Mom’s eyes flicker to the bathroom door. “No. Not like that.”
They both know he’s done other things. They’ve lived through them and watched them happen, and if they’ve never spoken about it before at length, not really, then now’s probably too late.
“How long is he in jail? Or, I mean…is he in jail?”
Everything she says sounds like a question, but that’s because she has no idea how any of this works. The Lifetime movies show the woman getting abused and fighting back, and then they skip to the part where she’s powerful and beautiful and running her own business and finding new love. They don’t linger on the day after, when there are new holes in the wall and everyone is waiting to hear bad news.
“I don’t actually know.” Her mom looks down at her phone. “They said he would go to a county facility. For the Violence. I don’t think there’s a test yet, but they want to keep these people isolated so it doesn’t spread.” She doesn’t look up as she says it.
And Ella knows why. It’s because her mom knows her dad doesn’t have the Violence. What she doesn’t know is that Ella also knows this because Ella has seen it firsthand and her mother has not.
“So what do we do?”
God, her mom looks so young sometimes. Ella knows she was born when her mom was only twenty, which means she’s only thirty-seven now, which is a lot younger than all the other moms at school. Her mom glances around the kitchen as if looking for answers, as if she’s lost.
“I don’t know. You guys can stay home from school today. Mental health day. Three-day weekend. We’ll figure it out by Monday, I guess. We can just…” She smiles, and it reaches her eyes. “Chillax.”
But it’s awkward, the concept of chillaxing. They finish breakfast and put their dishes in the sink, and Olaf eats his food like a fucking weirdo, picking up one piece at a time, dropping it on the floor, and then eating it. He’s always done that, and they have no idea why. He’s just super inbred, but Brooklyn loves him. When he’s finally done eating, Brooklyn picks him up like a baby and carries him over to the couch, where Mom is queuing up a Disney movie from under a cozy blanket. Ella kind of wants to join them; they see these movies in the theater without her, these days, but she never wants to admit that she’d like to come along, too. She pauses near the stairs, hoping for a clear invitation.
“I’ll make some popcorn,” Brooklyn says, sliding out from under the blanket; she can never sit still. Ella and her mom exchange a look; microwave popcorn is the only thing Brooklyn knows how to cook, and they’re not hungry, but it looks like they’re about to eat popcorn. Olaf is being a little douche, growling at Mom and lunging like he’s trying to attack the remote.
“Ouch! Cut that out, you little—”
Ella is walking over to help when her mother leaps to her feet. Olaf flops off the sofa and scrambles on the floor with a yelp, but Ella’s attention is on her mother.
She’s—something is wrong.
Ella has seen this look before.
Cold seeps down her spine.
“Mom?”
No answer. Ella is half hidden by the open bathroom door, and she watches, frozen and terrified, as her mother’s pinprick eyes focus on the ground at her feet. As if in slow motion, she raises her foot and slams it down. Ella’s grateful that she can’t see what’s happening on the other side of the couch as her mother stomps again and again. The sound is terrible, the snap of bones and the thud of meat. Olaf only gets one whimper out before he goes silent.
“Mommy, is Olaf okay?”
Shit.
Ella was so busy watching her mom that she forgot about her little sister making popcorn in the kitchen on the other side of the room divider. Luckily—luckily? Luckily?—her mom is still stomping on what’s left of Olaf, so Ella darts around the door, her sock feet slipping on the tiles, and uses the island to propel herself toward Brooklyn. She grabs the little girl with one arm and bolts for the door to the garage, flinging it open and immediately realizing her error.
The garage door is closed.
And her mom has the Violence.
Not like her dad or Hayden, but the actual disease. Whatever it is.
The real Violence.
The kind that left chunks of brain and skull all over the F hall bathroom.
Ella presses the garage door button, but it catches, because it always catches, and she knows that any moment her mom is going to tire of stomping on the dog and look for something bigger to kill.
“Ella, what’s wrong? You’re hurting me.”
Brooklyn squirms in her grasp, and Ella lets her down easy on her feet. She pushes Brooklyn behind her and grabs for the old rake, stepping backward as the garage door slowly ratchets upward.
“Climb under the garage door and wait for me by the mailbox,” Ella says, her voice rough.
“Why? What’s going on? Where’s Mommy? What’s wrong?”
“Just do it!”
“But I’m not supposed to go near the street—”
“Go, Brookie! Now!”
She never raises her voice to her sister, not ever. Brooklyn’s voice catches on a little sob of betrayal, and she scurries under the garage door and into the yard. It’s a gray day, just a little drizzle, and Ella backs into the rain, holding the rake, waiting for whatever has taken over her mother to run outside, thirsty for blood.
A few moments later, her mom appears, one hand to her head, looking confused.
“Honey, what’s going on? What’s with the rake? I thought we were going to watch the movie?” Mom stands in the door, her sock feet coated in blood and gore, and crosses her arms over her chest with a little frown. “It got chilly, didn’t it?”
“Mom, are you in there?” Ella asks, rake at the ready.
“In where?”
“Are you…normal?”
Chelsea chuckles and runs a hand through her hair. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
Ella lets the rake fall to the ground and points at her mother’s feet.
13.
Chelsea sits at her perfect kitchen table, staring into her box of Dream Vitality bottles. They were supposed to solve everything. That’s what she was promised. For a while, she believed it. But now, there is no sunbeam, no perfect cup of blond coffee, no sense of aspirational perfection overlaid with swoopy, feel-good cursive like in the ads she reposts. No matter what her sales leader tells her to say in the daily email blast, she knows that taking Dream Vitality oils internally and loading her house with their airborne molecules can’t stop the Violence. She takes her oils every day, and look at her. Look at what she’s done. Nothing can stop the Violence—she knows that now. Hell, it’s like she wasn’t even there when it happened.
This is the last thing she remembers: She was sitting on the couch under a blanket, holding the remote control, a little bored about seeing the same movie for the fiftieth time but just so happy she could relax, so relieved that David wasn’t going to burst in and yell at her or chide her or demand a sandwich. She was fast-forwarding through the ads, and Olaf was being nippy, and then—