16 Years Ago
She loves her baby brother from the first moment the swaddled newborn is placed in her arms. Her father hovers beside her in case she fails to hold the baby correctly, or, perhaps, on purpose.
There’s been talk of if she’ll act out over the arrival of a sibling; she’d listened to them discuss it while she crouched beside the fridge instead of playing quietly in her room as she’s been taught.
Her mother was fretful and teary as always, forever panicking about accidents and illnesses and how having a six-year-old already is just so much work.
How will they cope with another? The new baby wasn’t planned.
Her parents both work constantly, out from dawn till dusk, while Elodie is stuffed into school and childcare, then fed and sent to bed as soon as she gets home.
Her parents don’t seem to know what to do with her, how to play with her, and she makes them nervous with her chattering and twirling about the kitchen.
She gives her mother headaches. She puts her father on edge.
Watch me, she is always saying with bright smiles. Are you looking at me?
It is so rare that they are all together. Even when she can see them, it never feels like they see her.
The surprise comes when her mother decides to stay home with the new baby, her father shouldering extra shifts at the warehouse to cover the dip in their finances.
It thrills Elodie. She will be able to scramble off the bus and rush inside to homemade cookies and a relaxed, happy mother who is free of the strains of work life and has had all day to play with her children.
This is Elodie’s understanding, how happy they will be now.
When she bursts through the front door with her sweaty curls tangled about her face and her school uniform rumpled from a long day in class, she is beaming as she drops to her knees beside the play mat and tickles the baby with his chubby little thighs and rosy cheeks.
“Did you have a good day with Mama?” She blows a raspberry on his little belly until he squeals with delight.
Then her mother is hurrying into the living room, snatching up the baby. “Go play in your room,” she snaps. “I told you to be careful around him, Elodie. God, you never listen.” She is close to tears, as if her daughter has done something heinous.
Instead of just loving her little brother.
It turns out nothing is going to change.
There is less of her mother now than before, her body slimming to a whittled stick as she frets and does laundry and rocks the baby to sleep and takes him to carefully chosen playgroups and checkups.
He is perfect, her parents are sure to say so constantly, but babies take so much time, so much energy. There is nothing left over for Elodie.
“Your mother is doing her best,” her father will say as he drops her off to ballet class, where she knows she will be the last picked up. Sometimes they forget her completely and Verity has to drive her home. “It’s a lot to take care of two children.”
But Elodie can’t remember asking for much.
Just to be tucked in at night, to be taken to the park, to be admired when she is onstage for the end-of-year ballet performance.
Neither of her parents remembers to come, and it is Verity who gives her a little rose and gushes over her, a proxy parent who promises she keeps every card Elodie makes for her on the fridge.
Elodie’s mother always throws out the drawings and Mother’s Day cards and party invitations brought home from school. There isn’t space on the fridge beside her baby brother’s first finger paintings.
She is seven and her brother is one when it becomes her job to entertain him.
Her mother slips pills into her mouth behind a swallow of water and goes to lie down all afternoon, and Elodie must bustle about after the crawling baby, making sure he doesn’t fall over and bump his head or put his fingers into electrical sockets.
Her father is never home, his shifts starting early and ending late, and Elodie learns to make jam sandwiches for herself and put chocolate chips in the baby’s mouth to stop him fussing.
Her heart goes soft as melted butter when he beams at her, cherubic and beautiful, his arms reaching up as he shrieks, “Ewo-dee!”
When her mother emerges from the bedroom, her hair a matted snarl and her face the pallor of sour milk, she bursts into tears at the mess.
“How dare you trash this house!” her mother shrieks. “I ask for so little, and you throw this brattish behavior at me.”
She snatches up the howling baby and storms off to slam him in his crib, but when she returns, Elodie still stands in the dimly lit living room among the strewn toys.
Her eyes are dark pits, saucer-wide, and her bottom lip is trembling.
She watched the baby for hours. She thought she was being good.
“You will clean this pigsty and go straight to bed.” Her mother’s face has gone splotchy, her eyes rimmed red. “I can’t cope with your theatrics right now, so don’t even try.”
“But I’m hungry,” Elodie whispers.
The slap is crisp, the pain a delayed wave of heat across her face. It is not she who bursts into tears, but her mother.
“You made me do that.” Her mother covers her mouth, stifling her own sob. “Just—just go to bed. I can’t deal with this!”
None of it makes sense, none of it is fair, and Elodie flings herself onto her bed and cries herself to sleep that night among piles of stuffed toys, the only things that cuddle her in the dark.
Maybe when her mother returns to work and the baby is in day care, everything will be better.
Her mother will be less tired, her father will be home more.
She will be caught up in their arms and swung around while the world shimmers with golden perfection.
The fairy tale is harder to cling to this time.
Her mother doesn’t return to work. She takes more pills, sleeps longer, falls into a habit of slapping Elodie for her naughtiness and then locking herself in her room with the baby, ignoring her small daughter banging at the door.
Asking to come in. Asking to be played with. Asking and asking and asking—
Elodie is eight and her brother turns two.
There is a party with blue-frosted cupcakes and cheap plastic presents, an outing to the aquarium that Elodie misses due to being in school.
Her father tells everyone how proud he is to finally have a son while her mother gushes how good and delightful the baby is. Finally, an easy child!
Late that night, Elodie smashes her little brother’s new toys and eats the rest of the cupcakes, knowing there will be slaps as she’s locked in her room for her wicked behavior, knowing if she screams in helpless rage, no one will care.
Being good does nothing. Watching her brother diligently does nothing.
Putting away toys and washing the dishes and getting on and off the school bus without help does nothing.
She even stays up late to watch her father come in, haggard and achy from working overtime, and asks him to put her to bed, but he wearily says she can do that for herself. She’s eight now, isn’t she? A big girl.
Stop being so needy.
Stop being so much.
Her toddler brother has begun throwing howling tantrums when he doesn’t get his way, a cheeky little smile appearing as soon as she relents and gives him her toys, her snacks, her things.
If she is home from school, she is meant to babysit.
But she has homework now; she has ballet to rehearse.
She pulls on her leotard and tights and uses a kitchen chair as a barre, imagining herself all grown up and on pointe, the lead of The Nutcracker.
Roses will be thrown onstage and applause will fall over her shoulders like a silken cloak.
“Elodie, I swear to god!” Her mother is in the doorway of her bedroom, rumpled and stained from a long day with the toddler. “I told you to go give him a bath. Now. I need to start dinner.”
Elodie rolls her eyes and gracefully folds her arms to her sides, her mind a peaceful lake, her body fluid and light.
Nothing can touch her. No one talks of her mother going back to work now: She can’t find a job and day care is too expensive, or at least those are the words her parents hiss at each other late into the night.
“Elodie, I said now,” her mother shouts from the kitchen.
Annoyed at the interruption, Elodie stomps into the bathroom and runs the bath, dumping in a box of plastic toys and then plopping her grubby little brother into the midst of it.
Marmite smears his mouth, his fat little fingers sticky as he snatches her hair and yanks.
A cry of pain catches under her tongue, but she stays quiet so her mother won’t yell at her.
Somehow he never does anything wrong. He’s just a baby. She should know better.
Hot tears smart her eyes as she hurls a few more toys into the tub while he starts raging that there aren’t enough bubbles.
“You can’t have everything you want,” she snaps.
“Bubbles!” He slaps at the water, spraying it all over her. “Ewo-dee, want bubbles!”
“No.” Elodie reaches in the tub to try to sponge him, but he shrieks and then bites her with all his toddler might.
It is too much, the way she can never do anything right, can never make them happy. Not her mother or father, not even the baby now. As silent tears run down her cheeks, the baby laughs and splashes more water until her leotard is soaked.
A chasm has opened in her belly, the need to escape, to run, to fold herself into a tiny envelope and post herself anywhere but here.
She storms out of the bathroom, nursing the reddened teeth marks on her arm as salt stains her tongue.
He can play by himself for a while. Isn’t that what she’s always told to do?
No one watches her, no one cares if she is alone.
Loneliness splays fingers over her rib cage and folds her bones into splinters, and all she can do is swallow the shards and pretend it doesn’t hurt.
There is comfort to finishing her ballet practice, moving through the positions with perfect form that will make Verity pleased.
Elodie’s leotard sticks sloppily to her belly, but it will dry.
She feels calmer already. After this, she will play with her brother for hours and prove she is a good, patient sister. He doesn’t mean to hurt her, after all.
It takes her a while to realize the house has gone quiet; no sounds from the kitchen of dinner, no splashing from the bathtub.
Her mother must have taken him out already, dressed him in a onesie and put him in front of the TV, though as Elodie finishes her practice, she realizes she can’t hear cartoons blaring either.
She bites her lip, a kernel of worry blooming in her belly.
Then there is the scream.
It is blood-chilling, it is eternal, it cuts right through Elodie’s heart with blades of ice and she is no longer a little girl but rather a creature curling in on herself with terror at this sound. She flies into the hallway and freezes outside the bathroom door.
Her mother is on hands and knees, her hands plunged into the tub as she pulls the toddler from among the bobbing plastic toys. He was face down in the water.
No, that isn’t right. He was sitting there playing before. He was fine when she left him. It was only a few minutes. She only meant to nurse the bite mark and calm herself down and then come back. She was coming back.
She wouldn’t leave him, not forever.
Fright has rooted her to the ground as she watches her mother scream and scream with the little boy in her arms. She starts pumping at his chest, hitting his back, but no spluttering coughs come.
There is nothing, nothing, nothing. When her mother looks up, there is pure black hate boiling from her eyes, and her snarl is all animal.
“You fucking let him drown! You let my baby drown!”
Elodie runs, tears already sheeting down her face, because she doesn’t understand. She was only gone for a few minutes.
She doesn’t understand.
In the kitchen, she fumbles for the phone, trying to remember what she was taught in school about emergencies and accidents. Her leotard is still wet from her brother’s splashes, and in her mind, he is still in the tub, playing merrily before he’ll screech for her with his little baby voice.
Ewo-dee!
Her hands shake as she punches in triple zero and holds the phone to her ear, squeezing herself tight and hard against the wall as her heart skitters into her mouth.
A deep, wretched wailing begins in the bathroom and goes on and on.
“Hello, what is your emergency?”
“I—I—I need you to come right now.” Elodie clutches the phone with both hands, her stomach doing loops, her voice wobbly. “My little brother needs help. P-p-please.”
“Okay, sweetheart, we’re going to send someone right over to you. Can you tell me where you are?”
Elodie is already plowing forward, giving her address and her parents’ full names, steadying herself on the quick deliverance of information like she’s been taught. The dispatcher has a calm, soothing voice, and when they say, “You’re doing a good job, sweetheart,” her heart squeezes in relief.
Excuses tangle on her tongue, and she wants so badly to place them before this stranger in a bid for forgiveness. But she doesn’t want to be hated.
So she cannot be the one blamed.
“My mum said she was giving him a bath”—she is talking too fast—“but she just left him in there. And now he’s—he’s not breathing. I wouldn’t have left him. I would never. He’s just a baby.”
“An ambulance is coming to you right now. Can your mother talk to me?”
Elodie flicks a glance toward the bathroom, where her mother is folded in half on the tiles with sick, wretched sobs. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s your name?”
“Elodie,” she says. “I’m eight. It’s—it’s not my fault.”
“You’re not in trouble, Elodie,” the dispatcher says, voice calm and kind.
Tears slip down her cheeks and catch in the corners of her trembling mouth.
“What’s your little brother’s name?”
“Jude,” she says. “His name is Jude.”