Chapter Text
i. ‘the signs your kid might be a psychopath’
or
‘well, that didn’t fkng go as planned’
…
They say that by the age of eight an average human being has experienced a full range of primary emotions. Perhaps, not totally consciously, but you kinda get an idea of happiness (when you’re loved-loved by someone), sadness (when you realise you can never get what you want more than anything in your life; ‘Can I get it?’ ‘No, you absolutely cannot.’), fear (when you’re scared so much you can’t move your limbs), surprise (when it turns out you can trust someone profoundly), anger (when it feels like the whole world has betrayed you). It’s not perhaps quite as complicated as in the grown-up world, but your mate turning your back on you and going to play with another kid in a sandbox because their toy is cooler, is also quite a betrayal, so you probably see the point. I got to be introduced to most of them overnight, so don’t you dare call me a drama queen when I say that now my life is irrevocably divided on ‘before’ and ‘after’. I was foolish enough to think I knew pretty much everything about Her before; I’m very much aware I know close to nothing now.
If you ask me how my life has been since I discovered that I was an indirect reason for Her death, I’d tell you that it sucks. Oh well, curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it? But that would be quite an inappropriate question to ask a child, so don’t. Privacy is important, therapy is overrated, so screw it, screw it, screw it. I realise I was much happier when I didn’t understand She was not just ‘not around anymore’ but actually dead, and now that I do, it doesn’t feel nice, to say the least. I recall my mama’s words about the void and how I’m supposed to learn how to live with it, blah-blah-blah, but I don’t really see how exactly it can get any smaller. Ever. Like, ever-ever!
I think that that small ‘nuclear bomb explosion’ happened to do something to me after all. Not on the surface, but somewhere deep in the core. So, the time after my birthday ends up being quite a rollercoaster. Like, imagine it’s an escape room, or, I dunno, a jenga game two pieces away from collapse, and it’s just in your head. Good luck.
I don’t think I ever knew how it felt not to get what I wanted. Mama’s way of dealing with me always used to be something like this:
“Can I get an ice cream for dinner?” – “Yes, but after you eat your soup.”
“Can I get that drone we saw today?” – “Yes, but if you get all ‘nines’ at the end of this semester.”
“Can I get to drive your car?” – “Yes, but when you’re 16 and have your driver’s licence.”
It’s never been a ‘no-no’. Never. Until now.
So, the concept of ‘Can-I-get-it-No-you-absolutely-can-not’ that results from the understanding that She is gone forever, doesn’t do very well for me. It’s printed for good on the inside of my skull and every other ‘no’ or any ‘you have to/ must/ should’ now is a red flag that switches some tumbler in my head. I see those flashes of red and white before my eyes and just blackout. Again, and again. I’m like a train that goes off the rails and I have no control over it. Punching the holes in the doors is easier than punching or headbutting the walls, but punching or headbutting the walls makes my fists and head pound with pain, and it’s better than how my chest aches all the time. Sometimes when mama shakes me down and I jolt back to my senses, I find myself with the scissors cutting my new school uniform or pulling out my hair methodically one-by-one, or scratching my forearms with an unbent paper clip.
One of these days I go into a full-blown blubbering when I discover a single grey thread in the wild dark mess on mama’s hair. Even though she pulls it out right away I still cry a whole day because grey hair means that mama gets old and that she will die and leave me just like Her. The next day we go to the hair saloon and I wait for several hours while some lady dyes mama’s hair, and then I sob all the way home and three hours after we get there, because in the sunlight I discover that it’s two shades darker than it used to be.
The other day I had a meltdown because I wanted to move to the UK. Welp, guess where we live?
Any of this doesn’t make sense, but neither does the fact that I cannot get Her. Cannot see Her smile. Cannot smell Her hair. Cannot touch Her skin. Will never be able to. And if I cannot have Her, then it’s only fair for me to want the whole world to myself instead. One day I’ll grow up into a giant and swallow it down completely – I only hope this world is big enough to fill the space where She is supposed to be because mama says She used to be bigger than the world.
Mama has been quite weird, too. It’s late March when I find a book ‘How to Help Your Child to Cope After a Traumatic Event’ in mama’s bedside cabinet and well, that explains her weirdness a little bit.
Make Your Child Feel Safe. We cuddle a lot – much more than we used to. When I have a nightmare, I’m allowed to come to mama’s bedroom and sleep with her in her bed. One of such nights, when I just cannot stop crying even when with her, mama extracts some strange orange t-shirt with a blue teddy bear from the top shelf in her dressing room and pulls it on my pillow as a pillowcase. When mama explains that it was one of Her favourite t-shirts, tears stop. Nightmares don’t stop tho, but I don’t need to leave my bed every night anymore – when they are not too scary, I turn on the flashlight, get under the covers, hug my pillow and read Her notebook. Again, and again, and again.
Help Your Child Enjoy Themselves. We do stop morning jogging just like I was promised. And I get my fencing classes, my horse-riding and my museum visits. Fencing classes go quite well – Carolyn takes me to her Fencing club once a week; it’s really cool and fascinating, and I really like that no one can see my face at all. Horse-riding is… Erm… So, long story short, this is what happened during the very first day: I was very excited to feed an apple to my horse called Apple (what an irony) and he didn’t seem to really want it. So, when I tried to make him eat it, he bit me, I punched him and got almost back-kicked. But it’s okay – they said they’d give me another horse next time. And museums… Grandpa took me to the National Gallery and gosh, it’s so boring, you have no idea. Except maybe, Artemisia Gentileschi’s exhibition – this lady really had a way of painting decapitation.
Share information about what happened. I ask mama why she still was so angry about the iPad and me watching all the videos even when we knew that those were videos of Her (just for your information, the iPad was taken away from me and returned with a very edited and ‘cleaned up’ version of the file: no more blood and killings, what a shame).
“It was a dirty move of Hélène to show this to you.”
“But why? I don’t understand. It was a good thing – I could finally see Her. I could finally understand Her. I could finally know Her better!”
“Because She never wanted you to know Her like this. She never wanted you to discover that part of Her. She asked me that we keep it behind the closed doors of the past because She didn’t want you to meet all that darkness. It was Her choice, Her decision as your mother, and Hélène didn’t have any right to take it from Her.”
Mama looks really upset about it and I decide that not mentioning the ‘we had an agreement’ part is probably wiser. But I take a book from her hands and put it on the nightstand, paving a path for me to nestle myself on her lap. I put my head on her chest and circle my arms around her waist.
“I don’t care. I love Her anyway. I love everything about Her: both the colours of Her morning and the darkness of Her night.”
“You can be quite a romantic young gentleman sometimes.”
“I know, mama. I read a lot.” I grin so wide my cheeks hurt. “Was She romantic?”
A breath that mama takes is deep and shuddering, shaking my cheek pressed to her chest before she puts her chin on my head and hugs me back.
Realize That Questions May Persist. Mama, what did She like to have for breakfast? Mama, what did She smell like? Mama, who did She like to wear? Mama, if She could have one food for the rest of Her life, what would it be? Mama, what was Her favourite colour? Mama, did She like mangos? Mama, what shampoo did She use? Mama, what She was like as a child? Mama, did She have brothers and sisters? Mama, had She ever broken any bones? Mama, was She more like Her mom or dad? Mama, what ice cream flavour did She like the best? Mama, what friends did She have? Mama, had She ever been awake for 24 hours straight? Mama, was She a cat or a dog person? Mama, if She could get free tickets to go anywhere in the world, where would She go? Mama, what was Her favourite movie? Mama, did She have any scars? Mama, did She like Her job? Mama, how many countries had She been to? Mama, did She like pineapples on Her pizza? Mama, what was She dreaming about? Mama, was She scared of anything? Mama, how did you meet Her? Mama, why would you call Her a ‘spoiled brat’? Mama, what did She use to say about me? Mama, how do you think She would have killed me if She had to? Mama, tell me again how She called me your “Little Love”…
Encourage Family Discussions About the Death of a Loved One. We talk about Her. We talk about Her a lot. It’s like they all have been granted some unspoken permission to finally talk about Her and now cannot stop. Mama’s stories are about how beautiful and powerful and extraordinary She was. Grandpa’s stories are about how naughty and wayward She used to be. Grandma tells me what a child She was, a tactile cuddler, constantly seeking attention and craving for love. According to Irina, She was hilarious and also a real asshole, but mostly the latest one. Sometimes it feels like they’re talking about different people. But I get all the pieces together carefully, put them in their respective places of the huge puzzle of “Mom V.” in my head. I think about each of them, polish each and every shard of colourful glass until it shines. And rotate the cell of the kaleidoscope of ’She was so many things’, fascinated by every new pattern I get in the end.
Show Your Child How to Grieve. If you’d asked me before if mama was a happy person, I wouldn’t think twice before answering ‘of course, she is!’. She’d tell me so many times how happy she was because she had such a wonderful boy like myself. Now, in our ‘after’, she doesn’t look like a happy person anymore and I don’t think one can turn into an unhappy person overnight. I think, my mama is just an excellent liar, especially when she’s not trying to when it comes to lying to herself. Before, she would be just pretending to be happy. But now I reckon that my void encourages her void and she doesn’t quite know what to do with the two of our voids, which together are twice as big as this whole world.
She doesn’t cry after each and every full-blown anger outburst I have, but she bursts into tears every time I end up hurting myself, which means she cries often, nowadays.
She carefully wraps gauze around my blood-stained knuckles and “We could never stay away from each other for too long, pulled into each other like two magnets every time, with ‘stay away’ part getting shorter and shorter until there wasn’t such a thing as ‘stay away’. We were supposed to have forever…”
Her hands softly apply some cooling ointment on my bruising ankle and “I have stopped thinking of my future because I can’t help still seeing Her face over and over…”
A neon-blue bandage with SpongeBob masks a nasty scratch on my forehead and “If I had a time machine there’s one thing I would do – I would travel back to the last time we were together, hold Her in my arms and say how much I love Her because I would never say it enough when I could…”
When I watch the tears streaming down her cheeks without restrain, I feel the hole in my chest blooming with the new colours, which an adult person would have identified as guilt and regret, but I’m not an adult person, so I’m just confused. If I miss Her so badly without ever having Her for real, how awful it must be to not have Her anymore after She actually used to belong to you. My hands cradle mama’s face with as much tenderness as I am capable of. “If I had a time machine I would travel to the moment when you finally persuaded Her to have me and tell you both ‘don’t’. I think you and I would be much happier if She still were here instead of me.”
Mama suffocates a sob, scoops me closer and exhales “that’s not true” into my hair, but one of us has to be brave enough to say out loud that the fact I am in this world is the reason that She isn’t.
Maintain routines as much as possible. Mama says that I have to keep going to school until the end of this school year. She says it’s better if we leave things with the school like they are.
So, I keep going to school every day, where things are just like they used to be. But it seems like they all got together against me.
The teachers are dreadful. “William, you can’t lay on the floor during the lesson.” “William, you cannot walk. Sit back to your seat.” “No, William, you cannot stay playing outside because the break is over.” “William, you cannot wear you PJs instead of school uniform.” “William, you must eat your lunch.” “William, you cannot play on your phone.” “William, you should be listening to me.” “You cannot run in the hallways, William.” “You have to stop kicking the chair’s leg, William.” Yada yada yada…
But the kids are especially annoying. Derek isn’t here anymore, but his old gang is, and apparently, they have a new and very exciting game of who’s gonna make me snap first. Tuning them out doesn’t work so good anymore, neither does mama’s challenge of a passive tolerance to evil through inaction or indifference. Because even the numbsculls they are, they’re first-class bullies and it didn’t take them too long to figure out that the word combination ‘your mom’ is like a red rag to a bull for me.
This time when I’m suspended mama is the one who picks me up from school.
“What were you even thinking about? You realize that would have killed him? You realize that another minute of choking and he would have died?” she’s basically yelling at me, everything but patient and calm, as her eyes dart angrily between the road and my reflection in the rear-view mirror.
I open my mouth, exhale on the glass in front of me, fogging out the view of the running trees. I draw the smiley sun not meeting her eyes. “I know.”
I wonder if missing Her is what’s making me hate so much everybody else.
Listen well. We haven’t travelled as I wanted yet, but mama promises we will soon, so it’s okay. Also, we go to London together more often and it’s actually a lot of fun. Sometimes we go to the ice cream parlour in Soho and I confirm that my favourite ice flavour is not the Porcini chocolate cream but the blue cheese & walnut one. Sometimes we get to the upper deck of ‘Dixie Queen’ and watch the evening lights of the city through its windows. Sometimes we go to the ballroom with red walls and sit there watching the swaying couples until some old and very lovely lady invites me to dance with her and even though I’m pretty sure I step on her feet not only once, she thanks me very cordially after.
This time we go to a very fancy restaurant at the Connaught, because mama says she wants something special, just for the two of us. I’m wearing Gucci Kids, mama’s navy dress is Dice Kayek, and even though I’m quite used to people staring at us sideways, this time I don’t really mind it. Mama is very beautiful, the food is very delicious, and the whole evening is simply amazing. Almost as amazing as my birthday dinner before it was spoiled, but it’s just the two of us and hopefully, no one’s gonna spoil this one.
When mama comes back from the lady’s room, I stare through the window watching people passing us outside. I do not notice her and almost jump when she pulls her seat back to the table.
“What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, you know, just things.”
“Tell me?”
Her eyes, warm as the finest melted dark chocolate, look at me with the sparks of amusement and curiosity and I decide that well, why not.
“I’m thinking about all those strangers walking down the streets of the city in the darkness, merged into the faceless human river. Who are they? Is there anybody waiting for them anywhere? What are they doing for their lives? How easy it must be to take one of such lives at one of such streets, unnoticed and unrecognized? For the ghost who, hypothetically, only comes to the city every once in a while. For the ghost who doesn’t even look like one who can take the life. I wonder what happens to one’s soul when they die: if it leaves the body or just becomes so small that it can’t control it anymore and just stays there, dying forever. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a soul in the first place. I’m thinking about what one feels when they kill someone. How old do you think She was when She killed for the first time? How do you think She felt?..”
Mama doesn’t interrupt. She is listening. She is watching. She barely breathes and doesn’t blink at all when amusement and curiosity in her eyes alter into something that feels very close to recognition and understanding.
Know when to seek help. Mama’s phone vibrates loudly in the comfortable silence that surrounds us like a cocoon and when Carolyn’s name appears on the screen, she grabs it and rushes herself out of the kitchen. The rain drums the steady rhythm of its song against the window and I watch the streams of water running down the fogged glass in front of me. My head is cradled in both of my open palms as my thumbs trace the line of my throat, bones and muscles under the skin, and when they find two pulsating spots on each side of my neck, in the dips right where it meets the jaw, I realise I cannot recall the name of the artery, which pumps the blood from my heart and to my face, scalp, skull, neck and the brain.
I pull on the top panel of the open laptop that rests on mama’s side of the kitchen island and move it closer to me. Mama’s password generating system has been improved quite significantly if that’s what you call adding ‘nine’ and ‘three’ after ‘one-two-O-three’ of my birthday, so you don’t really need to be a genius (even tho I am incredibly bright) to get through its defence. I’m not gonna do anything naughty anyway - I just need to Google that stupid artery.
The browser app retains tabs from the previous session and oh wow. ‘When Your Child is a Psychopath’. Seriously, mama? Now you’re just being very mean…
“Mama. Do you think I am a psychopath?” I enunciate my question loudly when she enters through the arch of the doorway, and her face still glued to the phone screen, raises to meet mine and she frowns at me confused. I’m trying to keep my best deadpan face as she slides on her seat across from me, slams the laptop shut so fast that I barely manage to get my fingers out of its way, and mirrors my expression with her own ‘you-won’t-read-me’ face.
“I don’t know William. Are you?”
“Pffft,” I fill my cheeks with air and blow out sharply, trying to make my surprise less evident because I expect her to start denying everything or at the very least have the decency to look guilty, and not… well… this.
“I don’t have ‘callous and unemotional traits’,” my fingers perform air quotes, just to emphasise how ridiculous this whole idea is. “I do feel things! I love you. And Her. And grandparents. And Irina. And even Carolyn, mama!”
“Then tell me what you think has been happening here. Because I honestly don’t know. I open the DSM, point to a random thing and you end up exhibiting elements of it. I think, it’s ADD, but then oh, no, it’s not. I think, it might be OCD, but no, not really. I think you’ve got characteristics of the sensory-integration disorder, but once again, not a perfect match. I’m looking for the predominant feature to understand what exactly is wrong and can’t tell. So, you tell me.”
“Mama, I’m mourning!” I make sure my eyes are wide enough to demonstrate the level of indignation I feel about all this nonsense.
“You were choking your classmate to death!” Well, mama also is very good at widening her eyes at me.
“He didn’t matter!”
“You were pointing a gun at me!”
“Oh, so we’re digging that deep!”
“It was barely one month ago!”
“It was not a real gun!”
“You manipulated me!”
“Well, I didn’t shoot you, did I?” it’s not that my voice is an octave higher than normally but I yell it at her, and it’s mostly just a shot in the dark, just for the sake of yelling something back, because it’s not like I can admit it that it’s totally not normal to hold your mother up at gunpoint, but her body freezes, her bottom lip twitches in something so fleeting it’s barely there, but I notice. I catch the glimpse of it anyway because I’m excellent at reading mama now, and oh shit…
“Oh shit, She did. She shot you, didn’t She?”
And suddenly, all the ‘I was foolish enough to think I was much happier back to then when she was dead’ and ‘I should have shot you in the head and watched you die’ make so much sense. Oh, how much I wish it didn’t.
And probably my voice is heavy with much more accusation and disapproval than I intend it to because she blinks at me quite flabbergasted and a tiny bit scared, and blurts out a very defensive “I stabbed Her first,” probably without giving it any proper thought beforehand. I feel like my eyes go wider (if that’s even possible), eyebrows jump higher, basically to the ceiling, and I feel stupid and bamboozled, and hurt, and so small and miserable that I have to try really hard to swallow the lump in my throat.
“So… just to be clear. You stabbed Her. And then She shot you. And then you two got together and what? Decided to have a kid? And now, you’re sitting in your kitchen, Googling articles on child psychiatry, trying to confirm or refute your suspicion that this kid (who’s basically a product of the reaction between a stabbed and gunshot wounds) might or might not be a psychopath?”
“Erm… Yyyeeah?..”
And gosh, if the idea that my family was a little bit messed up occurred to me before, now the conveyor of my thinking machine spits out bright, multicoloured LEGO blocks assembled into a flashing ‘WE ARE SO FUCKED’ sign.
This probably can be read clearly on my forehead or something, because mama reaches for my hand and her thumb brushes softly over my knuckles.
“Do you think about hurting other people, Will?”
“Define ‘hurting other people’,” the corners of my lips extend into a dimple-ish grin but mama just keeps staring at me expectantly. I chew on my bottom lip considering my answer for a second or two, but then decide that there’s no point in lying. “Yes.”
She nods decisively and I don’t understand why just ‘yes’ is not enough. “How often?”
“Most of the time? When the teachers boss me around even though I’m smarter than they are. When the kids at school call me names, being stupid little shits. When a lady in the park asumes that you’re my babysitter and not my mother. When this annoying mister from your work invites you for dinner, or a man from the table next to ours in the restaurant eyes you as if you’re the thing in the toy-store window, and I know that if She were there with us they wouldn’t even dare to look at you because you’re Hers…”
Mama’s grip on my hand tightens on the last one. “And what stops you?” she whispers, her gaze searching.
“I know that you’d be upset. And because of Her. She hovers over me all the time, watching, listening. And She’d have been upset too because She didn’t want me to know that I’m dark and broken.”
“You are not dark and broken!”
“But you want to fix me anyways.”
Her hand retreats from mine and head falls in her palms, and a groan, low and frustrated, rattles deep in her chest.
“I don’t want to ‘fix’ you. But I want to be sure that my eight-year-old doesn’t go on a killing spree, because in this world it’s considered to be an indictable criminal offence and is most commonly penalized through a lengthy or life imprisonment.”
The words are new and somehow too complicated for me to grasp the meaning of anything but ‘life imprisonment’. I blink at her stupidly. “But She didn’t spend Her life in prison. She killed a lot of people but She was still with you. I am also with you.”
Mama’s gaze falls upon mine and she pulls back at her hair tiredly. “It’s more complicated than that, L’venok. You will not understand it now. But I’ll explain you one day why I’m not enough to protect you.”
When I wake up at night it’s not because of a nightmare but because I hear her crying. I grab my pillow, pad through the hallway, crawl quietly into her bed. I get under the covers and scoot closer to her, trying to wrap my body around her as much as I can. ‘Spooning releases feel-good hormones, increases intimacy and helps relax the nervous system. Spooning is important.’ I don’t succeed, not really. I sigh. I promise myself to become a much better big-spoon for mama when I grow up.
When I wake up again it’s to an empty space beside me. The house is mostly dark and when I track the only source of light it’s a thin line from under the door to mama’s study. The voices are quiet and muffled, but when I put my ear to the door I can hear “Hélène” and “found gutted” and “the trail of dead bodies” used in the same sentence before the silence dangles. Then the steps approach any faster than I can possibly retreat and the door swings open to reveal mama and Carolyn staring at me.
“William, I want you here in 20 minutes fully dressed,” mama almost barks at me and the amount of urgency in her voice makes me flee up the stairs without questioning.
When I’m back in 15 (I can be impressively quick when I want, and the only two things that I grab from my room are my phone and the ‘human-bacon’ notebook anyway), mama’s clothes is changed too. She pushes an orange roll-top backpack into my hands, drags me out of the house and into the back seat of Carolyn’s car.
She is quiet all 1 hr 15 minutes of our drive and Carolyn and her only exchange a nod before mama and I leave the car in front of the airport terminal. She is quiet for another 30 minutes as we sit and wait for something until a tall man with light-brown hair, five o’clock shadow and childlike expression in his eyes, approaches us and I’m told that this is Robert, we’re gonna be travelling together and I am to call him ‘father’ for now. I gawk at mama without sparing him a look, but she’s all weirdly alarmed and nervous and I only nod obediently at her “Do you understand me, William?”
I follow her down the hallways of the airport with my head lowered and bump into her as she stops abruptly and turns on her heels. “Give me your phone!”
I fish the phone out of the inside pocket of my bomber and watch her as she gets the SIM card out, breaks it into the half with her fingers and then throws the bright-blue cased device into the nearest garbage can. Then she pulls me to the side, kneels in front of me and her fists clutch at the edges of my unzipped jacket so tight I think she might tear it up.
“I will need you to be very brave!”
I almost scoff at this because, duh, mama, I’m always brave. But her hands flitter to my face, cupping it so firmly that my cheeks and lips pout comedically. “I am serious. I need you to be brave because I’m not going with you.”
My jaw drops and my eyes go wide. “But - ”
“ – I cannot go. I need to stay and deal with something. But I need you to be safe!”
“But - ”
“I will find you when it’s all over.”
“But how? You’ve thrown my phone into a garbage can!”
I feel dizzy and cold and hot at the same time, but her eyes watering, she tugs me closer, her arms circling my frame with a death grip, almost crushing me. The tips of her hair graze over my face and her breath burns against my cheek as she whispers into my ear.
“I will find you” and “I love you, L’venok.”
She raises sharply ripping me off like a band-aid, in one tug, spins 180 and dashes away without turning.
I stand there gasping for air, watching as her figure disappears behind the corner, out of my reach. My lower lip trembles, my forehead scrunches, tears roll over my cheeks and as someone grabs my hand and tugs on it, my body follows as if a ragdoll on auto-pilot.
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