Mother - Chapter 9

9

A lone snowflake flitters into the cherry blossom, one of the final remnants of a three-day snowstorm. 

It sails through the labyrinth of frosty branches, something almost deft and purposeful in its movements. I find myself unexplainably captivated by it, needing it to succeed; to glide all the way through and reach the snow-clad ground. Maybe it’s the unlikelihood of this happening that fascinates me, as if I’ll somehow find inspiration in this impossible journey ending in victory.

The flake sifts from the tree’s crown, free of further obstruction. Hope flutters in my chest.

Then a calm breeze washes over the park, collects the crystal chip in its current and delivers it onto the brim of Mother’s hood.

She’s perched on the bench opposite my own, beneath the sakura’s bloomless canopy, hood drawn and hands buried in their sleeves. Her eyes are shut tight, forehead pinched in the middle, like she’s concentrating hard on something. We often find her around the house like this, in the middle of some chore or another, oblivious to the world around her.

Conrad says she does it because she’s sick, and she is—Mother hasn’t been right since last winter. I once overheard the doctors tell Father that there’s something wrong with her organs. That was almost a year ago, though. They’re still unable to tell us anything more, despite how well Father pays them.

That’s why I have a large book propped open on my lap, titled ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Diagnosis with Evidential Reference’. It’s my 12th birthday, and with the blizzard waning, Mother insisted we venture outside to mark both occasions. I know she also wants to take advantage of Father being away on business; he doesn’t let her go out much anymore. So Mother made me choose something “fun” to do. She meant her definition of fun, because I wasn’t allowed to bring any of my half-finished school essays. 

I decided on a short trip to the park, something I knew wouldn’t put her under much stress and would also occupy Conrad, since he’s never seen a snowfall quite as heavy as this one. Sure enough, the moment we arrived, he scurried onto the crown of a hill and busied himself building an igloo, leaving me to wade through the heavy tome smuggled inside my coat.

Every time I reach a diagnosis that vaguely explains Mother’s strange behaviour, I glance up at her, placing the puzzle pieces together in my mind to see if they fit. This usually leads to frustration, which in turn leads to mundane distractions. Like watching a snowflake sashay to the ground, trying to guess if it’ll make it or not.

As I watch the icy shard melt into the faux-fur of Mother’s coat, despair bubbles within.

“Didn’t I say no homework today?” Mother says, startling me. She always exits her odd reveries as quickly as she enters them, cheery smile firmly back in place.

“Not homework,” I mutter.

She pads over to my bench and plops next to me, lifting the book with one finger so she can read the title. Her breath comes out in a plume of mist through her nose. “Studying for your doctorate?” she jokes. But something about her tone makes me certain she knows what I’m doing.

I stow the book back inside my jacket, suddenly feeling ridiculous for bringing it.

“You can’t keep on like this,” she says softly. “You should be having fun. You should be playing with Conrad, like you used to.” She instinctively glances to the hill, where his half-constructed igloo is almost lost to the white sky. “He’s missed you lately.”

“You’re getting worse,” I say abruptly, tired of always having to dodge around this undeniable fact. We’ve never outright spoken about this before. I think that’s why she pauses for a few seconds.

“Maybe I’ve begun to accept that,” she finally says with a small shrug.

Something inside me—a cocktail of emotions brewed over a long period of hopelessness—finally snaps. “Well, I don’t accept your acceptance,” I rise to my feet. The book slips out of my jacket and injects soundlessly into the snow. “Why am I the only one who cares about this? Father throws money at the problem, like that’s ever solved anything. The doctors can’t even figure out what day it is. Conrad . . . is Conrad. And you—you just go about your life pretending as if you’re not dying.”

I know immediately I’ve gone too far. The silence is torturous. Her face relaxes into one of accepted defeat. Yet now that I’ve started I find myself unable to stop.

“Why aren’t you worried?”

She plucks the book from the snow and delicately brushes frost off the spine. Then she examines the cover with a watery-eyed expression that tells me she isn’t really seeing it. “Sometimes there’s simply nothing that can be done.”

“That, Mother, is exactly when you should fight harder.”

I turn on my heel and storm off, trudging so hard in the snow that my feet pound all the way to the concrete path. Mother doesn’t call for me to come back, which suits me fine. I’m not prone to emotional outbursts, so she probably doesn’t know how to deal with the situation any more than I do.

“Hen! Hen!” Conrad squeaks, beckoning me up the hill with mittened hands. “I need you to put the roof on my igloo!”

I falter at the foot of the knoll, very nearly abandoning my frustration and running to Conrad without question. I remember what Mother said, how I don’t have fun anymore. Does she really expect me to waste time, laughing and making structures out of snow, knowing a dark shadow lurks around the corner, waiting to fracture our family?

Conrad sighs, gives up and disappears behind his igloo. The image seems oddly intangible, as if I’m watching my life from behind a frosted window. I think I hear him say something. “Hello, I’m Conrad,” perhaps. His voice doesn’t sound real, either, like hearing someone speak in the real world when you’re still trapped inside a nightmare.

Then Conrad screams, the cry of pain stabbing through me, jarring me back to my senses, and there’s no question of its authenticity.

I take immediate flight up the hill, slipping and sliding in my haste. I expect he’s fallen over, scraped his knee on a rock or something. That’s why when I mount the crest, I freeze, finding another boy standing over my brother, who’s quivering in the mouth of his igloo, tears streaming down his pale face.

“What’s going on?” I say, recovering, taking a protective step between them. The boy is about my age, but our similarities end abruptly there. His dishevelled appearance would make me suspect he comes from a poor family, if his extreme, well-fed bulk didn’t suggest otherwise. The sleeves of his tattered sweatshirt are stretched tight on his podgy, gorilla-like arms. He welcomes my arrival with a hacking chuckle, yellow teeth flashing between chapped lips.

“H-he pushed me.” Conrad sobs, confirming what I already suspected.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” the boy says with an obnoxious shrug.

“Where are your parents?” I ask the boy.

He chuckles again, and I’m surprised his misty, putrid breath doesn’t come out green. “I don’t need my mommy to walk me to the park. Why, did ya wanna tell on me?”

That was my original intention. But the confirmation of him being alone, as well as the clear pleasure he took from hurting Conrad, quickly gave way to a better plan.

Crunch! His nose shatters under my knuckles. A warm, wetness spatters across my fist and along my arm. For a second there’s a moment of horror frozen on the boy’s stupid face. Then he falls back and tumbles down the hill, his size working against him, making him roll faster and faster, until—

Thud! He slams to a stop, head-butting something solid buried in the snow. A streak of crimson flashes across white, awfully vibrant on the blank canvass.

An immeasurable amount of time passes.

It’s like I’m seeing through the frosted window again. This can’t be real. Because if it were, my breathing wouldn’t be so even. I’d surely feel something, a rush of emotions. Regret. Concern for a human I’ve gravely injured. Some sign of humanity.

“Hen?” Conrad says meekly, shuffling to his feet. The thought of him looking down the hill and seeing what I’ve done matters more to me than the act itself.

“We’re going,” I say, concealing my bloodied fist in my pocket. I usher Conrad down the hill, back towards Mother, who hasn’t moved from where I left her. For the first time, I’m thankful she’s fallen into one of her trance-like bouts of unawareness.

#

On the journey home, Conrad explains our abrupt departure to Mother, that someone pushed him for no reason. He leaves out the part I played. Perhaps he’s sparing me from getting in trouble. Or maybe he’s scared of what I did.

“Why did he hurt me?” he asks Mother, tiny hand in hers. He stares up at her with watery eyes and sniffs twice, waiting for her to offer an explanation.

“I don’t know,” Mother responds. I can tell she’s really tired. Otherwise she would have known just what to say, would have had Conrad back to his giggling self within seconds.

While we traipse our way through the city, the sudden thought hits me that the boy, Conrad’s attacker, might be dead.

I can certainly justify hitting him. After feeling helpless for so long, being able to finally fight a tangible threat to my family, being able to do something, had been too tempting to pass up. But I didn’t want to kill him—and I have no idea if I did. Though as I trail behind Mother and Conrad, I try to remember the stripe of blood that splashed in the snow. I imagine a shimmer of scarlet pooling around the boy’s head—because if his blood continued to pool then it meant his heart was still beating, and then that would mean he’s still alive. I must’ve seen that happen, otherwise I wouldn’t have left him there like that.

We eventually step out from an alley leading down the side of a pharmacy. Mother always lets Conrad run by himself from here, since there’s only a small bridge separating us from our apartment complex. Conrad normally spends the time it takes for us to catch up to linger on the bridge and count the jellyfish swirling in the canal below. He speeds away to do this, though not with the same usual gusto

I’m about to follow him, when Mother tugs me back, into the mouth of the alley.

“You’re right, I’m not worried,” she says, blue eyes glimmering blissfully. For a second I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then my words from earlier, my accusation that she doesn’t care about her impending death, rushes back to me like a shower of icy water. “I guess that’s because I know everything will be okay—my boys will be okay.”

“What about Conrad?”

Mother’s eyes flick over my shoulder, to where I imagine Conrad is gaping through the rails of the bridge. She then glances at my sleeve, where the spatter of blood has dried and darkened. I expect her smile to falter at the sight of this. It doesn’t.

“He has you, Henrik.”