Two Days Ago
The thing that looked like my mother banged against the wooden cellar door. The thing screamed, her voice shrill in my ear, “Let me out! Let me out!”
Theo said, “We can’t keep her like this.”
After my mother’s outburst in the bedroom, I’d seen her pillow smeared with blood. “Theo!” I yelled and he tackled her before she could do us harm.
“Mom! Mom!” he said, trying to calm her down. It was no use. “Mom, please!” Her entire body thrashed beneath him, and though he held her hands down, she kicked. “Take her legs!”
I grabbed onto them, holding for dear life.
My mother screamed, “Let go of me!”
Theo was trying not to cry. “What do we do?”
I didn’t know. I couldn’t hurt my mother. I wouldn’t hurt her. Yet, we couldn’t stay like this forever.
“The cellar,” I said. “Put her in the cellar.”
His face was a question mark.
“Maybe it’ll pass,” I said. “Maybe the infection runs its course. Like a cold.”
He looked unconvinced. Then she spit in Theo’s face.
“Okay,” he said.
“Can you do this, Theo? I need you to do this.”
“I can do it.”
I mentally girded myself for what was to come. I nodded, Theo understood and we grabbed onto my mother. It was worse than I thought. We hauled her kicking and screaming off the bed and into the hallway. Even with both of us holding her, guiding her, she was strong, wrangling and scratching.
My mother’s hand slipped outside of Theo’s grasp and she swung, her elbow smashing into Theo’s nose. I heard it crack. He held her tighter and slammed her against the wall. Hating every second of it, we hustled her down the hallway, pin-balling and pirouetting the entire way, scraping against photos on the wall, sending them crashing to the floor. The last piece to fall was our Home Sweet Home sign.
I wouldn’t allow myself to think. I wouldn’t feel. I couldn’t allow it.
As we appeared outside, Renzo said, “He’s bleeding,” and stepped back.
“He’s fine,” I cried.
“He’s bleeding all over. Just like the bus driver!”
“My mother—”
At the same time, my mother snapped at Theo, trying to bite him.
“Help!” he said and Max ran up and held my mother’s jaw shut and we moved in a strange tripod fashion, pushing her along the side of the house.
Renzo kept his distance, standing the hell away with Sasha.
The cellar was just around the corner. “Sasha,” I said. “The cellar!”
She ran ahead and I saw her hunched over the cellar doors. “It’s locked!”
I fought to remember the combination. “It’s 10-20-30.”
Sasha’s hands trembled as she worked the lock until it clicked, and the doors opened in a butterfly manner.
“Mom,” I said, trying to reason, hoping there was a part of her that could hear. “I love you. I love you. I know I don’t say it enough. But I love you.”
My own mother was ferociously trying to escape. Trying to kill us.
She wasn’t my mother anymore.
I couldn’t hurt her, no matter what. I could only hide her away and hope she would forgive us.
At the mouth of the cellar, we threw the stranger down the steps and she tumbled into the dark.
I threw my own mother down a flight of stairs.
In that moment, I would’ve given anything to switch places with her. Anything. She stopped on the bottom step, a shaft of light illuminating her face, and there it was: the certainty. Calmness. Her eyes dark mirrors, revealing nothing.
Her body tensed, preparing for what, I didn’t know, and then she shot forward, taking the stairs two at a time.
We closed the doors as she smashed against them, the doors bulging out, as I snaked the lock in place and clicked it into position.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Theo said. “I’m sorry.”
Max placed his hands on my shoulder and there was nothing to say that his eyes didn’t already. That’s when Theo said, “We can’t keep her like this.”
I felt just as guilty, but there was nothing to be done and Theo knew it. He looked at me, everything about him saying we must be monsters.
We were about to leave her when we heard her crying.
“Mom,” Theo said. “Don’t cry.”
“You kids,” she sobbed. “You’re leaving me.”
I looked at Theo and felt his resolve weakening. “No.”
“She’s better, Ruthie.”
I shook my head.
“I can’t just leave her in there, Ruth.”
“We have to.”
“She’s our mother.”
“Don’t leave me,” she wailed. “It’s so dark in here.”
I took hold of him. “Mr. Watkins did the same thing.”
He looked at the door, then back at me.
“Theo,” my mother said, her voice trembling. “I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
Theo pulled away from me and went to the cellar’s latch when Max ran forward and pushed him to the ground.
“The hell, Max?”
“I was there, Theo. I saw it. Mr. Watkins. And the only way to stop him was to kill him. Your mother has a chance to live. In there. But if you open the door?”
Theo slowly got up and I thought he might punch Max.
My mother asked, “Theo? I’m feeling better. I really am. I know why you did what you did. I would’ve done the same thing. But you can let me out now.”
The cellar held a magical pull on him. He held the lock in his hands. Then he stopped.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. “I can’t.”
Her voice took an odd inflection. “Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Then prove it.”
My brother recognized the same tone from the bedroom. “We’re gonna get you help, Mom. I’ll be back. I promise. We’ll get you better.”
There was silence behind the cellar doors.
“Mom?”
The stillness lasted long enough that we moved toward the door and placed our ears against the wood.
“Hear anything?” Theo asked.
Nothing, and then the doors rattled with a sudden fury. She banged and banged, a creature I was glad I couldn’t see.
“I regret the day I ever gave birth! I gave up my life for yours. I should’ve aborted you both. I should’ve taken a hanger into me and dug you out and flushed you away.”
Theo’s face crinkled, flushing red, and he cried.
My mother continued to yell obscenities, vile insults, and I shut my ears and ran to Theo’s car. We all did. We were well past our house and on the road before I removed my fingers, grateful only to hear the rumble of the Roadmaster and the rapid rhythm of my breath.
My mother was gone and I didn’t know if she would ever return.
She hadn’t meant what she’d said. She couldn’t have. Or was there a seed of truth? A secret so dark and deep, it had to stay hidden. She might not love me now, I thought, but she’d loved me once.
I held onto that. I had to.
Around me, Theo’s, Sasha’s, Renzo’s, and Max’s lips moved, but I didn’t hear what they said. They were intense, screaming and crying. I didn’t feel my body, and strangely, I felt safe: the numbness, the complete distancing between what was right next to me and the sensation of floating.
I thought of everyone who was dead, the list of names, growing and growing, repeating it in my mind, but most of all my mother, my mother, my mother.
I sat, squished in the back seat, and wondered if I was cursed. Terrible things happened around me and maybe I was the cause. I was the particle in the universe that set bad things into motion. My very presence was bad luck. I must’ve done something to deserve this. Something, but what?
Then, like a light switch, sound and sensation come flushing back, as if I was birthed from nothingness. I grabbed onto the headrests to stabilize myself, and in the mirror, I saw Theo’s eyes.
He said, “Ruthie?”
We’d tried to alert people. We’d tried our best to warn people. All of it failed. There was only one thing left. “We have to get off the island.”