When the thing that her granddaughter currently is lunges forward, Patricia grabs her, one hand behind her head and one on her back, gently, firmly, and tucks the child into her shoulder, Brooklyn’s face pointed away from her own neck. She used to hold Chelsea like this when she would cry for absolutely no reason. Colic, she sometimes thinks, might’ve been the beginning of the gulf between them, all that frantic wailing despite Patricia doing everything that could possibly be asked of her. By the time Chelsea was Brooklyn’s age, they never hugged like this. They were already too different, too distant. Chelsea flinched at her touch, which made her stop showing any interest in hugging her daughter.
But Brooklyn isn’t crying. The way Patricia is holding the child’s head against her shoulder, Brooklyn can’t do anything but squirm against her. Her other hand pulls tight around Brooklyn’s body, fingers digging in. Little legs automatically splay around her waist, squeezing tightly. Little arms curl around her, tiny fingers pressing into her ribs as if trying to reach for her heart and squeeze it. An odd thought floats up from somewhere like a balloon: If they survive this, get through this, she’ll have to trim all of Brooklyn’s finger-and toenails so that the next time this happens, it won’t hurt so much. She’d thought that the mirror was bad, but this is so much worse.
The tension in Brooklyn’s body is obscene, and Patricia’s only response is to pull her closer, hold her more tightly. The utter silence in the house is despicable, and Patricia starts singing the song she sang Chelsea when she was all colicky: “You Are My Sunshine.” She hasn’t sung out loud in years; she knows her voice isn’t ideal, and she doesn’t publicly do anything that isn’t perfect. Her room is big and echoey despite the plushness, and her voice comes at her from every side, mocking and uncertain. Still, she sings, maybe to soothe Brooklyn and maybe to soothe herself.
She feels everything and nothing, now; the ache in her throat, the heat in her wounds, the hot, sticky mess of her blood pooling underneath her, the chill where it’s drying in her shoe. Brooklyn’s body is burning hot against her, the child writhing every now and then like some sort of reptile, something that is mindless, muscles moving without conscious thought. Patricia holds her until her hands are numb. She holds her until she knows there will be dime-sized bruises all over her torso from those tiny, insistent fingers. She sings and sings and sings that same song as if it’s a holy mantra, a psalm, a prayer. “You Are My Sunshine,” over and over. Even makes up a few verses, just to break the monotony.
When you attacked me
When I walked in, dear
I was surprised to see your teeth
Now I will hold you
Until you stop, dear
And then I’ll have relief.
Her voice gets creaky and rusty, and she’s surprised to hear that she sounds like an old woman. Her fingers are numb, her legs are falling asleep. She wonders what will happen if she lets go, if her body just gives out and the child frees herself.
She can’t let that happen.
The arteries in her neck are right there.
She clings tighter.
She forgets what she’s singing.
She can’t stop staring at the open closet door, wondering how on earth it came to this.
In another life, she would call to Rosa for help, but Rosa is gone.
“Nana?”
The voice is tiny, tremulous, right by her ear.
“Brooklyn?”
“Nana, you’re crying again. And you’re hurting me.”
Patricia lets out a big breath and wiggles her fingers, unsure whether it’s safe to let go. Brooklyn’s body has relaxed, her fingers have released their death grip on her sides, and her head is moving in a manner that’s more curious than feral, a child trying to see what’s going on rather than an animal going for the jugular. Patricia’s hands are numb, but she lets go, just enough to allow Brooklyn to pull back and look at her. The child’s rump lands in Patricia’s lap, and Brooklyn looks very seriously into Patricia’s face. Her eyes are back to normal—Patricia’s eyes, Chelsea’s eyes, Ella’s eyes, blue as the sky—and her brow is rumpled down.
“Nana, you cry a lot. You said big girls aren’t supposed to cry.”
Patricia swallows around the lump in her throat and reaches up to dash away her tears.
“Yes, well, it’s a challenging time, isn’t it. How do you feel?”
“I think I forgot something. It’s nice to sit in your lap.”
Brooklyn settles down like a chicken on a nest and smiles. If she can taste the blood on her teeth and lips, she doesn’t mention it, and neither does Patricia. She can’t remember the last time a child chose to sit in her lap—it must’ve been Chelsea, as a toddler, before she got so standoffish. Ella never really did; she was always a cold creature. Sitting here together would be nice if not for the incipient trauma and the ongoing issue of two wounds that would normally have Patricia calling for an ambulance.
Brooklyn turns her face and lays her head on Patricia’s shoulder, and Patricia sits there for as long as she can, idly rubbing the child’s back and feeling her thoughts race a mile a minute. Does she need stitches, and if so, how does she handle that with no money? Is she still on Randall’s insurance, or did he have his young, busty secretary cut that off already? Does she still own a sewing kit, or is that just one more thing she left behind when she decided to never be self-sufficient again but to instead relax into the rest and comfort she’s deserved for a long time?
Finally Brooklyn pops up out of her lap. “I need to potty. That’s why I’m out of the closet, you know. Ella taught me how to open doors with a bobby pin. But I was so, so mad that you locked me in. Don’t lock me in again, okay?”
And without a backward look, the child is gone, with no apparent memory of anything that happened, without even noticing the blood.
Patricia’s head falls back against the wall, her neck numb and aching. She does a quick run-through of her body. Headache. Neckache. Backache. Bruises over her ribs and on her back where those tiny fingers plucked. Bruises on her hips from the child’s legs wrapping insistently, straining to hold tight, heels digging in. One bite above her knee, on the inside meat of her thigh. A worse bite on her calf, in the muscle, where Brooklyn worked her teeth back and forth. When Patricia glances down at it, she can see a little flap of skin and meat hanging there like the butt end of a cheap steak. She shuts her eyes and looks away; she can’t afford the sort of plastic surgeon who could make a wound like that disappear.
In Florida, in the South, elective surgeries have all been canceled to deal with the Violence. She’d have to fly somewhere up north, if she could find a slot.
She’d have to have money.
She doesn’t.
Everything has changed.
There’s a strange distance, just now.
Her body and mind seem entirely separate.
A thought flits by like a butterfly: Sometime soon body and mind will crash back together, and that won’t be pleasant.
“Oh, well,” she says, mimicking her mother’s famous saying, the one that drove her utterly mad every time it was muttered until the day she came down pregnant when it wasn’t said at all and she learned there was something too big, too terrible for oh, well.