Chapter 3
THREE
“This shouldn’t be allowed.” She will never be used to these fairy-tale mornings, being woken with a kiss on the forehead and a mug of coffee perched by her bed.
Her limbs feel sluggish, her face puffy with sleep, but when she reaches out floppily to catch hold of Bren as he passes by the bed, his eyes are full of soft adoration for her.
He’s halfway through threading his belt through the loops of his pants, already full of boundless energy as he readies for work. “Which part? Seven a.m. or, like, consciousness in general?”
“The part where you’re a morning person and the bed is cold without you.” She has the blankets scrunched up around her face, but he still leans to kiss the tip of her nose. “And you also put on clothes.”
“Malicious crimes against you.” Bren moves to kissing her neck. “How dare I?”
“How dare you indeed.” A small smile tugs at her mouth.
“You’re such a cold frog. You’re not…” Hesitation enters his voice as he pulls away to search her eyes. “You’re not homesick, are you?”
“No.” She says it hard and firm and is rewarded by his face lighting up with that boyish giddiness that makes her heart swell. “I will never be homesick for that goddamn place.”
“Good, because you’re never going back there,” Bren says with cool, factual certainty. “Do you want to stay in bed? I can get Jude dressed for school.”
Elodie’s good mood unspools and slithers bloodily from her mouth.
Last night is a haunt against her shoulder blades, and she knows she has to get up and face the fallout of that world-ending meltdown.
If Bren went into the nursery right now, Jude would see it as a betrayal, her sending in the enemy to fumble around and mess up the predictability of his morning routine.
His bed will be wet. Toys will have been thrown.
He will be primed to relay his feelings in kicks and bites.
Best to not let Bren see that. Best to let him forget the fractious chaos of last night and the missing tools she’d be ridiculous to offer to replace when her bank account is empty.
He is always full of an affable eagerness to pay for anything she wants, so she forces herself not to think about money.
But it’s times like these when a sick spinning feeling starts in her gut over how she is so wholly dependent on him. It’s a ridiculous, unfounded fear.
He wants to give her everything. There is nothing to worry about.
“I’ll get him.” Elodie’s smile is wan, and Bren places a last fond kiss on her forehead before drawing away to finish buttoning his crisp white shirt. “You can continue being an insufferably cheerful morning person, and maybe it’ll wear off on me.”
“Ooh, are we believing in the impossible now?” Bren grins and she hurls a pillow at him.
After he strides whistling from the room to start breakfast, she forces herself up and dresses in a pair of dark jeans and a turtleneck sweater of luxurious black.
Her curls are caught up in a bun that reminds her of the days when she used to dance.
Now her old warm-up routines are replaced with gliding about the master suite, picking up laundry and opening the curtains.
Their room is beautiful with the fireplace and mantel refurbished, their mahogany four-poster bed buffed to the perfect shine.
The flooring still needs to be done, and it takes effort not to complain about the lack of carpets and the way the cold seems to throb from between the grayed, shrunken boards in the mornings, because she doesn’t want Bren to think she’s impatient. Ungrateful. Bored of waiting.
When he first showed her photos of this house his parents had left him, she couldn’t believe it was his alone.
His sister wanted nothing to do with this part of their inheritance—she had a larger share of their parents’ savings, though she made sure her little brother had enough cash to fund some of his renovations, too—and Bren had free reign over the whole house.
Then Elodie walked inside and understood.
While the house is massive and stuffed with antique furniture and ornate woodworking and original carved cornices, it’s in dire need of restoration.
They make headway on the weekends when Bren is freed from his accounting office and they can get covered in sawdust and paint together, but they’ve barely made a dent in the workload.
It’s a long-term project; she understands that.
At least she loves the version of Bren who will stand with hands on his hips, sweat patches under the arms of his T-shirt, tool belt hanging low on his hips and his jeans as filthy as the words he whispers to her in bed.
A load of laundry is put on before she feels ready to face the nursery. She’s a coward, acting like twisting the doorknob will release a creature made of milk teeth and bare finger bones, who will cut and scrape and bite until she bleeds. But that’s how she feels, sometimes, with Jude.
He lies motionless in the little woodland bed, morning sunlight listing through the gauzy curtains and dappling his cheeks, still tacky with dried tears and mucus. His limbs are bent like soft green wood, his thumb in his mouth, but at the sound of the door, his eyes fly open.
“Rabbit.”
“Let’s get dressed and go find him,” she says.
He is all shivering belly and tearful hiccups as she dresses him—something he should do himself, but already they’re running late and she doesn’t have time to watch him take ten minutes to put one leg into his jeans.
Across the nursery, the enormous bay windows show a bright sky, blue as a tipped-over bucket of paint.
Everything is so lovely in here, the colors warm and cozy, and she doesn’t understand why he tries to ruin it by pretending there’s something creepy about his walls.
When they first walked into the house, Jude had clung to her, whimpering.
His teeth marks lined her hand from a catastrophic tantrum at the airport, and her arms felt like lead from having to carry him while wrangling suitcases.
Once inside, Bren took them straight to the nursery.
He couldn’t stop gushing about everything he’d done to it—the replicated wallpaper, the dusty vintage toys, the restored woodland bed.
He started worrying Jude wouldn’t fit since it was apparently built to fill that awkward time between crib and adult bed, but Jude did.
He’s always been small for his age.
“He’s on a food strike,” Elodie had said, knowing Jude wouldn’t pipe up to correct her. “It’s only string cheese and crackers these days.”
This was the first time she was grateful he didn’t seem able to articulate his feelings, didn’t say things other children his age would.
At the time, Bren had seemed too giddy about the nursery tour to notice the way she kept running fingers through Jude’s hair again and again, anything for an excuse to have her hands near his face in case she needed to cover his mouth.
Bren had taken tubs of toys from the shelves and shown them to Jude with eager delight. “What do you think? Coolest room ever, hey, Jude?”
The toys were endless. It was a wonderland, a bottomless well with endless capacity for magic.
Built-in shelves lined one wall, stacked with boxes upon boxes of hidden treasures.
None of it was new. No bright plastics or action figures from the latest movies—these were antiques stretched across centuries.
Tin soldiers. Carved wooden animals. Alphabet blocks.
Snow globes. Porcelain dolls with glass eyes.
Original redwood Lincoln Logs. Old model train sets.
Handcrafted peg dolls and china cats the size of thimbles.
A rocking horse. An enormous wooden dollhouse.
Jude’s face had lit up.
For the first time since she’d walked out of her father’s house, Elodie could breathe. There was nothing Jude liked better than a game, and this would keep him occupied—and quiet.
There is nothing creepy about this nursery, just as there’s nothing off about the house, and she can only hope Jude forgets his hysterical imaginings of last night.
Once he’s dressed, she holds a tissue to his nose and tells him to blow.
“No more tears, all right?” she says. “No being naughty, and no wandering the house at night.”
His bottom lip trembles.
“You could hurt yourself,” she says. “Tools are not playthings. You have to apologize to Bren for wrecking his things, and then you can go look for your rabbit.”
She starts to rise, but he grabs her and for a second her heart swells thinking he wants a hug—except his fist is tight in her curls and he’s yanking her head to the side.
She grabs his wrist to ease the tension, but pain smarts behind her eyes.
Don’t let him know this hurts. Peel apart his fingers.
Don’t react. But the hot rage that sweeps through her is wildfire that could blister skin from bone.
“Jude,” she says, anger barely bit back in the tremor of her voice, “let go of Mama.”
The way he looks at her is with such a childish, indignant fury, and she almost wishes she’d skipped the part about apologizing to Bren.
She has to take control. He is the child; she is the mother who built his lungs, his heartbeat, from pieces of herself. If she yells, she loses.
“Jude,” she says. “Let’s play a game.”
He lets go.
The last push to get out the door happens in a blur.
Together, she and Bren tangle in the tag-team-race of grabbing their things and confirming schedules and surging into the crisp morning air.
Car keys and thermoses exchange hands. She redoes Bren’s tie while he plays with the loose curls at the nape of her neck.
Today he is the picture of a respectable accountant: dress pants creased, oxfords glossy, sleeves cuffed on his crisp white shirt, though he’s left it unbuttoned low enough for Elodie to appreciate the peak of his clavicle, the toned muscle, the smooth skin.
Somehow they are still in the honeymoon period.
Proven by the antique milk jug of dahlias in the middle of the counter because he says beautiful women must be surrounded by beautiful things.
Proven by how he threw out his ideas for the kitchen and did everything in tones of olive green and dusky wood because she mentioned she liked it.
Proven by how sometimes he walks into their bedroom when she is reading and all she has to do is say “Take your clothes off” and he does without hesitation.
“Maybe,” she says as he climbs into his sleek black SUV, “we should get a TV. It distracts him.”
“Ava says screen time isn’t great for kids.”
She closes her eyes and tries to think of calm things, gentle things, not the way she’s been holding out for the TV installation with the weary desperation of a mother who wants to know her child will be occupied so she can have five minutes to herself.
“Well, Ava is clearly the expert,” she says.
“Yeah, she is.” Bren looks happy they are in agreement. “It’s better to be unplugged. It’s crazy how people let their kids’ brains turn to mush in front of the TV and plaster baby photos online where anyone can see. I’m glad we’re not into that.”
She used to be. The TV was on every waking minute to try to mitigate Jude’s meltdowns and she would post photos of him, of her, in the lonely attempt to find other single mothers who understood, who knew how hard it could be, to have people who would comment, Oh your baby is gorgeous!
and let that soothe the fear of how she was failing.
But she didn’t mind Bren’s suggestion to delete her profiles. In fact, she wanted to.
This way no one can look for her.
After his SUV glides out of the driveway, she turns around to survey Jude sitting moodily on the front steps, his matted, foul little rabbit once again clasped in the crook of his arm. There was no apology to Bren; she couldn’t bear another tantrum.
She pastes on a smile. “Simon says … jump in the car.”
And he does, because it is a game and he must win.
She spins the heaters up high, because without Bren around she doesn’t bother pretending they have adjusted to the Virginian cold.
The sedan isn’t new, but it’s the first car she’s ever had, her tentative refusal of it ignored cheerfully by Bren when he decided she needed it.
Most of his income is funneled into the renovations, but if he wants her to have something, she will have it.
“I have an appointment this afternoon,” she says as they wait for the car to warm.
“You’ll have a few hours at after-school care.
” Words can’t express how much she hates leaving him with strangers, but he won’t talk to them; he rarely speaks to anyone but her.
“Simon says put your hands over your eyes.”
He does. She can see when the loss of the world, of so many overwhelming assaults on his senses, relaxes the tension in his body.
Her heartbeat quickens, her palms suddenly clammy on the steering wheel, and a hundred excuses to skip telling him run through her mind.
To deal with another tantrum will split her in half.
All she wants is for him to perk up in excitement, to chatter happily, to be as obsessed with this news as Bren was when she told him.
“Jude.” Her voice is soft as the endless dark beneath the sea. “You’re going to have a baby sibling.” She holds her breath, a fist tightening about her lungs.
Silence fills the car.
Her muscles tense, dread thickening under her tongue like tar, and when she risks a glance in the rearview mirror, he’s no longer covering his eyes. His little fists clench in his lap, and his eyes are full of rage. They burn a hole straight through her skull.
Then he kicks out, wild and sudden, slamming both feet into the back of her chair.
Her seat shudders at the blow, and she feels the kick straight into her spine.
He does it again. Again and again. All she can think of is how he threw that wooden baby back into the dollhouse last night with vicious contempt.
And what he might do if the baby was made of soft, downy skin and a malleable skull with a neck as fragile as a wish.
His wail is earsplitting in the closed confines of the car. “I don’t want there to be a baby. You said we were playing a game. I want to play the game! I want to win!”
For a long minute, she simply sits there, absorbing his kicks to the back of her seat and waiting for the familiar pain of the knife wedged between her ribs to ease. Best to wait until he wears himself out here rather than in front of teachers at his school.
“You did,” she says and puts the car into gear. “You did win this time.”