Chapter 7 #2
Everything is made easier by the fact he is scared to be far from her.
This creepy old house is, perhaps, a good thing.
So long as she doesn’t think too hard on the things he’s said.
She flicks a glance toward the archway leading out of the kitchen, gelatinous gloom sticking to the hall walls where the sun can’t reach.
Unease wraps around her heartbeat. It’s nothing, literally just a darkened hallway, but the old wallpaper looks like flaking skin and her stomach twists.
She shakes off the disturbing, crawling feeling and drains the dirty water before slipping her wedding ring back on.
She takes a second to smile at the way it hugs her finger before she notices Jude has gone quiet.
Turning, she finds him under the kitchen table, squatting like a grubby little gremlin with his chin on his knees as he rocks and looks at something squirreled away beneath him.
“Let’s play follow-the-leader.” She reaches under the table to tickle his ribs, and that’s when she notices he has her phone. “Hey.” She frowns and holds out her hand. “You’re not allowed that and you know it.”
He starts whining. “I want to watch things.”
Cutting out screens for him has always seemed unnecessary to her, not to mention frustrating when she needs a break, but she doesn’t want to argue with Bren about it.
“Simon says”—her voice drops to a whisper to pique his attention—“do six spins in the kitchen.”
He watches her, his eyes gone dark and damp, but then he abandons the phone and scurries out from under the table.
As he spins, she has to crawl under and fetch it herself, annoyed but also relieved the battle didn’t escalate.
An alert notification is on the screen. He must have heard it buzz and it drew him in, honey to his sweet tooth’s craving.
She had forgotten, until now, that she’d set alerts to tell her if anything online ever mentioned her parents’ names.
It had been impulsive, done out of fear when she first moved here, because while she has cut away everything about her old life like congealed fat off rotten meat, part of her wants to know if anything is said. About them. About her.
Except maybe she doesn’t want to know anymore.
She’s about to delete the alert, then hesitates.
She’s worked hard to reshape herself into something enigmatic and quiet and impossible to find; looking over her shoulder at the past is asking for a swift punch to the gut.
Her parents are nobody; she is nobody. Unremarkable, unknown.
No one should even care to talk about them.
She taps open the article.
There’s a podcast soon to air, something about true crime and cold cases with unsatisfying endings.
The writers seem young and excitable, keen to prod at the churned soil of graveyards in the name of content, and somehow her parents’ names are in the article.
Information is sparse. These armchair detectives know little to nothing, but they enjoy speculating.
They are black flies to a bloated carcass.
… murder or suicide? The couple lost their young son years ago and neighbors report their older daughter ran off without warning. Such cruel blows could have sent them over the edge …
The world tips. She slides down to sit with her back against the cabinets, her forehead pressed to her knees as a wave of vertigo sends acrid bile burning up her throat.
Jude has swiped an apple from the fruit bowl, bit into it and then spat it out, and he’s trying to hand her the soggy, rejected piece, his agitation growing the longer she sits unresponsive.
“Mama, I don’t like it. I’m hungry. Mama.”
Tremors run through her hands and black ice fissures through her lungs. Breathe. But she can’t.
She wasn’t going to think about her old life again, and now the wound has reopened, scar tissue unraveling like thread until she is pulsing blood all over the kitchen tiles.
The mess is incredible, an Armageddon in every shade of violence, and she can feel her tongue loosening at its stump in her mouth.
When she parts her lips, it will slip out, long and supple as a sausage, and she will watch it worm away across the floorboards.
“You stopped playing. I wanna play.”
She should never have looked at the article. She should have continued to seclude herself in this new life where she is a January and she has a husband and a house and a new baby on the way and everything is beautiful.
Pain shoots through her wrist with such sharp velocity that she lets out a startled cry. She yanks her hand away and stares at the neat row of teeth marks. Jude squats next to her, his eyes round and serious.
“Did you just bite me?” Elodie gapes at him, wanting to see remorse and instant tears of guilt after her shriek of pain, but he only tries to hand her the apple.
“I don’t like it.”
A wild red swell streaks across her vision and she thinks, for only a heartbeat, how she could just smack him across the mouth instead of going through the tedious agony of putting him in time-out where his tantrum will punish her more than him.
Bile is still in her mouth. She swallows it back.
That thought isn’t hers; she would never do that to him.
She stares at the teeth marks on her wrist as Bren bursts through the pocket doors covered in sawdust, with safety glasses pushed up his sweaty forehead.
“Did you just scream? What happened?” He hurries over and crouches by her, his dirty hands at her face, thumb smoothing her cheek. “You’re pale. Jesus, did you— Are those teeth marks?”
Recalibrate. Redirect. But she feels like a marionette, strings cut, as she slumps against the cabinets.
“Wait, did he bite you? Jude.” Bren’s bafflement turns into a hard glare, a muscle flexing in his jaw as he looks at Jude. “You’re in big trouble, young man.”
Jude’s mouth pulls down at the corners and he tries to tuck himself under her arm. She feels too untethered to push him away, too listless to protest when Bren finally notices the phone in her hand and takes it from her to start reading the article.
He could have asked permission first. He could have waited until she was ready to talk instead of zeroing in on the fact she has her phone out when he never does.
“What’s going on? Is this about— Wait. What is this?” He looks genuinely confused as he reads, and then his eyes go wide.
Her wrist throbs as if Jude is still clamped onto her. “Can you not just yank things out of my hand?” Why is she snapping at him? She can’t lose her temper like this, she can’t let her teeth show. “I’m … I’m sorry.” She presses fingertips to her temple. “I’m in shock, I guess.”
“Elodie, it’s fine.” Bren scans the article again, his brow furrowed. “I mean, of course you’re freaking out. You had no idea?”
Numbness climbs through her body and settles into every nook.
Jude squirms into her lap, wrapping his arms around her neck and sniffling wetly against her chest, cuddly in a way that would usually make her heart leap, except she knows he’s being tearful and pathetic to get out of trouble with Bren.
It’s never about her. If she doesn’t put him in time-out soon, the connection of naughty act to consequences will be lost.
Get up. Be the responsible parent.
She sits there.
“How long ago was this?” He’s Googling on her phone now.
“I don’t know.” Her head has emptied, the wave of rage gone.
A distant part of her thinks it’s ridiculous that they are all sitting by the kitchen sink having a crisis when she wanted to make egg salad sandwiches.
“It says … four months ago.” Bren glances up in alarm. “This must have happened right after we left. And no one reached out to you?”
“No one knows where I am.”
“They speculate that your mother poisoned their soup so they could mutually commit—” He’s still reading, shaking his head, but then his mouth snaps shut as if he only just remembers Jude is listening.
Watching them.
He has dropped his bitten apple, and it rolls across the kitchen floor.
“Um.” Bren’s voice lowers as he glances nervously at her. “Do we explain this to him?”
“No, he won’t understand.” Elodie finally remembers how to use her limbs and she wraps her arms around Jude.
Well, great. He’s getting a cuddle, not punishment.
Again he wins. His thumb is in his mouth, his cheek pressed to her breastbone as he snuggles into her, and he looks from her to Bren with wide-eyed worry as if he’s absorbing their distress.
“I’m sorry, baby.” Bren sits down heavily beside her, sawdust from his jeans shifting and settling on her clean kitchen tiles. “But they don’t deserve your tears, you know that, right? After what they did to you.” He breaks off, and there is uncharacteristic anger in his bright blue eyes.
“I’m not sad.” She presses her fists to her eyes, but she’s not crying. Her head is empty. “It’s just, I decided never to think about them again, and this has brought it all back.”
“It’s bullshit to insinuate they were upset that you ‘ran off.’ Like, Jesus Christ, everyone just makes shit up online these days. You did nothing wrong.” He takes her hands, kissing each knuckle, his belief strong enough to spill over the kitchen and wash everything else away.
Jude keeps watching her, an unnerving stillness to him, as if he still has her secrets in his mouth, tucked into his cheeks like marbles.