Midnight Silpper

Chapter 2

"Sometimes when I get home from school. She tells me that I have to hide or they'll get me," I said quietly.  "Is someone coming after us?"

"No one is going to get you," my father explained sternly. "You're safe here, honey."

"Then what is mom talking about?" I questioned.

I knew that my father didn't really have a good answer. Even as a small child, I was intelligent enough to know that something was really off and my father was trying his best to field off the questions without alarming me. My mother was sick and she was refusing to acknowledge it. I could see the stress that it was causing my father and I had no idea how to fix it.

"It's her sickness," my father explained. "It's making her think things that aren't true."

"But how do we know it isn't true?" I asked him.

"Because we know it isn't, but your mother is having a hard time seeing that. In her own way, she just wants to protect you. Now, it's getting late. You should get some sleep," my father explained.  "I don't want you to worry about it, okay?  I'll ake care of everything and your mom will get better, you'll see."

I tried, but as the days went on and my mother became more adamant that I protect myself, I realized that I was slowly losing her. She had her moments where I would see the old her—where she brightened our house with her smile and energy. However, in those days where she spiraled, I didn't recognize her as my mom. 

Dad told me that mom had taken a temporary leave from work. She was no longer working at the PR firm that she used to work at. The changes were happening too rapidly and it wasn't long before Zayne noticed too.

At school, I wasn't my usual self. The only thing that I was able to do was keep my grades up. Dad told me that it would make mom happy, but I didn't think she'd notice. My teachers grew concerned, as I began to almost withdraw into myself. Zayne seemed to notice and asked me what was wrong. We no longer held ourselves in secret during school. Now, everybody knew that we sometimes talked or hung out.

Zayne was the only bright light in all of this. He distracted me from my problems, about losing my mom to something I had no way of identifying. I knew Zayne had his own issues and it felt wrong of me to dump them on him. The two of us would get ice cream together or just hang out by the park. It was nice to talk to someone about something.

The more mom got sick, the more I threw myself into school. In fact, my teachers had administered a test that allowed me to skip to the next grade. Now, I was no longer two grades behind Zayne, but one. I was good at math. I liked solving puzzles and numbers. They were easy to do in my head and it didn't surprise any of my teachers to know that I had a gift for them.

My father had no idea where it came from and neither did my mother. Neither of them were particularly math oriented. My father was a lawyer and my mother as some kind of executive partner at a PR firm.

My father was taking my mother to her doctor's appointments and each time, I thought she'd get better. However, none of it happened. She seemed to come back even sadder, my father tenser with more bottles on the bedside table, which began to obscure the space. 

It was then my father broke down and told me the truth—that my mother had a mental illness and it was upsetting her reality. I nodded like I was a grown up, understanding it all, when really I wanted to cry and scream. I knew I couldn't, because dad was under a lot of pressure and he didn't need me to add to his worry. Somehow, even though mom was the one suffering, I was losing them both.  The attention that I was used to my father had all but dissipated slowly as he poured hai energy into helping my mother.