Chapter 2
TWO
It’s instinct that wakes her, a hook slid into her intestines with a firm yank, so that when her eyes fly open she can feel the truth of it like old blood, pooled and calcifying in her guts: Jude is not in his bed.
It could be paranoia, her sleep-groggy mind pulled back to the years when he wouldn’t sleep, when she would drag his car seat inside and buckle him in so that at least she could close her eyes for a few minutes and know he wasn’t climbing cabinets or twisting oven knobs or putting plastic in his mouth.
She would crush a pillow over her head, desperate for sleep, though it did little to block out his wails.
He could scream for hours.
But he hasn’t done that since they moved to Virginia. He’s outgrown it or maybe the hold the nursery has on his attention has proven invaluable. A relief, because it means he is uninterested in wandering into unfinished rooms or poking at the numerous tools Bren always leaves out.
But this is where her mind goes:
Jude, in the dark, tiptoeing across corroded floorboards with his fluttering hands looking for switches on power tools.
Sometimes the want—no, the need—for him to be still hits her with an all-consuming desperation and she’ll squeeze his fingers so hard she can imagine them breaking, little splinters of bone cutting through his skin like toothpicks.
If he would just listen to her. If he would just let her keep him safe.
She flicks on her bedside lamp and eases out from under the covers, cold air and regret sliding against the bare sliver of skin where her sweater has ridden up.
She yanks her sleeves down over her hands and glances at Bren, his body like the slopes of a mountain, his breathing deep and unbothered.
He isn’t a mother, he isn’t attuned to whimpers in the dark, and he also doesn’t consider the house a death trap.
To him, six-year-olds obey instructions and understand consequences.
Jude will stay in bed because that’s where he was put.
Bren still knows so little about Jude, and every day she wonders if she can keep it that way.
She slips from the master bedroom and feels her way slowly down the pitch-black hallway.
It must be past two a.m. The dark is a formless thing and when she edges around a corner, it opens before her like an unholy mouth ready to suck all the air from her lungs.
She stumbles and for a second there is no floor, no walls, just her heartbeat hitting her stomach with a squelch that makes her feel instantly sick, disorientated, lost. Light, she just needs to see.
Floorboards creak and settle underfoot, and she slaps a palm against the wall for balance against the tipped-over feeling of the endless black hallway.
She feels for the light switch until she remembers Bren took out the old plastic casing with grand intentions to buy antique brass ones. He hasn’t yet.
He thinks himself an architect, a carpenter, an interior designer, an electrician, and it scares her how he plans to fix everything himself.
She is meticulous about her demure facade, though, never slipping up to show the cavernous gouge in her chest where anxiety festers like toxic spillage, images flashing through in a curated slideshow from hell: Bren falling from a ladder, cutting his hand on a power saw, his whole body spasming as he touches live wires.
So much of it is a game to him, drawing up plans on napkins in cafés, trawling through estate sales to pick up antique furniture, cruising down the aisle of hardware stores with his cart piled high with hardwood and new drill bits and tins of wood stain.
He could hire carpenters, but he won’t. This is his parents’ old house, and fixing it is his dream, his joy, his obsession.
There is a nostalgic worship to it that he’d never admit to, though she feels like it’s less a commemoration of his parents’ passing and more his way of bringing them back to life.
She should love this, really, his dream of a big house, a beautiful wife, a family to come home to and spoil with his affection.
They are still so new, the three of them together. She can’t shape her mind around what it would look like if his patience is used up, so she refuses to think about it. She can’t lose Bren. If Jude is an oil spill, uncontrollable, flammable, then she is a blanket meant to smother.
When she rounds the corner, enough moonlight crawls through the bay windows to show the nursery door is cracked open.
Panic flares in her chest like an electrical strike, and she is again unbalanced, her hands shaking as she traces the wall for balance and speed-walks to the nursery.
Empty. She holds her breath and listens, silently begging the universe for a sound, any sound to give away where he is so she can snatch him up before he gets hurt.
The noises are small, almost imperceptible. The thump of small feet on bare floorboards. A metallic click. Quick, guilty breaths. The tiniest sniffle.
Find him. Find him now.
She hurries downstairs, her heart a runaway riot as she ignores the way the dark unspools around her as she strides into the unfinished dining room. She slaps on the light.
In an instant, the dark is banished. The shadows curl their tongues back into their mouths and the world turns crisp and overexposed. Her eyes burn and she blinks hard, a hand raised against the brightness.
Sawhorses and tall ladders fill the dining room, the walls stripped down, naked wires hanging from the huge hole in the ceiling where a chandelier is meant to hang. The floor is a mess of paint-splattered throw cloths and toolboxes and wood shavings. Unsafe, all of it so unsafe.
She thinks, maybe, she hates this house sometimes.
Jude crouches in the corner, his stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm, a huge toolbox open in front of him. A small hole has been opened in the wall—probably Bren cutting it open to run wires—and fibers flutter around the perforated edges like thousands of miniature veins.
She has caught him in the act, a hammer in his hand, half of it posted into the fist-size hole that tunnels down to who knows where. Even as their eyes meet, hers still unfocused in the abrupt light, his serious and cross, he releases the hammer.
It drops into the bowels of the house. Entirely unreachable.
“Jude William,” she snaps. “What are you doing?”
His shoulders knot up, his body packing down small, as she storms over and yanks him up.
His rabbit slips from his fingers. Her grip is too tight, she knows this even before he shrieks in real pain, but in this moment she doesn’t care.
How many tools has he dropped down there, and how the hell will Bren get them back?
“Stop it. When I put you in bed, you stay in bed, and you do not touch Bren’s tools.”
“I don’t like it here.” His mouth pulls down, but she’s had enough.
“And I don’t care!” she snaps.
He starts up that whimpering cry, like an engine sputtering to life before the screaming begins.
All that’s left is to pick him up and be grateful, relieved, that he is still small and she can firmly grip his thrashing body.
She knows how to hold him, where to pin, but as she storms upstairs, all she can think is:
I can’t do this when he’s bigger.
I can’t hold him, pin him, stop him.
I can’t.
She can barely keep hold of him as she shoulders open the nursery door to sit him down hard on his bed.
He pops off instantly, and she has to grab him again, sit him down and then pin him as he keeps screaming.
Already he is a mess, salty drool spun from his mouth, tears streaking down his cheeks.
Only one word makes sense in the midst of it all.
Rabbit. He dropped his rabbit. She could race downstairs and get it for him and mitigate the meltdown—except, isn’t that giving in?
Her head feels split by the screaming, her nerves frayed.
She just wants him to stop. Everything is always turned all the way up with Jude, his reactions disproportionate and volcanic, and she is just so—tired.
what is wrong with you that your son is like this
She closes her eyes, going motionless as she lets the pain slide out of her body.
This is how she gets through times like this, when she can’t leave him alone but needs to escape.
She imagines herself a statue done in white marble, carving tools discarded, but instead of dust left behind from the chisels cutting out her shape, the floor is covered in blood.
Footsteps pad softly outside the nursery, and then Bren is there, leaning awkwardly in the open doorframe.
He’s backlit by the dull yellow glow from their bedroom light down the hall, but she can still see him looking sleepy and forlorn from the loss of her.
The oversize Brown University sweatshirt and tousled blond bedhead make him seem like he’s still some scruffy college student instead of an accountant, a homeowner, a parent.
Sometimes she forgets how young they are, she only twenty-two and he twenty-three, both of them playing at being adults.
Nights like these remind her that she should be looking through the undersides of shot glasses instead of knowing tomorrow’s hangover will be thanks to her child’s midnight hysterics.
She wishes Bren wouldn’t see this, wishes she could pull him deep into the angular cavities of his old house and cover his ears, his eyes, let him continue to live in oblivion as to what he took on when he begged her to live with him.
Jude has begun to tire himself out, screams ebbing, his limbs no longer thrashing as he squeezes himself into a tight ball on his bed, his hands over his ears as tears streak down his cheeks in abject despair.
A good mother would stay, clean him up and comfort him, but all she can think of is escape.
Slowly, Elodie picks herself up and steals toward the nursery door, guilt a living thing festering in her throat as she shuts it firmly behind her.
He did this to himself.
I am still a good mother.
I am.
Out in the hallway, she blinks in the disorientating light. She rubs one bare foot against her cold ankle as Bren scrubs at his fluffy golden hair with a rueful wince.
“Shit, what happened?”
“He was downstairs dropping your tools into a hole in the wall.”
Confusion creases his brow. “Why?”
“I don’t know why.” Don’t snap. She lets out a slow breath, frustrated at herself for still hesitating to let him in when it comes to Jude.
“Hey, hey, don’t worry about it.” He slips behind her and slides hands around her waist and flattens his palms over her belly.
With all the renovation work he’s done on the house, his hands have turned rough and chapped. They are workman’s hands, confident and beautiful. They are the hands that will cup the soft, malleable skull of her baby with such reverent, all-consuming love that she knows she will cry to see it.
Sometimes it sickens her, how good he is.
How she has tricked him into wanting her.
“You know,” he says, “Ava’s doing this Montessori parenting thing … Did I tell you about that? Maybe you two could talk.”
Elodie tries not to grind her teeth. She does not need to be compared yet again to his sister and her cherubic two-year-old who sleeps through the night and knows baby sign language and considers cleanup time a favorite activity.
“I’ll text her.” She will not. “But I have to tell Jude soon.” The words sound strained, her briefly won comfort at Bren’s touch already slipping. At sixteen weeks, she is starting to show. “He’s not going to take it well.”
“Hey, you never know.” Bren untangles himself and scoops up her hand, leading her down the hallway to the master bedroom. “He might be excited. Remember when we walked past that pet store last weekend? He was all about those kittens.”
She would love to rise to his optimism, but she couldn’t sound flatter as she says, “I’m not having a kitten.”
“Okay, but the concept—”
“Bren.”
He gives her a pouting face, but he’s teasing. While Jude cannot be distracted from a spiral, Bren is the epitome of a bouncy subject change. He never lingers on a sour taste or a foul day—there is always a joke to slip in to placate a tense situation or a smile that can clear a thunderous sky.
The only mistake he’s ever made was marrying her.
There is no loving her the way she was, only the way she will be, and she is determined to mold herself into the beautiful wife he wants. She is different now; she is new. He thinks her a lovely thing he found while visiting Australia and she is desperate for it to stay this way.
In their huge mahogany four-poster bed, their legs tangle together beneath the covers, and she presses her mouth against his while Jude’s crying fades. It is a big house, hungry for sound, and it is so easy to shut a door and pull quiet over herself like a shroud.
Bren’s fingers slide into her tangle of dark curls as he murmurs into her mouth, “We’ll figure it out together.
I am with you for everything.” He pushes up on one elbow, his fingers still in her hair as he gazes down at her.
“I know the house is a bit creepy for a kid, but it’ll be amazing when it’s done.
The bones are solid and it has so much personality.
You feel it, right?” He presses his face into the nook of her shoulder, his mouth on her collarbone.
“It’s the perfect place to start a family. ”
“You are perfect,” she whispers.
Bren is so earnest, so sweet and considerate and kind, and when he pushes up her sweater to glide his palm over the bare skin of her belly, she cannot help but revel in the weight of his worship.
It fills her up with delicious golden warmth, loosens the tight coils of her muscles like nothing else can.
In his arms, she is a flower in full bloom, drinking him in like a sun-soaked sky.
She is obsessed with him and he is obsessed with their unborn child.
She will be a better mother this time; she will be perfect.