The Mother Who Cried Werewolf

Chapter Nine

Drawing Conclusions

The only thing that Arthur knew about his middle son was that he was academically gifted. That was it. He didn't have many memories to look back on. Fifteen years went by, and Arthur couldn't tell what kind of ice cream Percy liked or what he had done last Christmas. His life had become a blur of pasty hospital walls and multi-coloured wires that glowed in the dark. When it came to Bill and Charlie, their childhoods were so vibrant. They played with Exploding Snap cards that glowed in the dark. Arthur could vividly remember them running away from them as they exploded in their face. He could still remember Bill complaining about his singed eyebrows.

They ran around the woods and came back with muddy knees and hand lacerations. In the summer of 1981, he remembered them whizzing past him with massive rucksacks, ready to go off on a camping trip with their Uncle Bilius. He could remember Bilius' light blue eyes twinkling in the sun. That was one of the last few times he'd seen his older brother so happy before his untimely death.

Untimely death. An alcoholic that succumbed to death at the ripe age of sixty-eight. Arthur could still remember hearing the news. He was numb for weeks.

"Percy, what do you want to do when you get out of the hospital?" Arthur asked. He was sitting on a squeaky chair in that horrible children's ward. The cleaners had changed stained green bed curtains to bright yellow ones. The smell of bleach hung heavily in the air.

"I don't want to do anything. I want to go home," Percy said.

It was Thursday night. Arthur had no idea how he would get up in the morning to go to work. He had never been so exhausted in his life. The demands of his day-to-day life were becoming too much for him to bear. Arthur didn't know how to cook, fold up laundry, and make sure that the twins were in bed by a reasonable hour. The house was in a state, and Arthur found it hard to make ends meet. He didn't know the best deal for aubergines or how to make sure they packed their trunks right. A week into the new year, Ron had already owled him about the books he'd forgotten at home. He'd also received three letters from the twins. They were in desperate need of spare underpants.

"What do you want to do when you go home?" Arthur asked.

"I don't want to do anything," Percy said. "I want to sleep."

Arthur smiled.

"Percy, you sleep all day in the hospital anyway."

"But I want my bed."

"What's the difference?"

"I prefer my bed," he said. He answered like they were discussing coffee orders instead of the fact that his son did nothing all day.

"Percy, do you have any hobbies besides reading?" he said as he placed a hand on his son's arm. Percy was in that pink hospital gown they'd changed him into since he'd gotten to the ward. It was endearing at first, but now, it felt like Arthur was living in a vacuum where he was living the same day. "What do you do all day?"

"I don't do anything."

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't want to do anything," Percy said.

"Nothing else interests you? Nothing whatsoever?"

"I draw sometimes."

Arthur jerked his head up in anticipation. "You do?" he asked. He didn't care if Percy took naked photos of himself and distributed them for money. As long as it was something besides being asleep for ninety percent of the day, Arthur was ecstatic to know about it. "What do you draw?"

"Anything," Percy said.

"Like what?"

He opened the book he was reading. The dedication page was full of illustrations. Arthur took them in with renewed zeal. Dragons, hippogriffs and plants that he'd only seen in Herbology textbooks. Percy seemed to like drawing leaves. He'd managed to cram about eight different plants with the most intricate leaf details he'd ever seen in a single page. The swirls of the ink were smooth. He'd probably drawn the same plants a hundred times before.

"How is it like to be in a greenhouse?" Percy asked.

Arthur froze when Percy asked that. "Um…" he couldn't even remember much of it. You never really think about some of the things you've experienced before. He didn't care about Herbology when he'd been in Hogwarts. "I'm not sure you'd like it. It's dirty."

"I couldn't have figured that out by myself," Percy said with a roll of his eyes.

"You've never been to a greenhouse before?" the girl in the bed next to Percy asked. Arthur was surprised because he didn't think anyone was listening in on the conversations. Percy pulled the curtains back. Arthur saw a brown-haired girl lying on the bed with a nebulising mask. There was a loud fizzing noise from the machine.

"Mind your own business," Percy said and then shut the curtains again.

"Your friend?" Arthur guessed. He didn't think that Percy would have any friends in this hospital.

"No," he said.

"Yes," she said from behind the curtain. "Do you want some tea?"

Percy opened the curtain again. She leaned over to hand him a flimsy white paper cup filled with milky tea. It was from her flask. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but Arthur could never convince Percy to drink lemonade out of a pitcher in their home unless he was the first one to drink from it. He couldn't imagine how this girl could pour tea from her flask into a cup and have Percy drink it without him complaining about how her germs had poisoned him.

"You've never seen a greenhouse before?" the girl asked.

"He's never been to Hogwarts," Arthur said. "It's a long story."

"It's not a long story," Percy said. "I'm too ill to do anything." The disdain in his voice made Arthur sigh.

Percy blew the steam off his cup and started to drink. Arthur looked back at the drawings. The Chinese Fireball looked like it had the wrong scaling. The Devil's Snare had an extra appendage and a big bulb at the roots that it didn't have. The hippogriff that Percy drew looked like something out of Tales of Beedle the Bard. It clicked in Arthur's mind that he didn't know how to show these things properly because he'd never seen them before.

"Oh, that sucks," the girl said. "But on the plus side, you've never met Snape, so I'd consider that a blessing."

"What's your name? What house are you in?" Arthur asked.

"My name is Audrey, and I'm in Hufflepuff."

"Couldn't tell," Percy said.

Audrey threw a pillow at him. Percy moved his hand away so that she wouldn't knock it over. It was like he expected her to. "Shut up," she said. "You're so dumb for someone that reads all day long." Arthur watched steam pour out of her mask. He wondered if it would help Percy to receive nebulisation at home. He would have to ask the healers.

"How juvenile," Percy said.

Percy thought that everything under the sun was juvenile.

Arthur marked this attempt at a conversation as a success. He knew that Percy liked drawing. Maybe he enjoyed arts in general. That was great. There were loads of artsy things to do in Diagon Alley. They could paint a few pictures on a warm Friday morning in the stalls. He could take him to a museum sometime and laugh at all the knob paintings (well, he would've had a bit of a laugh with Bill). Maybe he could help rearrange photo albums with him in his spare time or decorate his room now that he wasn't going back to a four-walled prison with a magical machine monitoring his sleep.

"Are the twins causing a lot of havoc in school?" Percy asked.

"Not much," Arthur chuckled. "Well…not yet anyway."

"You should discipline them more. You can't let them go do whatever they want willy-nilly."

"They've had a tough couple of years."

Arthur couldn't help but feel touched. It was so like Percy to say that.

"So have I," Percy said. "But I don't go around causing an upheaval everywhere I go."

"Not everyone is like you, Percy."

"I never said that everyone was like me."

"Do you know that you come off as self-righteous and holier-than-thou?"

"I think those words mean the same thing," Percy said. Arthur laughed.

After he'd gotten Percy off the topic of the twins, they talked about Ron and Ginny. Most of Percy's criticism was that they were just as bad as the twins.

Ron, Ginny and the twins weren't adjusting well without Molly. Charlie and Bill didn't have it in them to turn her letters away. Arthur couldn't stop himself from reading them either. And the sickening thing was that it all made sense. The more he read, the more he felt at fault for everything. She complained that she hadn't been out of the house for more than forty-eight hours before Arthur had managed to put Percy into the intensive care unit.

But I'm making him ill, aren't I? She wrote in her recent letters. You're the one that's said he's not sick, and now look where he is.

Maybe Molly knew and told him about Percy's heart problem. Arthur couldn't remember much of the last few years. It was a blur, especially after the healers inserted the feeding tube in his abdomen. A line that sustained him well when he was comatose in intensive care.

Arthur went back and forth on it by the hour. The evidence he mounted against his wife was disintegrating right before his eyes. His feelings of self-righteousness were deflating. Percy never told him that Molly hurt him. The only proof he had was a box of Skiving Snackboxes that Molly explained away in her letters. I found them in Percy's room, she wrote. I took them away. He's a teenage boy. He didn't want a feeding tube, but it had been the healer's orders. Did you think I tried to starve my child?

What if Percy was so frail that he fell after walking a few steps? If Molly had been there, he wouldn't have been out of the house, huffing and puffing until he was pulseless on Christmas Eve.

Maybe Molly was right all along. Percy was ill all his life, and the rest of the family failed him. Whilst she was tending to him when he was in bed, Arthur was at the pub with his mates, having a firewhiskey, so he didn't have to go home too early and fight with his wife. He complained about Molly not extending the same curtsey and love for Percy to the rest of her children, but Arthur hadn't bonded well with Percy either. What if he had been asking too much of his wife all along? What if he needed to step up and fill the gap? She couldn't possibly do everything in the house by herself. What if he'd been wrong about everything and had twisted the situation back onto his innocent wife?

"Percy, listen," Arthur said. "This is very important, son, and you have to tell me the truth. Did your mum ever hurt you?"

Percy's eyes widened. Arthur didn't know if it was from disbelief at the accusation or if he was surprised at Arthur's directness.

"Percy?"

He stayed quiet.

"Since your mum's gone, you've been seriously ill," Arthur said. He remembered how his wife would stay up all night with a colicky five-month-old Ron. Once, she took Ginny to shop for dresses instead of going to a salon appointment she'd been waiting for months because it was what Ginny wanted. He missed her dearly. "I think she was right about you. About the fact that you're sick. About how much help you need. I think…I think that I was wrong to throw her out of the house. And if—if she didn't hurt you, if she never did, then I wondered if I could ask her to come back again. Maybe we don't need to divorce after all. Maybe we just needed to work through a rough patch in our marriage. You understand, don't you?"

Percy nodded his head.

"Did she hurt you, Percy?"

No answer.

"Percy?"

No answer, no answer, no answer.

"We have a complicated relationship," Percy said.

"I'm sure your mum can be hard to understand sometimes, but I'm sure she loves you," Arthur said. "And Child Protection Services are following us, aren't they? It could just be temporary. Just to see how things work out and if it works out well, then maybe…maybe we can see what things will look like in the future."

"Oh."

"Oh, as in…oh, you're alright with this? That you and your mum—things are alright?"

Percy raised an eyebrow. "What do you want me to say?"

"Percy, I want to talk about this," Arthur said. "If there's something—you and your mother…."

"You can do whatever you want," Percy said.

"Percy…"

"I don't want to talk about it," Percy said. "I thought you'd gotten the hint when I didn't answer you the first six times."

Arthur was taken back by how defensive he was. "There's no need to talk to me like that."

"Like I'm self-righteous."

"Well, you aren't helping your case," Arthur said. "If you don't want your mum to be back, we should talk about it instead of giving me that look like you can't believe that I've asked you about it."

"I'm not giving you any look," Percy said. "I told you that you can do what you want."

It was hard to read Percy sometimes. His facial expressions didn't change no matter what. Arthur may as well have been asking Percy about what to have for dinner sometimes.

"I think I had better conversations with you when you were in a coma," Arthur said.

Percy scoffed.

"I'm trying my best to have a relationship with you," Arthur said. "I'm worried about you, but you're being so difficult." He wished he knew how to describe how he felt. It was hard for Arthur to try and be engaged in the conversation. Nothing about this came naturally to him. Being around Percy stressed him out.

"How touching," Percy said. Arthur didn't expect that half-smile to form on his face. He didn't know if this meant that Percy found his efforts endearing or if he thought his father's concerns were a load of rubbish.

"If you aren't comfortable with your mum around, you can always tell me," Arthur said.

He didn't know if Percy was acting this way because it was how he was like or because Arthur kept prodding at a sore subject. He didn't know enough about him to figure it out. But if Percy couldn't bear the thought of Molly being back in the Burrow, he surely would, wouldn't he? If the accusation in question was abuse.

"It'll be alright," Arthur said.

Percy kept that moody look on his face. They said nothing else.

Arthur was starting to see things more clearly. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense that Percy was ill, and Molly was the only one who picked up on it. In hindsight, the alternative sounded impractical.

He'd accused the woman who bore his children, wife, and best mate of making their child ill. For what? For a sewing circle meeting like he'd suggested? For a sick satisfaction? For attention, for love, for sympathy? He told Molly that he thought that she was starving, and abusing his son under their roof for years. The thought left a shiver down his spine.

What kind of a man suspected his wife of something so heinous and dark? All because of a box of misplaced chocolates! Was he mad?

Arthur felt angry with himself over how he'd handled the situation. He'd brought all his children, including his ten-year-old daughter, into this. If Percy were being singled out and abused by his mother, they would've done something long before now, wouldn't they?

And if Molly had been making it all up, then why was it that the second his wife left, his child collapsed in the middle of the night? She'd been convincing him that something was wrong with him, and he hadn't listened. Now, he'd paid the ultimate price for it. And why hadn't he made more of an effort? Was he the one that was being self-righteous? Was his ego so overly inflated that he couldn't bear to question himself? Was it easier for them to blame his marriage because the family had become disjointed? And how could he make up for his absence?

Arthur could barely remember the fights they had or why they even had them. They all seemed ages away. He knew that he wanted to spello-tape the family back together, no matter how wonky the picture would look. At least all the pieces would be where they belonged.

Ever since Molly left, Arthur felt a gnawing pain in his heart, his home, even in Percy's hospital bed. There was no one to fuss over his bags, make sure that he'd been cleaned and washed and kept well, and make sure that the younger children had clean clothes and food to come to when they got home from the hospital. No matter how often he talked to Bill and Charlie, Arthur still found himself so lonely, so in need of someone to talk to.

Later that evening, Arthur met up with Bill at a pub. The one they chose was more secluded than The Leaky Cauldron. Every three months, the owner decided to renovate it entirely because she was under the assumption that changing the wallpaper would cover up the sour smell that permeated the air. This time, the wallpapers were a nauseating green with streaks of maroon. It looked like someone that had been sick and had thrown up a few chunks of blood into the mixture. But the drinks were as cheap as chips, and the seating was alright if you could look past the fact that it smelled like a serial killer had stuffed a decomposing body under the floorboards. They also made the best chicken pie that Arthur had ever tasted.

Arthur poured his heart out after he dawned his first firewhiskey. He told Bill about how distant Percy was and how he misread the situation. He was sure that Molly should be applauded for what she'd done instead of punished, that Arthur was just too bloody stubborn to realise that Percy was sick. Bill listened to him without cutting into the conversation as he swirled ice cubes into his firewhiskey. He reckoned he had a neutral facial expression throughout Arthur's rant, which lasted a good fifteen minutes.

"So, you're not going to be divorcing mum then?" Bill said. There was a glint in his eyes that he hadn't seen in some time. He sounded hopeful for the first time in a while.

"I…I'm not sure," Arthur said. "I think we could give it a go again."

"Yeah."

"Have her come visit Percy in the hospital. See how it goes."

"Do you think if mum wasn't here that Percy wouldn't have…"

"That he wouldn't have nearly died?" Arthur asked.

"Yeah."

"I think so."

"Shit," Bill said.

"Yeah," Arthur agreed.

He took in his eldest son's face and realised that he still seemed like a child. He was a child. He was only twenty years old and had just started working out a life for himself. He shouldn't be sorting his father's life out too.

"Is Percy okay with this?" Bill asked. He leaned forward, and Arthur found himself staring at his sleeves. Bill always had them rolled up. He used to do that when he used to go to school too. Sleeves rolled up, hair out. Perkins mistook him for a girl the first time he'd had him around. The nostalgia for simpler times gave him much more warmth than the alcohol did. "With mum coming back, I mean? He seemed ecstatic about the divorce."

"He says I can do whatever I want," Arthur said as he waved his hand in dismissal.

"Right."

"I've no idea what he means."

"Perce? I think he wants you to do the right thing."

"And that is?"

"Beats me," Bill said. He smiled and then drained nearly half his glass in a single gulp. Arthur had to watch himself around his son. Bill could outdrink him any day. The last time he'd been out with Bill, he'd come home plastered whilst Bill was pleasantly buzzed. "Mum will be thrilled to see him."

Arthur ignored the gnawing feeling in his stomach. This whole situation was a right mess. "She must be worried sick."

Bill frowned. "Dad," he said. The colour from his face drained. "The healers say that Percy needs a heart transplant. That he's in it in a bad way and could spend years on the donor list. They said that he could die before he got a chance to have that transplant."

"Yeah."

"How come we've not talked about it?"

The truth was Arthur tried not to think about that.

"I'm sure it'll sort itself out," Arthur said. He was unconvinced. His son needed to be on a donor transplant list. Percy wouldn't like that. He felt like Percy would write to the committee himself and tell them that he didn't need a heart transplant, and he didn't need a procedure, and he didn't need to be in hospital any longer; he was perfectly fine, thank you very much.

"Dad, they said he needs a heart transplant," Bill said. "The only way it'll sort itself out is when he's dead."

"Well—"

"Percy is dying from heart failure, isn't he? That's what they were trying to say. It wasn't just something he could take a few potions for, and it'll be alright. That it was too late for that."

"Yes," Arthur said. He was eying up Bill's drink. He wanted to get pissed.

"Does Percy know that he's dying? Dad, does he know?"

"I can't tell," Arthur said.

"You can't tell," Bill echoed. "That's wonderful, isn't it? You can't tell if Percy knows what's happening to him?"

I don't think he cares as long as he's out of that hospital, Arthur thought, but it went unsaid.