Chapter 10
My relationship with my mother has never been easy. I mean, she didn’t drown me in the tub as an infant, so that’s something. There are people who wouldn’t have been able to handle even my existence, let alone the cost of how I came to be.
Fear does terrible things to love, though. Twists it, mangles it, often beyond recognition. Not to mention, I’m a constant reminder of the life and the “normal” daughter she desperately wanted but could never have. Like a perpetual pressure sore that will never fully heal.
Still, she’s the only person—the only human—who might be able to help. Emphasis on “might.”
“Dr. James-Trelane’s office, Classics Department. This is Sandy speaking,” a woman’s voice trills cheerfully in my ear.
If it’s true about opposites attracting, then that is certainly the case with my mother and her longtime assistant.
They’re contemporaries, but Sandy is a warm, bubbly woman who goes on vacations with her daughter and son-in-law, remembers my favorite cookies, and knits scarves for the mitten tree at holiday time.
“Hi Sandy, it’s Jo. Is my mother available?” I ask, turning the water on in Carter’s bathroom sink. I don’t know if the sound will drown out my whole conversation, but hopefully enough.
“Oh, Jo! Hi, sweetie,” Sandy says, and I can feel the affection radiating from her, even via Carter’s phone. “How is school going this semester?”
“Great,” I manage, trying to sell it.
Then she laughs. “Honey, where are you calling from? The bottom of a well?”
That might have been a simpler call to make. “No, just a bad connection,” I lie, adjusting the water to maximum.
I’ve locked myself in the pristine bathroom at Carter’s apartment, while he waits outside—likely impatiently—for his phone back.
He hadn’t wanted to give it to me, clutching it protectively when I’d asked for it.
“Why?” he’d asked, wariness written across his face.
Realization struck with a sharp, bladed precision, like a knife from an expert thrower. He thought I was going to snoop through his phone; he thought I was that desperate. Heat flooded my face. Excuse me, who just kissed who?
I’d gritted my teeth, working on regaining control over my emotions.
“I need to call my mother, let her know what’s going on. Before the cops do.” Another reason to make the call, if not the primary one.
He’d handed it over then, without another word, but I could tell he was reluctant. Because I might “accidentally” send a nip pic to Dr. Stephens? Or rage with jealousy over texts from the mysterious girl he’d stayed overnight with?
Well, fine, fuck him. I squashed the hurt and anger down tight into a little ball, taking the phone and closing myself in the bathroom. I had bigger problems at the moment.
“Is she available?” I ask Sandy now, trying to keep my voice a pleasant neutral.
“Oh, Kelly’s always available for you, hon.”
Uh-huh.
“One second.”
The phone clicks, then clicks again. “Dr. James-Trelane speaking,” my mother says in a brisk, even tone over the precise tap-tap-tap of her fingers on her computer.
I sigh. “It’s me.”
“Jocasta.” A beat of silence hangs for an extra-long moment. “Is everything all right?” Her voice holds grim determination, like someone facing a runaway car without room to dodge it.
“Not exactly.” I move closer to the running water.
“I can barely hear you. Please speak up.” The clatter of keyboard keys resumes but unevenly, betraying her anxiety. “Did something happen?”
Did you do something? is what she means.
She hired the lawyer, stood by me through the incident when I was fourteen.
But after that … it was as if I didn’t exist. I’d broken something in her.
We drifted through our house together, like two semi-polite strangers who happened to share a kitchen and the same oval-shaped face.
The two exceptions were when she saw the tattoos on my hands and when she learned I was applying out of state to Beecher.
This would probably be another.
I wince in anticipation but plow forward anyway. “Have you heard from … him?”
The question slips into the silence between us and explodes, spraying our pretend normalcy with decades of trauma shrapnel.
Her breath catches audibly before she clears her throat. “Jocasta, I’m in the middle of grading midterm papers, and this ridiculous AI detector doesn’t even—”
“Have you heard from him?” I repeat.
“No,” she snaps. A brick wall of a response, deterring any follow- up questions.
“Do you have a way of getting a hold of him?” I persist. Those childhood visits had to have been organized somehow, right?
“Why are you asking me this?” she hisses into the phone. “Nothing good can come from—”
“You don’t have to talk to him, I will. I need answers—”
She gives a strangled laugh. “And you think he’ll just give them to you? For free?”
For not the first time, I wonder exactly how Mors told my mother the truth about who he was. Who I would be. Did he show up when she was a sleep-deprived new mother and still grieving her husband to tell her I was his, Death’s, daughter? How did he prove it?
I’m not sure I want to know.
“Just give me the number,” I say. I’ll deal with whatever happens after that. Though the thought of my father on campus is enough to make me want to crawl into a hole somewhere and never come out.
“He doesn’t have a cell phone, Jocasta.” She pauses. “Or if he does, he’s never given me the number.”
I frown. “But he used to come to our house—”
“He would just show up whenever he felt like it. Take you whenever he felt like it. Once a week sometimes, and then nothing for months. It was impossible to predict.” She sounds weary, reflecting on that era in her life.
And I don’t blame her. How could you sleep at night, always half expecting a knock at the door and for that knock to belong to Death.
“I don’t think … I don’t think he experiences time the same way.
” She lowers her voice, as if discussing something shameful.
Like believing in the Loch Ness Monster or the colony of mole people in the tunnels beneath the Denver airport.
Both of which might be real for all I know.
I scrub my free hand over my face. “Great.”
“Jocasta, whatever is going on, you need to leave it alone,” she says firmly, in her best “the due date is the due date” professor voice. But there’s a faint quaver in it that softens something in me. She’s afraid for me. Of me. Both.
I sigh. “I can’t.” I fill her in briefly on Devon’s arrival and the whole announcement thing, Lennie’s death, and the police interest in me.
I brace myself for a wave of silent disapproval.
But instead she speaks right away, sounding thoughtful. “The only announcement I’m aware of was when you were born. Of course, I did my best to distance myself after that.”
“There was an announcement when I was…” I shake my head in disbelief. This is the first I’m hearing of it. “How did you find out?”
“Strangers were showing up night and day to pay tribute. Or that’s what they said, anyway, before he made them stop. It was like something out of one of the original fairy tales.”
It is not lost on me that my mother’s chosen area of expertise must be a source of bitter irony for her. She teaches mythology and religion, Greek and Roman primarily. She was, in a way, an expert on the Old Ones before she even knew they existed.
“That’s why I sold the condo in the city. I had to,” she continues matter-of-factly, as if this is something I should have known. “And then he moved us to the house.”
The house. It takes a second for my brain to process. “Wait. Our house? That’s … our house is his?” It feels like the world is tipping sideways, and I grip the edge of the bathroom counter to steady myself.
“Jocasta,” she says with exasperation. “Do you think I could have afforded that on my own back then? I was an adjunct and a single mother.”
I never thought about it. Which was a failing on my part. I should have thought about it. What she’s saying is logical.
“I don’t know how he did it, and I never asked. He said it was a safe place for you,” she says stiffly.
Which, of course, also meant that he would know exactly where I was, at all times. A price for everything. That’s what she was getting at earlier.
A soft tapping comes on the door behind me. Carter. Needing his phone. Shit. Carter. Lennie. Devon. My Beecher world snaps back into place.
“I have to go. I need to…” Do what? Reevaluate my whole life? “Go,” I repeat finally. I start to pull the phone away from my ear.
“Jo.” My mother sounds so much smaller, more fragile at a distance.
I freeze. She never calls me Jo.
I named you Jocasta. Not Jo or Joey or Cassie. One of the many arguments we had repeatedly in my middle school years. Before we found other things to fight about.
I raise the phone back up. “Yeah?”
“In the literature, no one is ever what they seem. Gods, demigods, they’re all playing games for their own purposes. And if you’re not playing, too, you’re likely the sport. Gladiator in arena consilium capit.”
I don’t share my mother’s expertise in Latin. (I took Spanish in high school: La biblioteca esta cerrada.) But even I get the gist of this one. If you’re not already fighting, it’s probably too late.