“The house doesn’t like you either.” He sounds cross and overtired. “The house is bad and it thinks Bren is bad.” A pause. “It thinks Mama is bad.”
It takes everything to not react, to blink back the sting in her eyes. “Good night, Jude.”
He ignores her, fussing about with his rabbit.
There is nothing to do but let herself flow out of the nursery as calm as a draining river, shutting the door with a soft click before leaning her forehead against the wood to wait and see if he will call out for her. No sound comes—until there; his voice, a blurred mumble of words she can’t parse. She bends to the keyhole to listen, unused to him talking to himself. He is the kind of child to play in silence as he lines up his toys for hours on end.
“… can hear you, even if Mama can’t.” His voice turns to a soft mutter. “I can hear you breathing in there.”
An odd disquiet furs the back of her tongue, and it takes everything in her not to rip the door open and rush in to check if he’s alone. Except, of course he’s alone. The house is unsettling in the dark, so of course his imagination is in overdrive. This is all normal, really. He’s a child acting out, sullen about bedtime and exhausted from a long day at school. Their life here is still so new, the edges not yet worn in.
But she wishes he’d cry out for her to come back and protect him, ask to snuggle into the safe crook of her arms until he falls asleep. She craves that. Sometimes she needs it so much she can’t breathe.
He is afraid of the dark.
She is afraid he doesn’t love her.
TWO
It’s instinct that wakes her,a hook slid into her intestines with a firmyank, so that when her eyes fly open she can feel the truth of it like old blood, pooled and calcifying in her guts: Jude is not in his bed.
It could be paranoia, her sleep-groggy mind pulled back to the years when he wouldn’t sleep, when she would drag his car seat inside and buckle him in so that at least she could close her eyes for a few minutes and know he wasn’t climbing cabinets or twisting oven knobs or putting plastic in his mouth. She would crush a pillow over her head, desperate for sleep, though it did little to block out his wails.
He could scream for hours.
But he hasn’t done that since they moved to Virginia. He’s outgrown it or maybe the hold the nursery has on his attention has proven invaluable. A relief, because it means he is uninterested in wanderinginto unfinished rooms or poking at the numerous tools Bren always leaves out.
But this is where her mind goes:
Jude, in the dark, tiptoeing across corroded floorboards with his fluttering hands looking for switches on power tools. Sometimes the want—no, theneed—for him to be still hits her with an all-consuming desperation and she’ll squeeze his fingers so hard she can imagine them breaking, little splinters of bone cutting through his skin like toothpicks.
If he would just listen to her. If he would just let her keep him safe.
She flicks on her bedside lamp and eases out from under the covers, cold air and regret sliding against the bare sliver of skin where her sweater has ridden up. She yanks her sleeves down over her hands and glances at Bren, his body like the slopes of a mountain, his breathing deep and unbothered. He isn’t a mother, he isn’t attuned to whimpers in the dark, and he also doesn’t consider the house a death trap. To him, six-year-olds obey instructions and understand consequences. Jude will stay in bed because that’s where he was put.
Bren still knows so little about Jude, and every day she wonders if she can keep it that way.
She slips from the master bedroom and feels her way slowly down the pitch-black hallway. It must be past two a.m. The dark is a formless thing and when she edges around a corner, it opens before her like an unholy mouth ready to suck all the air from her lungs. She stumbles and for a second there is no floor, no walls, just her heartbeat hitting her stomach with a squelch that makes her feel instantly sick, disorientated, lost. Light, she just needsto see. Floorboards creak and settle underfoot, and she slaps a palm against the wall for balance against the tipped-over feeling of the endless black hallway. She feels for the lightswitch until she remembers Bren took out the old plastic casing with grand intentions to buy antique brass ones. He hasn’t yet.
He thinks himself an architect, a carpenter, an interior designer, an electrician, and it scares her how he plans to fix everything himself. She is meticulous about her demure facade, though, never slipping up to show the cavernous gouge in her chest where anxiety festers like toxic spillage, images flashing through in a curated slideshow from hell: Bren falling from a ladder, cutting his hand on a power saw, his whole body spasming as he touches live wires. So much of it is a game to him, drawing up plans on napkins in cafés, trawling through estate sales to pick up antique furniture, cruising down the aisle of hardware stores with his cart piled high with hardwood and new drill bits and tins of wood stain.
He could hire carpenters, but he won’t. This is his parents’ old house, and fixing it is his dream, his joy, his obsession. There is a nostalgic worship to it that he’d never admit to, though she feels like it’s less a commemoration of his parents’ passing and more his way of bringing them back to life. She should love this, really, his dream of a big house, a beautiful wife, a family to come home to and spoil with his affection.
They are still so new, the three of them together. She can’t shape her mind around what it would look like if his patience is used up, so she refuses to think about it. She can’t lose Bren. If Jude is an oil spill, uncontrollable, flammable, then she is a blanket meant to smother.
When she rounds the corner, enough moonlight crawls through the bay windows to show the nursery door is cracked open. Panic flares in her chest like an electrical strike, and she is again unbalanced, her hands shaking as she traces the wall for balance and speed-walks to the nursery. Empty. She holds her breath and listens, silently begging the universe for a sound, any sound to give away where he is so she can snatch him up before he gets hurt.
The noises are small, almost imperceptible. The thump of small feet on bare floorboards. A metallicclick. Quick, guilty breaths. The tiniest sniffle.
Find him. Find him now.
She hurries downstairs, her heart a runaway riot as she ignores the way the dark unspools around her as she strides into the unfinished dining room. She slaps on the light.
In an instant, the dark is banished. The shadows curl their tongues back into their mouths and the world turns crisp and overexposed. Her eyes burn and she blinks hard, a hand raised against the brightness.
Sawhorses and tall ladders fill the dining room, the walls stripped down, naked wires hanging from the huge hole in the ceiling where a chandelier is meant to hang. The floor is a mess of paint-splattered throw cloths and toolboxes and wood shavings. Unsafe, all of it so unsafe.
She thinks, maybe, she hates this house sometimes.
