She slips him into a baby sling she found at a thrift store and walks to her old dance studio. Verity is an old family friend and has taught Elodie ballet since she was six, and if anyone will want to help, it will be her.
Standing in Verity’s office feels different now. An adult confidence coils behind Elodie’s breastbone, and she feels changed by motherhood. She has more teeth.
“I can hire you to teach the youngest class,” Verity says. “You know I adore you, sweetheart, and it broke my heart when you stopped coming to class. Perhaps we can take up private lessons in the evenings to get your certifications.” There is a tremor in Verity’s hands now, an oldness in her soft, glassy eyes as she coos over Jude. “Do you have childcare?”
“I’ll work it out,” Elodie says.
She has no idea how. Anxiety over Jude feels like someone has taken a blunt paring knife to the corner of her mouth and begun to slowly saw, leaving flesh ragged and minced. It hurts every time he bites her with his milk teeth while he still desperately tries to nurse, strikes her with small fists, screams until his little body contorts and she grows terrified that he isn’t breathing. He has yet to sayMama, he doesn’t clap, he spins the wheels of his toy cars but won’t play with them.
When they have more space, she tells herself fiercely,thatis when everything will be perfect.
Her only plan is to put Jude down for his afternoon nap in the garage, to leave the baby monitor with her mother upstairs, and then rush to ballet class to teach for a few hours. But there is nothing but impassive disinterest in her mother’s face as Elodie tries to press a bottle of formula and diapers into her hands, and she knows in her gut this will not work. Nearly two years, and her mother won’t so much as look at Jude.
Shouldn’t shewantto? Shouldn’t holding him make her heart soar, as if she has another chance with the toddler she lost?
Elodie stands in front of the TV so her mother is forced to look at her with Jude fussing on her hip. “Please? I need this job so badly. I know you and Dad give me a little money, but he goes through so many diapers.” She’s babbling now, but she can’t stop. She longs for her mother to listen, toseeher. “And he’s getting so big. He’ll outgrow his crib soon, and I need a better stroller. You won’t have to do much for him, I promise. And besides, don’t you think he looks so much like—”
Her mother peels from the recliner like a cicada leaving its shell and she is before Elodie with a swiftness she didn’t think possible.
She slaps Elodie hard across the face.
A white-hot sting roars across her skin, tears pricking her eyes even as she clamps her mouth shut. Jude goes still in her arms, clutching her with tiny, sticky fists as he stares wide-eyed, trembling at the shock of such violence.
Wretched frustration fists in Elodie’s throat.
Her mother is shaking, her lips gone white. “Don’t you dare.”
It takes everything in Elodie to keep her mouth a straight line, to ignore the inferno that will deepen into a bruise later across her cheekbone. She says nothing, only strides quickly into the kitchen while her mother slumps back into her recliner and begins to softly weep.
In the kitchen, Elodie rummages in the drawer where her parentskeep their prescription meds. It is easy to pocket the sleeping pills. Once safely back in her garage, Elodie puts ice on her cheek and then crushes half a sleeping pill and mixes it in his milk. He fusses, but she wrangles him into a newborn position and rocks and hums until he drinks the whole bottle. His eyes are blackened pools of midnight as he stares up at her with a ravenous love, and she cries in relief to see it. He pats her swelling cheek with tiny hands and then reaches up to play with her earring, her lips, her eyelashes. In this moment, she is infinite, her love for him an ocean that could fill the universe.
It is so easy to teach class later that afternoon. She puts makeup over her purpling cheek and goes through the ballet positions with her class of tiny preschoolers as if she’d never missed a day of dance. Jude is strapped in his stroller and left in the corner as he sleeps and sleeps. Everyone says what a good baby he is, what a good sleeper.
What a good mother.
THIRTEEN
“Let’s play a game,” shewhispers.
This is how he understands things best. It’s the only way he can take hold of a concept with both hands without dropping it, without spiraling, without ending up on the floor sobbing his little heart out because he doesn’t understand,he doesn’t understand, and it frightens him.
Sometimes she thinks it will destroy her, the way everything seems to hurt him. She can’t bear it, her heart a shredded mess of a thing in her chest, and all she wants to do is curl about him like his angel of protective vengeance.
Mothers should be willing to die for their children, but she could not die alone; she would keep him tucked tight to her breast as they took their last breaths together. They would be buried with foreheadstouching, her hands forever cradling his tiny face as the first shovelfuls of earth hit their naked, bleached-white bones.
Bren will never understand how much she loves her son; she doesn’t need him to.
She just needs Jude to be safe.
She will make him safe.
That is her plan for this week Jude is out of school: the two of them alone during the day, her fingers finding ways to slip inside his head and remold his brain like warmed clay. She is doing what is best for her son.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, I call over…” She’s sitting in the midst of his nursery, surrounded by a chaotic whirlwind of toys, everything out of its box and pulled from the shelves as he builds a world for himself. “Little boys who are four years old.”
The game doesn’t typically work for two people, but she twists rules to suit her.
He looks up, puzzlement furrowing his brow. “I’m six.”
