“Now, please,” I said to Ben. “Think. When would you say Mother started to change?”
“I’m not in the mood for this, Ali. She was a worse-than-shitty mother. Does it really matter when it started?”
“I just thought—”
“What?” he snapped. “That if you could pinpoint the exact moment, you’d be able to give her an excuse, put a ‘poor tormented artist’ spin on things? ‘Oh, her husband killed himself and something broke inside her and she was never the same, poor thing, so she started locking her children in closets and cutting them up with kitchen knives.’?”
“Ben, I—”
“She was fucked-up well before Dad died,” Ben said. “That was what killed him. Her.”
“He killed himself,” I said. “It was his decision. He put the rope around his neck. He jumped from the chair.”
My jaw clenched. I thought of the words in my mother’s journal:Azha made him do it.
The room seemed to waver around me.
“She left him no choice,” Ben said. “She was always pestering him. Berating him. Making him feel smaller and smaller until he was hardly there, a speck of a man, then,poof, one day he disappeared altogether.”
“That’s not fair, Benji.”
“No one calls me that, not anymore.” I could hear him breathing hard and fast, as if he’d just run a race. “I’ve gotta go, Ali.”
“Wait,” I said. “What if… what if she wasn’t really our mom when she did those things to us, to Dad.”
“What are you saying, Alison?”
“What if she was someone else…somethingelse?”
“Like who? What? Are we talking aliens here?Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Or robots, maybe—The Stepford Wives?”
“A demon,” I said. And just like that, the word was out. There was no going back now, so I forged ahead. My words tumbled out quickly, frantically. “She told me she’s a demon named Azha, and at first I thought it was impossible, that she was just messing with me, but then I found out that Paul knew—he’d discovered the truth and I think he actually tried to warn me the day he died. And wouldn’t it make sense, explain so much? The change in her personality, all the terrible things she did? I’ve been doing all this research, and I found this old journal of hers—”
“Have you lost your fucking mind, Alison?”
“No, I—”
“Because that’s how you sound. Like a genuinely crazy person. Not just what you’re saying, but the way you’re talking, all wound up, spinning out of control, out of touch with reality. You sound just likeher.”
“I—I—” I stammered.
“I’m not going to do this with you, Alison. I just can’t,” he said. And then he ended the call.
I paced around the kitchen, brewed another pot of coffee.
I ranted at my brother inside my head.
I was not crazy. I was not like her.
But Ben was right about one thing: my mother’s descent into illness happened before our father died. Well before. Her drinking, her cruelty, began right after Bobbi died.
That’s when she changed.
When she came back from California.
That’s when she started having the periods of missing time. When she felt herself starting to change.
I went up into our bedroom, dug through the closet, and pulled out the box that held my father’s suicide note.
