Chapter Twelve
TWELVE
Her anger about the walls has distilled into something sharp and mercurial, the taste of it scorched into her tongue as she kneels in the nursery slamming toys back onto their shelves.
Night has slid a cold blade under the windowsills—because of course there are gaps; of course they still need fixing—and it tunnels inside with a steady frost that leaves her fingers feeling numb and clumsy.
She wants to put Jude to bed so she can think, but he just ate sugar-loaded cookies and he’s thrumming with energy at nine p.m.
Yes, she’s a responsible parent. Yes, everything is under control.
Her teeth clench so tight they could snap off at the root.
Jude will never go back to that school. A livid flush still blooms high on Elodie’s cheekbones, and all she can think of is how dangerous a teacher like that is.
She doesn’t want people to look at her son; she doesn’t want them to look at her.
Thimble-size fairy dolls are scattered across the floor and she scoops them up to dump in a vintage cookie tin, trying to force her exhausted brain to turn this into a game so Jude will help. Why bother. She’ll just end up snapping at him.
He’s currently playing with the dollhouse, flapping both hands and then rearranging the furniture in ways that make sense only to him. All dolls have been discarded, and he plays only with the tiny beds and china plates and miniature plastic food.
There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s just Jude.
The only thing wrong, she thinks as she smooths down the pages of scrunched-up books, is this falling-apart house.
She has to push Bren to take the rot in the walls seriously, but first she needs to blunt the edges of her anger so that she doesn’t bite into him before he can get a word out.
He stayed unequivocally on her side when Jude’s teacher started leveling accusations, so the least Elodie can do is trust that he isn’t lying about the walls.
This is an old house. Walls leak. It might truly not be rot or mold. It could be something … else.
What the hell else? What if it’s noxious—
Stop. She doesn’t understand old houses. Bren does.
He has never given her reason not to trust him.
She pushes to her feet. “Okay, mister, shut the dollhouse and get into bed.”
The wail of protest is expected, but she has little patience for it tonight.
Jude scrambles behind the dollhouse, but his butt still sticks out.
Elodie rolls her eyes and kneels to push the two halves of the massive house together herself.
It’s a gargantuan thing, the wood heavy, and it’s at least fifty years old, if not more.
This late at night, the real slivers of wallpaper and carpet, real scraps from the curtains and chipped shingles from the roof, all feel eerie.
As if it’s a rotten tooth pulled from the main house.
It takes a good shove to get the halves back together, but she’s barely paying attention, focused instead on a well-trodden spiral: how she is a bad parent, she can’t even tidy the nursery properly, she didn’t brush his teeth or change his bedsheets, she hasn’t forced him into fleece pajamas now that the temperature is dropping—
One side of the dollhouse swings forward abruptly and slams on her fingers. She lets out a shrieked curse, surprise overruling the pain as she yanks her hand free and clenches her throbbing fingers into a fist.
“Jude! Don’t be a pest!” She whips around, expecting Jude to be hovering behind her, looking cross about bedtime, but he’s not there.
He ducks behind the dollhouse again, and she thinks she catches a muffled giggle.
“You don’t hurt your mama.” She checks her hand, sucking in a sharp breath. The bruise won’t be bad.
She just needs a break.
He peers around the dollhouse, owlish and innocent. “I didn’t do it.”
“Get in bed. Now.” She pushes to her feet, relieved he detects the warning in her voice and decides to flee to his woodland bed.
He flops around on the mattress as if his limbs are soft elastic and he is an untethered thing, liquid and unmanageable.
Tucking him in becomes impossible when all he does is wriggle around, so she gives up and leaves him to his ritual of tracing the woodland carvings with his fingers, his thumb in his mouth.
She snaps the mushroom night-light on with a little more force than necessary.
Offer him a story. Hug him. Sit with him until he falls asleep. Any caring, attentive parent would.
Her fingers throb.
As if he wants her in here anyway.
She storms out of the nursery only to have guilt catch up with her right as she’s about to shut the door.
She pauses, one hand gripping the edge of the doorframe as she closes her eyes for a second and breathes out.
If she lets that teacher get in her head, the frenetic spiral of self-doubt will never end.
Nothing bad has happened to Jude since they moved here.
She won’t let anything hurt him again. He is safe and healthy and—
The nursery door hurls forward with such force, she doesn’t have a chance to think before it slams on her hand.
Pain explodes through her fingers like a thunderclap, so intense and consuming that she forgets to scream.
Air punches from her lungs as she shoves her shoulder against the heavy mahogany door and wrenches it back open.
She’s going to pass out. But there is only pain condensing into a drumbeat through every bright red finger.
A gasp hisses through her teeth as she clutches her jammed hand and checks for broken bones.
Deep in the moody dark of the nursery, Jude flings himself onto the woodland bed and pulls the covers over his head.
As if he’d just run back across his room after shoving the door closed. On her hand. On purpose.
Everything in the room stays perfectly still, only the wind tapping softly at the windowpane like a winter fairy pleading entrance.
“Jude,” Elodie grits out.
His voice is tiny from beneath the blankets. “The house did it.”
The shot of sickening unease that splits through her chest is visceral and terrible. A dark, primal fear cracks open in her mind, and for a second she believes him, the truth of it slamming rationality aside. The house hates her. It already tried to kill her.
Stop it, stop it, STOP IT.
Her throbbing hand curls into a fist, her eyes squeeze shut, and for a second she wants so badly to scream at him.
But part of her knows he couldn’t have run across the nursery so fast without any lights on.
Toys still lie scattered across the floor like wounded soldiers after an aggressive playtime, and she would’ve heard them crunch and scatter if he’d slipped out of bed to follow her to the door in order to slam it. Wouldn’t she?
“Go to sleep,” she says, harsh and low.
“It’s scary in here,” he whispers.
She ignores him. “If you get out of bed even once, you will regret it, young man.”
This time, she takes firm hold of the nursery doorknob and closes it carefully, listening to the latch click and wishing she had a key and could lock it. She is so goddamn sick of today and needs it to be over before she bursts into tears and dissolves into her own salted devastation.
In the kitchen, she ices her hand with frozen peas and then makes herself a comfort sandwich of peanut butter and melted chocolate.
Somewhere deep in the house, Bren’s battery drill gives off a high-pitched whine punctuated by wood hitting the floor and the clink of screws.
She doesn’t even know what he’s fixing, which room he’s in, if he’s trying to manage the wall problem or if he’s just avoiding her.
She leans against the kitchen sink with her sandwich and looks at the torn-up floral wallpaper below the beautiful handcrafted shelving Bren put in to display the antique kitchenware he thrifted. A butter churn and an apple peeler, tin mugs and a retro scale. The kitchen looked nice up until today.
She really did ruin everything. But even now, with only a small light on over the stove, she stares at the torn wallpaper and swears the plaster behind it has a fleshy surface riddled with veins. It throbs. One beat, two.
soft
s l o w
beatbeatbeat
“No.” She says it with a calm factuality she doesn’t feel and then lowers her plate into the sink and walks out.
Whatever is wrong with her overtired, strung-out brain needs to stop.
A hot shower does little to ease the tension spasming in her chest, her lungs, her belly, and she can’t help wondering if the baby is sucking down her stress.
It will fester in him, congeal, corrupt, and he will be born with an empty chasm where his heart should be, his eye sockets teeming with worms of anxiety.
She loses two clumpy handfuls of hair down the drain and finds the beginnings of an ugly rash on her shoulder. Great. Stress breakouts.
Determined to get ahold of herself, she spends extra time taming her curls, moisturizing her face, massaging lavender across her abdomen until the baby’s mouth blossoms with flowers.
Once in bed, she cocoons herself in mountains of duvet, her sweatshirt pulled down over her cold fingers and her phone cradled in her good hand while she tries to assure herself her other fingers aren’t broken. She took Tylenol. It’ll be fine.
She worries her bottom lip, scrolling until a pop-up notification warns her that her phone has only a 10 percent charge left.
Her eyes burn with fatigue. Finally, Bren appears in the shadow of the doorframe, pulling off his shirt as he heads straight for the en suite without so much as a glance at her.
What does she expect? She tore up his house, her son is in trouble at school, and he has to deal with it.
At least he leaves the bathroom door open so she can watch the outline of him in the shower, how endlessly long his limbs seem, the corded muscles of his thighs disappearing behind a thick towel as he dries off and slips on pajama pants. He leaves them hanging low on his hips.