My mother’s weekly Sunday calls migrated to Derek’s iPad. She began appearing gaunt, her hands cracked and raw. When I probed, Derek would lean into the frame, flashing his signature porch-light charm, insisting Mom simply “loved keeping busy.” The final breaking point was an email from June Aldrich, my mother’s oldest confidante, noting that Ellen was carrying heavy groceries through the rain while Melissa scrolled on her smartphone in the dry, heated car. Somebody has been rearranging your mother, June wrote.
I didn’t pack a suitcase; I packed an arsenal. I secured emergency leave, printed out the property deed, the mortgage statements, and the original closing documents, and shoved them into my canvas backpack. Paper weighs virtually nothing, yet it possesses the tensile strength to hold up a house.
Now, standing on the Welcome mat of Maplewood Court, the jet lag evaporated from my bloodstream. Melissa, draped in a luxurious silk robe and clutching a ceramic coffee mug, had mistaken me for a hired cleaning girl she’d solicited online. She casually abandoned the front door, leaving me to step over the threshold of my own property like an invading ghost.
I followed the rhythmic, agonizing sound of a bristle brush scraping against wet stone, stepping out through the French doors. There, kneeling on a cheap foam pad, was the woman who gave me life, her hands plunged into a bucket of soapy water.
“Mom,” I breathed.
She turned. For a fraction of a second, pure, unadulterated joy illuminated her exhausted features. Iris. But the light was instantly snuffed out. Panic seized her eyes. She scrambled up, wincing sharply on her rehabilitated knee, gripping my forearms with a terrifying, bird-like frailty.
“Oh, honey, you can’t just…” she whispered frantically, her eyes darting toward the second-story windows. “They don’t like surprises.”
Chapter 2: The Pathology of Parasites
My mother embraced me with a desperate, crushing force, then instantly pushed me away, treating me like contraband that would surely trigger an alarm. Her wrists were appallingly thin. Her knuckles were split, weeping tiny fissures of blood from chronic exposure to harsh detergents. The last time I had held these hands, they carried the scent of peppermint lotion and potting soil; today, they smelled of industrial bleach.
