Chapter 15 #2
He shoots her an exasperated look. “Can you chill out?” He keeps his voice low, but their tones have caught the attention of his grandfather.
“Ah, Brendan with his beautiful wife from Down Under!” he booms. “Only turkey in the oven, sweetheart, no kangaroo today.”
“Alas,” Elodie says, deadpan, “whatever shall I eat.”
A muscle twitches in Bren’s jaw and she gives him a too-bright smile that is asking for a fight he’ll never stoop to in front of his family.
“Now, when I was a young man,” his grandfather goes on, “I had my house built and ready long before the wife started on the babies. What you need, Brendan, is some good ol’ grit and fortitude so your son grows up with a father who is a man.”
“Well, I am working…” Bren trails off because his grandfather seems to have lost interest in the conversation and begun talking to someone else.
A fissure of disgust has settled in Elodie at this idea she exists for “the babies,” and she’s pretty sure she’ll be caught leveling scathing looks at the old man, but then one of his aunts bustles in with a family album. She pauses to beam down at Elodie.
“Oh, darling, has Brendan showed you his baby photos yet?” she says. “I’m sure your little one is going to look just like him!”
An extremely doubtful hope, but Elodie fixes her smile to be a little less antagonistic. “I’m dying to see.”
His aunt settles down on the couch beside Elodie with the huge, musty-smelling old album, humming to herself as she starts flicking pages. “He’s such a looker now, you wouldn’t believe the skinny little thing he was as a teen.”
Elodie snorts. “Perfect. I need to see his embarrassing years.”
She hasn’t realized, until then, how stiff Bren has gone beside her.
His aunt has barely opened to grainy old photos of a baby with a shock of white-blond hair and smooshed peas all over his face, before Bren reaches over and casually shuts the album and slides it from her grasp.
His aunt gives an oh of surprise, but Elodie shoots Bren a confused glare.
“C’mon, she doesn’t want to see those.” He stands, his voice casual, but Elodie can read every taut line in his body, agitation in the way he grips the album.
“They’re just baby photos.” She tries to stare him down, but Bren is already moving away, while his aunt gives a laugh and pats Elodie’s knee.
“Such a silly boy you have,” she says. “He’s self-conscious.”
“Clearly.” Elodie watches Bren make a swift exit with the album, curiosity putting black hooks in her gut.
It’s hard to imagine him as a dorky, weedy kid, though he’s mentioned that he started working out in college and got laser eye surgery, and she can’t decide if his odd behavior is because he’s embarrassed—or if he doesn’t want to see the earlier baby photos with his bright, happy, alive parents.
A good wife would be considerate of the latter. Elodie is full of curdled cream with a tongue that feels like meddling.
“We lived for some years in Australia for my husband’s work,” his aunt is saying, her eyes fond with the reminiscing.
“Brendan did find it so hard after his parents’ passing, there was so much anxiety.
His grandparents had custody of him and Ava, but we all thought it best if Brendan stayed with my husband and I for a little while, just for a change in scenery.
Ava was busy with college and he needed a distraction.
” Her voice softens. “He loved it over there, so I’m glad he found a beautiful girl like you to remind him of the place. ”
Elodie sounds like a souvenir, but she manages to sound serene. “He’s certainly not anxious now.”
His aunt beams as she leans over to squeeze Elodie’s hand.
“Oh, he’s so happy. I’ve never seen him this happy.
” She starts nattering about old Thanksgiving family stories, so Elodie excuses herself graciously to “see where Bren got to,” though in truth she wants to bite into him about his weirdness.
Pettiness grinds between her molars as she stalks through Ava’s house.
If she closes her eyes, she can imagine tar seeping poisonous and foul down the walls, soaking into the cream carpets with putrefying stains that will never come out.
She slips around a corner into a sunroom with elegant Parisian rugs and photos in gilded frames, and when she rests a palm to the wall, she only wants to know if the same insidious pulse beats here.
But the wall feels cool. Nothing festers; nothing rots.
Down the hall, laughter rings out and dishes clatter from the kitchen, all the warmth and hustle and comfort of a normal family gathered to cherish each other.
Wherever Bren’s vanished to, she has no idea.
Her head pounds. She presses fingertips to her temple as she lets herself into a bathroom that looks straight out of a designer catalog and locks it.
She presses her head to the door, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass, inexplicable in its sudden arrival.
Morning sickness? But it’s a little late for that.
Her tongue feels thick and swollen, and gulping crystal-clear water from the faucet does little to ease the discomfort.
When she stares in the mirror surrounded in a frame of wrought iron flourishes, her face holds a peculiar gauntness.
When she finally eases open the door and creeps down the hallway, it’s the voices that make her stop. Quiet whispers slip inside one another like a threaded needle through silken paper.
Around the corner, a hallway stretches toward closed-off bedrooms. Elodie hovers just out of sight from the two people having a whisper-argument by the bay windows.
Bren and Ava stand close, their golden heads nearly touching; his frown a response to the downward curve of her mouth, her arms folded tight while his swing in agitation before he starts plucking at the edge of the lacy curtains to distract himself. He must’ve stashed the album somewhere.
“… take everything so personally.”
“But they always do this.” His annoyance is underlined with a wounded edge Elodie doesn’t hear often. “I talk, they ignore. I give an opinion, they talk down to me. They still see me as some stupid kid who has no idea what he’s doing.”
“They don’t.” She sounds soothing.
“I have a wife, I have a kid on the way.” Bren paces the narrow confines of the hall. “It’s still not enough? Or is it her? They don’t like her.”
The world has crystallized around Elodie, sharp and sweet as sugar on the tip of her tongue. She breathes out slowly, sinking into the words she always knew were there, just hinted at, never stated so fervently.
“Well,” Ava says carefully, “it was very … fast. I know Grandma was a little concerned.”
“Did you tell them the truth?”
“Of course not.” Something changes in Ava’s voice, a guilt thick as plumes of dust from long abandoned spaces. “I wish I didn’t know.”
What fucking truth? About her?
What do they know? What could they possibly know?
Air slices the insides of Elodie lungs and she’s breathing too fast, her fingers at her throat because surely there is a silken noose slowly tightening about her neck.
“I need to check on Jude.” Footsteps sound on the carpet, and Elodie has the barest second to flee before she’s seen.
She hurries into the living room far too fast and has to take a moment to steady herself, to smooth her coat and fix a fake smile to her face as another one of Bren’s aunts comes over to exclaim about the baby and how beautiful Elodie looks.
How she glows. How excited they are for another little one in the family. Poppy needs a cousin.
Behind the aunt’s legs, Jude crawls about on the floor, flapping his hands happily a few times before snapping a puzzle piece in place. To them, he is the smudged pencil outline of a child, ready to be erased and replaced. Not a real January.
“Sorry,” Elodie says, smiling sweetly. “I’ll be right back.”
She hurries over to scoop Jude up, ignoring his whining protests. As she stands, she notices Ava’s husband watching them from the couch, slowly swirling a glass of wine with an intense, dissecting look. He has been staring at Jude, only Jude. His eyes meet hers and she hurries from the room.
The bathroom feels like a sanctuary in this cloying house, and she puts Jude on the toilet despite his fussing.
She needs an excuse to lock them away from everyone else, if only for a minute.
He folds his arms and scowls at her with pure defiance, refusing to pee because she demands it.
Only half her attention is on him, the rest of her mind consumed by the growing beat of the headache, claws sunk so deep into brain tissue that to extract them will leave cavernous gouges.
She can’t swallow that conversation she heard.
She can’t understand it. So Bren isn’t enveloped in love and cosseted in support from the perfect, pretentious Januarys?
It makes sense now why he’s happy to hole up in the house with just her and Jude.
She massages fingers into her temples and squeezes her eyes shut.
If he married her to try and be seen as a “real man” by his family, he should have found a girl with status, a girl with a pretty life and a lovely smile and a gold-trimmed diploma.
But it still doesn’t answer what “truth” he is hiding that Ava knows.
Every way Elodie turns that conversation, it makes less and less sense. Her skin is crawling from the inside and it makes her feel ready to pull out her own teeth.
Jude hops off the toilet and brings her his overalls, the buckles beyond him. He steadies himself on her shoulders as she holds the overall legs for him to step into.
That’s when she sees the new red marks on his thighs. Two of them. In places not immediately noticeable. Her stomach lurches, a fluttering panic crawling up her throat even as she tries to sound nonchalant.
“Baby,” she says, but dread is already tunneling through her lungs. “Did someone hit you?”
Jude shrugs.
“It’s important that you tell Mama if you’re hurting.”
He leans in suddenly, banging their heads together, and she yelps a curse.
“You hurt me,” he says simply. “All the time.”
You hurt me more, she wants to scream, but she can’t. She’s the mother.
She buckles his overall straps with shaking hands.
As the turkey is carved, juices sluice out around the knife, pink and viscid, and Elodie’s stomach turns over.
Conversation has grown loud and animated down the long, extended table as dishes are exchanged hand over hand and nostalgic stories turn to sports and then politics.
Cranberry sauce slops onto undercooked meat like tiny blood clots, and the stuffing is full of teeth.
No one else seems to care. Only Elodie is sickened, ostracized, revolted by the food.
Jude sits on a cushioned chair beside her, refusing his sparse helping of mac and cheese in favor of biting the edge of the tablecloth. He’s overstimulated by the noise, she can tell, and it’s on the tip of her tongue to whisper to Bren that she’s unwell and he needs to take them home.
But as she looks at him sitting across the table, silent after three attempts to slide into the conversation between his grandfather and uncles, she decides they should stay.
Something about the slump of his shoulders, the single pea he’s making a half-hearted attempt to spear with his fork, feels vindictively satisfying.
She tries to quell these feelings, hates herself for letting them spill through her chest, but her own pain feels so acute and bright and livid at the moment, she only wants to share it.
He suffers beautifully, a renaissance painting of a young god slashed down the middle with a bloodied knife.
Jude slips from his chair and she hisses at him to get back, but he trots over to Bren and starts rubbing his cheek against Bren’s sweater.
She tries to make a motion for Bren to send him back, but she’s ignored.
Bren pulls Jude onto his lap and forks up the soft, sweet turkey meat, hovering it in front of Jude’s mouth.
“—young Brendan here would know a thing or two about faulty tools,” his grandfather has just said with a jovial laugh. “What was it, my boy? The circular saw that kept turning itself on.”
Bren gives a weak smile. “Uh, yeah, but I fixed—”
A gruff uncle cuts him off. “High time you gave up on that house. That sort of work is for a skilled and competent carpenter.”
Jude accepts the forkful of turkey. Then he starts bouncing on Bren’s legs until he’s offered more.
He seems starved, feverish in his haste to stuff his cheeks with food. Lurid blood runs down his chin in a vermillion line as he chews, wriggling on Bren’s lap to show his pleasure.
All she can think of is the way Jude punched her stomach, how he headbutted her only minutes ago, how stiff and violent his kicks are when he’s deep in the wildest, most ferocious parts of his meltdowns.
She already can’t hold him. If he eats, if he gets stronger—
He can’t. She can’t bear it.
He needs to be small, her son, her baby, her baby.
The room is suddenly too hot, the assault of sound against her head like a pickax splitting skull. Sweat slicks her upper lip, her neck, her eyes feel glossed over with a mossy coating until she is too far out of this room, this world, to think of coming back.
Bren feeds him more turkey, oblivious, raising a napkin to wipe the foul, bloody sewerage spilling between Jude’s teeth.
All she can think is how the three of them won’t survive each other.