“Of course. You’re so observant. That’s why I know you already know what I’m going to tell you …” The wiper blades did a screeching arch, and her shoulders started shaking. She sobbed gutturally and choked on the words: “Your father is cheating on me.”
Will hesitated. Even from the backseat, he could see tears pouring down her face in the mirror. “I didn’t know-know,” he said.
The car swerved the slightest bit as she groped inside the door pocket for a tissue. “But you suspected.”
“Well, he went into work on a Saturday. Plus, I heard him talking on the phone.”
“Your father and that goddamn phone! He thinks nobody notices him whispering in the dark, pouring his heart out.” She took one hand off the wheel and sarcastically clutched her chest, as if the contents of Douglas’s heart couldn’t fill a teaspoon.
“Have you checked his call history?”
“Yes! He wipes it clean! The man is so devious.” The line of traffic in front of them slowed for construction, and it took Josephine a few terrifying seconds to notice and brake.
Will made a supportive but vague sound. The dashboard heater was cranked too high, but this was not the time to ask whether she could turn it down.
“Maybe I should have kept all this to myself. But it affects you too. Your dad uses you too. On the one hand, he likes how we reflect on him. We’re the perfect family he never had growing up. But he also hates the way we restrict him. He hates sitting down to dinner when he could be off somewhere, talking programming with other megabrains.”
Below them, the Hudson River was the same slate-gray color as the overcast sky. It made Will feel disconnected, like he was flying or falling. His skin crawled inside his sweaty sweater.
“What are you going to do?” He wondered if he ought to brace himself for divorce. His head swam with the idea of a joint-custody agreement. He couldn’t handle spending half the week away from his mom.
“I don’t know,” she said, audibly wiping her nose. “Before I can even think about that, I need him to admit it. As if I don’t have enough going on with your sister going off the deep end.”
Will leaned forward to crack his window and had a full-body pins-and-needles sensation. An upward jolt shot through him, tailbone to head, and the dreaded tightening returned to his chest. Recumbentibus: a knockout punch. That was the word Will had copied into his unusual-word notebook a few months ago. In Will’s experience that was how epilepsy felt: like getting hit by an opponent much bigger and more depraved than him. Every time—every single flipping time—was a filthy sucker punch to the head.
He came to in a fast-food parking lot, where his mom had pulled into a handicapped space. The handicapped plates on her car were new—another weak upshot of Will’s health conditions.
The neurons in Will’s brain were still firing every which way, mostly in directions he sensed they really shouldn’t. His head was cradled in his mother’s lap. After pulling over, she’d moved into the backseat, unbelted him, and rolled him onto his side. She’d also balled up her cashmere coat and put it under his head. The fur collar tickled his ear. The smell of her Shalimar perfume brought the world roaring back to him.
“Are you okay?” Josephine asked.
Will responded with a groan.
“Oh honey, I shouldn’t have stressed you out,” she said.
When Will was teetering on the edge of a mini-seizure, a big dose of worry could cause him to seize. Now that he was awake, he felt more stressed out than ever. Every seizure was a reminder that he’d lost the ability to lead a normal life, and it usually took Will a day or two to pull himself out of the downward spiral of frustration and shame.
“It’s not your fault,” Will said. If anyone had stressed him out, it was his dad.
Josephine draped her watch over her wrist and redid the clasp. Presumably, she’d taken it off to time his seizure.
“Did it last long?” Will asked.
“Objectively, no. Subjectively, God yes.”
When Will first started having seizures, he was desperate to know what he looked like in their midst. He’d imagined all the terrifying eppy clichés: flopping around like a fish, his tongue gyrating around his gaping mouth. But Will’s fits were what his doctor called “absence seizures.” During them, his mom said he just stared at her as though she were a stranger. It sounded pretty underwhelming, and the doctor said Will ought to be seizure-free by the time he was eighteen, but each attack still scared Josephine and physically drained Will.
Things had barely come back into focus before Will conked back out in a drooling crash-nap.
Will woke up starving, his exhausted brain craving nourishment.
“Are there any snacks in the car?” he croaked.
She passed him half a roll of Life Savers from the glove compartment. They wouldn’t do a thing to kill the gnawing pain in his stomach. He was so hungry he could eat a city block and still have room for a foot-long sandwich.
“Any water?”
She shook her head and killed the ignition.
Will’s head rang as he righted himself. The car was idling in front of a brick building with arched windows and fortressy turrets. It looked as sad and complicated as the people Will imagined pacing its halls.
Josephine reached across the seat for her purse. “Wait in the car,” she said. “I just need to go inside and sign those forms.”
Will slipped one arm through his coat. “I’ll come with you,” he said. He didn’t want to be alone. Seizures were like earthquakes; sometimes there were aftershocks.
“I’ll be in and out. I promise. I don’t want you to be involved in this any further. It’s bad enough what Violet did, but the stress, setting off your seizures—No. Just stay still and I’ll be right back.”
The horn beeped twice and Will realized she’d hit the lock button on her keychain.
He returned his cheek to the seat fabric. His mind flitted back to the letter in his mother’s purse. He wished he’d had the good sense to copy down the return address before she took the envelope away. He wondered if his mother was thinking the same. Why had she delivered it to Violet without opening it first?
His mother’s cell phone interrupted his train of thought. It was vibrating between the two front seats, smacking its silver head against the plastic cup holder, the whirring sound threefold. Will reached over and inspected the screen. DOUG, read the caller ID. Maybe Will should have pressed Ignore. Instead, his thumb wandered to the green Talk button.
“Dad?” he said.
On the other end of the line was the swishing sound of a pocket call. There was a loud, social din. A restaurant, maybe. His father’s lunch hour?
A woman’s giggle cut through the racket like a clinking teaspoon. It was followed by the unmistakable sound of his father’s voice. “You’re a remarkable woman,” Douglas said. “A few of us are heading down to the Bull and Buddha. Any interest in joining us?”
As the call cut out, Will made a vow to himself: if he could not help his mother by bringing Rose home to apologize for the hurt she’d caused them, he would save her by finding out the whos and whys of his father’s indiscretions.
“See? That didn’t take long, did it?” Josephine said later, sliding behind the steering wheel and slinging her purse onto the passenger seat. “And now we’re safe. We really don’t have to worry. There won’t be a big, Violet-shaped cloud hanging over us any longer.”
Will glanced up at the spiky-looking building with its too-dark windows. “What’s it like inside?”