Frustration magnifies when, in the midst of battling Jude into clothes, Bren breezes past the nursery and says the preschool is closed today. He was notified. He forgot to mention it.
“It’s fine,” Elodie says, murderous. “I love being told things last minute.”
She releases Jude, who runs shrieking from the room in just his underwear and pajama shirt, gripping his rabbit by the ear so it trails behind him like a dying comet. One eye hangs by a single thread that stretches like a lurid, bloody vein.
“I’m taking today off too,” Bren says. “You can nap if you want.”
Elodie tosses the pants she’d been trying to stuff Jude into and makes her voice acidic and bright. “Sure, why don’t I just skip looking after my child today.”
“If only there were two adults in this house and one could watch the kid and the other could get some rest.” His tone stays casual, but avein flexes in his jaw, and she doesn’t like the way he looks at her right then.
Why are you being like this?is the unsaid shout between them.
But she knows why. She should never have felt safe enough to tell him what his twisted, vicious house is doing to her.
She pushes to her feet and stalks from the nursery. “Pity you’re too obsessed with your precious house to be a reliable babysitter.”
It lands like a petty scratch, and he looks hurt, though he says nothing as she storms down to the laundry to put a load on. Soon after, she hears the drill whirr to life in the living room, and it infuriates her that she was right.
She should go demand an update on his plans to fix the rot in the walls, to open up this house’s gangrenous carcass and figure out what is truly, deeply wrong with it.
Instead, she tracks down her son to ruin his life by making him wear pants.
Jude is absolutely feral today, the prolonged absence from preschool and disruption to his normal Monday routine making him impossible to manage. Twice he kicks her. Once he bites. When she finally pins him down to pull a warmer sweater over his head and get him into pants, he screams like he’s being murdered.
She could get Bren to—
She refuses to get Bren.
Unexplainable red welts still swell on the back of Jude’s thighs.
Any more of this and she’ll lose her shit before lunchtime, so she rummages in the kitchen drawer for electrical tape and strides upstairs to make a hopscotch on his nursery floorboards. This is what they need. A game to knit the chasm between them, to remind him that he needs his mother.
Sure enough, he crawls out from behind the dollhouse and watches her work.
She’s on her knees, ripping tape with her teeth, when he tiptoes over and leans against her back. It makes up for the wretched morning they’ve had, the soft weight of him at her spine.
“Not sure if you can play this game with me.” She sits back, skeptical of her wonky boxes. “It’s pretty hard.”
“I can! I can!”
She demonstrates how to do the correct order of jumps. In lieu of a stone, they use a small stuffed frog with beans in its belly to toss into the boxes.
Downstairs the belt sander comes on with a thunderous roar, and Elodie seethes between her teeth. Was Bren going to do that while he offered to “look after” Jude? She alone can be depended on. She alone is what her son needs.
Hopscotch takes more coordination than their games usually require, and Jude’s feet keep landing outside the boxes. He wobbles, restarts, drops the frog, restarts. She demonstrates again, even though all this movement makes her need to pee, and then she holds his hand through a set of hops. He’s stubborn and determined to do it by himself, a recipe for a meltdown if he fails, except somehow he’s engaged enough to keep trying while she sits on the floor and encourages him.
When he makes it through the whole hopscotch, his face lights up and he jumps atop her, his arms around her neck in a strangling hug. But she loves it. She loves him.
The belt sander shuts off and she glances toward the nursery door, only now realizing the entire house has been shuddering under the abuse.
Jude’s brow pinches. “The house hates being hurted like this.”
The way he talks about the house has started to sink hooks into her,leave her mouth dry and her hands shaky. She should shut it down, but it feels too late. Or maybe the problem is she believes him.
“I won’t let the house get you,” she says. “Mamas don’t let their babies get hurt, not ever.”
He cuts a glance at her from the corner of his eyes. “Never, ever?”
