“You couldn’t disappoint someone if you tried,” Judah says.
The silence that follows is a black hole. It sucks all of the air from the planet … or maybe just my lungs. I burst into tears. Girl tears. Foul, weak, stereotypical tears. I rub them away immediately, smearing them all over my palms, then rubbing my palms on the legs of my pants. I can feel Judah watching me through the screen that covers the window. I know that if it weren’t there, he’d reach down and touch me. That makes me feel better. Knowing that someone cares enough. Everyone should have someone who cares enough.
“Maggie,” he says. “People—our dads, our moms, our friends—they are so broken they don’t even know that most of what they do reflects that brokenness. They just hurt whoever is in their wake. They don’t sit and think about what their hurt is doing to us. Pain makes humans selfish. Blocked off. Focused inward instead of outward. “
What he’s saying makes sense. But the potency of it hurts nonetheless.
“Just tell me one thing,” he says. “Does your heart still beat … with the ache and pain there? Does it still beat?”
“Yes,” I say.
“That’s because humans are built to live with pain. Weak people let their pain choke them to a slow, emotional death. Strong people use that pain, Margo. They use it as fuel.”
When I go back to the eating house, I find his Rolex on the kitchen table. Tossed like the first day I found it in my mother’s bedroom.
“Fuck you,” I say, but I carry it to my room and hide it under the floorboards anyway.
I WAKE UP WITH MY PAJAMAS DAMP, and my hair stuck to my forehead. Before I have the chance to swing my feet over the side of the bed, my mother starts screaming. I run to her room, still disoriented, and fling open her door to find her standing at the foot of her bed, naked, her robe pooling around her feet. When she sees me, she points to the far side of the bedroom. I step around her, swiping at the hair falling in my face, almost tripping over the junk she has piled everywhere.
“What?! What is it?!” I ask.
My eyes search the darkness, seeing nothing, before I reach for her drapes and yank them open. Dust spirals in the air as light rushes into the room, hungry to devour the darkness. My mother lets out a little mewl of pain.
“Vampire,” I say under my breath. But then my breath is yanked from my lungs as I stare at the bloody mess in the corner of the room.
I look at my mother, who is clutching her swollen stomach, rocking back and forth. I now notice the bloodstains on her hands and legs that I hadn’t seen before. Shivering in the bright light, the blood on her pale skin looks garish and frightening.
“What is that?” I whisper.
She doesn’t answer me. I take a few steps closer. My hand flies to my mouth as my esophagus swells with vomit. “What have you done?!” My voice rumbles through the small space. I sound demonic as I drop to my knees in front of the baby. A baby. Can you call it that? Tinier than anything I have ever seen, its skin is purple, matted with blood and a foamy white substance. I touch it, pull back, touch it again. No pulse, no breathing. It’s too little. It—a girl. I groan and rock on my heels. How had she hidden it? How had I not seen? A billowing red robe. She no longer asked me to stay with her when she bathed. Had she done this on purpose? Rid herself of the baby. The answer is on her face, relief mixed with the pain. A baby, a little girl. I want to pick her up, carry her somewhere warm and safe.
My mother, gasping for breath and bleeding profusely, falls to the ground behind me. I take one last look at the little girl in the corner and walk out of the room.
I take my time walking to Judah’s house. Delaney has a phone. My mother has a cell phone; I’ve always assumed it’s how she makes her appointments with her various male clients, but there’s a passcode on it. I’m not sure if it will let me call the ambulance. And I want her to die. By the time I reach Judah’s gate, I am sobbing. Delaney opens the door. The smile falls from her face when she sees me. I’m sobbing so hard I can’t get her to understand what I’m saying. I point to the cordless, and she runs to get it.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
Suddenly, I am sober of the grief I was feeling. Sober enough to summon words, thick and clumsy.
“My mother,” I say. “She’s … had a miscarriage. I’m afraid she might bleed to death.” I hand the phone back to Delaney, who looks at me in shock, then repeats my address into the receiver. I walk home, soulless.
The ambulance comes; its wail cuts through the warm Wessex day like a thunderstorm, calling people to their windows and doors. I sit on the step and wait as the paramedics pound up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know if she will leave the eating house alive or dead. After I leave Delaney’s, I don’t go back upstairs. The paramedics leave.
They come to see my mother’s body—two men in navy blue uniforms with stars on their chests. Policemen. I want to clean away the blood on her face and hands, but they tell me to leave it. The morgue will take care of all of that after the autopsy. They’re asking me questions, wanting to know if I’m the one to contact about the autopsy, and if I’ll be making arrangements for her funeral.
“The autopsy?” I ask in a hollow voice.
“Standard procedure. You need one to be able issue a death certificate,” one of the cops tells me.
I look at the bottles of pills next to her bed, overturned and empty.