Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
She reaches for the heater and spins the dial to high, her fingers like winter white twigs thanks to the cold. Bren starts to complain, his hand hovering atop hers, but when she shoots him a seething look, he backs off.
“It’s literally a five-minute drive,” he says. “We’re going to roast.”
She holds his gaze, steady and unforgiving. “Good, and when we get there you can transfer me to the oven with the turkey so I can finally be warm for ten goddamn seconds.”
“Well. Guess you are already stuffed,” Bren says.
They stare at each other. One second, two.
Uncertainty flickers in his eyes, and he’s starting to mumble an apology, but the corner of her mouth twitches. His face melts into relief, sunshine filling his eyes as he lets out a bashful, nervous laugh.
“Watch it, buddy,” she says, but her eyebrow is raised in amusement and he’s still smiling.
He slides a hand over the back of her seat as he looks over his shoulder to reverse the SUV from the driveway.
She likes his arm like that, the protective strength of it as he then moves to palm the gearshift.
Leaves puff around the tires in a cyclone of gold and burgundy as they cruise through Farrows, a reminder autumn is almost over.
She’s missed this, missed him. Their corny jokes and casual ribbing and affectionate laughter.
The way their banter turns into kissing, into losing clothes, into both of them breathless and so wholly consumed by each other they can’t imagine a world where this isn’t their life.
They are a portrait of love, of starvation: his teeth sunk into her shoulder, hers into his neck, blood all over the floor.
Except there is more to him than that, just as there is more to her.
He hit her child.
Maybe.
Ever since Monday, she’s been quiet, excusing it as exhaustion, which isn’t untrue anyway.
Bren has kept staying late at the office, something about a coworker being on vacation so he’s absorbing their workload, but she thinks he’s been avoiding her.
In the glossy, cheerful World of Bren, it makes no sense that she’s moody and upset, and it’s easier for him to ignore it and continue on, loud and boisterous and energized, as if everything will right itself in good time.
She has thought, once or twice, about pushing her thumbs into his eyes as he sleeps, but she’s just being petty.
Instead, she spends each night slipping from their bed to check on Jude.
In the dark, she is soft as a ghost, her breath held as she pads across the nursery and adjusts his blankets, kisses his soft cheeks, and then simply stands there as he sleeps, waiting, waiting, waiting. Nothing comes in. Nothing moves.
She puts her ear to the wallpaper and waits for the whispering, but the house has sewn its lips shut, and she is simply a disheveled thing, shaky and so sleep-deprived that she’s imagining things.
In the morning, she picks up her coffee cup and her fingers skitter along the rim, detached and uncontrolled.
She is losing pieces of herself. But she has to get up, she has to care for her son, she has to figure out what is wrong with this house.
“You excited for turkey, little bud?” Bren calls over his shoulder, but Jude has his arms crossed in the back seat, thunderclouds on his face.
“I’m not excited for all the kangaroo jokes your grandpa makes,” Elodie mutters.
“I promise to intervene if you get cornered, my sweetest kangaroo queen.”
Elodie rolls her eyes, her voice grumpy. “Don’t make me exit a moving vehicle.”
“They’re just trying to be welcoming.” But his smile seems slightly forced.
She jerks her sleeves over her frozen hands. “Well, I’m tired. I’m crabby. And your baby is squeezing my bladder.”
“Oh, so he’s my baby when he’s misbehaving.”
“Taking after his dada already.”
He smirks at her as they pull into Ava’s street, and she decides she is determined to hold on to this, to him. Everything has felt so off lately, as if there is something monstrous and rank unfurling in her head, but she has to believe it’s nothing.
At least Jude is enjoying preschool—but she knew he would—and he’s already cross there’s no class today.
She forgot about Thanksgiving and stared at Bren for a full blank minute when he started chattering about how Ava is hosting for the Januarys this year.
It’s not an important date for Elodie, and she finds the holiday overall distasteful.
She would prefer it if today were normal and she were dropping Jude off at class, where he’ll run to one of the play areas and flop down to build a wooden track for the trains, his frown serious and focused.
In preschool, he is among the tallest, the most capable.
No one is pressuring him to read, to do math, expecting him to understand when to take his turn or process multistep verbal instructions.
She doesn’t have to blame herself for everything he struggles with anymore. She doesn’t have to worry that he’s being dissected and judged, labeled regressive and difficult. It makes sense, even, to let him go backward with toilet training, to stop correcting him when he sucks his thumb.
He is her baby; the terror of him growing up has paused. Again, she can breathe.
They are the last to arrive at Ava’s house, Bren’s fault as he kept fiddling with paint tins instead of getting ready, and they spend a few tense minutes figuring out where to park on this street lined with delicate poplars and other visitors’ cars.
It’s a gorgeous house, nearly identical to every one of the neighbors: gabled roofs and gingerbread trims, immaculate lawns and garden beds of docile flowers, hedges in precise cubes, lacy curtains and pert chimneys.
Ava greets them with delighted warmth, kissing Elodie on the cheeks, and letting Bren scoop her into the kind of floppy hug that little brothers give big sisters once they’ve grown taller.
This is the thing Elodie has always kept close to her chest: There can be nothing wrong with Bren when he has a lovely sweetheart of a sister who adores him.
“Oh, you all look beautiful,” Ava gushes, ushering them into the foyer. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
They’ve dressed up for it, though of course Ava is the immaculate one in her white pants and a pastel-pink sweater that looks like it cost more than Elodie spends on the week’s groceries.
Her husband is a family doctor, and she wants for nothing.
Bren is in ironed chinos and a collared shirt under his sweater, while Jude wears denim overalls with a white long-sleeved shirt patterned in little leaves.
The knees are filthy already; he can’t stay clean for five minutes.
Elodie opted for a too-short knit black dress and tights, her midnight coat buttoned to her throat.
“Look.” Bren holds up his arms in a dramatized show. “No paint splatters this time.”
“And yet.” Elodie pokes the dried paint smear on his elbow and he twists in a circle, trying to see.
“Dammit.” He frowns.
“I’ll forgive you this once.” Ava gives a little laugh and then plucks a wrapped box off the sideboard. “Oh, I meant to tell you! I always gift Poppy something for Thanksgiving, so I bought a present for Jude too.”
Jude hovers behind Elodie, gripping the back of her tights, but he sneaks out to snatch the present and then bolt past Ava toward the living room.
“Jude!” Elodie gives Ava an apologetic wince. “Sorry. I’ll make him come back and say thank you.”
Ava waves her off. “We mothers know when to pick our battles.”
Elodie pinches the crook of her arm so hard it will bruise. Her dress really is too short, the fabric pilling and stretched, and she knows the plum crescent moons beneath her eyes make her look beyond exhausted. Ava pities her; it’s written all over her face.
Be grateful, Elodie hisses to herself as Bren ushers her into the living room of cream couches and thick, fluffy carpets, everything meticulously curated and ornate.
It doesn’t matter that she’s falling apart, so long as they all willingly ignore it.
His family could be horrible to her, this dark-hearted creature Bren magicked out of nowhere, who stole his affections, his house, his life.
But they aren’t. They are always polite to her.
Be. Grateful.
Being in Ava’s living room makes Elodie nervous.
Expensive art on the walls. Crystal figurines on the mantel.
Delicate bowls of potpourri on the glass coffee table.
Everything screams breakable. How the hell Ava maintains a house like this with a two-year-old makes Elodie’s mind melt, and even now she watches Poppy sitting happily on the luxurious carpet surrounded by torn wrapping paper as she plays with her new wooden food set, clean and compliant and happy.
Grandparents and great-aunts perch on different recliners or bustle in and out of the kitchen, everyone chatting and laughing and cooing over Poppy, who seems to be the only January child. Everyone else is at least thirty, if not anciently old.
Jude has ripped open his present of a puzzle and dumped the pieces on the floor, crouching over them and frowning at the mess. A few adults have tried to talk to him, but he ignores them, putting hands over his ears if anyone comes too close.
“I forgot my phone,” Elodie says under her breath. “Can you give me yours for later when Jude needs—”
“Let’s see how he goes.” Bren seems tense, almost agitated, though his focus is on his relatives, not her.
“If he breaks something—”
“I’ve got him. Want to take off your coat?” He flops onto one of the stuffed couches, looking oddly uncomfortable.
She needs her coat to hide the way she is raw meat and muscle underneath, heart pulsing outside her chest, sick and wet and moldering.
Her smile is thin-lipped and ice-cold. “Thank god the experienced parent has everything under control. What would I know, after all.” The tentative truce with Bren is apparently over.