Nothing.
She blinked, and then she was standing in the door to the garage, staring at Ella, who was holding a rake like she was about to fight off the monster from a horror movie. And then Chelsea looked down at her feet and saw blood and bits of pink guts, and her first thought was that she’d killed Brooklyn.
Brooklyn, her precious baby, whom she loves more than life.
The relief that flooded her when she saw that it was Olaf made her feel like a sociopath. At least it wasn’t one of her daughters.
It was bad, but it could’ve been so much worse.
No wonder Huntley knew she was bluffing. What’s left of the little dog is unrecognizable. If David truly had the Violence, Chelsea now has no doubt that she would be a small, unsightly smear, a red tinge in the grout with a few bleached-blond hairs stuck in it.
She turned around and left Ella in the garage, went to see what sort of mess she’d made. She threw up when she saw what was left of Olaf. There were no words of comfort she could offer Brooklyn, and no child should ever see what was on the living room rug, so she put the blanket over it and sent the girls upstairs. She told Ella to take Brooklyn to her room and lock the door until Chelsea texted her that it was safe to come out.
It will never be safe again, really, but things are relative.
Cleaning up the mess was the first thing she had to do. She’d never felt this guilty, this vulnerable, this helpless. She finally just pushed the couch back and rolled the rug up tightly around the body and the ruined blanket and dragged it out into the garage.
What’s happened to her—she has to hide it. And she hopes Brooklyn never finds out what she did, because Ella said she kept her little sister away from the whole thing. Shame burbles up. She can’t hug Brooklyn right now, which makes her heart ache, but she also is spared the gargantuan task of facing Brooklyn and answering all of her questions. About what happened, about where Olaf is, about why Mommy won’t touch her again and why they couldn’t just watch the movie and enjoy some popcorn. The whole time she was tugging the big rug away, hoping nothing damning and bloody fell out of it, the air smelled like hot butter and the movie played in the background, princesses singing about their hopes and dreams in a beautiful world the Violence will never touch.
Next, Chelsea gathered everything she needed to function for a while and dragged it all into the master suite. She brought in her laptop, David’s laptop, his pile of mail and his bag and all his files that aren’t locked up, her phone, tons of chargers, the man cave minifridge, all the food she knows her girls won’t touch. She went through her closets and bathroom and cleaned out everything that could be used as a blunt-force weapon, all the way down to her hair dryer and all her pumps with the pointy heels. There’s a big pile of garbage bags in the garage on top of the rug, and her bedroom looks like the world’s coziest jail cell, all puffy duvet and throw pillows, no bedside tables or scale or mirror. They say that scientists around the world are working around the clock to understand the Violence, and until they figure it out, she has no choice but to go into hiding in her own home.
With David gone and the real Violence in her blood, there’s nothing else she can do. If she turns herself in, her kids will have nowhere to go—except her mother’s house, and there’s no way Chelsea will let that happen. She has no sisters, no cousins, no close friends, no one she trusts enough to make any decisions for her girls, not when the world is working the way it should and definitely not in the midst of a mystery pandemic that’s making the entire government seem pointless. She’ll have to figure out how to set the kids up to do remote learning again before Monday. Plenty of people have stopped sending their kids to school, Ella tells her. So now she’ll do her parenting through a sturdy door.
No one knows what triggers the Violence. No one knows how it’s transmitted. She has to be there for her girls while firmly physically separated from them. They must stay together, but they must stay apart.
What she needs is a plan, and in order to make a plan she has to do a thing that David has always told her was unforgivable: She has to snoop. She needs to know where their money is and how to access it, because her account is almost drained and David isn’t here to top it off. She needs to know if he ever bothered to add her name on the mortgage like he promised he would. She has to figure out how to keep paying for electricity and water and Wi-Fi and insurance, because without those things they’re all fucked.
She stands, running a hand over the solid wood of the kitchen table, her French-manicured nails dragging over the grain. This table made her so happy, once. It was expensive and sturdy and perfect and real in a way past tables weren’t. Now it means nothing, and she can imagine a more honest sort of apocalypse in which she’s healthy and trustworthy and strong, hacking the table to bits with an ax to burn as fuel. But this is no zombie outbreak, no nuclear fallout, no meteor or volcano that claimed the dinosaurs. This isn’t a cut-and-dried situation, an us-versus-them, live-or-die, end-of-the-world scenario. This is mass confusion with constant nonsense mumbles from the president about caution and preparedness and how nothing is really wrong except that part where the stock market dropped a thousand points after some trader on the floor killed the man next to him with his bare hands.
What will happen, she thinks, if she’s overcome with the Violence while utterly alone? It’s known that those suffering focus on a living target and beat it to death in the most brutal, hands-on way possible. No guns. Just bottles of salad dressing and wastebaskets and staplers and fists. Will she catch herself in the bathroom mirror and bash her own head in? Will she break through the big, arched window in her bedroom and jump out to go hunting for prey?
That’s one of the oddest things about this disease, or whatever it is—no one who suffers it remembers it, and no one with them generally survives.
For a moment, she stares at her beautiful nails and her beautiful table, thinking about how useless beauty is when you’re just trying to survive, but then she remembers that no one knows how this disease is spread. Her girls could already be infected. She could be leaving germs all over the table, all over everything she’s touched or breathed on. She snatches back her hand and hurries to her room, shutting the door and locking it with grim finality.
I’m locked in my room, she texts Ella. Wear a mask. Don’t let Brooklyn downstairs until you’ve hit everything with sanitizing wipes and turned up the AC. I could be contagious.