She has thought, once or twice, about pushing her thumbs into his eyes as he sleeps, but she’s just being petty.
Instead, she spends each night slipping from their bed to check on Jude. In the dark, she is soft as a ghost, her breath held as she pads across the nursery and adjusts his blankets, kisses his soft cheeks, and then simply stands there as he sleeps, waiting, waiting, waiting. Nothing comes in. Nothing moves.
She puts her ear to the wallpaper and waits for the whispering, but the house has sewn its lips shut, and she is simply a disheveled thing, shaky and so sleep-deprived that she’s imagining things.
In the morning, she picks up her coffee cup and her fingers skitter along the rim, detached and uncontrolled.
She is losing pieces of herself. But she has to get up, she has to care for her son, she has to figure out what is wrong with this house.
“You excited for turkey, little bud?” Bren calls over his shoulder, but Jude has his arms crossed in the back seat, thunderclouds on his face.
“I’m not excited for all the kangaroo jokes your grandpa makes,” Elodie mutters.
“I promise to intervene if you get cornered, my sweetest kangaroo queen.”
Elodie rolls her eyes, her voice grumpy. “Don’t make me exit a moving vehicle.”
“They’re just trying to be welcoming.” But his smile seems slightly forced.
She jerks her sleeves over her frozen hands. “Well, I’m tired. I’m crabby. And your baby is squeezing my bladder.”
“Oh, so he’s my baby when he’s misbehaving.”
“Taking after his dada already.”
He smirks at her as they pull into Ava’s street, and she decides she is determined to hold on to this, to him. Everything has felt so off lately, as if there is something monstrous and rank unfurling in her head, but she has to believe it’s nothing.
At least Jude is enjoying preschool—but she knew he would—and he’s already cross there’s no class today. She forgot about Thanksgiving and stared at Bren for a full blank minute when he started chattering about how Ava is hosting for the Januarys this year. It’s not animportant date for Elodie, and she finds the holiday overall distasteful. She would prefer it if today were normal and she were dropping Jude off at class, where he’ll run to one of the play areas and flop down to build a wooden track for the trains, his frown serious and focused. In preschool, he is among the tallest, the most capable. No one is pressuring him to read, to do math, expecting him to understand when to take his turn or process multistep verbal instructions.
She doesn’t have to blame herself for everything he struggles with anymore. She doesn’t have to worry that he’s being dissected and judged, labeledregressiveanddifficult. It makes sense, even, to let him go backward with toilet training, to stop correcting him when he sucks his thumb.
He is her baby; the terror of him growing up has paused. Again, she can breathe.
They are the last to arrive at Ava’s house, Bren’s fault as he kept fiddling with paint tins instead of getting ready, and they spend a few tense minutes figuring out where to park on this street lined with delicate poplars and other visitors’ cars. It’s a gorgeous house, nearly identical to every one of the neighbors: gabled roofs and gingerbread trims, immaculate lawns and garden beds of docile flowers, hedges in precise cubes, lacy curtains and pert chimneys. Ava greets them with delighted warmth, kissing Elodie on the cheeks, and letting Bren scoop her into the kind of floppy hug that little brothers give big sisters once they’ve grown taller.
This is the thing Elodie has always kept close to her chest: There can be nothing wrong with Bren when he has a lovely sweetheart of a sister who adores him.
“Oh, you all look beautiful,” Ava gushes, ushering them into the foyer. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
They’ve dressed up for it, though of course Ava is the immaculateone in her white pants and a pastel-pink sweater that looks like it cost more than Elodie spends on the week’s groceries. Her husband is a family doctor, and she wants for nothing. Bren is in ironed chinos and a collared shirt under his sweater, while Jude wears denim overalls with a white long-sleeved shirt patterned in little leaves. The knees are filthy already; he can’t stay clean for five minutes. Elodie opted for a too-short knit black dress and tights, her midnight coat buttoned to her throat.
“Look.” Bren holds up his arms in a dramatized show. “No paint splatters this time.”
“And yet.” Elodie pokes the dried paint smear on his elbow and he twists in a circle, trying to see.
“Dammit.” He frowns.
“I’ll forgive you this once.” Ava gives a little laugh and then plucks a wrapped box off the sideboard. “Oh, I meant to tell you! I always gift Poppy something for Thanksgiving, so I bought a present for Jude too.”
Jude hovers behind Elodie, gripping the back of her tights, but he sneaks out to snatch the present and then bolt past Ava toward the living room.
“Jude!” Elodie gives Ava an apologetic wince. “Sorry. I’ll make him come back and say thank you.”
Ava waves her off. “We mothers know when to pick our battles.”
Elodie pinches the crook of her arm so hard it will bruise. Her dress really is too short, the fabric pilling and stretched, and she knows the plum crescent moons beneath her eyes make her look beyond exhausted. Ava pities her; it’s written all over her face.
Be grateful, Elodie hisses to herself as Bren ushers her into the living room of cream couches and thick, fluffy carpets, everything meticulously curated and ornate. It doesn’t matter that she’s falling apart, solong as they all willingly ignore it. His family could be horrible to her, this dark-hearted creature Bren magicked out of nowhere, who stole his affections, his house, his life. But they aren’t. They are always polite to her.
