Breathing through my anxiety, I entered the four-story building and signed in as Louisa Becker’s son and hoped to God it would be the last time.
One of the nurses accompanied me in the elevator, and I took the opportunity to ask if my mother was allowed to have a cell phone.
Unfortunately, she was.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, the hospital smell hit me with a force that made me want to run back to my car.
I swallowed uneasily and loosened my tie a bit.
So, she’d been moved up here now. Last time I’d been forced to visit, she hadn’t required much care.
I didn’t bother asking for an update from the nurse. I already knew pretty much everything was wrong with my mother. Aside from a chronic chemical imbalance, a narcissistic personality disorder, and Borderline, she had a medical condition that had given her the weakest immune system. She was always ill.
I firmly believed the world would be a better place if she hadn’t been born.
It wasn’t as if my brother and I had contributed to much anyway.
The nurse smiled politely and slowed down as we reached the right room.
Once she’d left, I stood there in the doorway and studied the frail form sitting in a wheelchair by the window. She didn’t have a regular bed anymore. Everything looked like it’d been delivered straight from a hospital.
She pulled off seventy-five great for a fifty-six-year-old.
She must’ve noticed some movement, because she glanced at me from over the rims of her glasses.
It was the same dead gaze I’d grown up seeing. Steely dark blue. My brother and I had inherited a dark hazel color from the father we’d never met.
“Took you long enough, Finn,” she noted sourly.
I hated her voice. It was too sharp—and probably the strongest thing about her, except for her teeth, maybe. She was always crunching her hard candy.
I left the doorway and put my hands in my pockets. “It’s Avery.”
She scoffed. “I know.”
I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down, doing my best to look comfortable, when I was anything but. The table between us was covered in books, candy wrappers, and markers. A hobby of hers was to find typos in books and boast that she’d do a better job. The fact that she didn’t have an English degree or had never worked in editing didn’t seem to matter.
I watched her highlight a paragraph in an old senator’s memoir.
“Imbeciles,” she muttered. “Seven typos in 260 pages.”
“Why did you want to see me?” I asked.
She made a haughty sound and lifted a brow at me. “You came to see me, Avery. Because you’re like a dog. Regardless of what I do, you come crawling back. You need a leader to follow because you’re too weak to stand on your own.”
I stared at her, forcing a casual expression. The fury I carried for this woman was putrid and all-consuming, and it’d long since taken control of my actions in my everyday life. It colored every opinion I had.
“I want you to stop contacting me,” I told her. “You have no place in my life anymore.”
She wasn’t going to wake up one morning and realize what she’d done. By the sound of things, she already knew. Either she lacked empathy for it, or she’d made sense of it in a way that absolved her of guilt.
My mother snickered and unwrapped a piece of candy. “Do you remember when we used to play hide-and-seek?”
I flinched, and that was it. I’d had enough. I had to get out of here before I threw up, but first, I had to get my hands on her motherfucking phone.
The crunching began. She watched me with amusement dancing in her eyes as she chewed on the hard candy, and it made my fucking skin crawl. There. I found her phone on the side table attached to her bed.
I wasn’t surprised to see that no pin code was required. She’d never remember it. Which gave me an idea.
“You weren’t as good at hiding as your brother, Avery,” she told me.
“Shut up,” I snapped.
I deleted my number in her contacts, then clicked down to see if Finn was in there somewhere. Luckily for him, he wasn’t. There were only two other numbers, neither of which I recognized.
“Not that tone with me,” she sneered. Crunch, crunch, smack, crunch. “It’s not my fault you weren’t good at hiding, boy.”
I ignored her. “How did you get my number this time?”
There was no forgetting the first time, because it was Angie who’d provided it. Along with my address and email. I’d since changed both, but I’d rather not change my number. Hundreds of students had access to it.
My mother waved a hand. “Nurse gave it to me.”
I clenched my jaw hard and pinched the bridge of my nose. Knowing how manipulative and convincing my mother could be, I didn’t trust the nurses to simply not give her the number even if I told them I didn’t want her to have it. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and change it. I could still tell the nurses I didn’t want her to contact me, and maybe if I gave them a fake number…
There weren’t enough precautions to take when it came to that vile woman.
“You were always in the closet,” she mused, and I screwed my eyes shut. Thankfully, with my back to her. “Every single time. You sat there under one of my coats, shaking like a leaf.” She found that funny.
I couldn’t stop the memories from washing over me.
Memories of pushing my brother under the bed, telling him to stay there and be quiet. On the days I sensed she was in an extra cruel mood, I hid Finn on the fire escape, no matter the season. And I took the closet, the place she searched first. If I heard Finn cry, I even left the closet door open.
Get out, get out, get out.
I gnashed my teeth and quickly set a pin code on her phone, then returned it to her nightstand.
“It’s not good to be so afraid, Avery. I tried to make you strong and resourceful. Instead, you pissed your damn pants.”
“Yeah, it’s baffling,” I replied, clearing my throat. “You told your sons that whomever you found first would suffer until they learned not to cry at a little bit of pain, and they got scared. I can’t believe it.” I took a slow breath and faced her one last time. She was smiling, perfectly at ease. “Don’t contact me again.”
“I’ll see you soon, son.”
“Die,” I said and marched out.
I felt like a contained animal as I stalked over to the nurses’ office and knocked on the door.
Fuck. I rubbed at my chest, and it took all my strength to force air into my lungs. My hands and forehead broke out in a cold sweat, and the nausea traveled higher, tightening a noose around my throat.
Fuck, fuck. I couldn’t stop hearing Finn’s screams.
Or my own.
The same nurse from before opened the door, and I rushed out the words.
“Don’t give her my number again unless it’s an absolute emergency,” I said. “There’s a new number in that case. My old number will stop working next week because it’s through my job, and I just quit.” The lies rolled off my tongue without difficulty, and the nurse told me to hold on while she got me a form to fill out.
Four
I spent the next few days in my new house, surrounded by tools and equipment to work on the damaged floorboards, but I barely left my bed in the middle of the living room. One panic attack set off another, until I drank myself into oblivion.