The second blow cracks through skull as if all this time he had been made of porcelain, a doll in a dollhouse.
There’s no scream, just a disjointed moan as his body spasms and he tumbles forward to crash into the closed front door. Jude slips from his hands and hits the floorboards, scuttling sideways as Bren collapses to his knees and then, finally, slumps to the floor.
Jude reaches out small, shaking fingers and touches Bren’s cheek. Terror pools in his eyes and she hurries to scoop him up. She presses him into the corner of the entryway under the coat hooks and lifts his hands to cover his eyes.
“Stay like this.” She smooths his filthy curls, hums the soft line of a lullaby to soothe him. “Don’t look, okay?”
All around her, the walls grow tighter, their hunger rabid and ravenous as they track her limping to the storage bathroom to gather supplies. When she hits the hall light switch, this time it turns on, and the brilliance of the glare is a blinding slash over her eyes. She blinks away glossy spots and forces herself to focus.
She feels nothing but the ghostlike echo of long-faded screams, sees nothing but her parents turning away from her, blame coating her ribs and flooding her lungs, her baby brother’s immortalized smile.
It’s almost over. She can rest soon.
A brilliant, horrifying pool is in her mouth, metallic and thick, and it’s only when she walks back into the entryway with a handsaw dangling in one hand that she realizes the taste is his blood. Her face must be flecked with it.
“Keep your eyes closed, Jude.” Her voice is stern because this time she needs him to do as he’s told.
She drags Bren’s body away from the door and spreads him out on the entryway floorboards, his limbs floppy and warm, his eyes wide open as he stares into an infinity of nowhere. Blood oozes from his split skull and stains the floorboards in irrevocable ways. His shock is calcified, majestic. It makes sense, if he thought about it from her perspective, how one of them had to stay here and feed the house.
She thumbs each eye closed and kisses his eyelids.
The handsaw is an old thing, teeth gummed with rust, and she isn’t sure she’s ever seen him use it. He likes electric things, powered things, he likes to feel in control.
As she saws into her golden sunshine boy, she thinks he’d understand why she needs to put pieces of him in all the walls. He would choose this anyway, wouldn’t he? To be always with his beloved house. It only ever hated her.
When she rests the saw on his shoulder, she feels the baby kick,just once. It should be a relief—look, there he is, he was only sleeping—but all she can think of is that the baby is fighting for room among all the ghosts she has swallowed.
A slow, honeyed tiredness pulls around her as she works, relentless, focused, her hands soaked with a red so dark she can no longer see the color of her skin. Twice she looks up to check that Jude isn’t watching, and he still cowers under the coats, his hands over his eyes, though his fingers flutter a few times as if maybe he has peeked. He is still saturated in Bren’s blood from being held. No sound escapes his mouth.
He deserves a better mother than her.
There is so much blood, slippery and hot as it gushes from separated limbs and flows across floorboards in a ceaseless ocean. She kneels in it, soaks in it, her coat darkening to shades deeper than midnight as it absorbs Bren. The saw catches a few times on cartilage, on bone. Stringy tendons wrap through the teeth, and she has to pick them out before positioning a knee on Bren’s chest for better leverage to keep sawing.
Breathing hard, she picks up the first piece of her husband and takes it to the hole in the wall that first swallowed Jude. She slides it inside and waits for the house to preen in triumph. To eat.
But there’s nothing. No sound, no movement.
Around her, the house feels dead.
It occurs to her later, when she’s almost finished and there is so much of Bren’s blood in her mouth, that they’re still playing hide-and-seek.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The front door swings openwithout protest.
She pauses on the porch as she locks it behind her, struggling because her fingers are stiff and full of splinters from the saw handle, and because Jude is a deadweight on her hip. Dawn has broken the sky with a sharp slice, a bruised persimmon glow to the horizon that feels like condemnation. It clears as she drives, the sky almost cloudless, the blue frostbitten and gorgeous.
She wipes her hands on her coat before she slides behind the wheel, but blood rims her fingernails and the tissues she used to wipe her face probably did futile battle against the mess. A hot shower is needed, a solid scrubbing. Later. To do that now would be to think of Bren, his mouth warm and sultry on the back of her neck as the shower’s steam envelops them both, she leaning into him with easy confidence because he would never let her fall.
He stalked her, she reminds herself. He obsessed over her, he felt owed, he waited until she was too desperate to do anything but cling to him to keep from drowning.
She hates him, but she also pulls out every soft memory she has of him and sews them into her skin.
The drive is quick, Farrows sliding past in a blur of dying autumn leaves and sleepy homes. She turns down the street lined with poplars and parks in front of the quaint house that looks made of gingerbread and white chocolate, a soothing lure to it that makes her feel calm as she unbuckles Jude from his booster seat and carries him slowly up the garden path. A headache drums in the back of her skull, but it feels like a lifetime since Bren cracked her head. She can ignore it. She can push through.
Her black coat feels glued to her skin, stiffening, but she can’t imagine taking it off. Wearing it is like being held by him.
Exhaustion has set in as she rings the doorbell, and she tries to remember what time it is—seven o’clock, eight?—and if she will inconvenience anyone by waking them. Cheerful music from children’s cartoons can be heard sifting under the door, and she smells coffee, luscious and freshly roasted. It gives her a heady rush, reminding her how long it’s been since she ate, how the baby will suffer if she starves herself.
