Get up. Be the responsible parent.
She sits there.
“How long ago was this?” He’s Googling on her phone now.
“I don’t know.” Her head has emptied, the wave of rage gone.
A distant part of her thinks it’s ridiculous that they are all sitting by the kitchen sink having a crisis when she wanted to make egg salad sandwiches.
“It says…four months ago.” Bren glances up in alarm. “This must have happened right after we left. And no one reached out to you?”
“No one knows where I am.”
“They speculate that your mother poisoned their soup so they could mutually commit—” He’s still reading, shaking his head, but then his mouth snaps shut as if he only just remembers Jude is listening.
Watching them.
He has dropped his bitten apple, and it rolls across the kitchen floor.
“Um.” Bren’s voice lowers as he glances nervously at her. “Do we explain this to him?”
“No, he won’t understand.” Elodie finally remembers how to use her limbs and she wraps her arms around Jude.Well, great. He’s getting a cuddle, not punishment. Again he wins.His thumb is in his mouth, his cheek pressed to her breastbone as he snuggles into her, and he looks from her to Bren with wide-eyed worry as if he’s absorbing their distress.
“I’m sorry, baby.” Bren sits down heavily beside her, sawdust from his jeans shifting and settling on her clean kitchen tiles. “But they don’t deserve your tears, you know that, right? After what they did to you.” He breaks off, and there is uncharacteristic anger in his bright blue eyes.
“I’m not sad.” She presses her fists to her eyes, but she’s not crying. Her head is empty. “It’s just, I decided never to think about them again, and this has brought it all back.”
“It’s bullshit to insinuate they were upset that you ‘ran off.’ Like, Jesus Christ, everyone just makes shit up online these days. You did nothing wrong.” He takes her hands, kissing each knuckle, his belief strong enough to spill over the kitchen and wash everything else away.
Jude keeps watching her, an unnerving stillness to him, as if he still has her secrets in his mouth, tucked into his cheeks like marbles.
EIGHT
She pretends it’s the lullof the car gliding down this smooth forest throat that makes her eyes close. Rural Virginia couldn’t be more beautiful, especially during these last golden months of autumn when the view is all hickories and red maples and pines, foliage plumed against the azure sky in a shock of color. Bren drives like a dream, easy and confident, his hands laid casually on the wheel, wrists cuffed in expensive leather bands and his olive sweater deliciously tight. When he glances sideways at her, his smile is endlessly sweet and understanding.
She didn’t sleep last night, and the makeup under her eyes feels thick and tacky. The real cause of her current exhaustion is now strapped in his booster seat in the back, only just gone quiet after spending the last forty-five minutes crying.
Forty-five minutes. She thought about slamming her forehead against the window. She thought about slamming his.
But that’s the exhaustion speaking, not her; she wouldn’t hurt her child.
She’s wrung out after yesterday’s foul turn and frustrated at her own inability to manage Jude. Bren had wanted to leave for the estate sale early in order to secure his coveted wingback armchair set, but of course they didn’t leave till well after ten since Jude fought her every single step of the way. A quiet, morose part of her thinks this is just him being frightened of doing something different, going to an unknown place, but she remembers how he looked at her yesterday in the kitchen. Those liquid black eyes cutting into her soul, cold and unforgiving.
Bad mother.
bad
bad
bad
“Maybe he’ll take a nap,” Bren says under his breath.
“Doubt it.” She keeps her voice low, glancing over her shoulder to see Jude playing with the electric window buttons they’ve long since disabled on his side of the car. It still makes her heart lurch when he suddenly yanks the handle, as if the safety lock will fail and he’ll fly out into the forest like the curl of a russet autumn leaf.
“I was thinking about why your parents… did that,” Bren goes on, still quiet.
It’s a little late to be censoring her parents’ suicides from Jude’s keen ears, but she appreciates the effort.
