Koren Zailckas - Mother, Mother - Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM

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An electrifying debut novel about what happens when the one who should love you the most becomes your worst enemy. Sure to appeal to fans of GONE GIRL and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVINMeet the Hurst Family.Meet Violet Hurst -16 years old, beautiful and brilliant. So why is she being accused of being a danger to herself and others?Meet her brother Will Hurst – the smartest and sweetest twelve-year old boy around. But does he really need all that medication he is being told to take?Meet oldest sister Rose – the one who got away. She disappeared one night in her final year of school, never to be heard from again.

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“Later,” the nurse said. “Right now, I need you to come with me. There are some officers here who’d like to speak with you.”

Violet trailed her down the hallway to the visitors’ lounge, where two uniformed police officers were drinking black coffee.

So this was the moment of truth. Violet imagined the sound of handcuffs clinking around her wrists.

The two men stood as she approached. They looked like linebackers.

It was hard for Violet to remember a time when she’d ever associated police with safety. Faced with a blue uniform, Josephine would fall all over herself, offering to buy policemen gas-station coffee and asking them how to organize a neighborhood watch. But Violet’s fear of authority ran deep. Even when she didn’t have red-wine lips or a one-hitter pipe in her pocket, the sight of a badge made her blood run cold.

“I have Viola for you,” the nurse told the officers.

Viola was her real name, after the wild yellow variety Viola pubescens . But she’d insisted on going by Violet since kindergarten. “I don’t know why you’d possibly want to be a shy little Violet,” Josephine said. “That’s as bad as being a common Rose.” This dig was directed at her sister, whose Christian name was Rosette.

Violet held her pajama pants closed with one hand and tried not to look mental. She was so nervous she barely heard the cops’ introductions. Their names went in one ear and out the other without so much as a whistle, leaving her to think of them as one beast with two heads and two guns. They were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, only armed.

“I should begin by saying you’re not being charged with anything at this time,” Tweedle Dee said. “I understand you’re an unemancipated minor, is that right?”

Violet must have given a zombie stare because the other cop translated. “You’re under eighteen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And your parents are still your legal guardians?”

“Yeah.”

Officer Dee crossed his rib-roast arms. “You see, Viola, we’re here in response to a domestic violence complaint. Your brother arrived last night at Kingston Hospital with serious damage to his right hand. There were other minor injuries too. Injuries your mother said he sustained from you.”

“I’ve never hurt Will!” Violet cringed at her own ugly adolescent whine. She took a jagged breath and tried with mixed success to mellow out her tone. “I didn’t try to stab anyone. I can’t remember everything, but I know that for sure. If it’s her word against mine—”

“You’re talking about your mother?” asked Officer Dee.

Yes , my mother.” Secretly, Violet preferred the term wombdonor . Convinced as she was that her mom was lying, she still wasn’t sure if she could trust her own mind’s version of events. Most of what had happened in the kitchen felt like some strange half-reality. The drugs had fragmented things and forced them back together in ways that didn’t entirely fit. Violet’s memory had kaleidoscoped. Every time she tried to examine the details, the whole scene shattered. She wanted to say something about Rose, but every time she brought up her sister’s name it seemed to get her in more trouble. When she’d mentioned Rose back in the kitchen, her family had turned against her. When she’d mentioned Rose during her intake, she’d come off like someone grasping at straws.

“Look,” said Officer Dum. He was the one with the rounder face, the softer eyes. “We weren’t there. We didn’t see whether this was an assault or what. We’ve given your mother a notice of her rights, and she’s trying to decide whether to press criminal charges. Your mom did say she was going to pursue a protective order unless you agree to admit yourself here.”

“Like, a restraining order?” Again, Violet hated herself for sounding so young.

Dum cast a look at the head nurse, who had been hovering in the corner like a Crocs-clad warden. “Your mother says you’re a threat to yourself and your family. It’s in everyone’s best interest if you stay here.”

She gritted her teeth, but figured she’d rather be in the hospital than at home. And so, without knowing her clinical diagnosis, Violet Hurst voluntarily committed herself to a facility that treated serious mental disorders with the help of psychotropic meds.

Back in the intake office, the counselor on duty read her the riot act: “You can go home if and when the doctors agree to discharge you. If you insist on being discharged, you can write a three-day letter asking for your release from the hospital. The hospital has three working days—Monday through Friday, weekends and holidays excluded—to give you a decision. We will either release you or we will file an affidavit and you will receive a court hearing. Do you understand all that?”

“I think so.”

“Sign here, please.”

Her heart pounded. The pen felt too thick in her cold fingers. The name Violet scrawled on the line began with a headstrong V but soon after collapsed into a mousy grade-school script. Her last name, Hurst , looked like a blight on her first, which, by this point, it was.

After she signed away what precious little agency a sixteen-year-old girl has, Violet took her first shower in days. She had to sign out a showerhead at the front desk—a strange procedure, born of the fact that past patients liked to unscrew them and throw them at the staff. After drying off with a rough white towel and stepping into a fresh set of the standard-issue pajamas, she wandered into the dayroom. As she walked down the hallway, Violet felt her distended stomach flip. For the first time since intake, she felt like a detainee. She had no ID, no cell phone, no clothes, no escape. A terrifying thought cut through her façade of couldn’t-care-less. What if I never get released? Relieved as she was to get away from her mother, she wasn’t eager to spend her teens and twenties in lockup. What if they gave her drugs? The antipsychotic kind that left her slurry and diabetic, grimacing at walls?

In the dayroom, two girls brawled for control of the channel button. They looked roughly the same age as Rose. One had a tumble of dyed red hair and thin, eyeliner-drawn brows. The other was tall and angular with eyes that were almost aggressively blue, piercing through the overgrown bangs of her Mick Jagger haircut. A fresh-looking scar, pink and terrifying, curved from her earlobe to her voice box. Violet couldn’t help thinking the girl had a sad majesty. She was scrappy-beautiful. A beam of sunlight picked up the rusty highlights in her otherwise clove-brown hair.

After the nurse broke up the squabble, the screen was smeared with fingerprints. Violet grabbed a tissue from the box on top and gave it a quick buff.

“Thanks,” the brunette said. “And sorry. I’m Edie. This is Corinna.”

Corinna eyed Violet like a target, then aimed her sniper gaze back toward the TV.

“Violet.”

“Did you just get here?”

Violet tensed and nodded. “Last night,” she said.

“Was it pills?” Edie asked.

It took Violet a few beats to catch her drift. By then the girl was already elaborating.

“Suicide attempt? It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I mean, come on”—Edie gestured to her scar—“Have you ever seen anything more embarrassing than this?”

Later, Violet would find out Edie had strung herself to a curtain rod with a length of electrical wiring. Instead of killing her, the rod had snapped and the wiring had gashed a four-inch wound in her neck. Her Vassar roommate had found her, bleeding nearly to death, making a second attempt with a plastic shopping bag over her head. One hundred stitches and a six-pint transfusion later, Edie ended up at Fallkill Psychiatric. This was her second stay in two years.

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