“Okay,” she whispers, and Bren’s face breaks into a relieved smile. His eyes are so bright, she realizes he’s about to cry.
“Do you want to take any stuff?” he says. “You don’t have to. I’ll buy you anything. Everything.”
“Just my suitcase. And my…” She can’t think. “Legal papers. Jude doesn’t have a passport.”
“We’ll get a motel and figure it all out.”
She stands, swallowing hard. “I need to go upstairs for a minute.”
He catches her elbow. “But you don’t need—”
“Wait for me.” And then she’s pulling away from him, hoisting Jude onto her hip as she hurries out of the garage and upstairs.
No plan exists in her mind, just this throbbing, otherworldly ragethat streaks across her vision. She is vengeance, she is a goddess of hate, and she shoulders through the dilapidated screen door and into the hovel of a kitchen.
The TV blares from the living room, and everything is covered in a tacky layer of grime. A pot of curried soup boils on the stove, set to a low simmer, and the fact they’ve bestirred themselves to cook while locking up her son and drowning out his screams with the TV makes her see red. Then an odd calmness settles over her, strange and detached. She thinks about walking in there and yelling at them. Smashing the TV. Losing her mind and seeing what they’d do. Whether they’d even react.
She presses her mouth to Jude’s soft, babyish cheeks and kisses him again and again. “Close your eyes.”
Her parents don’t even know she’s come upstairs.
It is such an easy thing to do, pulling the rat poison out from under the sink next to the bleach and carpet cleaners. She rips open the packaging and pours half into the frothing soup. The curry should be strong enough to cover any odd taste and her mother, at least, is usually high on the meds she takes to numb her grief anyway.
So Elodie pours in the rest.
She settles the lid back on the pot.
Jude’s face is buried against her. He wouldn’t understand anyway, what it is that she has done.
When she closes the screen door behind her, quiet so the hinges don’t squeak, she walks quickly down the stairs. Her heartbeat is a violent hurricane in her chest, yet she feels calm, steadied. She almost feels safe.
Bren is waiting, his eyes worried.
She walks right into his arms.
TWENTY-ONE
The switch on the circularsaw is faulty.
It turns on by itself sometimes, even the Januarys commented on that at Thanksgiving, their tones blithe and mocking at the boy trying to fix an impossibly ruinous house.
Trying to fix an impossibly ruinous girl.
The saw has turned itself on.
She did nothing wrong.
She simply watches as the house screams and screams around them and blood like clotted sour milk hits her face and runs down her cheeks as the hot tears she cannot cry.
There is a monster in the basement; she has been here all along. Immortalized in mold-furred photos, her eyes bitten out by black rot.
If they ask, she can explain what happened—a faulty saw, the switch turned itself on. A faulty saw, the switch—
your fault
the
switch
