SINCE THE spring, Nick has been having occasional nightmares about his mother’s bad day. He doesn’t tell anyone about them, because he doesn’t think there’s anything anyone can do. He just relives the incident, twisted into something worse, then wakes up and gets on with life.
In reality, it happened like this: There was an end-of-the-year dance for the sixth graders. It wasn’t anything fancy, just some punch and a DJ in the gym, which had dimmed lights and balloons. Nick hadn’t asked anyone to the dance, but he’d gotten to dance one song with Sadie Merrick, who he’d always thought was funny and good-looking, if not quite as cute as Jackie Dalhause. He hadn’t gone for girls, though; he’d gone because everyone was going, and he thought it ended up being kind of fun. Not like the masquerade balls that Severkin sometimes went to in the game, but Severkin was usually there to steal something from a museum and often got chased by guards by the end of the party, so Nick thought maybe it was okay that this party was a little boring.
As the dance ended, the kids all went outside to wait for their parents to pick them up. It was late May, and the night was warm, but there was a strong breeze that made Nick cross his arms. Charlie asked Nick to go with him around the corner, out of view of the chaperones, where Charlie was going to smoke his Second Cigarette Ever because Charlie’s dad had just sent him an email saying he and the girlfriend he’d left Charlie’s mom for had set up Charlie’s room in their new place in California for when Charlie visited. He wanted Nick to take a drag, too, but then Nick’s mom’s car pulled up.
It arrived with the sort of screech that always precedes a car chase on TV, and his mom didn’t park in one of the parking spaces but rather at a slight angle through two of them, right across the dividing line. The door flew open and Nick’s mom stepped out.
“Oh, Nicky,” she said, “I’m so sorry I’m late. I forgot all about the time.” She wasn’t really late—only a few people’s parents had already shown up. But weirder than that, she was wearing her bathrobe, turquoise and ragged and cinched around the waist with a belt but, still, low-cut in the front. Nick felt a strange fear in his stomach, a cold nausea and dizziness. It was like when there was a glitch in a game that made you walk through a mountain and fall into a sky that wasn’t supposed to be there and you died. Except it was happening in real life.
“Your mom has a nice rack,” Charlie snickered.
Nick ran over to her. “It’s okay, Mom, you’re not late,” he said. He knew he needed to get her into the car, and get away. He looked behind him, and everyone was staring. The teachers, his classmates, some of his classmates’ parents. He looked back at Mom as the wind picked up and blew the bottom of her bathrobe out behind her, showing that she was naked underneath. There was laughter behind him, but it was quickly silenced. His mother looked down at him and smiled, seeming not to notice that her body was on display.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t be late next time.”
“Get in the car, Mom,” Nick said. Mom got back into the car and Nick walked around to the passenger side, his face burning, his eyes a little watery. He heard footsteps behind him.
“Um, Mrs. Reeves?” It was his English teacher, Ms. Ford. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive? We can call a taxi for you.”
“She’s fine,” Nick said, turning around. He had said it in almost a roar, and his hands were clenched into fists. Ms. Ford looked at him with an expression Nick had sometimes seen on white people’s faces when his Dad walked by. That weird combination of confusion and fear, and an unspoken What is this person doing here? And now Ms. Ford was looking at him the same way. He turned away from her and got into the car, slamming the door.
“Let’s go,” he said.
In the nightmare he’s been having, the incident plays out like it did in real life, except that when the wind comes along and lifts his mother’s robe up, the laughing doesn’t stop. His classmates and teachers laugh and point, and his mother laughs, too, and suddenly her hair is askew, and her lipstick is messy, and her eyes are heavy with mascara, and she looks like a clown or a crazy old woman from a cop show, laughing and lifting up the bottom of her bathrobe and dancing as though everything were wonderful, and Nick begs her to stop, but she doesn’t.
In tonight’s dream, though, when Mom goes to lift up her bathrobe, she tears it off and throws it into the wind, and along with the bathrobe, her skin and hair come off, too, and underneath is Reunne, gleaming in leather armor, her spear in one hand. She smiles at Nick, then looks behind him. Nick turns, and his classmates and teachers are mechanical spiders with glowing tentacles, and he reaches into his quiver for an arrow and takes aim.
“Nick!” Nick wakes up to Dad calling his name and knocking on his bedroom door. “I made pancakes!” Dad sounds really excited. “And they’re only a little burned!”
Nick sits up in bed, his eyes crusty from sleep. The smell of burned pancakes—like an oven on the self-cleaning setting—wafts through the door Dad left open. Nick rubs his eyes and hops out of bed. He looks over at the game console. He’d been hoping to play again this morning. He was so close to Wellhall, but he had played till 2 a.m., and he wanted to be awake when he finally saw Wellhall, so he could appreciate it. So he’d saved and shut down, hoping again that Reunne wouldn’t mind. He’d had to wait for her before going into the colony, after all, so it seemed fair.
He pulls on some clothes and heads downstairs. The smell gets stronger as he walks, but the burned part fades. Instead, it’s the full, sweet smell of pancakes.
“Hey,” Dad says as Nick comes into the kitchen. Dad’s at the stove, and Nick swears he can see a shadow in the shape of his mother just behind him. “Go get that survey from your class that you want to give your mom. Let’s see what I can help you with.”
“It’s too early for homework,” Nick says.
“It’s eleven o’clock, and it’s not work for you. Just asking questions. I’m the one who has to answer them. Go get it.” Dad flips a pancake into the air. It lands on the counter and he quickly scoops it up and puts it back on the stove. “Five-second rule,” he says to himself. Nick sighs and goes back upstairs. The questionnaire is wrinkled and in his backpack, but he digs it and a pen out and brings them downstairs. Dad has put the pancakes in a large pile on one plate in the center of the table.
“Help yourself,” Dad says, handing him a plate. Nick sits and takes one of the pancakes, inspecting both sides of it for burned bits or hair. It seems clean, though, so he starts eating. It’s a little tougher than it should be, but it tastes good.
“Not bad, Dad,” Nick says, nodding. Dad smiles, then sits down and takes one and cuts into it before reaching over Nick’s hands and grabbing the questionnaire.
“We should talk about yesterday,” Dad says.
“What about it?” Nick asks.
“You…” Dad pauses, pours some syrup on his pancake. “The way you talked to your mother. I think you were being a little emotional.”
“I just wanted to know if she was playing the game. And I thought it was weird she didn’t remember. Do they have her on some new medication or something?” Nick has seen TV shows where hospitals keep their patients docile and stupid through their medication.
“Yes,” Dad says, using his careful voice. “But she forgets things, Nick. That’s what the disease is.”
“She’d remember the game,” Nick says. He knows arguing that Mom isn’t sick, not the way they think, will just prolong the conversation. But the information about the meds confirms a new possible alternative to Alzheimer’s. He takes another pancake. He can feel Dad’s eyes on him but chooses not to look over. “So can you answer any of the questions for homework?” He eats as Dad looks it over.
“Well, something she ‘remembers hating about her childhood’ is the food, I know that.”
“The food?”
“In East Berlin, they got only certain brands of food—really cheap stuff, and what they had at the store varied wildly from week to week. And, of course, they were only allowed to buy so much. They used ration coupons, I think. But what there was was crap. Your mom used to have to do a lot of the cooking after her dad got sick.” Dad stops talking for a moment and stares at his pancake. Nick looks over at him. The room feels very hushed now, like the strange quiet of a church. Nick holds his breath, hoping Dad will say what exactly his grandfather was like, hoping there’ll be some clue. “Anyway,” Dad continues with a shake of his head, “she came here, and she was thrilled to be able to cook with all these different, higher-quality brands—all these new foods. That’s how she became such a good cook. I was never allowed in the kitchen—she wanted to do it all.”
“That’s what she hated the most?” Nick asks, annoyed that nothing more has been said about his grandfather. “Not her friends vanishing in the night or being cut off from the world?”
“Well…that’s what she talked about to me,” Dad says. Nick takes another pancake and cuts into it with his fork. The bottom of this one is burned, and crackles as it breaks. Nick takes a different one. He thinks of how the dwarves and elves below Wellhall had nothing to eat but algae and mushrooms.
“Did Mom…protest?” he asks Dad. “I’ve seen some videos online, of people marching and the wall coming down. Was she there?”
“No,” Dad says, and shakes his head. “She didn’t want to get arrested. But she marched a few times, at the very end. She wanted to get out of there really badly, to run away, and she couldn’t do that if she was arrested. Her dad was a cobbler—made shoes. And her mom was a secretary. By the time your mom was ten, though, her dad wasn’t working, so her mom had to work long hours, and it was just her and her dad. And then her mom died five years later.” Nick opens his mouth to ask what that was like, but his father, staring at his pancakes, just keeps talking. “Her life was hard, and really scary. Scarier than you can imagine, I think. That’s why you have to be careful about asking her about that sort of thing. It reminds her of the stuff from her past. We don’t want to remind her of that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Nick says. But he knows that it’s fear that’s keeping her in the home—that’s what she has to overcome. “You and Mom said that Grandpa—Mom’s dad—that he had Alzheimer’s, too, right?”
Dad nods.
“So is that why everyone thinks she has it?”
His father looks up at him, his eyes narrowing like he’s just caught Nick saying a dirty word. “Mom does have it,” Dad says, and stands up. He puts his fork on his plate and takes it to the sink.
“But is that why Mom went into the home?” Nick says, trying to get the conversation back on track. “Even though she’s not that sick? Was taking care of her dad hard? Does she just not want that for me? Because I don’t mind taking care of her if she forgets her car keys or something. I can start putting that stuff away, so I remember where it is. And we had fun cooking the other night, so she doesn’t have to do that anymore. I mean, you probably shouldn’t try pancakes without me….” He trails off, staring at his father. Dad’s back is to him, but Nick can see his shoulders hunch over, slowly, like stone settling after an earthquake.
“Nick,” he says, without turning, “just trust that we know what’s best for you.” Nick can’t see his dad’s face, but his voice isn’t angry. It cracks like the old ropes of Bridgefall, creaking in the wind, holding up a great weight. Nick’s desire to fight back, to demand answers, fades at this. He is left silent.
“Let’s see,” Dad says in his normal voice, turning back around. “What else is on here?” He sits down at the table and picks up the questionnaire again, and Nick stares at him for a moment. He won’t get answers this way, he knows. He’ll still have to find the answers on his own.
They go over the questionnaire for about an hour, but Nick doesn’t feel like he learns anything new. Maybe a little about East Berlin, but nothing about Mom. People were poor, the secret police were terrifying and controlled not just the people but also the information that got into the country. The news was twisted so that capitalism always looked like it was failing. And that all sounds awful, but Nick doesn’t know what it has to do with Mom.
“That place was like a disease,” Dad says. “That’s what your mom used to say. She said East Berlin was like a disease.”
“Okay,” Nick says. He leans back in his chair. There’s one pancake left, but Nick doesn’t want it.
“Is that enough?” Dad asks.
“I’m supposed to talk to Mom about this,” Nick sighs. “I know you’re trying to help. But this is about Mom, not you. Can we go see her?”
Dad picks up Nick’s plate and walks it over to the sink. “I thought we’d give her a day to rest up,” he says, putting their dishes in the dishwasher.
“Rest up from what?” Nick asks.
“Well, just seeing us,” Dad says, closing the dishwasher and not looking at Nick. “It can be a little exhausting, you know, hosting people you love after you’ve moved.”
“She saw us every day until a week ago,” Nick says.
“It’s different now,” Dad says, turning around. His voice is steelier.
“Fine,” Nick says. “I’m going to go play my game.” He gets up and walks away from the table. He feels the ragebrew again, the prick of the needle a clear throbbing on the back of his neck. He rubs at it as he walks up the stairs.
“And do your homework!” Dad calls after him.
Nick ignores this, walking up the stairs with heavy footfalls, like a marching soldier. The questionnaire is squeezed into a spear in his hand. He opens the door to his room and slams the door shut, making his room cave-dark. He doesn’t know why he’s so angry, or even who he’s angry at. He knows he should feel a hundred other things—sadness, fear—and he does, but somehow the anger always comes rising to the top, red and boiling. He feels it swell up in him like a tide, and so he takes a deep breath, sits down in front of the TV, and turns on the game.