“Attemptedexorcism.”
“Look,” Nathaniel breathed out, “obviously she had dangerous delusions, but she’s your mother, don’t you want to find her and finally understand what happened?”
You have to tell him,the Devil said,you have to tell him her delusions were right.
“I want nothing to do with her,” I said coldly.
Nathaniel opened his mouth only to close it when I returned my attention to my laptop and the assignment we weresupposedto be working on. I knew he wanted to observe a cult for extra credit, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice my own wellbeing for it, nor was I going to risk him obtaining a higher grade from my trauma.
***
Nathaniel drove me home as promised and I prepared dinner for Auden who was studying in the living room. A low hum of musicdrifted from his headphones, and I turned on the television to watch the news.
A stabbing in London, a terror plot thwarted, the world crumbling all around us. God had abandoned everyone, it seemed.
I switched off the news and approached Auden, peeling off his headphones as I placed a plate of food down in front of him. It was his favourite. His safe food. Chicken schnitzel and salad.
“What are you working on?” I asked, moving his homework aside so he didn’t spill food all over it.
“Macbeth,” he answered as he reached for his knife and fork.
I sat down beside him with my own plate. “Macbeth, huh? That’s my favourite Shakespeare play.”
“Why?”
“All the death,” I joked.
Auden did not share my sense of humour, though he did say, “I am enjoying it.”
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“Banquo’s ghost.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that part.”
“It’s not really a ghost, though. It’s a metaphor.”
“A metaphor, huh? For what?”
“For Macbeth’s guilt and descent into madness.”
I shifted uncomfortably and reached for my fork, hand trembling. Guilt. Madness. Insanity. Like Banquo’s ghost, the Devil wasn’t real. He was a metaphor. But he’d been with me since I was four, stranded outside in the cold, waiting to be forgiven for not eating my dinner. What sins of mine did he represent?
“What areyouworking on?” Auden broke through my thoughts, his question catching me off guard.
“Hm?”
“For university,” he said, “you were working on an assignment today, weren’t you?”
“Oh, uh…yeah. It’s nothing interesting,” I shrugged, “but last week I took a personality test, that was cool.”
“What’d you get?”
“INFJ.”
“That’s my one too!” he beamed.
I chuckled quietly and ruffled his hair, affection sweeping over me at the wide smile on his face. I wanted to ask him about our mother—what he remembered of that final night in North Lane—but I didn’t want to invoke that trauma. Auden and I rarely talked about it and it seemed better that way. I didn’t want to remind him of that pain. My job was to protect him. So I didn’t ask him about whether he thought our mother had schizophrenia or whether he thought maybe I did too. It was my burden to carry, not his.
