Sallekhana was gradual. First, you fasted one day a week. Then, you ate only on alternate days. Next, you gave up foods one by one: first fruits, then vegetables, then rice, and then juice. After that, you drank only water. Then, you drank it only on alternate days. In the final step, you gave up water too, erased your bad karma, and hoped to shit you weren’t reborn into another nightmare.
Violet looked down at her hands. This was a newly acquired nervous tic. A month into fasting, her hands went cold and her fingernails started to turn blue. Ever since, Violet had been hiding them under thick layers of Night Sky, a sparkly navy polish.
Within the hospital’s cinder-block walls, it was impossible to know whether it was dusk or dawn. “What time is it?” Violet asked.
“Ten p.m. Let me ask you again. Did you attack your brother with a knife?”
“I don’t remember. Everyone keeps asking me that. When are they going to stop asking? I keep saying, I don’t know.”
“Do you think you need to be admitted to the hospital?”
All the feeling trickled out of Violet’s arms. An old childhood fear—claustrophobia—set in.
“Please don’t make me stay,” Violet whispered.
“I know you’re frightened. People come here, and the idea of the hospital is scary. But you’re going through some difficult things, and the people here are trained to handle difficult things. You’re on a journey. The lights are out right now, but they will come on again. For the moment, I think we should give you a bed and a pill to help you get to sleep.”
“I’m afraid to go home,” Violet confessed. “But I don’t want to stay here.”
“I know, honey. But according to what your parents told us, you said and did some things that make you a threat to yourself or others. So we need to keep you here.”
The walls of the office seemed to constrict. Violet cast a helpless glance at the Audubon nature calendar that hung on the wall behind the nurse’s shoulder. October’s photo was a redwood forest—the kind of woodland scene that could make a person feel very awed and alone.
“For how long?” Violet asked.
“The next seventy-two hours.”
“There’s one more thing I haven’t told you.”
The counselor crossed her arms and blinked once.
Violet exhaled in a great gush. “I saw my sister last night.”
THEY DIDN’T USUALLY have school on Saturdays, but they’d fallen behind on account of prepping for Will’s coming math Regents exam. The state said students with disabilities only had to score fifty-five out of a possible hundred percent in order to pass. But it was important to both Will and his mom that he score at least a seventy-five. That was the grade that indicated “college readiness,” and it was Josephine’s endgame that Will graduate early and go on to Columbia in four years’ time.
“We don’t have to push ourselves too hard today,” Josephine said. “But a little bit of social studies will take our minds off last night. After that, I have to drive to Violet’s hospital and sign some forms. Does that sound okay?”
Will nodded. He adjusted his costume beard over the bruise on his chin. He fashioned his sister’s black bowed headband around his neck like a tie.
Ever since the controversy at Stone Ridge Elementary last fall, Will really had come to think of the breakfast nook as his new school. This had required some adjusting, of course. Gone were the familiar sights and smells of learning: pencil shavings, lunch-box rot, the stab-and-drag sound of chalk against a blackboard.
Sure, Will still nursed a few aching, phantom limbs: recess, book fairs, games of Heads-Up, 7-Up with lazy substitute teachers. When he confessed to missing weekly job assignments like “board eraser” or “math shelf helper,” his mom put him in charge of keeping her orchids evenly moist. When he got word of his former classmates’ field trip to watch Othello at the Rosendale movie theater, Josephine had, in her words, “done one better.” She’d driven Will to the city to see the real deal at the Met. She’d even bought him a new brass-buttoned blazer for the occasion.
When Will realized he’d never be in another school play, his mother had the idea to organize a one-man performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” He’d recited it in the Hursts’ formal sitting room, for an audience of Perrier-sipping ladies, mainly Josephine’s various girlfriends and golf partners from the Rondout Country Club. The verse had wormed its way into his long-term memory, and months later, Will still found himself crooning it under his breath:
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
“Where’s the tea?” Will asked his mother.
Social studies usually began with a game called “Tea at the White House.” They would both dress up as famous people from history, and together, in character, they talked about how they grew up, how they died, and what made them famous. There was usually iced tea in a heavy crystal pitcher.
“There’s no tea today,” Josephine said irritably. “Just pretend.”
“Okay.” Will rose from the table, trying to make himself six feet, four inches tall. “I grew up in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky …” He trailed off. He asked his mother why she wasn’t in costume. She was supposed to be dressed like Florence Nightingale.
Josephine didn’t seem to hear his question. Her gaze lingered over a patch of condensation on the windowpane.
Will insisted on running upstairs to his parents’ bedroom to fetch a lace doily for his mother to wear on her head.
He pushed the door inward to reveal his father sitting on the bed, wearing only a towel. His cell phone was cupped to his ear. His pleading voice was unfamiliar, so very different from the managerial tone that he had used to persuade Will to join the Boy Scouts.
“I made a mistake,” Douglas said. “I need to see you. When I’m in a place like this I just can’t see the light. Are you hearing me? I can’t see the fucking light.”
Somewhere toward the end of his father’s plea, the doorknob hit the closet door with a clatter.
Douglas startled at the sound. His rimless glasses were off and his eyes were tear-swollen.
“Sorry, Dad,” Will said, swiping the doily from the top of his mom’s mahogany jewelry box and swiftly closing the door behind him.
“Did you know Dad’s on the phone?” Will asked his mother when he went back to the kitchen.
“So?”
“So it sounded like a funny conversation, is all.”
Josephine’s crossed arms and knitted brow put Will on edge.
“What do you mean, funny?”
Will scoured his brain for the right word. He needed something accurate, but also something that was sensitive to his mother’s feelings. Words meant a lot to his mother, so they meant a lot to Will. He spent a lot of time trekking through the dictionary. He filled notebooks with long and unusual nouns that might impress her (rastaquouère: a social climber; widdiful: describes someone who deserves to be hanged).