When Bren walks in with Jude on his hip, she’s cleaned up the floor and laid out his clothes. They don’t speak, Bren only pausing to kiss the back of her neck before he takes off whistling like this is another successful morning of parenting.
As soon as he’s gone, she undresses Jude quickly, checking over every inch of his skin while he chews the tattered ear of his rabbit.
She finds it on the back of his thigh, the red mark.
Don’t jump to conclusions.Jude was throwing himself around on the floor when she walked in. He might have done this to himself.
But yet.
Vindicated elation swoops through her gut with such force she feels sickened and ashamed of her relief, but there is now evidence of something wrong. This is a thing she can map with her own eyes, a marker proving she isn’t being delusional or paranoid.
“Did Bren smack you?” She brushes sweaty hair from Jude’s face.
Jude jerks away, his glower petulant.
“You can tell Mama,” she whispers, but he’s more interested in picking up alphabet blocks and hurling them across the nursery.
“I don’tlike itin here.” He rubs at his eyes and won’t look at her.
She dresses him in the Pull-Ups usually kept aside for nighttime accidents and corduroy overalls with a teddy bear on the bib; everything meticulously chosen to make him seem younger. On the way to the car, she carries him so she can whisper that he is four years old again and again in his ear. He should walk, but she wants him clutched close to her chest, unable to squirm away when she kisses his cheek. He goes rigid as she buckles him into his booster seat, and when she holds out the rabbit, he snatches it with sullen ferocity.
Farrows is too small, the drive over too fast. The preschool is a quaint place, clean and tidy, the yard area shaded and the classrooms full of muted earthy colors and soft play mats and attentive teachers with gentle voices. Because it’s his first day, they are more than happy to let Elodie linger, watching Jude sit with the other kids for singing and stories before they move toward tiny tables for craft time. Clearly the staff expect him to be clingy, to cry for her, to flee to her for reassurances about thisstrange new place, but he refuses. He glares at her from across the room and then sucks his fingers before dropping onto all fours and crawling around under the tables—something he would absolutely not get away with in a first-grade class. Here, no one seems surprised.
Here, he is a four-year-old being silly.
After the way he carried on this morning, she should be relieved the transition ended up being easy, no prying him off her at the gate with another meltdown. But her head is filled with static, her thoughts sharpening to something hot and bloodied when she thinks about Bren hitting her child. She has to confront him—but what if he turns it on her? Asks Jude about all the things she’s done to him. Maybe she should just put this aside and continue forward, trust she has been diligent in carving herself free from the bones of her old life, removing excess fat and skin and ligaments.
All she should focus on is keeping Jude safe from everything.
From everyone.
FIFTEEN
She reaches for the heaterand spins the dial to high, her fingers like winter white twigs thanks to the cold. Bren starts to complain, his hand hovering atop hers, but when she shoots him a seething look, he backs off.
“It’s literally a five-minute drive,” he says. “We’re going to roast.”
She holds his gaze, steady and unforgiving. “Good, and when we get there you can transfer me to the oven with the turkey so I can finally be warm for ten goddamn seconds.”
“Well. Guess you are already stuffed,” Bren says.
They stare at each other. One second, two.
Uncertainty flickers in his eyes, and he’s starting to mumble an apology, but the corner of her mouth twitches. His face melts into relief, sunshine filling his eyes as he lets out a bashful, nervous laugh.
“Watch it, buddy,” she says, but her eyebrow is raised in amusement and he’s still smiling.
He slides a hand over the back of her seat as he looks over his shoulder to reverse the SUV from the driveway. She likes his arm like that, the protective strength of it as he then moves to palm the gearshift. Leaves puff around the tires in a cyclone of gold and burgundy as they cruise through Farrows, a reminder autumn is almost over.
She’s missed this, missed him. Their corny jokes and casual ribbing and affectionate laughter. The way their banter turns into kissing, into losing clothes, into both of them breathless and so wholly consumed by each other they can’t imagine a world where this isn’t their life. They are a portrait of love, of starvation: his teeth sunk into her shoulder, hers into his neck, blood all over the floor.
Except there is more to him than that, just as there is more to her.
He hit her child.
Maybe.
Ever since Monday, she’s been quiet, excusing it as exhaustion, which isn’t untrue anyway. Bren has kept staying late at the office, something about a coworker being on vacation so he’s absorbing their workload, but she thinks he’s been avoiding her. In the glossy, cheerful World of Bren, it makes no sense that she’s moody and upset, and it’s easier for him to ignore it and continue on, loud and boisterous and energized, as if everything will right itself in good time.
