INTERLUDE
The Dream
She's peeing.
That's not unusual, since it seems like she has to go every thirty seconds, what with the baby doing his little Irish step dance on her bladder. The doctor told her that the pressure would relieve during the second trimester, but her mother said it was a lie, and her mother was right. Big lie.
Miriam looks up. Someone has carved a message into the stall's wall – odd, because around these parts, girls are pretty girly and don't go carving messages into bathroom stalls on habit. Maybe a swirly ink message, "I Love Mike," but always with marker, never with a knife.
The message reads: "Merry Christmas, Miriam."
She finds that strange. Yes, it's almost Christmas, but how does the bathroom stall know that? She sees another message below it, and it reads: "She's coming for you."
Miriam thinks little of it.
Somewhere in the distance, she hears: clomp, clomp, clomp. The plodding of boots.
She's about to pull a few squares of toilet tissue (and here in this bathroom it's about as sturdy as an angel's whisper, so she needs more than a few lest she dampen her hand) and she sees that someone's in the next stall, someone who wasn't there a minute ago.
One foot ends in a ratty sneaker.
The other foot is missing below the ankle. It drips black blood on the tile.
"Merry Christmas," says Ashley's voice. "Don't you miss me?"
She finds that, in a weird and horrible way, she does. But she shakes it off, and now the feet are gone, and the blood has been cleaned up, and she leaves the stall to wash her hands.
She's washing her hands.
She's looking at her hands, not her face, because she doesn't like how the pregnancy has bloated her cheeks, her chin, her everything. She's poofy like those puffy bubble stickers she collected when she was nine. Unicorns and rainbows and all that.
The sound comes again: clomp, clomp, clomp.
She's done washing her hands.
She looks up.
Her face is pale. Her hair, chestnut – her natural color – and pulled back in a ponytail.
Something moves behind her. A blur of dark blue, then a flash of red.
"You killed my son," comes a haggard, horrible whisper.
Mrs. Hodge stands behind her. Snow galoshes tracking wet footprints into the bathroom. A navy blue snow jacket, dirty and old, sitting awkwardly on her thick torso. The woman's hair is stringy, dark, unwashed, and it hangs like jungle vines across her ruddy face.
The woman's holding a red snow shovel.
Miriam grips the porcelain sink –
The shovel slams into her back.
Miriam's feet skid out from under her, and the sink clips her on the chin, and when her face hits the tile, she bites her tongue. She doesn't just taste blood; it fills her mouth.
She reaches out and tries to pull herself away, but the floor is freshly wet and gives her hands no purchase. Her palms squeak and slide across tile.
"You little poisonous whore," the woman says. "You don't deserve what Ben put in you."
Wham. The shovel comes down hard between her shoulder blades and then again against her head and again against her back, and the flat metal keeps slamming into her, harder and harder, until she feels something inside of her – like a little glass snowflake between pinching fingers – fracture, crack, and shatter, and she feels a warmth between her legs, a rush of wetness, and her hand reaches down between shovel blows and comes back with the palm wet with red, and she plants one bloody handprint on the floor to pull herself up –
But it doesn't matter, because the shovel comes down again.
Miriam hears a baby crying, a hard echo in the bathroom, coming from the hallway. The squalls are suddenly drowned, like the baby's choking, gurgling in its own fluids, and then the screams are cut short entirely and all goes dark.
She hears Louis's voice whisper in her ear: "Six more days, then I'm dead."