Chapter 9 #2
Elodie jerks to the side, just as the light fixture crashes down and slams into the exact place she was standing. The curved iron arms are dug into the floorboards like knife points.
For a second, shock leaves her frozen with her heart in her mouth as she stares at it.
Then she scrambles back the way she’d come, fright slitting her open like a fish until she’s shaking so hard she can’t think.
She nearly died. Above, the hole where the fixture used to be looks down at her like a black mouth, plaster lips rimmed with an oily, oozing liquid that slops onto the floor where she stood. Almost like it’s salivating for her.
She stares at it, still shaking so hard her teeth have begun to chatter, her heart punching its way from her chest with bruising intensity. It is in her mouth, the need to scream for Bren, until she hears a tiny mewl and spins around to see Jude standing in the doorway.
There is no way he slipped out without her seeing. She was standing right goddamn there.
She rushes over and snatches him up, backing out of the awful room where the hole in the ceiling has seemed to have grown with hungry delight.
“Are you okay?” she whispers into Jude’s hair, kissing him hard.
“I don’t like looking at it.” Jude’s mouth pulls down at the corners.
“Looking at what, baby?” She closes the door to the room and walks quickly down the hallway, trying to slow her breathing, though panic still runs like quicksilver through her veins. If she slows, if she calms down, she’ll realize this was all her fault for being in an unfinished part of the house.
It’s just that she doesn’t remember why she was in there, almost as if she was … pulled.
“The thing in the walls.” Jude whimpers and presses his face to her shoulder while her stomach does a backward flip.
She’s letting his silly little fears get into her head is all, but she can’t shove aside the image of that wet, black-slick mouth and the ravenous way it looked at her.
Maybe it looks at Jude like that while he’s in the nursery. Alone.
It can’t look at him. What is wrong with you?
She goes down the stairs too quickly for someone carrying a child, and when she pulls up short in the archway to the living room, she’s completely out of breath.
Bren is hard at work, oblivious to all fears and distress as he busts open a wall.
The small hole Elodie poked her head into last week has widened enough that a person can step through to the arguably useless parlor on the other side.
They agreed combining the rooms and opening the space would look amazing—but she didn’t realize he was doing it now.
On a Sunday night. Huge, ragged slabs of plasterboard lie scattered on the floor and dust pulses in the air.
He’s abandoned the power saw and has a sledgehammer in hand, smashed slivers of wreckage littering the ground before him, his arms and jeans layered in filth.
Jude coughs and Elodie fans the clouded air and tries not to breathe.
Telling Bren she was in the wrong part of the house seems pointless right now.
He’ll fuss, and she doesn’t want to be fussed over.
She wants him to fix this hellhole and make it safe while she takes a scalpel to the rabid way her imagination is spinning out of control these days and cuts out the meaty, blood-soaked offending pieces.
“Dinnertime.” She is amazed at how level her voice is, how easily she hides her still galloping heartbeat. “Also, what stops the second floor from falling on your head once you take out that wall?”
“I’ve got it sorted!” Bren sounds cheerful. “I’m not smashing all the way through now. Getting a load-bearing beam delivered on Tuesday.”
“Great.” She tries to keep her tone neutral. “And maybe the dining room will just finish itself since it’s so close anyway.”
“I’ll get back to—”
“But you don’t, and all that dust keeps drifting into my kitchen. There are tools everywhere, all the time, and it’s not safe. Can’t we stow some stuff in the basement?” An edge has crept into her voice, a brittle plastic to her poor attempt at artificial levity.
“We don’t have a basement.”
“Wow, how nice that we’re the only house on the block without one.”
He must notice the snarl in her tone, because his effortless grin slips and he lets the sledgehammer hit the floor with a dull thud. “Hey, are you annoyed about something?”
“Nope. I just want to eat dinner.” She forces a thin smile and sets Jude down, her arms suddenly too numb and weary to hold him.
Jude tiptoes into the living room and stops, his bare toes surrounded by splintered boards and brick shards.
Bren brightens. “Hey, little buddy. Want to come see what I’m doing? You can help me hold the drill.”
The idea of Jude becoming comfortable with power tools, viewing them as toys, even, fills Elodie with dread. She should reach for him, snatch him back and slap away that encouraging hand Bren is offering to her child.
She stares at the crumbling wall, the ruin of bricks, the plaster dust coating the air and thickening on her tongue, a hole blown through to show everything ugly beneath. She almost expects it to expand into a wide, toothy mouth spilling over with festered blood.
Breathe. Stop this. Just breathe and be fucking normal.
She is fine. She is in control of herself, of this situation.
“That’s not a good idea.” She tries to catch Bren’s eye. “He’s so little—”
“Nah, he’ll be fine,” Bren says. “It’ll help him be less scared of the construction noise.”
“But I don’t want—”
Bren’s hefting up the drill in one muck-stained hand, pulling Jude in, not looking at Elodie. Not listening. Not caring that a tense anxiety has filled her voice. He should care.
“See, you hold it like this,” Bren is saying, but Jude lets out a shriek and flings himself away.
Startled, Bren nearly drops the drill, and vindictive relief steals across Elodie’s chest in a warm glow before Jude balls up his small fist and lands a solid thwack to Bren’s thigh.
“The house doesn’t like it when you cut it up!” he shrieks.
“Jude!” Elodie jolts forward, unprepared for this. “You are not allowed to hit people!”
But Bren is the one who snatches Jude’s arm, half lifting him up as he propels him backward. The movement is fast, hard, a surprising brutality to it that shocks Elodie.
Something flares in Bren’s eyes; annoyance, maybe, but tinged with a hardness she’s never seen directed at Jude before. “You can go straight to time-out for that.”
Jude lets out a ferocious wail just as Elodie snaps, “You’re holding him way too tight. Bren. Get off him.”
Bren lets go.
Jude flees toward the kitchen with a martyred shriek.
“What the hell was that?” Elodie stares.
“What?” Bren scrubs at the grit dusting his hair, still looking annoyed, but the hardness has already dissolved. Unless she imagined it. “I just stopped him beating on me. Like, Jesus, I thought we made progress today and he’s back to doing that.”
“So you were going to break his arm for it?”
“The fuck? Elodie, I just held him so he didn’t do it again.”
Their eyes meet, his bright and confused against the tar she knows burns in her own. She’s overreacting, isn’t she? Did he even grab Jude that hard, or did she just think he did?
It’s been a long day, and she’s shaken after nearly being speared by that light fixture. The weekend has been fissured with wrongness from the start, and she just wants today to be over.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs at the same time he says, “Are you okay?”
Elodie squeezes her eyes shut, makes herself breathe. “Can we just have dinner? I’m very tired.”
He hurries over and rests the back of his hand gently against her cheek. “You should get an early night. Baby’s probably having a growth spurt or something.”
By the time Bren gets washed up, the chili is steaming hot on the stove and Jude has already lain on the floor to weep about how he doesn’t like SpaghettiOs.
He does; he eats them every other day. This is ridiculous.
She scoops him up and sits him in his chair at the kitchen table far too hard.
Hypocrite, she hisses to herself, that she can blow up at Bren and then turn around and slam Jude into the unforgiving wood of a kitchen chair.
But she just wants him to eat and then she can put him to bed and stop thinking, stop thinking.
Bren ladles heaping servings into bowls and sits down to shovel chili into his mouth.
Old paint still flecks his knuckles, dust lining the crevices of his face.
The kitchen table is crowded with dirty dishes and car keys and miscellaneous items no one has put away yet, and Elodie feels suffocated by the clutter.
The chili looks sludgy, beans soggy from being frozen, and it slips off her spoon, leaving a greasy sheen of oil.
“Why don’t I put Jude to bed tonight?” Bren gives her a hopeful look. “You can take a break.”
She thinks about slamming her fist on the table so hard skin splits, but when she speaks, her voice is calm, unhurried. “It’s fine. I’ve got it.” She realizes that she never asked him about his plans for the nursery.
If he has intended, all this time, to kick Jude out.
“I don’t want any more.” Jude tries to slither under the table, but Elodie snaps her fingers at him.
“You haven’t even had any. Get your spoon and take a bite.”
“I don’t want soup.”
“It’s not soup.” But as soon as the words leave her mouth, she understands.
There is too much sauce in the bowl, the red of it already congealing into unappealing slurry as the night’s chill crawls up the floorboards and flattens itself about their ankles. He must be freezing in so little clothing; a better mother would dress her child warmly, wouldn’t she?
“I don’t want a poison soup!” Jude shrieks.
Bren shoots an unreadable look at Elodie, and she ignores him. She takes Jude’s spoon and dips it in the bowl.
“These are noodles. You love noodles, and there’s nothing wrong with them.” Calm voice. Stay unaffected. But she is spiraling backward as fast as a comet with its tail caught between the black teeth of an endless void. “You are having three bites.”
Jude is grunting low in his throat as he thrashes his head side to side. “I don’t want. I don’t want.”
“One bite,” Elodie says as she holds out the filled spoon. “Or else I guess I’m taking you up to bed with no more games. Just time-out in your bed in the dark.”
He’s whimpering now, but he squishes his eyes closed and opens his mouth. She shoves the spoon in.
“See?” she says. “Shocker how your food is nice, because it’s the same thing you eat all the—”
Jude opens his mouth and lets the mess splatter on the table.
Silence pounds inside her head so loud she can feel the kitchen sliding out from under her. She has lost this fight, this evening, and this is ridiculous. He’s a fucking child and he’s acting like a toddler, which is her fault after all the things she’s put him through—
Jude bursts into tears, his fingers going into his mouth, the sobs ratcheting higher by the second.
“I swear to god.” Elodie shoves up from her chair, grabbing his spoon, knowing she will force him to eat and hold his mouth shut if that’s what it takes.
Except, Bren snatches Jude’s bowl away before Elodie can reach it. She is about to yell at him, but shock has sheeted white across Bren’s face.
He digs his own spoon into the SpaghettiOs, frantic, wild, then reaches in with his bare hands.
He holds up a piece of glass.
Elodie’s blood runs cold.
Jude is still crying, his fingers in his sauce-smeared mouth.
It’s not sauce. He’s bleeding. Her baby is bleeding.
“Fuck. Fuck.” Elodie snatches Jude from his chair, trying to cradle him to her chest and tilt his face up at the same time. Everything blurs, and her voice is a thousand miles away as she tries to feel inside his mouth. “I can’t tell if there’s glass in his mouth— Bren. brEN!”
Jude’s cries are hysterical now. She doesn’t know if he’s in pain or just responding to her panic. She’s losing her grip on him, on sanity. She can’t hold him; he’s slipping. But she needs to get his mouth open now now now—
Then Bren is there, taking Jude off her and sitting him on the kitchen counter, his voice soothing and calm as he grabs a washcloth and starts wiping sauce from Jude’s chin.
“It’s okay, buddy, I got you. We’ll check your mouth. I don’t think you ate any of it. Shh, shh, I’ll fix it.”
“I nearly killed him,” she whispers.
“No way, you absolutely didn’t.” Bren tries to look in Jude’s mouth, made easier by the fact Jude is still screaming. “I think he’s fine. I can’t see anything, and he didn’t swallow. We saw him spit it all out. Hey, hey, Elodie. He’s not hurt.”
She puts her back to the kitchen counter and slides down, her face in her hands, wanting to cry but too frozen to let the tears come.
A mottled, numbed horror has settled into her, and all she can see is Jude with a mouthful of glass, shards lodged in the tender pink flesh of his gums as she forces it down his throat.
She could have killed him.
“He’s fine.” Bren tosses the sauce-stained washcloth in the sink and picks up Jude, holding him tight as he squats down next to Elodie.
He tries to pull her hand from her face, but she can’t look at him.
“He’s freaked out, that’s all. Look, we’ll call the store and tell them to pull all those cans from their shelves.
Someone messed up at the factory or something.
It’s fucked up, but this is not your fault. ”
But Jude is still sobbing “I hate you, I hate you!” and that’s all she can focus on.