CHARACTER
Penpalby Dathan Auerbach

The Narrator's Mother

The Narrator's Mother

Quick Facts

Who They Are

The portrait that emerges is of a woman whose love is absolute and action-oriented—someone who will break rules, social norms, and even the truth itself to keep her child safe. She functions as a gatekeeper of reality, filtering what her son sees and knows to preserve his childhood, even as danger presses against the walls of their home. In a story built on partial memories and withheld facts, she embodies the painful calculus of protection: exchanging clarity for safety, and innocence for silence.

Physical presence is sketched sparingly but tellingly—dark brown curls shared with her son; a silhouette at the blinds in Footsteps; a dirt-smeared, “unhinged” look after crawling under the house in Boxes. Her body often communicates what her voice will not: fear blanching her face at the Polaroids, frantic breath on the phone with the police.

Personality & Traits

She appears strict, but her strictness is a strategy. Her tenderness is practical, her lies purposeful, and her panic tightly leashed until it explodes. The contradictions—nurturing yet secretive, calm yet brittle—trace the fault lines of a parent living under siege.

  • Fiercely protective: Enforces rules like “home before dark” and relocates the family without explanation, privileging safety over stability.
  • Resourceful and nurturing: Masks poverty with care—“I know now that we were poor, but had you asked me then, I would have had no idea.” She brings home the kitten Boxes after the broken arm, arranges sleepovers, and buys walkie-talkies to foster connection with Josh.
  • Secretive caretaker: Reframes the abduction as “running away,” obscures the reason for their move, and hides what happened to Josh—choices that sustain a protective fiction central to the book’s fractured-memory design.
  • Cracks under pressure: Her gasp-and-call panic at the Polaroids and the hysterical intensity of her final confession expose how long she has been holding the line alone.

Character Journey

Viewed through the narrator’s retrospective investigation, her arc moves from “strict but loving mom” to tragic strategist. Each “odd” choice is recontextualized: the curfews, the controlling stories, the sudden move—all responses to a predator she identified early. The discovery of bowls and blankets beneath the house confirms her worst fears and triggers decisive flight; afterward, she doubles down on silence, believing that confusion is safer than truth. Years later, the scaffolding finally collapses: her confession to her adult son about the intruder beneath their home—and about Josh—lays bare the costs she has paid to manage terror. Her journey captures the ripple trauma of stalking, where the parent becomes both protector and casualty, and where love must navigate the steep moral terrain between shielding a child and lying to him.

Key Relationships

  • The Narrator: Their relationship is intimate, pragmatic, and ultimately wounded by secrecy. She is his soft place to land and, later, the custodian of answers he can only pry loose through confrontation. The bond survives, but not unchanged; her deceptions protected his childhood while compromising his trust.
  • Josh: She recognizes the stabilizing power of this friendship and actively cultivates it—coordinating sleepovers and gifts to give the boys a normal childhood. Yet her failure to warn Josh’s parents about the danger weighs as unpayable guilt, a moral burden that fuels her final breakdown.
  • Mrs. Maggie: She teaches her son compassion by contextualizing Maggie’s Alzheimer’s, balancing empathy with caution. Their interactions let her model kindness under threat: be gentle, be aware, keep your distance—an ethical framework for surviving a hostile world.

Defining Moments

Her story is told in jolts—each scene revealing a deeper layer of what she knows and what she’s willing to do.

  • The abduction reframed (Footsteps): After her son is returned from the woods, she seizes him and insists he “ran away.” Why it matters: This is her first overt reality-edit, a protective lie that tries to keep terror from attaching to her child’s sense of self.
  • The Polaroids (Balloons): Seeing photos of her son triggers visible shock—breathless, pallid, calling the police at once. Why it matters: Her visceral response confirms the threat’s reality and history; she’s been living with fear long enough to recognize its signature instantly.
  • Under the house (Boxes): She crawls into the crawlspace to retrieve the kitten and emerges dirt-streaked and shattered, having found the intruder’s blanket and bowls. Why it matters: The danger is no longer abstract—it is embedded in their home. Her immediate flight shows she will sacrifice everything, including stability and truth, to remove her son from harm.
  • The final confession: At last, she tells her adult son that someone lived beneath their house and reveals the truth about Josh. Why it matters: The protective myth collapses. Her breakdown exposes the psychic toll of carrying terror alone and forces a reckoning between love’s intentions and its consequences.

Essential Quotes

“Don’t you ever make fun of her like that again. It’s not funny. Do you understand me?” This sharp rebuke crystallizes her ethical stance: compassion enforced as a household law. Even under chronic fear, she insists on humane conduct, modeling a moral clarity that coexists with her secrecy.

“We found the note you left on your pillow.” The line is a surgical lie, replacing abduction with agency. By rewriting the event as “running away,” she attempts to protect her son’s psyche from being branded victim—an early example of her choosing psychological safety over factual accuracy.

“Veronica’s dead, sweetheart. Oh God, I thought you knew …” Her faltering tone exposes the limits of her control; information has slipped through the cracks she tried to seal. The moment illuminates how perilous and exhausting her curation of reality has become.

“Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for Boxes. You think you were the only one to find them there? Don’t you tell me that I lied to you about there being someone in that house, goddamn you.” Raw, desperate, and unvarnished, this confession detonates the narrative she spent years managing. It confirms the proximity of the threat and reframes her secrecy as a form of love under siege—misguided at times, but grounded in terror and responsibility.