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You visit your mother regularly while she’s still in the hospital, playing the part of the good daughter until the very end. The nurses smile gently when they see you, all tenderness and sympathy. You’re so devoted, they say. Such a dedicated child.
You bring her flowers, because that seems to be the thing to do when your mother’s in the hospital. Specifically, you bring her cyclamen and watch the nurses coo over the fairy-like pink buds. Privately, you wonder if she’ll know what they mean. You consider bringing something more obvious instead—orange lilies, perhaps—but that seems too aggressive, as though flowers on their own could ever be considered violent.
The scent of cyclamen blends with the stench of gauze and antiseptic, creating a sickly fragrance that reminds you of the Aether Paradise. You keep your gaze fixed on the window when you visit. If you can see the beach, then you’ll know that you are safe, with your two feet still planted firmly on the ground.
You’re silent on your visits. You make no effort to speak to her despite the urging of the staff, who cannot understand why a dedicated child like yourself would rather sit and stare than try and hold a conversation with their mother while she lies in a coma in the hospital. Try, they say. I’m sure that she can hear you. It might help. But whether it’s meant to help you or her, they never clarify.
It doesn’t matter. You have nothing to say. Anything you might have said died back in Ultra Space when she looked you in the eye and said you’ve become ugly.
When she wakes up, she smiles at you softly; so very, very softly. She smiles at you with all the tenderness that she’s always reserved for her most cherished pokémon, reaching out to you with a thin, pale hand, saying “Darling—”
And you knock the hand away.
You’re being cruel, they say. She’s your mother, and you’re her child. You need to reconcile someday, so why are you holding back? She told you that she’s sorry. What more do you want?
(You want your childhood back.)
It wasn’t her fault, they say. Their voices grow impatient. It was the Ultra Beast, the neurotoxin, the grief of having lost a husband. You’d hold the past against her? You’d punish her for something beyond her control?
(But why was she allowed to punish you?)
It’s unfair to stay angry, they say. They’re angry now themselves; howling, screaming, every word a blow, despite never once raising their voices. You’re being unfair. It wasn’t her fault. Can't you understand that? Can't you understand?
(But what they can't seem to understand is that it wasn’t your fault either.)
They call you angry, and you wish you really could be. You wish you could burn. You want to scorch the surface of the earth with the power of your anger; to reduce to ashes the life your mother cherished so much in place of you. You want her to burn as well. You want everything to burn.
But then you remember Nebby’s tears—a plaintive howl that it sometimes felt like only you could hear. And you remember Moon and Hau and Kukui and Burnet—good people, kind people, innocent people. And you think, I couldn’t do that to them.
Despite everything, you do not have that anger in you.
You cannot be like her.
“What do you want to do?” Professor Burnet asks you that night over hot chocolate.
You’re sitting together in your loft, upon the sofa that functions as your bed. You’d woken screaming from a dream of being swarmed by Ultra Beasts, of flesh melding with membrane while your mother laughed and cooed, only waking when you’d heard the professor say your name.
(There had been a time, once, when it had been your mother who’d made you hot chocolate after nightmares. But that was long ago.)
“I don’t know,” you say, voice low. Your fingers curl around the mug. You’ve yet to take a sip, but something about the heat is comforting. “She’s awake. That’s all I was waiting for. But…she’s going to need to be hospitalized a while longer, and…I feel like I can’t leave, not while she’s still sick. I mean, what if she needs me? And she is my mo—”
“No,” Professor Burnet interrupts, shaking her head. “I’m stopping you there. You’re eleven. You’re under no obligation whatsoever to take care of her.”
“But she’s my mother,” you repeat. It’s the refrain you can’t escape. She’s your mother, she’s my mother, she's our mother. As if that alone entitles her to you, makes her infallible. As if those words alone are all it takes to excuse the things she’s done to you.
But Professor Burnet shakes her head, just the way you knew she would. “She was your mother,” the professor says. “But she abdicated any right to that position long ago. You owe her nothing now.”
She says this the way she might have said poliwrath favour the breaststroke. Like it’s a fact, indisputable and definite, one that anyone with common sense should know.
You’re not sure if you can believe her, not when you have so many people telling you forgive, forgive, forgive, family is forever. But it helps to hear her say it, just like it helps to have a loft to call your own; a place to stay where you won’t feel like a butterfly under glass. It helps to know that you are not alone.
Your mother calls you.
You don’t answer.
Your mother texts you.
You delete them.
Your hands shake with every message you delete. But it's not so bad, really—the first time you got a call from her, you fell to the floor in a ball of arms and legs, emitting a high, keening wail, a wail that only went away when Professor Burnet found you and held you to her chest and said you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe. At least you’re not doing that anymore.
You speak to her again only when you choose to. You walk to the hospital on your own two feet, in sneakers that have steadily grown dirtier with time, denim shorts she never would have allowed, a T-shirt lent to you by Moon that says Welcome to Alola. Your hair is twisted up and out of the way, to try and help you grow accustomed to the cut you want to get someday, and although neither Moon or Nebby are there with you, you think that you feel almost brave.
“Lillie,” your mother says upon seeing you. She’s sitting upright now. A sunbeam falls through the window, casting a soft light upon her profile. She looks beautiful, almost angelic. “I’m so glad you’ve returned.”
You stay close to the door and say, “I came to ask you not to contact me.”
Something in her expression shifts.
“Lillie,” she begins, tone bordering on sharp, and you instinctively back up, moving one step closer to the exit. You’re stronger now, you tell yourself. You won’t collapse, won’t get sick, won’t let her have that power over you. You’re stronger now. You can walk out any time you want.
When she sees you back up, her expression once again turns gentle. She says, “Darling, please don’t be afraid of me. We need to talk. I know that you must have a lot to say. I have a lot to say as well.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” you say. Your heart is smashing against your ribcage like a hammer out of fear. You feel like you could choke up shards of bone.
“I am your mother,” the woman in the hospital bed says. “Surely you realize you can’t just ask me not to contact you."
“I’m asking you now.” The words come out as stiff as wood. They’re rehearsed, having been practiced for ages with Professors Kukui and Burnet until at last you knew for sure that you could say them without fainting.
“I’m your legal guardian,” the woman begins, but you shake your head.
“You abdicated any right to that position long ago,” you say.
Like all echoes, the sound resounds, enough so for the woman’s lips to purse, becoming a grim slit.
She shouts, begs, weeps.
You walk out, and she does not contact you again.
It’s what you wanted.
But some small, hopeless part of you still hoped that she would try. That she would think you worth it. That she would reach out, ask permission to love you again.
She doesn’t.
You cannot burn, but you think sometimes, I wish I could be like water.
Water would have washed away the dirt that still clings to your memories. Water would have helped you wipe them clean and start anew. Water would have helped you be a little kinder, and if you’d just been a little kinder, then maybe things wouldn’t have ended up like this. Maybe you would have still had a mother.
But although you may not have been able to bring yourself to burn the dying flower, you couldn’t bring yourself to nurture it, either. Instead, you cut away the withered blossoms altogether. You can only hope that something new will grow in their place.
If nothing else, you think that you at least now know what type of starter you will choose when you finally depart.
“I thought we were going to help her,” Gladion says over the phone that night. His voice is terse. The woman told him what happened, you surmise, although he doesn’t say so in as many words. “I thought you wanted to help her.”
“I did,” you confess. You fiddle with the drawstrings on your shirt, twisting them around your fingers, cutting off the circulation in your hands. “But…I changed my mind. I don’t know if that feeling was ever real, to be honest."
“Family isn’t supposed to change their mind about each other,” he snarls.
His anger rouses something ugly in you, and before you can stop yourself, you’re snapping, “No, it isn’t! So why did she?”
“She—”
You cut him off. You can’t bear to hear any more excuses. If anybody ever tells you she's your mother again, you'll scream.
“She said so herself—she has no children, apparently!” It’s been so long since you last raised your voice, and here you are, doing it for the second time in as many weeks. Already your throat is sore, but you can’t stop, not now, not yet. “So why should I have to be the bigger person? Why should I have to be the one who tells her it’s okay, that she wasn’t terrible, that she doesn’t have to hate herself for what she did? She never told me it was okay! She let me hate myself for the way she treated me!”
On the other end of the phone, there’s silence. He's listening to you, but it’s not enough. For years, that woman has been seeping poison into you with every unkind touch and too-sharp word, and now, every drop of it is spilling over. You have borne it all, but you’re only eleven; a child can only bear so much.
“Even if she hadn’t been terrible, we were children!” you scream. A scream—there's no better word for it. Tears are rolling down your cheeks as something in you splinters, and it’s ugly, so very, very ugly, horrible and hateful and unforgivable. You know you’ve never been a pretty crier, but she’ll never be here to tell you so again, not if you can help it. “We were children, and I wanted my mother, and she was the one who hurt us! Why is it my fault?!”
You're sobbing now, scraping your lungs raw. And on the other end of the phone, Gladion says, “I’m sorry.”
He’s not crying. But the anger has fled his voice for once, and it’s the closest you have heard him come in years.
“You don’t have to apologize,” you manage to say, pressing your hand to your now-throbbing temples. “But…I changed my mind. That’s all.”
“Okay,” your brother says, and you have never felt so burdened with relief.
The very last time you speak to her, you dial the phone yourself.
You say, “I’m leaving Alola.”
“You can’t,” the woman says. “You’re a child.”
“Plenty of children leave home for their journeys at my age,” you retort. “And I’ve been on my own for a while now. Gladion and me both.”
“You can’t,” the woman says again, and you say, “I wasn’t asking for permission.”
You hang up.
You're heart can't stop pounding.
You feel as though you've won.
By some trick of fate, you learn from Gladion that the woman’s doctors are bringing in a specialist from Kanto the very same day you’re scheduled to depart.
A hole develops in your stomach at the news. For a moment, you wonder if you ought to cancel, ought to pick a different destination to avoid any potential awkwardness. But Kanto is where Moon is from; Kanto is the region where the memories you most want to make with her someday reside. You won’t sacrifice Kanto, no matter what.
Still, you’re left so out-of-sorts by the news that you somehow forget to tell Hau and Moon that you’re leaving at all. It’s only when you see them running to you in the marina that you realize your mistake. You don’t think you’ve ever been quite so glad to see them—the friends who have become your strength.
When Hau begs for an explanation, eyes filled with tears, you say “I want to help myself get stronger.” He nods, dejected, but Moon’s smile falls at your words. You wonder if she somehow suspects your true intentions; it wouldn’t surprise you if she did. So to her, you promise, “I’m going to be okay,” and slowly, her smile returns.
You wave from the ship as long as you can bear to do so, long past the moment the island vanishes from the horizon.
You’re leaving, you think, giddy. You’re leaving. You were the one who was left behind when Gladion left all those years ago, but now you're the one who’s getting out.
You know that leaving’s not a cure. Distance alone won’t be enough to rid you of your fear of unspoiled white clothing or heels clacking on tile. But if you can scatter your seeds elsewhere and give them room to grow, then maybe you won’t feel as overshadowed by the weight of everything that that woman has done. Away from her, you will be free to come into your own. And when you someday return to Alola, your bulbasaur companion by your side, you will be strong enough to finally blossom.