“Jude?” Elodie rattles the door. She can’t get it open. She can’t get it—
Bren’s hand is on hers, taking the key, fitting it in the lock and twisting while a frenetic roar fills Elodie’s ears.
The smell hits first. Ammonia and vomit. One step into the room, and all she can focus on is the destruction, the hurricane of clothes strewn across the floor and broken toys and knocked-over chairs and thrown bedding.
Then Jude is on her.
He claws up her legs, sobbing frantically, every breath a dry rasp as he starts shrieking. She snatches him to her chest, and he wraps arms and legs around her, his wails pitching higher as she cups his head and tries to soothe him.
She stares at the destroyed room while horrible understanding unfurls.
They left him down here. They locked the door and left.
A strangled sob rips from her throat as she sinks to her knees and tries to peel Jude off enough to check him over, but his screams have turned hysterical, and he clutches her in terror of being put down. Of being left.
“Baby, it’s… It’s okay. Mama’s got you. Mama’s here.” But her voice sounds too weak to pierce his hysteria. His skin burns, fever licking at her fingertips as she smooths the chaos of sweaty, matted curls from his eyes. Vomit and grot cakes his pajama shirt, his underwear stiff with dried urine.
Somewhere, a thousand miles away, Bren is speaking.
Tears blur her eyes as she slowly picks herself up, Jude wrapped in her arms. “Leave.”
“Elodie—”
“Just fuckingleave.” She can’t undo what he’s seen. The despicable, rotten truth of her terrible life is now splattered between them like hot entrails. But she doesn’t have space inside her to care right now.
He needs to go so she can focus on Jude, clean him up, calm him down. Hold him and hold him. This is all her fault. She left him with people sheknewhated him, hated her. Clearly, her mother’s spite won over whatever sympathy her father retained for her, or maybe his love for her has withered to nothing by now. Has Jude even eaten in this whole time? They hate him and they’re punishing him for what she did.
“No.” Bren shoulders into the garage, setting her bag down firmly and then striding to their dismal kitchenette.
Elodie sinks onto the edge of the mattress, ignoring how bad it smells, and keeps Jude tucked hard to her chest. Their hearts beat against each other, panicked and fast, and his crying begins to wane. He’s exhausted, starving, sick. He has no energy for a full-blown meltdown when he’s been screaming for days.
Screaming and no one came for him.
Guilt is a monster devouring her whole. She presses her face into his curls as tears slip down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry.”
Then Bren is back with a warm washcloth, and she takes it in shaking hands. She makes a feeble attempt to wipe some of the dried vomit off Jude’s cheeks, but she’s crying too hard to see anything. Bren blurs in front of her, and then he’s sitting on the mattress beside her, pulling both her and Jude into his arms. She presses her face to Bren’s shoulder and breathes him in, wanting—no, needing—his calm to soothe her.
“We have to call the police,” he’s saying, and there’s a fury in his voice she’s never heard. “This is…criminal. Did your parents just leave him down here alone? This is insane.”
Jude’s small fingers twist into her shirt, and he is so fragile in her arms. There is nearly nothing of him.
“I’ll take you to a hospital,” Bren says. “He’s burning up.”
“No.” Elodie wipes her eyes quickly. “I can’t call the police. I can’t tell anyone. Bren, you don’t understand. If anyone sees how I live, they’ll take Jude from me. I can’t—” Panic tips her voice high. “They’lltake him from me.”
“No one is taking him from us.” He glances around the room and it must have sunk in by now, how much she held back. How miserable and pathetic and stunted her life is, how her five-year-old is not normal.
When she gazes down at Jude, his thumb is in his mouth and he snuggles into her as his sobs turn to hiccupping coughs. He is near catatonic, his eyes half-lidded. This is the first time he’s wanted her with such intensity since he was born.
A harrowed knot in her belly unwinds and there is a wicked, unforgivable moment when she is almost happy.
When she looks up at Bren, her voice cracks. “You’ll miss your flight.”
“Fuck my flight,” Bren says. “I’m not leaving you two here. Actually, I’m not leaving you two at all. You’re coming home with me.”
She knows she should refuse, say this is too fast, remind herself they barely know each other—but how can she? Her life here is over. She knows it as she looks at the destroyed and trashed garage, at the traumatized terror Jude will feel every day he lives here.
She wants nothing more than to get away from the monsters upstairs who want her to suffer like they do.
