Jude’s hand is tight in Bren’s shirt, and he seems smaller than ever, his pajamas damp and filthy with grot from inside the walls. Bren’s blood is imprinted across his front like a claim, like a baptism. She needs to separate them.
“Come here.” She is needling, begging, nearly crying. “Come on, baby. Please.”
Bren cups Jude’s face, smoothing the damp curls from his eyes, but when he sucks in a ragged breath, blood sluices down his chin.
She just has to outlast him.
Jude flicks his gaze between them, fear melting down his face as he clutches the rabbit to his chest.
“Jude.” She forces herself to sound stern, but her voice shakes on each word with a wretched kind of fury. “I am your mother. I am your fuckingmother, and that—that man is dangerous. Come here. We’ll get away. I—I love you.”
He wriggles out of Bren’s arms, and her heart explodes in her chest. She is elation and she is glory. She is Mother and he is Son and this is how it should be.
She’s holding back tears as Jude tentatively crosses the room, his toes curled up against the cold floorboards. He puts his thumb in his mouth, the stuffed rabbit dangling from the crook of his elbow.
Then he hesitates and glances back at Bren.
She thinks Bren will lunge forward and snatch Jude, but he does nothing. He slumps against the wall, his breathing gone shallow, the ruined half of his face petrifying as blood crusts in the saw’s grooves. He has to understand her son was always going to choose her, the invisible umbilical cord still tying them together, the bloodied purple weight of it wrapped about their throats.
She holds out her arms.
He tiptoes toward her.
Then he pauses, just out of reach and holds out his rabbit. She takes it obediently and stares down at the filthy thing: the matted fur and the torn-out button eye and the rips where the stuffing pokes out. When she looks up, there is only this anxious sort of hope in his face.
“Rabbit loves you,” he says.
She thinks this is the first time he’s ever said that to her. Tears burn her eyes.
Then he runs back across the room and flings himself into Bren’s waiting arms.
She is still kneeling on the floor, staring at the rabbit in her hands, surrounded by sawdust and splintered wood and the scattered tools of a doomed renovation. The hammer lies on the floor before her, discarded. Bren clambers slowly to his feet, still holding Jude. He limps toward the doorway, each step labored, his breathing erratic, but something calm in his eyes. As he passes her, he pauses long enough to cup a hand on her head in a gesture so tender she has to close her eyes.
Those are the hands she loves, cherishes, the strong and capable hands that pulled her from the wreckage of her life. Those are the chapped, calloused hands she’s kissed a thousand times, the hands that have held her and worshipped her and loved her. Those are the hands that tried to fix this house, tried to fix her.
They were always the same, she and the house.
“Do whatever you want.” He sounds so tired. “Take anything. Just don’t come back.”
His hand slips from her hair and he keeps walking, his footsteps echoing toward the front door. He’s murmuring something comforting to Jude. Metal clinks; he’s pocketing his keys, readying himself to leave.
She doesn’t remember deciding to stand, to follow them out to the entryway where he’s trying to unlock the front door with one hand, holding Jude with the other. His depth perception will be skewed with just one eye—or perhaps it is the house, not letting them out.
A fathomless hunger echoes in her chest, and she wonders if it was ever the house that needed to be fed, or if it was only ever her.
She is a black star, exploded, starving, cavernous as she walks toward them.
She still loves him, she knows this, just as she knows he will do everything to take her children from her, both Jude and the unborn baby. They have always been his. The truth of it gnaws down to the marrow of her bones with unstoppable, frantic terror.
Just don’t come back.He’s lying. It will never end here.
“You’re right, you know,” she says quietly, and he turns back to her, keys still in his hands. “I don’t deserve him. Or you. I’m going to do what’s right, I promise.”
The hammer comes up in a swinging arc and smashes into the side of his head.
TWENTY-SIX
The house is inside her;she can feel it pulsing, lead paint streaming down her throat.
