She turns her back to them and begins to walk down the garden path.
If he is taken from her, she will die; the truth of that has beaten itself into her skull from the moment she pulled him from inside her and looked at him lying wet and smeared in her blood on the bathroom tiles. She was his house.
But she is not a house anyone can survive in, not when peeling back her skin will show bones ribboned with rot, horror sunk so deep into her marrow that there is no separating her from it.
If she chooses to leave him, she thinks it will be the first time she has actually been a good mother.
She walks quietly to the car and pulls open the door, his screams echoing down the street as they escalate higher and higher.
“MAMA!MAMA!”
On the porch, Ava wavers, her mouth open as if she means to call Elodie back, but obvious panic is wrapped so tight about her tongue, she can only choke. Jude thrashes in her arms, and her attention is taken up by trying not to drop him.
Elodie slams her door and starts the engine.
The car slips easily from the driveway. In the passenger seat sits his wallet—she will empty his cards at an ATM and then later abandon the sedan in a different city. Jude’s rabbit lies on its side, its single button eye locked on her with eerie reproach. Blood splatters its deflated belly, as if it has been shot.
When she glances in the rearview mirror, she sees Ava lose her gripon Jude, unused to the wily wriggle of his limbs. She runs after him as he bolts into the street. It hits Elodie with swift, cutting force, how she didn’t stop to explain to Ava what Jude likes to eat, his bedtime routine, how he will want milk in a duck cup, that he plays by lining up his toy animals. She didn’t mention the skills he’s regressed on, the potential lead poisoning in his blood. She didn’t explain that he loves to play games, he loves to win, and he will be cuddly and affectionate when it suits him, when he’s ready.
She didn’t tell Ava how he is perfect; he always has been.
Through her closed windows, she can hear his wretched, panicked wailing. For her, over and over and over.
“MAMA.”
As much as she terrifies him, she is all he knows.
She will never be more loved than here in their darkest moment, and she will forever be listening to the cadence of his scream in the back of her head. If it ever begins to fade, she will cut herself open from throat to navel and plunge her hands into the decayed cavity of her soul until she finds those screams again.
Ava runs onto the road and snatches Jude up, holding him tight as he wails and struggles, his hand outstretched toward his mother’s fast-disappearing car.
Elodie presses her foot on the gas and then she has followed the bend in the street. The car picks up speed and poplar trees race away beside her. Tears cut free of her hollowed-out eyes and run a soft line down her cheek. Inside the car, there is silence.
She can’t hear him anymore.
EPILOGUE
The baby is born inthe upstairs bathroom, a slippery creature come too fast and small, so slick with clotted blood that she thinks he’s dead. She bursts into tears. Blood pools in the cupped palms of her hands like cherry syrup, and the mess of him, of her, feels so like that day in the house in Farrows that she takes hours to stop saying “My baby, where is my baby? I lost my baby.”
Every waking moment those words have lived in her head, and it feels surreal that they finally are a lie.
She has her baby again.
In dance, there is a carnivorous demand for repetition until perfection is reached. She embraced the concept, even as a child not yet allowed the coveted pointe shoes or stiff, elegant tutus. Practice, do it again. Do it again until you are flawless. There is loveliness in the simplicity of it,and it’s easy to ignore the fact that trying again a thousand times often left her exhausted, her insides carved out and bones picked clean. She told herself then, as she tells herself now, the cost is immaterial.
If she cannot hold the pose, if she cannot leap high, if she cannot pirouette enough times, she will simply try again.
And again.
And again.
She will be a better mother this time; she will be perfect.
It feels uncomplicated to unmake herself, to leave bloody, carved-out nubs of who she once was in different cities as she slips through them. Before the baby is born, she finds shelters for domestic abuse victims, and she always leaves in the night before her case is looked into properly. With the money emptied from ATMs, she takes herself to a city so large she is lost in a hurricane of people. She is nameless and unwanted and unseen.
With hair cut short and put in bunches, wearing thrift store overalls and chunky falling-apart boots covered in doodles, she looks nineteen. She calls herself Rose and loses her Australian accent and convinces a little Italian grocer on the corner to let her clean shelves and sleep in the storage room.
The owner is a sweet old woman with white hair and a tremor in her hand that reminds Elodie of her dance teacher. There is tenderness to their transaction, a warmth growing between them as Elodie goes from mopping floors to sitting on a floral sofa in the cozy apartment above the grocery store, sipping tea and breathing in the smell of herbs and flowers growing from the window boxes. It takes next to nothing to win over Maria, to position herself as this tragic girl who has been knocked up by an abusive boyfriend and thrown out of her home by her parents. The story stays simple, the devastation of the unsaidpulling at heartstrings and turning eyes glassy as a gnarled hand rests tenderly atop Elodie’s skeletal one.
