These were ancient marks of protection.
Apotropaic markings used to ward off evil.
And I’d seen them somewhere else, I realized. I opened my mother’sred journal and found them there, scribbled on pages between entries.
“Oh my God,” I said aloud, realization beginning to wash over me.
The strains of Tchaikovsky crackled out of the baby monitor.
“Rewind it so we can watch your mouse dance again,” I heard my mother say to my younger daughter.
I paced, thinking.
I flipped through the books again, found a chapter on spells and charms to keep people safe from demons. It instructed a person to make a small sachet or even a doll with bits of hair and snippets of clothing and nail clippings, to mix in salt and protective herbs. To pour wax on top and carve a protective symbol into the hardened wax.
The strange nests I’d found in my mother’s closet hadn’t been used to curse or bind us. They’d been made to protect us.
I pulled out my phone, hit my brother’s number.
“Don’t tell me,” Ben said. “Mom’s started spewing pea soup? Or her head’s spinning?”
“They’re marks of protection,” I told him.
“What are you talking about, Ali?”
“The scars on our backs. She wasn’t trying to hurt us, Ben. She was trying to save us. She knew what she was becoming. She knew we were in danger. The part of her that was still our mother did it to save us.”
I had to tell him, had to find a way to explain that we’d had it all wrong. That our mother, our true mother, was the hero in the story, not the villain.
I could hear Ben’s ragged breathing getting harder and louder. “She sliced into our fucking skin, Alison. She turned our backs into her own masochistic graffiti walls, scribbling shapes into us just to watch us bleed and daring us not to scream. Do you remember that? How she’d promise it would be over fast if we’d just hold still and let her do it?”
And I did remember.
Ben muttered, “I can’t do this with you, Ali,” and hung up on me.
I remembered how my mother would cry as she cut me, apologize, tell me how sorry she was, that it was for my own good.
“One day you’ll understand,” she’d said.
And she was right.
I finally did.
She wasn’t marking me to hurt me.
She was marking me to save me.
To keep the demon away.
This was my real mother being ravaged by the demon, fighting to hold on to some piece of her true self, fighting to protect her children.
It wasn’t going to enter a body with sigils of protection etched into its skin. Maybe it couldn’t truly harm us because of the marks.
But didn’t they still work now? Had the magic worn off somehow? How was the demon going to enter me when my mother died?
The baby monitor crackled, and I heard my mother’s voice cooing to Olivia. “You are by far the best mouse on that stage. And next year, you’ll be better still.”
“One day maybe I’ll be a rat like Izzy was.”
