It was a normal overcast Saturday in June and there was a slight chill in the air. Cassidy's dad and older brother were in the backyard working on a treehouse that had been begun and abandoned too many times. It was about to be abandoned once again as Christian noticed through the kitchen window his mothers' intent focus; she was holding something down in the sink. He stood watching, his arms at his side holding a hammer and two inch nails, confused about what his mother was doing. His father was talking about the importance of using good joiners when Christian saw a little hand fly up in front of his mother's face and soapy water splashed into her eyes. This caused her to jerk back slightly but emboldened her resolve to keep the 72lbs girl down even more adamantly. She has no memory of her 13 year old son and husband pulling her off her daughter. She hazily recalls the coughing, crying, puking of her little girl on the kitchen floor, eyes red, face snotty.
'Hyacinth! Hyacinth! What are you doing?!' echoes in her mind even now over nineteen years later. She stands by what she said that day. 'I'm saving her. You don't know...you can't protect her.'
When she was sent home a month later things were fine. It was as if nothing had happened except the look in her eyes when they'd land on her daughter.
Hyacinth was convinced that someone want to kill her babies. Cassidy was not afraid of her mother even after the attempted drowning. She believed that her mother just wanted to protect her in the only way she knew how. She missed a lot of school, enabling her mother's delusions. Her mother would call the school and say Cassidy wouldn't be in because she wasn't feeling well. They would then stay in, watch tv, play cards and bake scones. Well, Cassidy would watch whatever television was on and her mother would fix her with an unblinking stare lest her daughter disappear in a puff of smoke.
By the time Cassidy was thirteen years old her mother was a well-known presence in town because of her wanderings. She'd be walking around the small downtown without her purse, no makeup and her hair not done or she'd be impeccable with nowhere to go but places in her own mind.
The stories would drift to Cassidy and Christian while at school. Tuesday it was the one about Holmesie's mom handing out M&M's. Christian's buddies called him by their own nickname.
Some kids would take the city bus home while Cassidy and Christian would walk because they lived close to school. They had no idea that their mother was riding different bus routes armed with bags of M&M's. She would walk up and down the aisle handing them to people with a vacant smile and that 1000 yard stare seen in the mentally ill.
She was seen as harmless so the bus drivers around town had no problem allowing her on their buses. She was usually very quiet however peculiar. They even had a nickname for her: Crazy Flower. Owing to being named after a flower and crazier than a 7 layer fruitcake the title stuck. An elderly couple sat across from her when she carefully and slowly applied fruitberry lip balm on her lips. She swirled it around her full lips over and over again and proceeded to cover her entire face in the beeswax emollient. Once her face was completely covered in wax she nibbled at the remains of the lip balm until it was just a plastic container. She the rang the bell, stepped off the bus, walked a few steps, sat down on the ground and waved at the elderly couple who had been transfixed by her behaviour. 'That poor girl,' the woman whispered to her husband who quietly felt grateful that the insanity in his family had just missed him and his children. He took his wife's arthritic hand in his and kissed it.
The wandering became so much of an issue that Hyacinth's mother moved in with the Holmes family. She helped Hyacinth take her medication, went on walks with her and generally kept an eye on her. And for two years this arrangement worked until she herself was killed by her daughter while experiencing one of her delusions.
She'd been pretending to take her medication. She felt that her mother, Cassidy's grandmother, was up to something. Cassidy wouldn't be safe around her, she believed, so when Teresa Reid, mother to Hyacinth Holmes, 60 year old grandmother to two bright high-school students turned her back on her daughter she was stabbed in the lower back with an 8 inch chef's knife which severed her abdominal aorta and nicked her kidney. It was one cut. The knife wasn't clean and Hyacinth didn't call the police.
Teresa felt the sharp pain but didn't need to see who caused it until she rolled over and saw her daughter staring at her with the face of a mask. 'You're not good for them. I need to protect them from you,' she said with a flat unaffected voice before wandering out to the field behind her house to pick some scilla. She would sprinkle these on her mother's body when she returned home to watch some television. Nobody would notice the flowers because of all the blood but Hyacinth would always believe she did the right thing honoured her mother with posies.
Hyacinth's husband, Peter, was the first person to find Teresa, near death on the kitchen floor. His wife was taking a nap on the sofa, her hands resting on her heart and covered in a henna of dried blood and scilla petals. He called the ambulance and the paramedics were putting grandma in the back as Cassidy and Christian rushed up the driveway. Cassidy didn't even need to ask what happened because she'd felt something like an elastic snap in her soul as she left school. She knew it was her grandmother and that she needed to get home. As her mother was being escorted by the paramedics she ran a bloodied hand across her daughter's cheek and smiled. Her lips were curled into such a warm embracing smile Cassidy was almost doubtful that her mother had attempted to murder her grandmother.
She then remembered that she too had been on the other side of her mother's murderous love and pulled back.