Odd Thomas

insanity.
        I have been told that she wasn't always like this. As a child, she had been sweet, playful, affectionate.
        The terrible change occurred when she was sixteen. She began to experience sudden mood swings. The sweetness was supplanted by an unrelenting, simmering anger that she could best control when she was alone.
        Therapy and a series of medications failed to restore her former good nature. When, at eighteen, she rejected further treatment, no one insisted that she continue with psychotherapy or drugs, because at that time she hadn't been as dysfunctional, as solipsistic, and as threatening as she became by her early twenties.
        When my father met her, she was just moody enough and dangerous enough to infatuate him. As she grew worse, he bailed.
        She has never been institutionalized because her self-control is excellent when she's not being challenged to interact with others beyond her capacity. She limits all threats of violence to suicide and occasionally to me, presenting a charming or at least rational face to the world.
        Because she has a comfortable income without the need to work and because she prefers life as a recluse, her true condition is not widely recognized in Pico Mundo.
        Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
        Her voice grew raw and more confrontational: "I curse the night I let your idiot father squirt you into me."
        This didn't shock me. I'd heard it before, and worse.
        She said, "I should've had you scraped out of me and thrown in the garbage. But what would I have gotten from the divorce then? You were the ticket."
        When I look at my mother in this condition, I don't see hatred in her, but anguish and desperation and even terror. I can't imagine the pain and the horror of being her.
        I take solace only in the knowledge that when she is alone, when she is not challenged to give anything of herself, she is content if not happy. I want her to be at least content.
        She said, "Either stop sucking my blood or pull the trigger, you little shit."
        One of my most vivid early memories is of a rainy night in January when I was five years old and suffering with influenza. When not coughing, I cried for attention and relief, and my mother was unable to find a corner of the house in which she could entirely escape the sound of my misery.
        She came to my room and stretched out beside me on the bed, as any mother might lie down to comfort a stricken child, but she came with the gun. Her threats to kill herself always earned my silence, my obedience, my grant of absolution from her parental obligations.
        That night, I swallowed my misery as best I could and stifled my tears, but I couldn't wish away my sore and inflamed throat. To her, my coughing was a demand for mothering, and its persistence brought her to an emotional precipice.
        When the threat of suicide didn't silence my cough, she put the muzzle of the gun to my right eye. She encouraged me to try to see the shiny point of the bullet deep in that narrow dark passage.
        We were a long time there together, with the rain beating on my bedroom windows. I have known much terror since, but none as pure as what I knew that night.
        From the perspective of a twenty-year-old, I don't believe that she would have killed me then or that she ever will. Were she to harm me - or anyone - she would doom herself to exactly the interaction with other people that she most dreads. She knows that they would want answers and explanations from her. They would want truth and remorse and justice. They would want far too much, and they would never stop wanting.
        I didn't know if here on the porch steps she would turn the gun on me again, and I didn't know exactly how I would react if she did. I had come seeking a confrontation that would enlighten me, though I didn't understand what it needed to be or what I could learn from it that would help me to find Robertson's collaborator.
        Then she lowered the gun from her throat to her left breast, as she always does, for the symbolism of a bullet through the brain will not as powerfully affect any mother's son as will the symbolism of a shot through the heart.
        "If