pulled tight around him, he could feel sweat gathered all over his body in little groups. The cool water on his forehead was cooling, but it did nothing to calm him down, the disorientation clouded his entire mind.
“What?” He managed in a slurred voice. Pain ricocheted around his skull as he spoke and he slammed his eyelids shut again.
“You were having a bad dream. Really, Thomas, this fever is doing more than I thought it would.”
What fever?
He opened his eyes again and stared at Mother, and then he realized what was wrong with the picture. Mother looked fine. Her brown hair was neatly combed and kept, her eyes were clear and there were spots on her face where just the tiniest bit of makeup had been applied. She wasn’t sick.
“What about you?” He asked.
She cocked her head. “What about me, Thomas?”
“You aren’t sick?”
A light grin, “Of course not. I haven’t been sick a day in my life. You remember, don’t you, Thomas?”
For a moment he thought he was going insane, he honestly couldn’t remember.
“You, on the other hand, have been terribly sick for days. If I can’t get this fever down then you’re going to the hospital.” She wiped the…
Dragon’s tongue?
…cloth across his head again, causing him to flinch, but then submit to it again. The cool moisture felt good against his screaming skull.
“My head hurts.” He croaked.
“You took a wild tumble a few days ago, hit your head right on that table there,” she pointed to a small coffee table in the middle of the living room. “I was afraid you really hurt yourself.
If it was a few days ago, why did it still hurt so badly?
“How long…?”
“You’ve been sick about two weeks. It’s gotten worse over time…you really don’t remember?”
He tried to shrug. “It’s a little foggy. I’m having a hard time thinking.”
“You’ve been dreaming.” She said.
He didn’t ask what about, he was sure that he was dreaming the whole situation in front of him.
“You keep saying her name.” Mother continued. “Trisha’s gone dear, you need to realize that much, and remember that you’re not gone. You’re here. You’re with me. Stay with me, Thomas. Don’t leave.”
Fog moved over his mind once again and he looked at her face, her eyes clouded with moisture.
“Don’t leave me.”
He settled into the cushion. “I won’t, Mother.” The ceiling drooped down at him, scattered spots of popcorn texturing to cover up all of the screw-ups that the sheet rock had in it. He moved his hand that had fallen asleep around under the blanket, resting it on the pocket of his jeans, trying to get more feeling in it.
“I had a weird dream.” He said.
The cloth wiped, “I know.”
“It was about you. You were sick, and I found a box. A box with a lot of newspaper clippings in it.” He turned to face her. “It had a lot about Dad in it…and some stuff about you.”
She stared down at him, her eyes were searching him, as if she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He must have sounded like a madman.
“Trisha was in the closet. She was tied up and looked hungry. That’s the last thing I remember. Trisha was in the closet.”
She nodded.
The dragon tongue licked.
His fingers brushed his pocket, and a strange thought occurred to him, and he slipped his hand into the pocket.
“It was just so weird.” He said. “I was taking the box to you to ask you some questions about it. I had no idea what it was all about. I just wanted to ask you some questions. I saw your light on, the one in the closet, and I went up to it. I just wanted to ask you some questions, and there she was.”
“It was just a dream.”
“You know the funny thing?” He began to pull his arm out of the blanket.
“What’s that?” The shadow of a humoring smile played on her lips.
He pulled the rest of his arm out and in his hand was a thin slip of paper. A picture. “This picture was in that box.”
Trisha stared back at Mother from the picture.
Her expression froze into unshaped clay, unsure of what form to take on, but a flaming kiln of anger was about to determine its final expression.
“It was a picture I had of Trisha. One of the best one’s I had. And you went and took it. Just like you took her.”
She dropped the cloth.
“I guess I’m not sick, Mother.”
She carefully stood, “You shut your mouth you insolent little…” The sentence caught in her throat, but didn’t choke her.
“You’re the one who is sick. Real sick.” He leaned up on the couch, trying to push back the squealing of his skull as he sat up. The lump on the back of his head was easy to feel; he could feel it rising slowly.
“You just shut up.” Rumbled out of her.
“Why? What’s the matter, Mother?”
“Stop it…”
“You’re sick. You kidnapped Trisha, stole from me, clocked me and then lied to me? How much else is there I don’t know? What about the box? What were all of those articles in there?”
“Stop it…”
“Lemme guess. Your past victories?”
“STOP IT!”
“No! I will not, Mother!”
She swore, “You just shut up, Thomas, right this very instant.”
“How many more did you take? Did you just kill them?”
“You are just like your father.” She said with ice dripped from her words. She stared at him with that hot furnace growing even hotter, he could see the red rising in her face like thermometer. The vein in her forehead announced her accelerated heart rate.
Tom paused. “What about him?”
She smiled, a devilish smile, “Didn’t piece that together? I thought you were better than that, smart guy.”
He thought of the articles. “You did kill him.”
A nod, barely detectable, “Him and that whore he was going with.” She backed away another step. Her eyes glowed, cutting into him.
Tom remembered the one article, the stand-alone article in the entire box. The murdered prostitute, the one that nobody really cared about. Mother had killed her too.
“He thought he could really play around like that? I knew what he was doing from the start, I just had to catch him at it…then I had to make sure he would never do it again.”
“So you sabotaged his car?”
She thought a moment, “I think ‘modified’ would be a better word here.”
The question sputtered out of him, a tired old question that had been there since he had first looked into the photo album and found those awful articles in the first place. “Why?”
Mother paused, looked at him, measuring him, testing him. A look of sorrow and mingled pleasure hovered over her expression. “I did it for us.”
He paused. Didn’t say a word.
“You didn’t deserve a father like that, and I didn’t deserve a husband like that. He was scum. I love you and I knew that you couldn’t have a father like that.”
“So you…killed him? Was that supposed to make everything better?”
“It seemed to fix the problem some. You didn’t have that terrible role model your whole life. I can see that it did little good though. You decided to do the same thing, run off with that little whore…”
Heat flared in his ears, and his words, through the white-hot pain in his skull, “She is not a whore, Mother. Don’t talk about here that way…ever…” He looked around Mother, trying to calculate a way around to her to get to Trisha who was still locked in the closet upstairs.
“You were going to run off with the little whore, Thomas! Just like your father you were going to take off with her and leave me here alone!”
“Stop it, Mother.”
“You were going to break your pr
omise just like your father!”
The room suddenly felt hotter, more suffocating. The rising anger in both of them was making it sticky and humid. Tom didn’t think he’d ever been that angry before, and as he stood there it burned more and more. As he thought of Trisha, tied up in the closet, waiting for someone to come to her, someone to rescue her.
Waiting for him to save her.
The dam within broke. Heat flared through him, consuming all thoughts that had before caused him to hesitate.
“JUST SHUT UP! SHUT UP YOU STUPID MANIAC!”
Mother glared at him, sharp teeth lined up like daggers in her mouth. “Fate has a way of keeping promises, it just needs a little help now and then.”
He took a step forward. Wobbly though it was, he knew that it sent the message clearly: the conversation was over.
He took anther step forward.
“I wouldn’t do that, Thomas…”
“Get out of my way, Mother.”
She didn’t move, and he took extra care to walk around her and bump her arm with his shoulder as he went by, his footsteps echoing the whole way. The hallway announced his departure from her and toward the stairs.
“I wouldn’t do that, Tommy!”
She never called him Tommy. Dad had called him Tommy, but never Mother. He did not stop but continued on, his step wobbly and loose. It was the clocking on the head he had taken that had him down, whatever Mother had hit him with—the injury had to be messing with his balance…something like that.
The stairs were in front of him and he began to mount them, trying to move as fast as he could without falling back down and further wounding himself. Mother would be sure that he didn’t get back up, he knew that much.
His feet felt like they were stones, but he managed to pull them up the stairs, taking them one by one, trying to stay balanced.
He could hear Mother behind him,