He leans in suddenly, banging their heads together, and she yelps a curse.
“You hurt me,” he says simply. “All the time.”
You hurt me more, she wants to scream, but she can’t. She’s the mother.
She buckles his overall straps with shaking hands.
As the turkey is carved,juices sluice out around the knife, pink and viscid, and Elodie’s stomach turns over. Conversation has grown loud and animated down the long, extended table as dishes are exchanged hand over hand and nostalgic stories turn to sports and then politics. Cranberry sauce slops onto undercooked meat like tiny blood clots, and the stuffing is full of teeth. No one else seems to care. Only Elodie is sickened, ostracized, revolted by the food.
Jude sits on a cushioned chair beside her, refusing his sparse helping of mac and cheese in favor of biting the edge of the tablecloth. He’s overstimulated by the noise, she can tell, and it’s on the tip of hertongue to whisper to Bren that she’s unwell and he needs to take them home.
But as she looks at him sitting across the table, silent after three attempts to slide into the conversation between his grandfather and uncles, she decides they should stay. Something about the slump of his shoulders, the single pea he’s making a half-hearted attempt to spear with his fork, feels vindictively satisfying. She tries to quell these feelings, hates herself for letting them spill through her chest, but her own pain feels so acute and bright and livid at the moment, she only wants to share it.
He suffers beautifully, a renaissance painting of a young god slashed down the middle with a bloodied knife.
Jude slips from his chair and she hisses at him to get back, but he trots over to Bren and starts rubbing his cheek against Bren’s sweater. She tries to make a motion for Bren to send him back, but she’s ignored. Bren pulls Jude onto his lap and forks up the soft, sweet turkey meat, hovering it in front of Jude’s mouth.
“—young Brendan here would know a thing or two about faulty tools,” his grandfather has just said with a jovial laugh. “What was it, my boy? The circular saw that kept turning itself on.”
Bren gives a weak smile. “Uh, yeah, but I fixed—”
A gruff uncle cuts him off. “High time you gave up on that house. That sort of work is for a skilled and competent carpenter.”
Jude accepts the forkful of turkey. Then he starts bouncing on Bren’s legs until he’s offered more.
He seems starved, feverish in his haste to stuff his cheeks with food. Lurid blood runs down his chin in a vermillion line as he chews, wriggling on Bren’s lap to show his pleasure.
All she can think of is the way Jude punched her stomach, how heheadbutted her only minutes ago, how stiff and violent his kicks are when he’s deep in the wildest, most ferocious parts of his meltdowns.
She already can’t hold him. If he eats, if he gets stronger—
He can’t. She can’t bear it.
He needs to be small, her son, her baby,her baby.
The room is suddenly too hot, the assault of sound against her head like a pickax splitting skull. Sweat slicks her upper lip, her neck, her eyes feel glossed over with a mossy coating until she is too far out of this room, this world, to think of coming back.
Bren feeds him more turkey, oblivious, raising a napkin to wipe the foul, bloody sewerage spilling between Jude’s teeth.
All she can think is how the three of them won’t survive each other.
1 YEAR AGO
She thinks nothing of himat first. They don’t say hello; they only make brief eye contact from across the room, because her attention is on surviving this event for the next hour so she can flee back home to her son.
It’s one of the few times she has left him with a sitter, though it’s only the fourteen-year-old girl who lives over the fence and is primed to let Jude sit in her living room watching TV with her own younger siblings. Nothing bad will happen so long as Elodie is only away for a few hours and he remains engrossed in a film and fed crackers when he starts whining. Elodie put him in a Pull-Up, made sure he had his stuffed rabbit, and told the teenager she’d get forty dollars, just please,please,don’t take your eyes off him.
He is five now. He is inquisitive and quick and unmanageable. He is a comet exploding between her cupped palms.
The one suffering most from their severing is Elodie.
All evening, she keeps a hand fluttering at her throat, feeling spores of terror taking root deep in the nubs of her lung tissue, blossoming gangrenous and foul the longer she is away from him. She feels like this every time she leaves him at preschool, every minute she’s working at the dance studio, every second she can’t look up and catch sight of his busy little self, pottering around with his toys, ignoring her in favor of his own world. If he’s not within arm’s reach, she panics.
One hour. She promised Verity she’d stay this long.
The dance studio is celebrating twenty years, and Verity booked tables at the local yacht club for a party, inviting the staff and their families to celebrate. The idea of bringing Jude made Elodie feel physically ill, so she came alone, wearing a little black dress she bought for the occasion. She has retreated awkwardly to the corner of the balcony overlooking the ocean, her fingers sweaty around the flute of champagne, watching everyone else mill around with bright conversations and laughter. She is reminded, as she looks at the other teachers in their silk dresses, their husbands in dark suits with expensive watches, their children docile and well behaved, that she only has a job out of charity.
She, the high school dropout, the one who never went on to study dance at a professional level, who watched her future slip away somewhere between teaching toddlers ballet and desperately coaching Jude to speak, to stop eating dirt, to take a nap, to stopscreamingat her because something was hurting him and she didn’t understand what it was.
