Then there is the scream.
It is blood-chilling, it is eternal, it cuts right through Elodie’s heart with blades of ice and she is no longer a little girl but rather a creature curling in on herself with terror at this sound. She flies into the hallway and freezes outside the bathroom door.
Her mother is on hands and knees, her hands plunged into the tub as she pulls the toddler from among the bobbing plastic toys. He was face down in the water.
No, that isn’t right. He was sitting there playing before. He was fine when she left him. It was only a few minutes. She only meant to nurse the bite mark and calm herself down and then come back. She was coming back.
She wouldn’t leave him, not forever.
Fright has rooted her to the ground as she watches her mother scream and scream with the little boy in her arms. She starts pumping at his chest, hitting his back, but no spluttering coughs come. There is nothing, nothing,nothing. When her mother looks up, there is pure black hate boiling from her eyes, and her snarl is all animal.
“Youfucking let him drown! You letmy baby drown!”
Elodie runs, tears already sheeting down her face, because she doesn’t understand. She was only gone for a few minutes.
She doesn’t understand.
In the kitchen, she fumbles for the phone, trying to remember what she was taught in school about emergencies and accidents. Her leotard is still wet from her brother’s splashes, and in her mind, he isstill in the tub, playing merrily before he’ll screech for her with his little baby voice.
Ewo-dee!
Her hands shake as she punches in triple zero and holds the phone to her ear, squeezing herself tight and hard against the wall as her heart skitters into her mouth.
A deep, wretched wailing begins in the bathroom and goes on and on.
“Hello, what is your emergency?”
“I—I—I need you to come right now.” Elodie clutches the phone with both hands, her stomach doing loops, her voice wobbly. “My little brother needs help. P-p-please.”
“Okay, sweetheart, we’re going to send someone right over to you. Can you tell me where you are?”
Elodie is already plowing forward, giving her address and her parents’ full names, steadying herself on the quick deliverance of information like she’s been taught. The dispatcher has a calm, soothing voice, and when they say, “You’re doing a good job, sweetheart,” her heart squeezes in relief.
Excuses tangle on her tongue, and she wants so badly to place them before this stranger in a bid for forgiveness. But she doesn’t want to be hated.
So she cannot be the one blamed.
“My mum said she was giving him a bath”—she is talking too fast—“but she just left him in there. And now he’s—he’s not breathing. I wouldn’t have left him. I would never. He’s just a baby.”
“An ambulance is coming to you right now. Can your mother talk to me?”
Elodie flicks a glance toward the bathroom, where her mother is folded in half on the tiles with sick, wretched sobs. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s your name?”
“Elodie,” she says. “I’m eight. It’s—it’s not my fault.”
“You’re not in trouble, Elodie,” the dispatcher says, voice calm and kind.
Tears slip down her cheeks and catch in the corners of her trembling mouth.
“What’s your little brother’s name?”
“Jude,” she says. “His name is Jude.”
TWENTY-FOUR
When she first realized shecould control her son with a simple game, he a malleable puppet and she the puppet master, she almost cried with relief. Dread slid from her bones and pooled on the floor like a bloodletting. She could breathe again. This was the answer to all the fights with him, the pleading and bribing and coercing, the meltdowns and head-banging and sleepless nights. This was the way to make him love her again.
