Mothered by Zoje Stage
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I started writing Mothered in April 2020, I had no intention of it being a “pandemic story.” It is common for novels to take place amid a world that looks much like our own, and the longer I worked on the book—and the longer the COVID-19 pandemic lasted—the more of that reality crept into the story. I feel it’s important to note, however, that while the backdrop of this novel is the early months of a pandemic, with all its confusion and uncertainty, the world that Grace and Jackie inhabit is fictitious. You may recognize certain aspects and may have encountered similar things—but I’m aware that as waves of COVID-19 moved around the country, people in different regions experienced different protocols and rates of infection at different times. Mothered was never meant to document a universal experience or the specific early months of our pandemic—but for Grace and Jackie, their pandemic provides a crucial catalyst for what unfolds in their lives.
Z. S.
February 18, 2022
PROLOGUE
Silas loved a good puzzle, especially if it involved the interlocking pieces of science and soul, the known and the unknown. What made a human being turn monstrous? An error in prenatal development, a misalignment of chemicals, an insufficient ability to adapt to misfortune, too much of one thing and too little of something else? As a psychotherapist he’d never utter the words monster or crazy aloud; more than ever, the world was aware of the synergy of illness—in an individual, in a society. But in truth, his path to working with the criminally insane began with a teenage passion for serial-killer movies and horror stories.
He’d once imagined a state hospital as a barbaric castle where screams echoed in shadowed hallways. Now he knew it as a more prosaic place, an office park that wouldn’t look out of place in the former Soviet Union, surrounded by rolling fields of clipped grass where no one ever ran or played. Each building had harsh lighting and its own litany of rules, though one building had more locking doors than the others.
The folder in front of him carried a mystery in its thin, fresh pages. He’d met the new patient only once, and the details of her case made it all the more confounding as to how someone so frail had committed an act of such brutality. Silas pondered it as he turned his attention to the gloom outside his window. He tried to keep his office clean and bright, with framed pictures as colorful as a child’s xylophone, to counter the effects of the gray clouds that invaded the western Pennsylvania skies with mournful frequency. Homicides within a family weren’t that unusual, but this . . . The file didn’t have enough information, but he turned back to it, looking for whatever clues it held.
Blood had dripped from the walls. The police photos revealed a chaotic scene and Silas was sure the two had fought, physically and ferociously—no quick slicing-open-the-throat while the victim lay asleep. Overkill wasn’t uncommon in crimes of passion, where love and hate bred a frenzy of mixed emotions, deep and personal, but ninety-one stab wounds? How long had that taken? How had those thin arms had so much strength? The detectives found four knives at the scene: two had broken from repeated, forceful use; one was embedded in the skull.
Silas looked away again, this time because the murder scene was threatening to dislodge the chipped-ham sandwich he’d eaten for lunch. He could taste the salt and mayonnaise rising in his throat.
“I had to do it. She was contagious”—her greeting as she’d opened the door to let the police in. A miasma of decay had wafted out like a poisonous cloud, making the uniformed officers gag. How had she lived with the stench? And why? Most people, if they were going to report their own crime, would do it right after the fact—not wait two weeks while living with the corpse. Her excuse, given days later, was that she’d been terribly ill (too ill to make a phone call?), but the first responders had quoted her as saying, “It wasn’t an emergency. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
It hadn’t taken anyone long to reach the conclusion that she was mentally disturbed, and she was sent to Torrance, the region’s only forensic psychiatric hospital.
Silas grinned. Another’s tragedy shouldn’t please him, but he couldn’t help it: he loved a good puzzle, especially one that looked on the surface like the gory movies he still so loved. But film and fiction weren’t enough anymore; now he craved the real thing and loved his role in revealing the perpetrator’s story.
From what he knew of her so far, she was communicative and expressive and quick to open up. His job, as it often was, would be to filter the drop of truth from a waterfall of magical thinking. He glanced upward at the clock; she would be brought to his office momentarily for her first full session. Silas closed the folder and slid it into a drawer, abuzz with the nervous excitement of a boy who’d mastered the art of trespassing.
1
They were all lied to. Maybe it hadn’t started as a lie—maybe it started as wishful thinking. That’s how easy it was to turn good intentions, uttered by powerful people, into absolute bullshit. It confirmed what Grace already knew: everyone lied, even if they started out telling the truth. It was easy for the truth to slip away. Two weeks of lockdown became three. One month became two.
Grace whirled around the “office” in her new rolly chair, angrily pushing off the wall with her bare feet. She’d never had space for an office before. At present it was a mostly empty room, with a cheap IKEA desk in the corner—one of the mix-and-match styles where you picked the tabletop and legs separately.