Page 89 of You Did Nothing Wrong
She has lost so much weight that the baby seems like a growth eaten into her.
The only time she slips up is at night as she sleeps on a camp cot in Maria’s spare bedroom, when she cries out in her sleep with frantic terror.
I lost my baby. Where’s my baby—
She wakes sobbing, nothing to comfort her but a nasty, foul stuffed rabbit, the only thing she bares teeth over if anyone suggests getting rid of it. She washed out the blood, but the fur is still stained stiff, an odor of decay lingering. But when she presses it to her nose, she still thinks she can smell him. Babyish and sweet. She cries for hours into that rabbit; she kisses its nose a thousand times and pretends it’s him.
After these nightmares, Maria often brings in hot milk with nutmeg, her voice soothing as she reminds Elodie the baby is fine.Look, feel him kick. He’s right there.
Nothing is wrong.
Elodie has done an immaculate job, it seems, of papering over the tremulous rot rooted deep in her core. She even believes it; there is nothing wrong if no one else can see it.
The boy is the only thing she didn’t count on and doesn’t know what to do with. Maria’s grandson—anxious as a rangy starved fox, with feather-fine scars on his wrists. He comes into the grocer every few days to help, to take inventory and restock shelves, and he is careful of Elodie. Terrified of her, she realizes, but also entranced. At twenty, he has dropped out of college and is trying to recover from something Maria only refers to as The Incident in very gentle tones. She fusses over him, feeds him sun-dried tomatoes and heaped platters of fettuccine, and shewinks whenever she catches Elodie giving him long, measured glances out of the corner of her eye.
It would not be hard to convince this boy to kiss her; she knows that. As they shelve cans of tomatoes and green beans together, their palms brush. She makes him laugh with a self-deprecating joke, and later she sees him sketching her in a tiny pocketbook he usually fills with watercolor flowers.
When the baby starts coming, she tells no one. She screams into a towel and panics that everything feels wrong this time, the baby tearing her open with teeth of splintered wood, its skin covered in a floral wallpaper beneath the blood. When Maria bursts into the bathroom in a panic, Elodie squats in the tub, holding the gnarled creature with his twiggy limbs, his cries filled up with sawdust and curls of dried paint.
Blood is a black pool beneath her, the stream steady, but she knows it’s not hers. It feels, it tastes, like Bren’s.
Going to a hospital is out of the question, and she is delirious and incoherent as she begs Maria not to call an ambulance. In the end, they settle on Maria’s friend, a matter-of-fact midwife, who stitches Elodie up and scolds her for this nonsense, making her promise to see a doctor. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest. Elodie can’t. They will find out who she is and they will steal her baby.
No one will take this baby; no one will touch him.
She is vicious in her protection of him, she is a wolverine howling, a monster all claws, and there is nothing that will part her from this thing she has made, that will save her.
He is perfect, of course, snuggled against her breast as she nurses him in the tiny back bedroom, sunlight drifting lazily over the herb pots and dappling her face in summer’s golden freckles. A gently waving fist, that newborn smell, eyes turning blue as the ocean—she is obsessed with him.
An anxious trip to the library’s computers to research the effects of lead poisoning left her breathless with fear that he would be born too early or born blue, but he’s fine. She cups his tiny skull in both her hands and rubs the tip of her nose against his and he mewls, gummy mouth open and rooting for her. Love for him drowns her.
But she isn’t surprised when, in the darkest hours of the night, a body curves about hers in the bed, a question mark that fits against her spine with comforting warmth. His hand slides over her empty belly to where the baby is nestled in the crook of her arm. She can feel the wisp of his giddy sigh on the back of her neck.
She thought he would haunt her with vindicated fury, driving nails into her throat with blows struck from a rusted hammer. But he is so tender with her, his mouth on the back of her neck in tentative adoration. He was always going to love this baby. He wanted nothing more than a family.
When she wakes, her pillow is soaked with tears and the bed is empty of him except for his outline in the rumpled sheets.
It takes a few weeks before she ventures downstairs to the store and begins her usual duties, dusting, sweeping, restocking shelves. Maria shoos her away with loving indignation. Everyone mistakes her for Maria’s granddaughter, and Elodie never corrects them. For the first time in months, she is almost happy as she rings up purchases and fits a bouquet of fresh parsley into the jam jar by the register. She adores the coziness of small family-owned businesses, the way customers are known by name and Maria is always popping out to do good deeds. There is such kindness here. Elodie can only hope the stain of her goes unnoticed for as long as possible. If her case ever made it to the news, no one ever says anything.
The baby is cocooned against her chest in a newborn sling, the top of his soft head in kissable range, his cheek warm against her. Milkysweetness layers his skin, and when he stirs, she will abandon everything and feed him. But for now he is content, and she is too.
The grandson has finished washing windows and comes in with a sodden T-shirt, hair stuck to his forehead in sweaty whorls. This early, the store lies empty and quiet except for the radio humming Italian news.
A small, private smile tugs at the corner of her mouth as she watches the boy. She looks away. He sets down his buckets and wanders over to the register, where she’s fiddling with a basil leaf, turning it over and over; the green is the same as his eyes.
“Baby’s asleep?” He tilts his head, trying to catch a glimpse around the sling.
When Elodie breathes, the baby’s lungs fill. She is tethered to him; she is his heartbeat, his lungs, his universe.
“He’s a good sleeper.” She puts the basil leaf in her mouth and looks straight into the boy’s eyes.
He blushes and leans on the counter, tapping mindlessly as he steals quick glances at her. She is beautiful yet ribboned in darkness, an enigma, a dance, the whole night sky.
“You never told me his name,” the boy says.
Time skips a beat, pauses, breathes out. She nuzzles her face against the beginnings of his downy black curls.
“Jude,” she says. “His name is Jude.”
