Chapter 10
TEN
Sometimes, when the house is quiet and she is alone, she checks to see if she is still beautiful.
There is still a fluid loveliness to her skin, to the supple curve of waist to hip, a grace to how she twists her arms slowly above her head like the necks of two swans.
It’s been over four months since she danced, but her body remains slim, flexible enough to indulge her in the delusion that she could yet flow across the stage as light as rippled silk.
She has caught her hair up in a bun, soft wisps escaping, and when she draws herself into fifth position, she looks like a woman sculpted from white marble.
She is naked and feels unfathomably lovely.
The skin of her belly distends only a little.
Today marks seventeen weeks. The app has informed her the baby is the size of a turnip, and she thinks it’s a stupid comparison, but she can’t help imagining her turnip baby flourishing inside her, its tiny hairlike roots sunk into the moist flesh of her womb, leaves blossoming from the nub of its little head.
It’s ridiculous, but it amuses her when not much else has these last few days.
All she wants in this moment is to reach between her legs and feel the soft crown of the baby’s skull, slick with her gore, her blood, to know he is coming. She will be the only one this baby needs and her worship of him will be all-consuming.
That was when everything was best with Jude, those first few months.
She wants that back. Craving hits, sudden and vicious, and she is ravenous for her new baby. She imagines shoving a hand inside herself and dragging him out right now, cupping him tenderly in a cage of loving finger bones.
For a minute, she does nothing but breathe, too fast and bloody.
She lowers her arms and relaxes the seized-up muscles of her abdomen.
Breathe. Calm down.
She can be patient; she knows how to wait. After all, she has Bren now, who adores her with affection so uncomplicated it leaves her wondering how this is real, how this is her life.
For now, she will be content to be a house for her child, her body contorted into walls of vertebrae and rib bones, her organs packed down and juiced to give the baby more room, her only purpose to nourish him until she is nothing and he is everything.
Phone in hand, she takes a few pictures, one more explicit than the rest, which she sends to Bren and receives an immediate keyboard smash of letters back.
Someone isn’t very focused at his desk today.
A small, private smile tugs at her mouth and she tucks her phone away and picks up her clothes off the floor, awareness of the cold returning with a vengeance.
Her alone time has dwindled far too fast and she needs to tidy the kitchen before she picks up Jude from school.
Jude, who hasn’t forgiven her for the glass in his dinner.
It’s Wednesday, and he’s still on a food strike, the only reprieve coming if he can spread a cupful of dry cereal out on a large plate and inspect each piece before popping it in his mouth.
He blames only her. She caught Bren in the kitchen with him last night, Jude sitting on the counter, drumming his heels on the cabinets in a way that always makes her snap at him yet doesn’t bother Bren.
They each had a big dessert spoon, scooping ice cream straight out of the tub.
Chocolate had been all around Jude’s mouth, his expression grim with determination as he chipped the spoon into the icy dessert, and Bren had leaned close, vibrating with quiet excitement because moments like those make him think he’s making progress with Jude.
Maybe he is; she hates how it stings. Elodie had drifted backward into the shadows like an ethereal ghost until she was out of sight.
This was a gentle moment between them and she was not invited.
She wasn’t even missed.
But she clings to the comfort—as ashamed as she is to admit it’s comfort—that Jude hit Bren only last Sunday and that punch in the leg came out of nowhere. Hunger must be the only thing overruling his feelings.
Jude doesn’t like Bren.
Watching them together makes her pledge to do better, to curtail that twisted, molten spiral that ate through the weekend and made her want to punish her son.
If he was just easier, if he just loved her, if he just needed her like he used to.
But it won’t matter once the new baby comes and she can spend her days spooned in bed among piles of warm, clean laundry, nursing him for hours as the world folds down and they exist in a minuscular envelope, just them together.
She will not make the same mistakes as she did with Jude.
Humming to herself, she drifts into the kitchen, rolling up the sleeves of her mint sweater, a rare foray into color when she usually chooses endless arrays of polished blacks.
She’s halfway through stacking clean dishes when she feels something different about the house’s quiet.
A subtle wrongness that makes her look over her shoulder with a small frown.
Maybe it’s just her own heartbeat, but she could have sworn she heard something else.
A dull, wet thud-thud coming from the wall.
An eerie crawling sensation trickles down the back of her neck.
Setting down the sunflower dishes, she plucks up a towel and wipes her hands as she moves to the kitchen archway. Silence beats down the hall, the shadows pulling tight into the corners as if scurrying away from her.
Elodie rubs a palm against her forehead, a tightness behind her eyes that speaks of sleep exhaustion brought on by lying in bed awake with ghosts all through her head.
She can’t keep doing this, letting Jude’s creepy comments about the house get to her and eat through her days.
There is no beating heart in the walls. There is no mouth in the ceiling.
There is nothing to see but a goddamn old house that needs more plaster and paint.
Get a grip, Elodie.
She hears the thud-thud sound again, muddied but definitely there.
It hooks fingers under her jaw and tows her down the hall and into the disheveled mess of the dismantled living room.
It looks even worse than it did on the weekend: half of the wall gone, shards of wood and plaster littering the floor between ladders and toolboxes, the circular saw still plugged in and resting on the floorboards.
Annoyed, she marches over and yanks the power cord from the wall. Bren should know better. The unkempt chaos of the room makes her itch, because all she can think of is the picture-perfect house he once described to her, a house for Mrs. January, shaped by his beautiful hands.
This rotted house is not that.
Something makes her take a step closer to the half of the wall he hasn’t knocked down yet. She puts her ear to it, tentative at first, then presses closer to the dusty plaster as she listens.
There’s nothing. Until—
Thud.
thudthudthudthud—
Every muscle in her body tightens, fear pulling its way into her mouth with the acrid taste of copper and ash.
“What the hell,” she whispers to herself, “is inside these walls?”
It isn’t a conscious decision to pick up the paint scraper and start chipping away at the petrified glue before peeling back wallpaper. She just starts. It’s satisfying. Like catching a sliver of skin at the edge of a thumbnail and yanking it with her teeth.
Paper tears. She rips it off and it flutters to the floor.
For a minute, she doesn’t understand what she sees. Her heartbeat quickens until she is full of a sickening, heady thrum.
Lesions cover the wall, blood blisters, pustules. One of them has busted where the paint scraper caught it, and it now leaks a pale, foul-smelling fluid. Rust smears the wall in long, red streaks.
It looks like—
Blood.
The impossibility of it makes her want to turn around and shout for Bren, but she’s alone.
She’s achingly, wholly alone in this house where something foul has been hidden under wallpaper that beats like it’s covering a bloody severed heart.
A frenetic urge seizes her and she darts across the room and starts gouging that wall with the paint scraper too.
When she tears back more paper, the ripping of old fibers loud against the quiet, she finds more of the stain.
More lesions, more speckled rust marks that look almost furred.
She’s not breathing as she runs into the hallway, ignoring the fact this wall had been finished and papered in a deep, moody green floral pattern long before she moved in.
The sharp edge of the scraper digs in too easily, as if the wall is made of a softened pudding.
She claws her fingernails under the paper and rips.
This wall is the same. Bloody and wet.
She touches it, flinching at the cold, slick slime dribbling down the bared wall. Her fingers leave indents in the plaster as if it’s the meaty underside of a rotting mushroom.
As if it’s the raw flesh of human skin, peeled.
That’s what she’s doing: She’s peeling the house’s skin off.
Revulsion owns her and mixes with a hysterical sort of terror that has her hands shaking uncontrollably. The need to deny it, to scream that this isn’t happening, beats at the inside of her skull. But she can’t stop.
She goes to the next room, then the next.
The house, with all its interconnecting, unfinished nooks and corners, spreads before her like a rabbit warren, and she is drowning with the need to know if every wall is the same under the paper.
A wretched, monstrous scream grows behind her teeth.
She is throttled by this terror, this horrifying realization that they have been living in this.
There’s an explanation. There has to be. Because it can’t be skin. It literally can’t be, or else she’s losing her fucking mind.
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket and she jumps, letting out a startled sob as she sees Bren’s name on her screen.
She hurls the paint scraper away and flees into the entryway, where she hasn’t yet attacked the walls and can’t see red stains dribbling in languid rivulets down the naked bricks and plaster.
“Bren?” She’s shaking, her voice out of control. “There’s something in the walls. I don’t understand—”
“Hey, hey, Elodie, slow down. What happened? Are you okay?”
“No.” She digs fingers into her curls and turns in a circle. “The walls are bleeding. I need you to come home right now and see this.”
“Wait, what?” Papers crunch, a chair shoving backward. She can hear car keys rattle as he says, “I’m coming, okay? But I actually called you because the school contacted me … They need us to come in.”
“What? Why?” Her mind feels fogged, and she’s barely holding back tears.
“I don’t know,” Bren says. “They want to talk to us about Jude.”