Page 56 of Synodic

They were talking as if they were discussing what was for dinner, not the failing condition of their one and only child. It was so callous and cruel that a tear slid down my cheek. I didn’t want to be here at all. I couldn’t believe that I'd wanted to return to this life even for a moment.

How much more interesting their study would be if they knew I could hear every word they uttered, even more so knowing that I could project my consciousness somewhere else entirely.

“What could have been the catalyst for our daughter ending up in a coma?” my father questioned. “We’ll have to ask her roommate everything she knows. Hell, she was the one who found her when she wouldn’t wake.”

Natalie found me? I could imagine her checking in my room only to see my unmoving body. Her running to me and shaking my shoulders frantically, begging me to open my eyes. Then calling my mom with tears running down her cheeks, smudging her mascara.

“John, there is something you should know.” I could hear the quiver in my mother’s voice.

My father sat rigid, sensing my mother’s confession would not be good. Whatever she was about to reveal, I knew it would break my heart.

“You remember our experimental drug we gave her up until her freshman year?” she asked, waiting for my dad to say something, anything, but he remained silent. It was as if he already knew where this story was going, but I didn’t. My mind simply would not let my thoughts wander to the possibilities.

“When she told me she no longer wanted to take our medication because it made her too sluggish, I knew it was simply out of the question. You remember the things she used to tell us—so disturbing, so ludicrous, not to mention the complaints. I couldn’t go through that again, John. I just couldn’t, so I made a few adjustments to our drug and slipped it into her food until the day she left the house. She never said anything or suspected, not with the new tweaks, so I kept medicating her. I couldn’t stand by while our daughter lost her mind.”

I jerked as if a bomb had gone off inside my head. I remembered the bottle she’d come home with had been label-less, a dangerous concoction of her own making. The disorientation had me grasping at where I was and how I got here. A high-pitch ringing ruptured in my skull and it felt like my ears were bleeding.

My father’s voice reached me like a targeted beam. “For God’s sake, Calliope,” he practically yelled before realizing he was in a public space. He lowered his voice, yet it still dripped with rage, “We could lose our practice and licenses if anyone found out about that. We created an extremely dangerous and unethical cognitive suppressant powerful enough to drug an elephant. Even the lowest doses didn’t make it past clinical trials. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill her then, and it’s a miracle she’s still alive today. What were you thinking? We agreed never to use that again.”

“It’s not our fault nothing ever worked on her, and I never agreed to stop trying.”

My tongue turned thick in my mouth. My mother had drugged me.

The terrible realization that lies and deceit had shaped my life crushed me. How could my mother do such unspeakable things without my consent? And my father barely batting an eyelash, more concerned about losing their professional statuses.

My mother’s explanation didn’t cover everything. What about the past five years? She must have found a way to continually poison me, and as much as my mind wanted to shut down and drown out the rest of her admission, I knew I needed to hear it to its end.

My father seemed to come to the same conclusion. “And how have you been continuing to give it to her?” he asked, straightening his glasses.

“Well, that was a bit tricky, but I saw how well Keira was doing on the new blend. It wasn’t affecting her motor skills in any way. She could still run.”

“Calliope. How did you do it?” He accentuated every word through a clenched jaw.

“Her roommate,” she finally admitted in a hushed violent whisper. “When I met the girl, I wanted to warn her about Keira’s condition, prepare her. She asked if there was anything she could do to help, and I saw my opening. I’ve been paying her quite handsomely for the past few years, and it seemed like she was competent enough to get the job done. Until recently.”

Natalie?It was the final nail in the coffin.

I wished I could destroy everything within arm’s reach, break anything I could get my hands on, and scream until my voice went raw, but my body remained frozen. An invisible storm of fury and despair raged in my mind while I was completely inert, dying on the inside.

“Dammit, woman. Witnesses?” Veins bulged out of his forehead and neck. I had never seen him so furious, so out of control. “You better pray they don’t find traces of our narcotic in her blood.”

“They won’t.”

“How?” My father asked with clipped yet contained paranoia.

“I’m not an idiot. How do you think she passed all her athlete panel tests? It’s untraceable. It’s not like it was performance-enhancing anyway. I thought I was doing right by her, John. I really did."

My mother had been drugging me. She’d even gone so far as to create an undetectable narcotic to cover her tracks. The depths in which her treachery reached crippled me. She couldn’t even see that what she’d been doing was wrong. Trying to justify herself further, she said, “It was helping her lead a normal life.”

Normal? Normal! My normal was always feeling half alive. Numb. Devoid of depth and genuine feeling. It had been hell. Running was the only thing that kept me sane, but only just. My whole life I’d always been half asleep, constantly wandering through an inescapable fog that kept me so drowsed I was merely a shell of a person.

My father ran a hand down his clean-shaven face, looking older than I’d ever seen him. “Hopefully the girl keeps quiet, Calliope. She’s just as culpable as you and has no reason to go to the authorities.” His drawn expression was tired but completely devoid of shock, as if he always knew the capabilities and determinations of his brilliant wife.

I did the math and counted back the months. It confirmed what my mother confessed, and I realized in horror that the dreams had started back up again when I stopped eating Natalie’s breakfasts. I had gone along and pretended to drink her horrid smoothies, so she assumed everything was going according to plan, still happily accepting a paycheck from my mother to secretly drug me. She had been doing it for years, my mother’s perfect partner in crime.

Something fundamental snapped within me, some intrinsic column of belief that held me up all my life was careening, and there was nothing left to brace me as I fell. I was a giant redwood plummeting to the forest floor, but as I broke and roared and crashed to the ground, nobody even noticed.

And if no one could hear me, was I even really crashing?

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