Spencer shrugged and together they walked up to the doors. As the passed through, Spencer couldn’t help briefly tracing her fingers over the sign on the door as they moved on,

OAKPARK PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE

Once inside, they found Mr. Carlin waiting in the foyer. He had aged a lot in the last few years and the hair at his temples was now a steel grey. He retained his old curls and colour, but Spencer could see a few new lines that had added to the myriad that had occupied his face. Her father looked tired, and a little defeated. Everytime she saw him it nearly broke Spencer’s heart.

As usual he greeted her with a hug, and she squeezed him tight, her arms around his waist. He stroked her hair and lifted her chin up with his knuckle.

“You’re getting too thin.”

Spencer let it pass.

“Lets go on through. Dr. Maywright said she was in the sun room”.

Spencer never could put her finger on exactly what drove her mother mad. Clay had said that after Glen died, she had taken to stealing drugs out of the cupboards at work just to sleep. Combined with the alcohol she consumed each night, the potent cocktail had been enough to hospitalize her over and over. But her slow decline into madness over 4 or 5 years had been painful enough to watch, that Spencer felt like she’d nearly gone too. Sometimes Spencer thought that Glen’s death alone was enough to have driven her mother mad.

Paula Carlin sat in the sun room next to a window. Her blonde hair sat lankly on her shoulders, but at least today it was clean and brushed. She wore old clothes. Comfortable clothes. And as always, she cradled one of Glen’s sports sweaters in her arms. She didn’t look up as the family approached but kept blankly staring out of the window. Spencer felt her insides clench.

Arthur reached his wife first and put his hand on her shoulder, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. She sat, staring out the window, not moving. Clay knelt down next to his mother, greeted her, and also got nothing in reply. Spencer stood, unmoving, mirroring her mothers statue like behaviour, a few feet away from the others. Clay looked up at her, the look on his face indecipherable. Spencer took a deep breath and moved forward.

“Hi Mom” she whispered, putting her hand on the older womans and kneeling down next to Clay.

Paula turned her head to look at Spencer. Her blue eyes, the exact shade of her daughters stared deeply into their twins. Then she went back to staring out of the window as though she had never moved. Spencer thought the world had stopped with the silence and still that engulfed them. Then her mother moved her hand out from under Spencers, drew it back, and back handed Spencer across the face so hard it sent the girl sprawling on the floor.

“Paula no” Arthur cried out, grabbing at his wife’s arm. But she had gone back to staring out the window, cradling her precious sweater like a baby. Spencer sat on the floor, her cheek stinging. Clay reached out a hand and she hesitated, then accepted, standing up slowly. She ignored her fathers pleading with her mother and took a step back. Clay looked torn until she softly spoke,

“It’s ok. It didn’t hurt.”

The bruise that was rapidly appearing across her cheek branded her a liar immediately, but Clay squeezed the hand he still held in mute understanding.

And so the afternoon wore on. Clay and his father talked earnestly to Paula, filling her in on the details of things that had happened, on the antics of her grandchildren, and the state of her garden. Through all of it she sat, unresponsive, staring out the window and never moving. And Spencer sat, a little way away, in another chair, staring out of a different window, wondering if she wasn’t a little too much like her mother anyway. She gently touched her cheek where the swelling was now acutely painful, and dropped her hand. It wasn’t the first time Paula had hit her, and Spencer knew, as long as she kept coming to visit her, it wouldn’t be the last.

‘At least this time she didn’t spit on me’, Spencer thought bitterly.