Emma's mother

Emma's mother is a loving parent whose effort to protect her children has sometimes meant withholding difficult truths. During a visit to Emma in the PAAZ, she explains why the hospital itself has been painful for her, admits regret about not recognizing Emma's needs, and tells her that David has been hospitalized. Her disclosures turn a visit framed around Emma's recovery into a conversation about family history, fear, and the possibility of helping one another.

Family history and the hospital

Emma's mother has a personal history with the hospital that predates Emma's admission. She tells Emma that she struggled to become pregnant and to remain pregnant, and that she had three miscarriages. Each occurred in this same hospital. Although the losses were years in the past, seeing the building from a distance could still bring on a deep sadness and nausea, as though she were losing a child there again.

That association shaped her response to Emma's hospitalization. She describes feeling that she had lost another child when Emma was left in the hospital. The explanation does not erase the pain Emma felt about her mother's reluctance to visit, but it gives that absence a history distinct from shame or rejection. Emma's mother insists she was never ashamed of Emma and would not be, however often Emma might be admitted. Her account makes clear that a place can carry one person's earlier grief into a later family crisis, even when the people involved understand that history differently.

Protectiveness and regret

Emma's mother says she tried to shield Emma and David when David had episodes of losing control. Looking back, however, she doubts that she succeeded: she acknowledges that the children may not have been protected at all. She also connects this regret to Emma's later recognition that she has Asperger syndrome. Emma needed calm and regularity, her mother says, and she did not see that at the time.

Her admission is not presented as a complete explanation of the past or as a claim that she could have prevented every difficulty. Instead, it shows her revisiting the way she understood her children's needs and recognizing what she missed. The same protective instinct remains active when Emma is hospitalized: her mother initially hesitates to bring up David because she thinks Emma should have time for herself. In both cases, care is expressed through shielding, but the visit also shows the limits of deciding on someone else's behalf what they can bear to know.

Telling Emma about David

During the visit, Emma learns that David has been admitted to a hospital. Her mother says the family does not know exactly what happened and that David will not talk about it. He has stopped speaking. Elise found him in the room where he lived with support, after he stopped answering the phone. Because staff had been checking on him less often as things seemed to be going well, Elise decided to visit and found him severely neglected, surrounded by bottles of alcohol and pills.

Emma's mother cannot say whether David made an attempt that failed, was confused, or intended to do something; she stresses that he has never done anything like this before. The uncertainty is part of what makes the news frightening. She had withheld it because Emma had recently been admitted herself, but Emma points out that there is ample time in the hospital to talk. Her response allows the conversation to move from the initial shock toward the specifics of David's situation.

The timing makes the disclosure especially difficult: the event occurred a few weeks earlier, on the day Emma called Elise to say she had been admitted. Her mother had been carrying that knowledge while trying not to burden Emma. Once she tells her, she asks whether Emma might accompany her to visit David after Emma leaves the PAAZ and feels ready. She sees Emma as someone who knows from the inside how a psychiatric ward works, whereas she is an outsider, and hopes that this experience could help the family notice what matters in David's care. Emma agrees.

Reading Emma and Sergei

The visit also gives Emma's mother a chance to respond to Emma's worry about Sergei. Emma explains that Sergei resisted removing her stockpiled medication, despite the psychiatrist's request; it took more than three weeks and two conversations with the psychiatrist before he did so, and he remained reluctant. Emma fears that his resistance means he does not take her difficulties seriously.

Her mother offers another interpretation. She suggests that if Sergei minimizes the seriousness of Emma's problems, he may be protecting himself from recognizing how close he came to losing her. If he accepted that the danger had been life-threatening, he would have to face the possibility of losing Emma. This is her conjecture, not a fact established by the narrative, but it shows her trying to understand the emotional stakes behind Sergei's behavior rather than simply treating it as indifference.

A changed form of support

Emma's mother does not arrive with a simple answer to the family's past or to its present crisis. Her visit instead brings several truths into the same conversation: her fear of the hospital is rooted in earlier losses; she regrets failing to notice Emma's need for routine; David is in serious difficulty; and Emma may still be able to support her family while receiving care herself. Asking Emma to accompany her to David's ward acknowledges Emma's experience without asking her to take responsibility for his outcome.

The exchange changes the shape of their relationship in the moment. Emma had wondered whether her mother's reluctance to visit meant that she was ashamed; her mother's account contradicts that belief and gives Emma a more complicated explanation to consider. By naming her own fear, regret, and uncertainty, Emma's mother moves from trying to spare Emma painful information toward trusting her with it. Her support is imperfect, but it becomes more reciprocal: she can offer reassurance and perspective, and she can also ask Emma for help.