Elodie’s fingers slip free of Jude and he overbalances and sits down hard, his surprisedoofmaking his eyes go wide. There, she’s hurt him again. But itwasn’t her faulthe was leaning so far backward and couldn’t steady himself.
“Out to the car, buddy.” Bren slips into a cheerful voice, upbeat and unconcerned, as he maneuvers his briefcase under his arm so he can unlock the front door.
Jude snatches his backpack and runs outside, not a single backward glance at his mother, who is still crouched like a gnarled, twisted thing curtained in matted hair there on the floorboards. All her bones have splintered and been glued together crookedly; there is a wrongness to her, the glossy coating she hid herself under now turned translucent.
“He’smine—” She starts to snarl, but Bren cuts her off.
“I can’t trust you alone with him,” he says simply.
He slams the front door behind him. The lock turns over with a dull, heady thump. The storm that soars to life in her chest is ravaging and murderous and built on teeth, and she is at the front door in a flash, yanking the handle and screaming at him to come back.
“You can’tlock me in here, Bren! Not in this house. Bren.BRENDAN.FUCK YOU.” She slams her hands again and again against the door, but the brass knob only spins. She snatches her hand from it, but it keeps twirling, faster and faster as if to mock her desperation.
She backs up, her heart punching into her ribs, the need to keep screaming ripping through her lungs.
“Stop.Stop, stop, STOP!” Her hands are over her ears, but the doorknob keeps spinning with a snarling rattle until she turns and runs out of the entryway.
She needs to catch hold of herself, stop fueling his conviction in her instability. Everything she does now, every emotion, every fear and agony and anger, only confirms that she has lost her mind and he is the only one left in control. Rage is not an option, even thoughhehas done the unthinkable,hehas caged her.
Her car keys are gone from the little dish on the kitchen bench. A quick run through the house shows the back door has also been locked. Upstairs, she can’t find her phone. She smashes the plate of toast against the wall and screams and screams since there is no one to hear her, to watch with a tired, ironic smile and murmur,There, there, little girl, you are just being hysterical.
She is fury. Molten steel slides down her spine and she feels full of razors, full of brittle desperation todosomething.
If she broke a window and climbed out, what then? She could spend the entire day walking across Farrows to Jude’s preschool, but no doubt Bren will have told them not to let her pick Jude up. And even if she did snatch Jude up, unimpeded, she couldn’t leave town fast enough. Buses don’t even run out of Farrows every day. Her wallet is locked in the car, not that she has much cash since Bren only gives her enough for a few groceries, and he buys everything else with a nonchalant swipe of his card.
There is nothing left to do but continue with her plan.
Prove to him the house is monstrous. Make him see.
She is going to tear open its throat.
It is all up and through her, belief in the house and its vicious games, and it will take Jude next, crack open his fragile chest and gnaw on the tender green sticks of his bones. She alone understands what’s happeningso she, alone, must halt this spiral before she loses everything. Inside her a clock ticks.
She shoves her way into the downstairs bathroom where Bren stores most of his tools and supplies. Fool he, not to lock it. Buckets tip over as she rummages around, tools clattering from chaotic piles and hitting the tile with shrill clangs. She snatches a box cutter blade, a heavy hammer. Then she picks up the circular saw and loops the electrical cord around her arm.
As she sweeps into the living room he has so tenderly finished renovating, she thinks about how she still loves him. It is not such an easy thing to stop, not when they’ve magnetized to each other with such fervent, hungry intensity. His fingers in her hair, her teeth gentle as she tugs at his lower lip. The worshipful, tender way he looks at her, asks if she’s all right, puts his body between her and the world’s sharpest edges.
It is obvious he loves her, but then, he loves this house, so maybe this is his failing, his glorious and radiantly bloody Achilles’ heel. He puts his love in monstrous places.
She can feel the house watching her as she sets down the saw and places a palm to the delicate wallpaper and raises the hammer. A simmered, ugly heat runs through the plaster, blisters her fingertips. Agitation shivers through the floorboards and she can feel it under her bare feet. She is not dressed for this, not in that oversize T-shirt and bulky sweater, her dark curls wild and frightful around her shoulders. If they think her crazed, she willlook the part.
She slams the hammer through the wall.
The house screams.
Plaster dust filters around her, sucks down her lungs. Wallpaper tears as she slashes it with the box cutter.
The paper comes off too easily, shredding in her hands like damptissues the more she yanks and peels. Beneath it, the wet skin of the house weeps tawny fluid, blackish green fur flourishing between the bloodstains in a liquified infection. Wall after wall, she rips and destroys, before she plugs in the saw.
She flicks at the faulty switch a few times, back and forth, back and forth, before the blade screams to life with a whir of metal. A saw like this is better on flat surfaces, not a vertical wall, but she puts her whole weight behind it when she places it against the drywall. It works. The blade howls—or maybe that’s the house.
The wall peels as she saws, flesh parting in pungent slabs, and then there is nothing but blood streaming between drywall and plaster.
There is so much blood.
He fixed nothing; he was never going to. He just covered it up.
She is saturated in it, sawdust and blood and sweat, as she cuts open one wall, then the next. Huge arcing X shapes. An exposing of rot and ruin.
