“I’m not letting you go,” he says. “I couldn’t bear it. Ineed you.”
She needs to be wanted. She needs to be touched. She needs this.
He pulls off her shirt, then her sweatpants, his kisses growing more frantic. She wants to dig into his chest, carve out mounds of meat and oozing organs with her fingernails until there is space enough for her to worm inside him.
When there is nothing left of their fight—the consuming heat andravenous hunger now whittled down to lust alone—she stops feeling like she’s falling.
She is calm again. She is in control.
“I love you so much I can’t bear it.” The anguished tremble in his voice thrills her. “Say you need me.”
She presses her face into the sweaty crook of his neck with a small, whimpered gasp. “I need you.”
“This house is for you.” He is everywhere; he is everything. “This house is you.”
She thinks, in a distant way, as she kisses him, that she doesn’t understand what he means.
6 YEARS AGO
Newborns are meant to bedifficult, but she has never been this happy.
The rush of euphoria is staggering, overwhelming, intoxicating. She is drunk on it, giddy with it, her cheeks permanently aching because she can’t stop smiling as she cradles him and watches his pink, gummy yawns. There is something so tender about the cries of a newborn. No judgment or contempt in their muddied eyes. All he wants is to latch on to her, to own her, to forbid her from leaving him even for a second.
When she hears mothers talk about these first days with a baby, they say they feel like a cow. They’re exhausted and frayed as they leak tears and blood and milk, as they hemorrhage sleep and lose sight of who they were before the birth.
But Elodie is addicted to this feeling, to him, to being wholly, irreplaceably wanted.
Only her father makes vague gestures of care, driving her to the hospital so both she and Jude could be checked over and later bringing a bag of tiny onesies, diapers, and pacifiers into her bedroom.
“I’ll clean out the garage for you.” His voice is a deflated mumble these days, and he doesn’t look at her or the baby. “We can put in a little fridge and microwave, and there’s that old double mattress… if you want the extra space, that is.”
“Okay,” she says, though she can’t help wondering if this is so they don’t have to listen to Jude crying. “Do you want to hold him?”
But her father is already leaving, his head bent low, shoulders hunched, and the slight flinch is the only indication he even heard her. This offer is still more than she expected and the isolation from upstairs won’t make much difference.
Her parents have ignored her for a long time.
She was eight when her two-year-old brother passed away, when her parents stopped like clockwork toys with their cogs forever broken. They loved him, only him. At least, it had always felt that way to her.
Her parents had always spent long hours at work while Elodie was shunted off to day cares and then kindergartens, always minded by strangers in rooms full of other needy, sloppy, whiny children. But when her little brother was born, her mother quit her job to stay home with him, something that thrilled six-year-old Elodie—she would finally have her mother. But of course, the baby consumed the attention. Her parents patted her head, told her she was “too big to be so clingy,” and then put her in ballet to get her out of the house.
Her nervous, high-strung mother had energy for only one child at a time, and it was never going to be Elodie.
At six years old, Elodie knew what it was to be the last picked up from school or ballet, knew how to make herself a peanut butter sandwich once she got home because her mother was too exhausted tocook, knew to play alone in her room with her stuffed animals. Quiet so she wouldn’t bother anyone.
She is still quiet now, in this garage that smells of mildew with a cracked cement floor stained with oily puddles. Their house is two stories, the living area above while the garage is the only enclosed space below. Even with a battered secondhand couch and the bigger mattress on the floor and the ancient TV, it’s barely livable. Cold pulses relentlessly up from stark cement. The only place to attempt bathing Jude is in the laundry sink.
But she has never been so loved as when he wails in the night, his mouth rooting for her breast, his tiny fists bunched up against her bare skin, his warmth melded to hers until they are one, mother and child, a single heartbeat entwined. She presses her nose to his soft hair and breathes him in. He is all that matters.
No one suggests she should finish school or look for a job, but as Jude grows alert and learns to sit up, then crawl, she begins to plan. She doesn’t want to leave him, not even for a second, but she needs more than this garage. She wants a beautiful house of her own, just for her and Jude.
Applying for government aid makes her anxious about the chance they’ll see her as too young and unfit and snatch Jude away, so when he is eighteen months old, she begins to dance again. Dedication is a thing Elodie finds easy. She digs her fingers into obsession and squeezes until it oozes wet and bloodied between her fingers. Her stomach slims, her muscles grow taut again, her body bends supple and elegant.
Her milk dries up.
Jude rages.
Defiance makes sense: He is learning the shape of what he wants; he is becoming a person and learning to communicate. But she doesn’tunderstand why she is suddenly the enemy. If she picks him up while he’s playing with toys to buckle him into the high chair for dinner, the screaming is catastrophic. If she tries to bathe him, she will be hit and scratched and bit. If she takes him to the playground, the only way to make him leave is to drag him thrashing from the swings in such a purpled rage that other parents stare at her like she’s a kidnapper. He is nearly two, so this is normal. It has to be normal.
