…threw the Coke in Twyla’s face and barreled into her and knocked her backward onto the hotel-room bed.
Mother came off the arm of the chair—“Jolie, stop this!”—and grabbed her.
Jolie tore free and went for the door.
A deadbolt. A security chain.
Mother clutched Jolie’s hand and tried to prevent her from disengaging the chain. “We only want the best for you, honey. It’s for the best, it really is.”
Never had Jolie raised a hand against her mother. Until now she never imagined a situation in which either might assault the other. She found herself left defenseless by love, unable to strike a blow.
Mother turned Jolie away from the door, pressed her back to it, and pinned her there. No anger in Mother’s face. Only what seemed to be concern.
“Honey, it’s okay. You don’t understand, but it’s going to be okay. Would I ever do anything to hurt you, sweetie? Of course I wouldn’t. I brought you into the world, and I want only good things for you. Only the very best.”
Their faces were inches apart, breath mingling with breath. Jolie searched her mother’s eyes. She could see nothing different about those eyes. No menace in them.
“I just want to go for a walk,” Jolie said, dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice. This was her mother, but Jolie sensed that it was dangerous to convey weakness. “I just need some fresh air, clear my head.”
“We have to stay here, honey, in case Daddy’s friends contact us. Anyway, I can’t let you go for a walk alone, a pretty young girl in a strange city.”
Twyla had wiped the cola out of her eyes. She lifted Mother’s suitcase onto the bed. “Listen to Mom, Jo. I don’t know why you’ve taken such a turn against me, but you know Mom is on your side.”
“Jolie, dear, you’re shaking like a leaf,” Mother said. “What in the world is going through that crazy imagination of yours? Let’s go back to the chair and you sit down and I’ll get you another Coca-Cola.”
Opening the suitcase, Twyla said, “You should have drunk your cola last night at McDonald’s, the one I ordered with your dessert.”
Still pressing Jolie against the door, Mother smiled and said, “It was just too much sweet, cola with a dessert. That’s what you said. And you were right, of course.”
So there must have been a sedative in the cola.
“When you and Mother came back from the bathroom,” Twyla said, “she drank her coffee, she drank it all, and if you had just drunk your cola, you wouldn’t be so agitated now.”
Her mother smiled. Her breath was warm and pleasant-smelling. It reminded Jolie of the aroma of fresh-baked bread. Mother’s voice was soft and reassuring. “Twyla’s right, dear. You wouldn’t now be so agitated. You see, I’m not. This is all unnecessary, sweetheart. Let’s go back to the chair and sit down and be respectful to one another.”
From Mother’s suitcase, Twyla extracted the hypodermic syringes and the insulated metal box. She put them on the bedspread.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Jolie asked.
“Happen to you?” Mother said and laughed softly, with apparent affection, as if her younger daughter’s failure to understand was adorable. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, honey. I love your sense of drama. You’re probably going to be a great writer someday. A really great writer.”
“What’re those needles about?”
“You get a flu vaccine every year, don’t you?”
“This isn’t about the flu. It’s not that time of year. Anyway, doctors give flu shots.”
Mother’s voice was soothing and so reasonable. “Oh, not only doctors, Jolie. Nurses give them. Sometimes pharmacists give them. People with the littlest bit of training give them at warehouse stores, places like that. You’ve even had a flu shot at a warehouse store, honey, and you said it was the most painless ever. Do you remember? Of course you do. And you’re right, sweetie, this isn’t about the flu. It’s much more important than a silly little flu shot.”
The more Mother talked, the less she seemed like Mother. There was a word for the way she sounded now: oleaginous. Oily. She was trying too hard to comfort Jolie, layering on the reassurance too thickly.
“I feel dizzy,” Jolie said. She had been standing stiffly, her shoulders tensed as her mother pressed them against the door. She sagged, suddenly weak. “I need to sit down.”
“We all need to sit down, honey. Sit down together and figure this out.”
Twyla was getting another Coca-Cola from the honor bar.
“Okay,” Jolie said shakily. “Let’s sit down and you tell me what this is all about.”
Mother let go of Jolie but still held her against the door with her body. She smiled. “That’s more like my Jolie.” As she searched her daughter’s eyes, she put one hand to Jolie’s face and stroked her cheek with apparent affection, whether genuine or not.
Jolie hated what she did, but she did it anyway: bit the hand. She bit it hard and tasted blood, and her mother cried out in shock and pain. Mother stepped back, and Jolie punched her in the stomach, and Mother dropped to her knees beside the bed.
Mother’s purse stood on the nearby nightstand. Jolie grabbed it, pivoted to the door, disengaged the security chain, threw open the door, slammed it behind her, and ran.
Their room was on the third floor. Stairs at both ends of the corridor. No time for the elevator.
As Jolie opened the stairwell door, she heard running footsteps behind her. She glanced back. Twyla.
She raced down the stairs, which seemed to telescope out before her, adding a tread for every tread she descended, so that she might never get to the bottom. Jolie was in a state. She had never been in such a state before. Torn by so many emotions. Terrified but at the same time crying in grief for having somehow lost her mother and sister—how, why, to what?—burning with shame for hurting her mother, yet fiercely pleased with herself for having gotten away. The world had been wobbly to one degree or another ever since Cora Gundersun killed herself and those people at the hotel, but during the past three days it had grown more wobbly ever faster, and now it had abruptly undergone a total pole shift, north becoming south, the new angle of rotation apocalyptic. Jolie could feel the outer crust of the earth sliding catastrophically to a new position under her feet, entire continents heaving and colliding and buckling over one another, all the works of humanity crashing down in ruins, and mile-high tsunamis coming fast out of the deep sea, metaphorically if not literally.
Feet pounding, heart pounding, she ran to the ground floor and opened the fire door and hurried along a corridor. As she sprinted toward the lobby, she zippered open her mother’s purse and took from it the disposable phone.
Close behind her, she heard her sister call her name, and as they dashed into the lobby, Twyla shouted, “Help me, somebody, help me stop my sister! She’s hallucinating, she’s taken drugs!”
Jolie stopped and turned and threw Mother’s purse, and it hit Twyla square in the face. Twyla stumbled and maybe she fell, but Jolie didn’t wait to see. She ran toward the front entrance, and when people moved as if to intercept her, she screamed at them to fuck off, screamed so hard that spittle flew. She had never used that word before, but she used it now, snarled it, as if she really might be a crazy person on drugs, because nothing mattered except escaping. Realizing there was blood on her chin, her mother’s blood, she shouted, “I’ll bite you,” when the F-word didn’t work. Through the front entrance, into the cool day, she ran flat out, her heart knocking so hard that with every beat she felt shaken, as if quakes were rocking her flesh and bones along fault lines in her body, breath burning her throat. When she finally dared to look back, no one pursued her, but still she ran.