Jude is still crying, his fingers in his sauce-smeared mouth.
It’s not sauce. He’s bleeding. Her baby is bleeding.
“Fuck.Fuck.” Elodie snatches Jude from his chair, trying to cradle him to her chest and tilt his face up at the same time. Everything blurs, and her voice is a thousand miles away as she tries to feel inside his mouth. “I can’t tell if there’s glass in his mouth— Bren.BREN!”
Jude’s cries are hysterical now. She doesn’t know if he’s in pain or just responding to her panic. She’s losing her grip on him, onsanity. She can’t hold him; he’s slipping. But she needs to get his mouth open now nownow—
Then Bren is there, taking Jude off her and sitting him on the kitchen counter, his voice soothing and calm as he grabs a washcloth and starts wiping sauce from Jude’s chin.
“It’s okay, buddy, I got you. We’ll check your mouth. I don’t think you ate any of it. Shh, shh, I’ll fix it.”
“I nearly killed him,” she whispers.
“No way, you absolutely didn’t.” Bren tries to look in Jude’s mouth, made easier by the fact Jude is still screaming. “I think he’s fine. I can’tsee anything, and he didn’t swallow. We saw him spit it all out. Hey,hey,Elodie. He’s not hurt.”
She puts her back to the kitchen counter and slides down, her face in her hands, wanting to cry but too frozen to let the tears come. A mottled, numbed horror has settled into her, and all she can see is Jude with a mouthful of glass, shards lodged in the tender pink flesh of his gums as she forces it down his throat.
She could have killed him.
“He’s fine.” Bren tosses the sauce-stained washcloth in the sink and picks up Jude, holding him tight as he squats down next to Elodie. He tries to pull her hand from her face, but she can’t look at him. “He’s freaked out, that’s all. Look, we’ll call the store and tell them to pull all those cans from their shelves. Someone messed up at the factory or something. It’s fucked up, but this is not your fault.”
But Jude is still sobbing “I hate you, Ihate you!” and that’s all she can focus on.
TEN
Sometimes, when the house isquiet and she is alone, she checks to see if she is still beautiful.
There is still a fluid loveliness to her skin, to the supple curve of waist to hip, a grace to how she twists her arms slowly above her head like the necks of two swans. It’s been over four months since she danced, but her body remains slim, flexible enough to indulge her in the delusion that she could yet flow across the stage as light as rippled silk. She has caught her hair up in a bun, soft wisps escaping, and when she draws herself into fifth position, she looks like a woman sculpted from white marble.
She is naked and feels unfathomably lovely.
The skin of her belly distends only a little. Today marks seventeen weeks. The app has informed her the baby is the size of a turnip, and she thinks it’s a stupid comparison, but she can’t help imagining her turnipbaby flourishing inside her, its tiny hairlike roots sunk into the moist flesh of her womb, leaves blossoming from the nub of its little head. It’s ridiculous, but it amuses her when not much else has these last few days.
All she wants in this moment is to reach between her legs and feel the soft crown of the baby’s skull, slick with her gore, her blood, to know he is coming. She will be the only one this baby needs and her worship of him will be all-consuming.
That was when everything was best with Jude, those first few months.
She wants that back. Craving hits, sudden and vicious, and she is ravenous for her new baby. She imagines shoving a hand inside herself and dragging him out right now, cupping him tenderly in a cage of loving finger bones.
For a minute, she does nothing but breathe, too fast and bloody.
She lowers her arms and relaxes the seized-up muscles of her abdomen.
Breathe. Calm down.
She can be patient; she knows how to wait. After all, she has Bren now, who adores her with affection so uncomplicated it leaves her wondering how this is real, how this is her life.
For now, she will be content to be a house for her child, her body contorted into walls of vertebrae and rib bones, her organs packed down and juiced to give the baby more room, her only purpose to nourish him until she is nothing and he is everything.
Phone in hand, she takes a few pictures, one more explicit than the rest, which she sends to Bren and receives an immediate keyboard smash of letters back. Someone isn’t very focused at his desk today. A small, private smile tugs at her mouth and she tucks her phone away and picks up her clothes off the floor, awareness of the cold returning with a vengeance.
Her alone time has dwindled far too fast and she needs to tidy the kitchen before she picks up Jude from school.
Jude, who hasn’t forgiven her for the glass in his dinner.
It’s Wednesday, and he’s still on a food strike, the only reprieve coming if he can spread a cupful of dry cereal out on a large plate and inspect each piece before popping it in his mouth. He blames only her. She caught Bren in the kitchen with him last night, Jude sitting on the counter, drumming his heels on the cabinets in a way that always makes her snap at him yet doesn’t bother Bren. They each had a big dessert spoon, scooping ice cream straight out of the tub. Chocolate had been all around Jude’s mouth, his expression grim with determination as he chipped the spoon into the icy dessert, and Bren had leaned close, vibrating with quiet excitement because moments like those make him think he’s making progress with Jude. Maybe he is; she hates how it stings. Elodie had drifted backward into the shadows like an ethereal ghost until she was out of sight. This was a gentle moment between them and she was not invited.
She wasn’t even missed.
