Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
She wakes to a hand at her throat, pressing down hard and slow, as if the wish to strangle her is a thing to be done at a languorous pace.
Gray light filters between the heavy drapes, not quite reaching the side of her bed where the creature hovers over her with eye sockets emptied, its fingers like bent nails digging deeper into the soft tissue of her neck.
Her scream is trapped. She tries to jerk away, clawing for Bren in the predawn gloom, but then a tiny voice hisses, so fissured with rage, that her mussy, half-awake brain doesn’t recognize it at first.
“Mama.”
She strikes out blindly and shoves him away, sitting up with a sharp gasp as the pressure on her throat releases. Her entire neck aches as she swallows again and again, trying to shake that feeling of strangulation. Of suffocation.
Jude is a moody sliver of shadow beside her bed, whimpering now, because she was rough with him. His fingers knot into the edge of the duvet, and he tugs as he shakes his head fast.
“What time is it?” Her voice is a rasp. She starts to reach for her phone and then remembers how naked she is.
Bren’s alarm goes off and he rolls over with a mussy moan, his eyes still closed as he fumbles an arm out to find her across the mattress.
Of course he didn’t wake up when she was garbling a cry for help, her son’s hands crushing her throat.
Bren’s is the sleep of the comfortably unconcerned—he is going to get a stiff reality check when their newborn is screaming in the night and she makes him get up with it.
He blinks one eye open, sleep sliding from him sticky and sweet and slow, and she can see the marks her teeth left on his neck last night. The rush of vindictive pleasure is satisfying.
She yanks up the sheets to cover herself. “Jude, go back to the nursery. I’ll come get you in a minute.”
He stamps his foot. “No, no, no school.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Bren sounds groggy.
“He’s scared of new things,” she says, her teeth clenched, though what she wants to do is snarl at her child for hurting her when she’s just trying to do her best. She’s trying.
“What…?” Bren yawns and scrubs at his face. “Buddy … it’s just preschool. You’ll play with blocks or something.”
Jude tries to climb up the tall bed frame, scrabbling at the blankets, and Elodie yelps as she nearly loses the sheet she’s clutching over her bare breasts.
“Ow, Jude,” she snaps. “Stop—”
But the sheet has slipped before she can snatch it back, and he’s on the bed, sitting on her legs and staring at the smooth mound of her bare belly.
This is different to last night when he lined the teacups atop her, a ribbed sweater softening her changing shape, but now he can see exactly what she’s been hiding so diligently.
“C’mere, Jude,” she says carefully. “I’ll give you a cuddle and you can feel the baby, see? He moves a lot in the morning.” She cups both palms around her stomach, feeling the nudge of a tiny foot, the baby’s energy so much like his father’s.
Bren is tugging on his boxers, glancing at her with a question curved in his raised eyebrows. “I’ll get your sweater.”
Jude stares at her.
Then, with a swift and sudden intensity, he leans forward and punches her in the stomach.
Her gasp is instinctual, the pain delayed by shock. She imagines the baby folding in on himself like wet paper, absorbing the blow of his big brother in graceful silence as if he knows what the future holds.
Jude will hate the baby, just as he hates her, and it shocks her how much force he put into that hit. He’s so slight, he barely eats; he shouldn’t be this strong.
She curves one protective arm across her stomach and tries to snatch Jude’s wrist, but the way he’s looking at her—his eyes dark as moonless night, his small fists shaking, his breathing fractious and heated—makes her want to cry.
Then Bren has grabbed Jude around the middle and wrenched him off the bed. Jude gives a single, short scream of rage, but Bren looks unfazed.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“I’m fine.” She feels untethered, cracks in her calm feathering out across glass just before it breaks. “Let me handle him.”
“I’ve got it. Remember our deal.” Bren tucks the thrashing, wailing Jude under his arm and strolls from the room, whistling with affable calm.
Jude screams the whole way down the hall.
Elodie should have anticipated this, but she didn’t have time to prep Jude about starting at a new school when Bren only told her last night that it was arranged.
Seeing evidence of the baby has only made everything about today worse.
How much he understands is impossible to guess, but she wonders if he can see through the charred, festered layers she’s been hiding behind all this time: how the baby is her chance to try again.
Him, but better.
Shame fills her mouth with a sharp, metallic sting and she shoves the wretched thought away. She cannot think like that. She doesn’t think like that.
A quick shower does nothing to relax her, and she loses another huge fistful of hair.
It’s starting to freak her out. Maybe it’s the baby, or hormones …
or stress, but it looked like an entire gnarled bird’s nest when she gathered it from the drain, and she feels lightheaded.
With curls still lank and wet down her back, she finds her jeans won’t button.
She’s tall and carried Jude high and small, so she didn’t anticipate the need to shop for maternity clothes yet.
Leggings it is, then. She layers thermal undershirts and adds a chunky knit black sweater with big wooden buttons that hangs down to her thighs.
Ankle boots. No time for the hair dryer, so a wet, messy bun it is.
She needs to appear at Jude’s new preschool looking effortless and elegant, the type of mother who would never pretend her son is two years younger than he is.
When she glides downstairs, he’s in the midst of a catastrophic meltdown: on the kitchen floor sobbing his heart out, his fire truck pajamas so threadbare that his teeth are chattering between wails. He kicks hard at the cabinets, his fingers in his wide, reddened mouth as he screams and screams.
Bren has slid into trousers and a tight-fitting turtleneck to hide her bite mark on his neck, and he stands calmly at the stove with a spatula, scrambling eggs in his frying pan.
Jude’s decrepit stuffed rabbit lies beside the egg carton, stuffing poking from a hole in its throat, and Elodie hurries over to scoop it up so that Jude can soothe himself with the comfort of it.
Bren’s hand closes over hers. “Leave it. He gets it when he calms down.”
Elodie stares at him. “He uses it to calm down.”
“Okay, well, I already told him he can’t have it if he’s screaming at me, and if you tell him something else, he’s pitting us against each other to get his own way. This is, like, Parenting 101.” Bren shuffles the spatula through his eggs. “He can’t win all the time.”
It lodges in her skin like a splinter, this idea that this is all her life is, a game of who will win.
“He’s a little kid.” Her teeth are clenched. “Just give him the goddamn rabbit.”
Bren seems oblivious to the anger seeping through her voice, because he gives her an absent kiss on the temple as he heads over to the toaster.
“We can’t argue in front of him” is all he says.
Snatching Jude up and storming out feels like a good option, but there’s the fact he just punched her.
Maybe she needs to put a lock on her bleeding heart and let him swallow his consequences, but looking at him sprawled on the floor, his cheeks flushed, his crying a feverish, sick throb, she can feel herself fracturing.
Everything feels tipped sideways and inside out. Even the morning remains steeped in a gray and lavender gloom, the sky overcast, the cold coming up through the floorboards with remorseless intensity.
Bren shovels eggs in his mouth, checking something on his phone as he goes to the fridge for milk. He’s not heartless, she knows he’s not, so what the hell is this? Maybe it’s less about Jude, more about her. Punishing her.
But Bren isn’t like that. He is sweet and kind and good, unlike her, who has bit deep into him like a rabid dog, her teeth sunk into his rib bones, praying he won’t notice her infection and shake her off.
“Bren, I can’t handle this.” Tears are in her voice, Jude’s screaming splitting her rib cage apart.
He sets down his coffee and gives her a wry smile and shake of his head, as if they are sharing a moment, their movements in sync, their unsaid thoughts looped like a cat’s cradle between their fingers. Instead, she feels alone, unknowable, lost.
He scoops Jude off the ground, a feat because Jude’s bones have turned to water, his face a ruin of snot and salted tears.
“Take a breath,” Bren commands. “Jude, listen to me. Let it out. Start copying me or you know what happens.” He palms Jude’s wet cheeks and models breathing in deep, letting it out slow.
You know what happens.
Elodie’s stomach clenches. That was a threat, wasn’t it? He is threatening her son and she doesn’t know what it means.
At first, she thinks it won’t work and Jude’s too beyond it to process instructions, but as Bren continues to model, pausing to place a firm hand flat on Jude’s chest to calm his hyperventilating gasps, Jude begins to slow his breathing.
He’s still whimpering, his face slicked wet, his bottom lip trembling, but the shrill screaming has stopped.
“You’re having breakfast before school,” Bren says. “You can have some of Mommy’s or mine. Which is it going to be?”
Jude’s mouth tilts downward. “Not Mama’s. I d-d-d-don’t want Mama’s bad food.”
The cold fist around her stomach tightens and she can’t keep the snap out of her voice. “Jesus, Jude. I’m just going to have cereal.”
But he wails and presses his hands over his eyes.
Bren picks Jude up and sits him on the counter, cupping one hand under his chin to catch any mess as he puts a forkful of scrambled eggs to Jude’s unwilling lips. There are a few more tears, his heels drumming against the cabinets in defiance, then his mouth opens and he accepts the eggs.
If it were her, Jude would spit them out, half-chewed and slimy. He’s never eaten eggs before in his life.
But for Bren, he sits there and chews, his tears forgotten as he takes a fistful of Bren’s shirt to anchor himself. He swallows and opens his mouth obediently for more while Bren murmurs, “See? That’s the way. Good boy.” He hands Jude back the stuffed rabbit.
Neither of them notice Elodie leaving the kitchen blinded by hot tears.
No sane reason exists for why she kneels on Jude’s little woodland bed and presses her ear to the wallpaper. She holds her breath, waiting, listening, her palm flattened to the cool wall as if she will feel the press of fingertips mirroring her on the other side.
She hears nothing. No heartbeat, no breathing coming from inside the walls.
Don’t let anyone see you like this is all she thinks. Don’t let them know you are losing your goddamn mind.
When Bren walks in with Jude on his hip, she’s cleaned up the floor and laid out his clothes. They don’t speak, Bren only pausing to kiss the back of her neck before he takes off whistling like this is another successful morning of parenting.
As soon as he’s gone, she undresses Jude quickly, checking over every inch of his skin while he chews the tattered ear of his rabbit.
She finds it on the back of his thigh, the red mark.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Jude was throwing himself around on the floor when she walked in. He might have done this to himself.
But yet.
Vindicated elation swoops through her gut with such force she feels sickened and ashamed of her relief, but there is now evidence of something wrong. This is a thing she can map with her own eyes, a marker proving she isn’t being delusional or paranoid.
“Did Bren smack you?” She brushes sweaty hair from Jude’s face.
Jude jerks away, his glower petulant.
“You can tell Mama,” she whispers, but he’s more interested in picking up alphabet blocks and hurling them across the nursery.
“I don’t like it in here.” He rubs at his eyes and won’t look at her.
She dresses him in the Pull-Ups usually kept aside for nighttime accidents and corduroy overalls with a teddy bear on the bib; everything meticulously chosen to make him seem younger.
On the way to the car, she carries him so she can whisper that he is four years old again and again in his ear.
He should walk, but she wants him clutched close to her chest, unable to squirm away when she kisses his cheek.
He goes rigid as she buckles him into his booster seat, and when she holds out the rabbit, he snatches it with sullen ferocity.
Farrows is too small, the drive over too fast. The preschool is a quaint place, clean and tidy, the yard area shaded and the classrooms full of muted earthy colors and soft play mats and attentive teachers with gentle voices.
Because it’s his first day, they are more than happy to let Elodie linger, watching Jude sit with the other kids for singing and stories before they move toward tiny tables for craft time.
Clearly the staff expect him to be clingy, to cry for her, to flee to her for reassurances about this strange new place, but he refuses.
He glares at her from across the room and then sucks his fingers before dropping onto all fours and crawling around under the tables—something he would absolutely not get away with in a first-grade class. Here, no one seems surprised.
Here, he is a four-year-old being silly.
After the way he carried on this morning, she should be relieved the transition ended up being easy, no prying him off her at the gate with another meltdown.
But her head is filled with static, her thoughts sharpening to something hot and bloodied when she thinks about Bren hitting her child.
She has to confront him—but what if he turns it on her?
Asks Jude about all the things she’s done to him.
Maybe she should just put this aside and continue forward, trust she has been diligent in carving herself free from the bones of her old life, removing excess fat and skin and ligaments.
All she should focus on is keeping Jude safe from everything.
From everyone.