He stiffens, and she realizes her mistake too late.
She should never have mentioned Jude.
His growl is low, ferocious. “He’s my son too. You’re going to kill him.”
Panic hits like ice water to her lungs, and she can’t breathe. Her chest seizes, her mouth goes dry. But she isn’t sure who she is most horrified at: him for knowing what she would do, or herself for thinking of doing it.
“N-no,” she starts. “I would never—”
“You’ll kill him like you killed all the others.” He suddenly surges to his feet, the cry ripping from his mouth so wolfish with fury that she shies backward, cowering against the bed. “You know I never started the adoption paperwork for him. I got a paternity test done when I took him to the doctor. I’m going to get myself on his birth certificate, and then I’ll have fucking full rights to him. You’re so goddamn scared he’ll spill your secrets, you’ve been torturing him to keep him silent.”
“You’re the one killing him!” She screams it at him. “This house. Thispoisonous house. The mold, the lead paint, the monsters in the walls. The house will eat us alive.”
“There is nothing haunting this house!” he roars. “The haunting isyou, Elodie fucking January. The haunting has always been you.”
She needs to block her ears, run, get out of here, get her son. Leave Farrows, never look back. Leave before he can steal her baby.
Molasses dread drowns her chest, and she can barely breathe through the intensity of her need to snatch Jude and run. He has been so quiet all this time. See? He is scared of Bren. He hates Bren.
There is a steady tap-tapping sound and only now she realizes it’s blood running from Bren’s torso and dripping onto the floor. Steady, continuous. He doesn’t seem to notice.
Then he looks over his shoulder. “Where’s Jude?”
The door is still wide open, the bedroom empty but for them. A trail of bloodied footsteps tracks to where Bren stands, but there is nothing else here. Not a whisper remains of Jude.
“All right, we’ll do this your way,” Bren snarls. “Let’s. Play. A. Game. First one to find Jude keeps him.”
16 YEARS AGO
She loves her baby brotherfrom the first moment the swaddled newborn is placed in her arms. Her father hovers beside her in case she fails to hold the baby correctly, or, perhaps, on purpose.
There’s been talk of if she’ll act out over the arrival of a sibling; she’d listened to them discuss it while she crouched beside the fridge instead of playing quietly in her room as she’s been taught. Her mother was fretful and teary as always, forever panicking about accidents and illnesses and how having a six-year-old already is just so much work. How will they cope withanother? The new baby wasn’t planned. Her parents both work constantly, out from dawn till dusk, while Elodie is stuffed into school and childcare, then fed and sent to bed as soon as she gets home. Her parents don’t seem to know what to do with her, how to play with her, and she makes them nervous with her chattering andtwirling about the kitchen. She gives her mother headaches. She puts her father on edge.
Watch me, she is always saying with bright smiles.Are you looking at me?
It is so rare that they are all together. Even when she can see them, it never feels like they see her.
The surprise comes when her mother decides to stay home with the new baby, her father shouldering extra shifts at the warehouse to cover the dip in their finances. It thrills Elodie. She will be able to scramble off the bus and rush inside to homemade cookies and a relaxed, happy mother who is free of the strains of work life and has had all day to play with her children.
This is Elodie’s understanding, how happy they will be now.
When she bursts through the front door with her sweaty curls tangled about her face and her school uniform rumpled from a long day in class, she is beaming as she drops to her knees beside the play mat and tickles the baby with his chubby little thighs and rosy cheeks.
“Did you have a good day with Mama?” She blows a raspberry on his little belly until he squeals with delight.
Then her mother is hurrying into the living room, snatching up the baby. “Go play in your room,” she snaps. “I told you to be careful around him, Elodie. God, youneverlisten.” She is close to tears, as if her daughter has done something heinous.
Instead of just loving her little brother.
It turns out nothing is going to change. There is less of her mother now than before, her body slimming to a whittled stick as she frets and does laundry and rocks the baby to sleep and takes him to carefully chosen playgroups and checkups. He is perfect, her parents are sure to say so constantly, but babies take so much time, so much energy. There is nothing left over for Elodie.
“Your mother is doing her best,” her father will say as he drops her off to ballet class, where she knows she will be the last picked up. Sometimes they forget her completely and Verity has to drive her home. “It’s a lot to take care of two children.”
But Elodie can’t remember asking for much. Just to be tucked in at night, to be taken to the park, to be admired when she is onstage for the end-of-year ballet performance. Neither of her parents remembers to come, and it is Verity who gives her a little rose and gushes over her, a proxy parent who promises she keeps every card Elodie makes for her on the fridge.
Elodie’s mother always throws out the drawings and Mother’s Day cards and party invitations brought home from school. There isn’t space on the fridge beside her baby brother’s first finger paintings.
She is seven and her brother is one when it becomes her job to entertain him. Her mother slips pills into her mouth behind a swallow of water and goes to lie down all afternoon, and Elodie must bustle about after the crawling baby, making sure he doesn’t fall over and bump his head or put his fingers into electrical sockets. Her father is never home, his shifts starting early and ending late, and Elodie learns to make jam sandwiches for herself and put chocolate chips in the baby’s mouth to stop him fussing.
