thirty?”
“The birds,” he says, but there’s no follow-up to that. We just walk inside.
Oren speaks quietly to a woman at a desk; we’re led into a waiting area. We sit on a bench. Wood-framed windows with wired glass smudge the outside. The walls are a peeling institutional pistachio green—from a certain time. I hunch over, studying my phantom reflection in the buffed, industrial-tile floors hospitals always have.
My head is pounding even though this place is pretty quiet. I hear subdued, echoing conversations down hallways. After a few minutes, a lady dressed like a school librarian speaks quietly to Oren. We’re led down a hallway, and then to an open door.
My mom is dressed in a blue sweater and loose beige slacks, her long, graying hair tied back with a black ribbon. She stands with her back to us as she touches up a portrait on an easel: a man with fiery eyes, emaciated, whiskery, wearing a hobo hat. Cans of brushes and tubes of paint are scattered around the room.
My mom is a lot heavier than the last time I saw her. But I know that’s what can happen with certain meds.
“It’s okay, honey, you can step inside,” says Librarian Lady. It’s only then I realize I was hovering in the doorway, frozen, my heart thumping.
“Hello, Mother,” says Oren as we step inside. Librarian Lady closes the door softly behind us.
My mother turns around, laying the paintbrush on the easel. Oren places a hand on her shoulder, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. She turns her head to the side, accepting the kiss, smiling faintly. Then she sees me and claps her hands to her mouth.
“Oh my,” she says, swaying on her feet. She walks over to me and kisses my cheek. She holds my face in her rough hands, but not for too long. She has paint-specked, chewed-up nails. Her deep, hazel eyes make me think about someone trapped in a cold, dark cave whose only flashlight is slowly dying.
Oren sits on a worn sofa that faces a twin bed. The blanket is rose colored. The walls are rose. The windows are open a crack, and the limp curtains, which feel like they should be blowing in a breeze that isn’t here, are also a pale rose.
My eyes wander to the portraits lining the walls. They’re so specific. A bald man with baggy eyes in a yellow sweater, holding a cup of coffee, sitting in a leather armchair; a little blonde girl sitting on a windowsill holding a toy sailboat; a wrinkled old lady with white hair, a garland of flowers around her head, standing against a door; a black man in a peacoat standing on a pier beside a stormy sea.
“You painted all of these?” I ask my mom.
“I did,” she says, twisting the bottom of her sweater.
The people are motionless, static, but there’s so much going on in their eyes.
“They’re so vivid. Who are these people?”
My mom looks over at Oren, mouth slightly open. She folds her hands in front of her chest.
“People she knows,” says Oren, vaguely.
My mom seems to find Oren’s explanation acceptable. She nods and picks up a canvas from a stack of them leaning against the wall in front of the open windows. She gazes at it thoughtfully and then turns it around to face us.
It’s a portrait of a boy—sixteen or seventeen, maybe. His long black hair tumbles over his shoulders. He has a goatee and coal-black eyes, fathomless, making him seem brooding Spanish Renaissance. The portrait is mostly from the neck up, but he’s wearing what appears to be a white doublet. The background isn’t as specified as the other portraits—it’s just a solid indigo. “This one is of you,” says my mother.
I peer closer. “Wearing a doublet?”
“I haven’t seen you in so long.”
So she took me hundreds of years into the past. I look like I’m about to board the Santa Maria to the New World. “It’s beautiful,” I tell her. But actually, it gives me the creeps. The boy looks unloved, hurt, kind of infuriated.
“What I meant was,” she says, circling her hands around rapidly, “I projected my own rage onto this portrait. I missed you.”
“I missed you too, Mom.”
Standing in front of the windows blacks her out into a kind of silhouette. “I meant . . . I missed . . . your life, Dario. I never saw you grow up. They took you away.”
I look over at Oren. He doesn’t meet my gaze. He’s fumbling with his stupid pocket watch, holding one side of his raincoat out, intently studying the fabric inside like he just found out there’s a treasure map stitched into the lining.
I turn back to my mom. “Who took me away?”
She looks down at the floor, moving her lips, and then at the paintings, almost like she’s afraid of them. “I did things. I said things. That weren’t . . . who I am,” she says. “Not as a mother. Not as your mother.”
Her speech is slightly slurred. She’s trying to communicate through the thin sunbeam of psychotropics that are cutting through the black clouds of her schizophrenia. But I know what she’s trying to say: that she’s separate from the delusions that coat her mind. That it isn’t really her who threatened me, who rejected me, who abandoned me at a bus stop. That was her illness, and she’s separate from it.
But I already knew that. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I know.”
She seems relieved by this, like she’s been waiting forever to finally confess this truth to me. “How have you been, my peach?” she asks me.
It’s the way she says my peach that kind of shreds me up inside. It’s what she used to say to me—something from a totally innocent time, which I’ll never get back, when I had a real mother, when I had all of her.
I hate this . . . all of a sudden . . . I hate this so much—that I’m here, reminded of what it was like to be loved by her, which was so pure and simple, without any judgment.
I don’t recognize this woman, trapped in the undulating maze of her mixed-up mind that’s forever short-circuiting, regulated by ferocious drugs. I’m only getting brief glimpses of what once was, and it sucks.
I sit next to Oren on the couch, clasping my hands tightly in my lap.
Oren looks at me and then at our mom. “Dario got into Harvard,” he says.
My mom looks at me proudly, her face round and flushed. “Of course he did.” She looks at Oren. “I knew this, right?” She looks back to me. “When do you leave?”
“I’m not sure yet if college is what I want,” I say. “Moldavia needs me.”
Both my mom and Oren seem surprised by my reply.
“Oh?” says Oren, frowning at me.
“Moldavia will hurt you again,” my mom says, with a shake of her head. “It won’t ever stop hurting you. Everyone who was supposed to protect you there failed.”
The way she’s looking at me now—she sees me as the tragic figure here.
She gives me a sad, wicked smile. “You were the greatest horror creation Moldavia ever claimed.”
“Mother!” says Oren.
“People do terrible things when they’re scared,” she adds.
“What do they do?” I ask. But I know she’s talking about my dad. And if he was ever scared of anything, it was losing my mom. He wanted to preserve their dying love.
“I think I was born out of fear,” I whisper-laugh to Oren.
“What?” he says, leaning toward me. “I didn’t hear you, sorry.”
My mom moves to a midcentury desk, rummages through it. “That sweet girl loves you,” she says. Is everyone going to tell me this?
My mom opens a drawer, takes something out of it. “Close your eyes!” She folds her hands behind her back. “And stick out your hand.”
I look over at Oren. He has this forced smile plastered on his face.
“Close your eyes, stick out your hand!” my mom repeats, girlishly.
I close my eyes and stick out my hand, expecting anything, and possibly something horrible, but something small and papery is placed gently in my palm. When my mom tells me to open my eyes again, I see it’s the tiny cutout photo of me that used to be in her locket. “The photo of me.”
“It used to be in my locket. I kept it.” She places her hand against her bare throat. “I gave the locket to Hayley.”
“Yes,” I say, closing my fingers around the photo, but unsure what to do with it.
My mom points down at my hand. “Does Hayley still wear the locket?”
Oren and I both nod. Carefully, I pocket the photo.
“Some people are pulled into orbit with one another—a planet and its moon,” she says. She moves over to her easel, tending to her art supplies, sticking brushes into coffee cans. “Sometimes love is dangerous,” she says. “It can lead to unnatural things. Regret. Monstrous creations.” She turns around to face to us, wiping her hands on her pants. “Sometimes we see the worst of ourselves reflected back in our children; all our fears, our flaws, like through a backward mirror.”
To her, I’m a filthy, mocking reflection of everything wrong with her. This is kind of how she always saw me—as something alien to her. That’s always been part of her narrative. And I’m getting more and more of a sense why.
She walks over to us, but instead of sitting on the edge of the bed, which would have been a more natural choice, she squeezes between us on the sofa. Oren and I both move over to make room, our clothing getting caught under us. Our mother, sitting between us now, takes both our hands. We sit there like that for a minute. I wonder what we’d look like if someone took our photo. It would probably be amazing, one of those uncomfortable-looking things that get circulated online and become memes.
Kid Who Once Played a Zombie and His Weird Brother Visiting Their Mom at a Mental Hospital.
“But I had another baby,” my mom says, looking off, “didn’t I?”
“It’s just us,” says Oren, patting her on the knee. “Your two boys.”
“No, there was a third,” she says in a thin voice.
I lean toward her. “Did you and Dad have another kid? Did Dad have—”
Oren gives me a sharp, bug-eyed look, like: Don’t encourage this.
“Those babies are bones,” she says. “Corpses behind the castle walls. Poisoned wine. Masons. Bricks and mortar. Tombs and revenge.”
“Mother,” says Oren. “Stop that! There are no dead babies buried at Moldavia.”
“Disposed of. Behind the stone walls. Dead babies in little jester costumes. No longer drunk. With bells that no longer ring.”
“Let’s have some tea,” says Oren, clearing his throat loudly, standing up, disassembling our odd little triptych. “How does that sound?” he says, spinning around and bending forward to face our mother, hands on his hips.
“That sounds lovely,” says my mom. “You can go out into the hallway, speak with one of the nurses, and they’ll take care of it. I can have a little time with Dario.”
“Wonderful!” says Oren, needing no further excuse to barrel out of the room.
My mom stands up and wanders over to the window. It’s started raining again, and she listens to it, her head cocked to one side, her back to me. Then she turns around, rolling her eyes a little at the closed door. “He treats me like a child.”
Suddenly I’m frozen, locked out of myself. It’s like what happened when I was trying to say good-bye to my dad. I feel panic; terrified I’m going to miss some last chance. Then I manage to speak: “I wouldn’t like that either.”
She gives me a mischievous look. “So I play with him a little bit.”
I laugh. “You mess with him?”
“Maybe a little.” She smiles. “You should go to college, Dario. See the world. Learn new things. Meet new people.”
I didn’t expect her to have an opinion on my future. It’s gotten a lot darker and duskier in the room, which makes all the portraits seem more alive.
“You weren’t treated right by this family,” my mother tells me.
I look at her and start to feel so awful I don’t even know what to do.
“I’m sorry about that, my peach.”
“You weren’t either,” I say, wanting her to stop calling me that.
She sits beside me on the couch again. As my throat lumps up, my chest heaves, and tears spill out of my eyes. My head falls onto her lap. I’m imagining her as she was, from the past. I have to. Because I wouldn’t let this woman, the one here with me right now, ever touch me. She runs her fingers through my hair like she used to when I was little, her nails lightly scraping my scalp. “They had no right to take you from me.”
I can never connect to her delusions. I want her like she was. If I accept another version of her, it feels like a lie because it’s not my mom, it’s an imposter.
“No one took me from you,” I say, my voice tight and garbled, knowing she does not like her beliefs challenged. “Who do you think—”
“Oh, Christ, Dario, I was a breeder!” she says, raising her voice.
She takes my head off her lap—not roughly, but not gently either. “I was impregnated by them.” She stands and paces the room. “I know what’s going on,” she says, “bringing you back here like this—trying to quell me into submission. I know what they’re up to.”
I sit up fast. “Mom . . . don’t . . .”
“They keep me locked up. They medicate me to keep me docile. I’m being sequestered and silenced.” She looks at one of the portraits with a tragic, knowing sigh. “I paint all the ones I know. They walk among us, disguising themselves as humans. When the siren call comes, the rest of them will rise from beneath the purple sea, transform water into blood, sand into bone, plant fiber into muscle. They’ll build their bodies from earth’s raw materials, form an elemental army, join with their fellow sleepers, and they’ll wake the dark world up.”
“Mom,” I say haltingly, “those are delusions. None of that is true. Please . . . come back to me. . . . Mom, please don’t go away. . . .”
She fixes me in her livid gaze like I’m part of the system oppressing her. I recognize that look in her eyes—vacant yet alert.
“There will be a war with them—thrust from a supernova with no heartbeats, no souls,” she continues, “who we thought were our children, our friends, our neighbors—those cunning serpents from Cassiopeia. Those motherfuckers.”
“Mom,” I say, calmly but firmly, wondering where Oren is with that goddamn tea. “I’m your youngest son. You wanted to see me. So see me.”
“I see you!” she cries, her arms outstretched. “But I don’t know what you are.”
“Yes you do, Mom.”
She reaches for me, but then she retracts her hands like I’ll bite them off. “Good-bye, my peach,” she says, so softly I almost don’t even hear her.
She looks me up and down, her face brittle, suspicious.
I press my fingers into the back of my neck. “I’m right here.”
“They come every night,” she says, gesturing out the window. “They nest in the trees—I see their russet eyes staring in at me. But I’m too old for them now. . . .”
“Mom, I’m sorry.” All I wanted in the world was to have her back. I thought I could do it somehow—because it had been so long, and she’s been on all these meds, and then she was back and the world seemed calm and still and soft. And then she was gone again. She appears and disappears to me, a hologram through a faulty transmission.
“I don’t know you,” she says, brows furrowed. And I believe her.
She grabs my portrait, and starts kicking it—harder and harder with her scuffed, dull-blue, old-lady shoes, until my Spanish Renaissance face is pulverized, the canvas shredded to bits, ruined.
I back away, reaching for the door. For some reason I see Hayley in my mind, a little girl again, at the top of the staircase, dropping that marble down all the way—thump thump thump—until it reaches my open, cupped hands.
A planet and its moon . . .
Then what seems like fifty people rush into the room and grab at my mom, trying to restrain her. I become a pinball in a nightmare arcade. But there’s a moment I come face-to-face with my mom, in the throes of her psychosis. She’s thrashing like a fish out of water, fighting all the orderlies, who are just trying to get hold of her arms.
And I think: She’s missed her own life, not just mine.
And this could be me one day—not being able to trust my own senses, not knowing who I am. Reality as I know it could reveal itself as an illness other people tell me I have. And they’ll fight to flush truth through my misfiring brain, drowning in a hellish matrix of my own making. So I move forward, through all the mayhem, and kiss my mother softly on the lips. They’re rough, cold, and brittle like a dead, crisping rose.