6 Years Ago
Newborns are meant to be difficult, but she has never been this happy.
The rush of euphoria is staggering, overwhelming, intoxicating.
She is drunk on it, giddy with it, her cheeks permanently aching because she can’t stop smiling as she cradles him and watches his pink, gummy yawns.
There is something so tender about the cries of a newborn.
No judgment or contempt in their muddied eyes.
All he wants is to latch on to her, to own her, to forbid her from leaving him even for a second.
When she hears mothers talk about these first days with a baby, they say they feel like a cow. They’re exhausted and frayed as they leak tears and blood and milk, as they hemorrhage sleep and lose sight of who they were before the birth.
But Elodie is addicted to this feeling, to him, to being wholly, irreplaceably wanted.
Only her father makes vague gestures of care, driving her to the hospital so both she and Jude could be checked over and later bringing a bag of tiny onesies, diapers, and pacifiers into her bedroom.
“I’ll clean out the garage for you.” His voice is a deflated mumble these days, and he doesn’t look at her or the baby. “We can put in a little fridge and microwave, and there’s that old double mattress … if you want the extra space, that is.”
“Okay,” she says, though she can’t help wondering if this is so they don’t have to listen to Jude crying. “Do you want to hold him?”
But her father is already leaving, his head bent low, shoulders hunched, and the slight flinch is the only indication he even heard her. This offer is still more than she expected and the isolation from upstairs won’t make much difference.
Her parents have ignored her for a long time.
She was eight when her two-year-old brother passed away, when her parents stopped like clockwork toys with their cogs forever broken. They loved him, only him. At least, it had always felt that way to her.
Her parents had always spent long hours at work while Elodie was shunted off to day cares and then kindergartens, always minded by strangers in rooms full of other needy, sloppy, whiny children.
But when her little brother was born, her mother quit her job to stay home with him, something that thrilled six-year-old Elodie—she would finally have her mother.
But of course, the baby consumed the attention.
Her parents patted her head, told her she was “too big to be so clingy,” and then put her in ballet to get her out of the house.
Her nervous, high-strung mother had energy for only one child at a time, and it was never going to be Elodie.
At six years old, Elodie knew what it was to be the last picked up from school or ballet, knew how to make herself a peanut butter sandwich once she got home because her mother was too exhausted to cook, knew to play alone in her room with her stuffed animals. Quiet so she wouldn’t bother anyone.
She is still quiet now, in this garage that smells of mildew with a cracked cement floor stained with oily puddles.
Their house is two stories, the living area above while the garage is the only enclosed space below.
Even with a battered secondhand couch and the bigger mattress on the floor and the ancient TV, it’s barely livable.
Cold pulses relentlessly up from stark cement.
The only place to attempt bathing Jude is in the laundry sink.
But she has never been so loved as when he wails in the night, his mouth rooting for her breast, his tiny fists bunched up against her bare skin, his warmth melded to hers until they are one, mother and child, a single heartbeat entwined.
She presses her nose to his soft hair and breathes him in. He is all that matters.
No one suggests she should finish school or look for a job, but as Jude grows alert and learns to sit up, then crawl, she begins to plan. She doesn’t want to leave him, not even for a second, but she needs more than this garage. She wants a beautiful house of her own, just for her and Jude.
Applying for government aid makes her anxious about the chance they’ll see her as too young and unfit and snatch Jude away, so when he is eighteen months old, she begins to dance again.
Dedication is a thing Elodie finds easy.
She digs her fingers into obsession and squeezes until it oozes wet and bloodied between her fingers.
Her stomach slims, her muscles grow taut again, her body bends supple and elegant.
Her milk dries up.
Jude rages.
Defiance makes sense: He is learning the shape of what he wants; he is becoming a person and learning to communicate.
But she doesn’t understand why she is suddenly the enemy.
If she picks him up while he’s playing with toys to buckle him into the high chair for dinner, the screaming is catastrophic.
If she tries to bathe him, she will be hit and scratched and bit.
If she takes him to the playground, the only way to make him leave is to drag him thrashing from the swings in such a purpled rage that other parents stare at her like she’s a kidnapper.
He is nearly two, so this is normal. It has to be normal.
She slips him into a baby sling she found at a thrift store and walks to her old dance studio. Verity is an old family friend and has taught Elodie ballet since she was six, and if anyone will want to help, it will be her.
Standing in Verity’s office feels different now. An adult confidence coils behind Elodie’s breastbone, and she feels changed by motherhood. She has more teeth.
“I can hire you to teach the youngest class,” Verity says.
“You know I adore you, sweetheart, and it broke my heart when you stopped coming to class. Perhaps we can take up private lessons in the evenings to get your certifications.” There is a tremor in Verity’s hands now, an oldness in her soft, glassy eyes as she coos over Jude. “Do you have childcare?”
“I’ll work it out,” Elodie says.
She has no idea how. Anxiety over Jude feels like someone has taken a blunt paring knife to the corner of her mouth and begun to slowly saw, leaving flesh ragged and minced.
It hurts every time he bites her with his milk teeth while he still desperately tries to nurse, strikes her with small fists, screams until his little body contorts and she grows terrified that he isn’t breathing.
He has yet to say Mama, he doesn’t clap, he spins the wheels of his toy cars but won’t play with them.
When they have more space, she tells herself fiercely, that is when everything will be perfect.
Her only plan is to put Jude down for his afternoon nap in the garage, to leave the baby monitor with her mother upstairs, and then rush to ballet class to teach for a few hours.
But there is nothing but impassive disinterest in her mother’s face as Elodie tries to press a bottle of formula and diapers into her hands, and she knows in her gut this will not work.
Nearly two years, and her mother won’t so much as look at Jude.
Shouldn’t she want to? Shouldn’t holding him make her heart soar, as if she has another chance with the toddler she lost?
Elodie stands in front of the TV so her mother is forced to look at her with Jude fussing on her hip.
“Please? I need this job so badly. I know you and Dad give me a little money, but he goes through so many diapers.” She’s babbling now, but she can’t stop.
She longs for her mother to listen, to see her.
“And he’s getting so big. He’ll outgrow his crib soon, and I need a better stroller.
You won’t have to do much for him, I promise.
And besides, don’t you think he looks so much like—”
Her mother peels from the recliner like a cicada leaving its shell and she is before Elodie with a swiftness she didn’t think possible.
She slaps Elodie hard across the face.
A white-hot sting roars across her skin, tears pricking her eyes even as she clamps her mouth shut. Jude goes still in her arms, clutching her with tiny, sticky fists as he stares wide-eyed, trembling at the shock of such violence.
Wretched frustration fists in Elodie’s throat.
Her mother is shaking, her lips gone white. “Don’t you dare.”
It takes everything in Elodie to keep her mouth a straight line, to ignore the inferno that will deepen into a bruise later across her cheekbone. She says nothing, only strides quickly into the kitchen while her mother slumps back into her recliner and begins to softly weep.
In the kitchen, Elodie rummages in the drawer where her parents keep their prescription meds.
It is easy to pocket the sleeping pills.
Once safely back in her garage, Elodie puts ice on her cheek and then crushes half a sleeping pill and mixes it in his milk.
He fusses, but she wrangles him into a newborn position and rocks and hums until he drinks the whole bottle.
His eyes are blackened pools of midnight as he stares up at her with a ravenous love, and she cries in relief to see it.
He pats her swelling cheek with tiny hands and then reaches up to play with her earring, her lips, her eyelashes.
In this moment, she is infinite, her love for him an ocean that could fill the universe.
It is so easy to teach class later that afternoon.
She puts makeup over her purpling cheek and goes through the ballet positions with her class of tiny preschoolers as if she’d never missed a day of dance.
Jude is strapped in his stroller and left in the corner as he sleeps and sleeps.
Everyone says what a good baby he is, what a good sleeper.
What a good mother.