Chapter 19
NINETEEN
The plan comes to her in the early hours of the morning.
When Bren’s alarm finally goes off, she stays quietly in bed as he moves through his morning routine, coming out of the bathroom with his hair combed, buttoning the cuffs of his neat white button-down.
It ages him, the suit, makes him seem less like a fluffy-haired boy with a head full of butterflies and more like a stately businessman ready to dissect numbers.
He seems a million miles away as he perches on the edge of their bed and stuffs his feet into black socks.
Her tongue has moldered into a flaccid thing and she can barely shape words around it. Maybe she has none to give.
Get up, she thinks. Get dressed. Act normal. But she lies listless in bed while her lungs catch on the edge of her ribs and tear.
Her eyes must have closed, she doesn’t know if she drifted back to sleep for a minute, because the next thing she knows, he’s leaning over her, his cologne vibrant and jaw freshly shaven, the back of his hand warm as he lays it on her clammy forehead.
He sets a plate of toast piled with slivered canned pear and honey on her bedside table along with a mug of steaming coffee.
He must have left and come back and she heard nothing.
He kisses her then, on the tip of her nose.
“Sleep as much as you want, okay? You need to rest.”
“I have to get Jude ready for school,” she says, groggy.
“Nah, I’ve got it. Relax today.” He has reset, affable and nonchalant, as if yesterday never happened.
“I’ll ask Oliver when he can fit you in, and we’ll go to the appointment together.
Ava will look after Jude; she won’t mind.
I was thinking that from now on, she can pick up Jude from school in the afternoons, and then I’ll get him from her house on my way home from work.
That gives you all day to rest and prepare for the baby. Sound good?”
She wants to claw out his eyes. He is separating her from her son, depriving her, starving her, killing her.
“Oh.” She keeps her voice light. “Let’s not inconvenience Ava. I can get Jude—”
“I think this will work out better.” Bren heads for the door. “Love you.”
He’s gone, the door shutting quietly.
She rips off the blankets and snatches a massive sweater off the floor, ignoring the chill pimpling her long bare legs as she hurries after him. The weight of what needs to be done presses on her chest and keeps her short of breath, but she has to wait till he leaves first.
First, Jude.
She is always thinking of Jude.
He’s in the entryway, ready for school in jeans and a bright striped sweater.
His backpack lies upside down on the floor and he’s making his rabbit spin into the air with a whooshing sound—mimicking the rocket ship game Bren played with him last night.
A simple game, one meant for amusement. Not designed to make Jude do something, be something, settle down, tidy up, go to sleep, obey obey obey.
She feels young and childish, a teen sneaking through quiet halls, as she hurries to her son, glancing furtively around for Bren, who sounds like he’s still in the kitchen filling his travel mug with coffee.
Jude looks up in surprise as she grabs his arms and draws him to her for a quick hug.
“Baby. Are you okay?” She kisses his forehead while he frowns. “Mama missed you last night.”
You know, after I smashed your dinner and squeezed you tight enough to bruise.
He grunts, leaning backward so, if she lets him go, he’ll topple straight to the floor. She struggles to hold on to him, too shaky for one of their meaningless battles of wills.
“Listen to me.” She speaks low and earnest. “I’m going to find the bad things in the walls and make them stop. Nothing will hurt you anymore, okay?” She flicks a glance down the hall toward the kitchen. No sign of Bren yet.
Jude is still tilting backward, and she has to readjust her grip as he starts to melt toward the floor.
“Jude.” She is desperate, scared, she is so close to tears. “Does someone go in your room at night? Is someone … coming to get you?”
He gives a mewl, more mad than anything else. “Lemmego.”
“In a minute. I just need … I need you to focus.” She sounds hoarse as she whispers, “Simon says tell Mama who is hurting you.”
He is forever a puppet on a string for her games, and the irresistible urge to play has him pointing toward the kitchen.
At the wall?
Or Bren.
“You need to say it out loud,” she says, teeth clenched. “So Mama knows exactly what you mean.”
But then Bren is in the entryway, travel mug in one hand, briefcase in the other, and the way he looks at her is pitying.
“Let go of him,” he says, low and calm.
Elodie’s fingers slip free of Jude and he overbalances and sits down hard, his surprised oof making his eyes go wide. There, she’s hurt him again. But it wasn’t her fault he was leaning so far backward and couldn’t steady himself.
“Out to the car, buddy.” Bren slips into a cheerful voice, upbeat and unconcerned, as he maneuvers his briefcase under his arm so he can unlock the front door.
Jude snatches his backpack and runs outside, not a single backward glance at his mother, who is still crouched like a gnarled, twisted thing curtained in matted hair there on the floorboards.
All her bones have splintered and been glued together crookedly; there is a wrongness to her, the glossy coating she hid herself under now turned translucent.
“He’s mine—” She starts to snarl, but Bren cuts her off.
“I can’t trust you alone with him,” he says simply.
He slams the front door behind him. The lock turns over with a dull, heady thump. The storm that soars to life in her chest is ravaging and murderous and built on teeth, and she is at the front door in a flash, yanking the handle and screaming at him to come back.
“You can’t lock me in here, Bren! Not in this house. Bren. brENDAN. FUCK YOU.” She slams her hands again and again against the door, but the brass knob only spins. She snatches her hand from it, but it keeps twirling, faster and faster as if to mock her desperation.
She backs up, her heart punching into her ribs, the need to keep screaming ripping through her lungs.
“Stop. Stop, stop, STOP!” Her hands are over her ears, but the doorknob keeps spinning with a snarling rattle until she turns and runs out of the entryway.
She needs to catch hold of herself, stop fueling his conviction in her instability.
Everything she does now, every emotion, every fear and agony and anger, only confirms that she has lost her mind and he is the only one left in control.
Rage is not an option, even though he has done the unthinkable, he has caged her.
Her car keys are gone from the little dish on the kitchen bench.
A quick run through the house shows the back door has also been locked.
Upstairs, she can’t find her phone. She smashes the plate of toast against the wall and screams and screams since there is no one to hear her, to watch with a tired, ironic smile and murmur, There, there, little girl, you are just being hysterical.
She is fury. Molten steel slides down her spine and she feels full of razors, full of brittle desperation to do something.
If she broke a window and climbed out, what then?
She could spend the entire day walking across Farrows to Jude’s preschool, but no doubt Bren will have told them not to let her pick Jude up.
And even if she did snatch Jude up, unimpeded, she couldn’t leave town fast enough.
Buses don’t even run out of Farrows every day.
Her wallet is locked in the car, not that she has much cash since Bren only gives her enough for a few groceries, and he buys everything else with a nonchalant swipe of his card.
There is nothing left to do but continue with her plan.
Prove to him the house is monstrous. Make him see.
She is going to tear open its throat.
It is all up and through her, belief in the house and its vicious games, and it will take Jude next, crack open his fragile chest and gnaw on the tender green sticks of his bones.
She alone understands what’s happening so she, alone, must halt this spiral before she loses everything. Inside her a clock ticks.
She shoves her way into the downstairs bathroom where Bren stores most of his tools and supplies.
Fool he, not to lock it. Buckets tip over as she rummages around, tools clattering from chaotic piles and hitting the tile with shrill clangs.
She snatches a box cutter blade, a heavy hammer.
Then she picks up the circular saw and loops the electrical cord around her arm.
As she sweeps into the living room he has so tenderly finished renovating, she thinks about how she still loves him.
It is not such an easy thing to stop, not when they’ve magnetized to each other with such fervent, hungry intensity.
His fingers in her hair, her teeth gentle as she tugs at his lower lip.
The worshipful, tender way he looks at her, asks if she’s all right, puts his body between her and the world’s sharpest edges.
It is obvious he loves her, but then, he loves this house, so maybe this is his failing, his glorious and radiantly bloody Achilles’ heel. He puts his love in monstrous places.
She can feel the house watching her as she sets down the saw and places a palm to the delicate wallpaper and raises the hammer.
A simmered, ugly heat runs through the plaster, blisters her fingertips.
Agitation shivers through the floorboards and she can feel it under her bare feet.
She is not dressed for this, not in that oversize T-shirt and bulky sweater, her dark curls wild and frightful around her shoulders.
If they think her crazed, she will look the part.
She slams the hammer through the wall.
The house screams.
Plaster dust filters around her, sucks down her lungs. Wallpaper tears as she slashes it with the box cutter.
The paper comes off too easily, shredding in her hands like damp tissues the more she yanks and peels.
Beneath it, the wet skin of the house weeps tawny fluid, blackish green fur flourishing between the bloodstains in a liquified infection.
Wall after wall, she rips and destroys, before she plugs in the saw.
She flicks at the faulty switch a few times, back and forth, back and forth, before the blade screams to life with a whir of metal.
A saw like this is better on flat surfaces, not a vertical wall, but she puts her whole weight behind it when she places it against the drywall.
It works. The blade howls—or maybe that’s the house.
The wall peels as she saws, flesh parting in pungent slabs, and then there is nothing but blood streaming between drywall and plaster.
There is so much blood.
He fixed nothing; he was never going to. He just covered it up.
She is saturated in it, sawdust and blood and sweat, as she cuts open one wall, then the next. Huge arcing X shapes. An exposing of rot and ruin.
She moves on to the dining room, the hallways, before wondering if it’s not the house screaming, but her.
When she makes it to the kitchen, she shakes with fatigue. Dust fills her lungs as she stumbles to the mouth of the pantry and pauses, trying to force her exhausted brain to decide what to do next.
A cold thread of air wraps about her bare ankles and her eyes snap to the pantry, wild and feverish. It’s a small walk-in room off to the side of the kitchen, lined with whitewashed shelves and mostly empty thanks to their inability to cook. There should be no airflow coming from it.
He said they had no basement, casually, easily, as if he is so used to lying.
A tremulous energy runs through the floorboards as she creeps into the pantry, the circular saw heavy in one hand, electrical cord flopping behind her like a dead snake.
She rests the saw on the pantry floor between her ankles as she glances around the tiny area.
With the light switched on, it remains bare and uninspiring.
She steps forward and rests her palm against the very back of the pantry wall where there are no shelves, just hooks for aprons and tea towels. One knock, two.
It rings hollow.
“Oh, fuck you, Bren,” she whispers as her fingers trace the poorly lined caulking around where there used to be a door. The sloppy whitewashing, the way he didn’t plaster it over and then paint, all says this was done in a rush.
Perhaps because he brought her to his house much sooner than he thought he would and he still had things to cover up, to hide.
This is the basement that he said they didn’t have.
Why the hell did he need to hide it?
Because the house is alive alive alive and down there is its beating heart where all the things begin to slither out and whisper to your son and take your son and murder your son your son your son—
She is manic and feverish as she fumbles to plug in the power saw again and level the blade to where the doorknob has been hastily unscrewed, the hole stuffed with putty before it was painted over.
When she cuts into it, mist hits her face like a fine spray of blood.
She is shaking as she cuts around the door and it swings inward with a rusted wail to reveal cement stairs swirling into blackness.
This is a dark that picks its teeth with children’s bones.
It whispers to her, calls.
She has to go down there.