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“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Her stepchildren are way more fun than me. She lives in California now. She’s on the PTA and everything. The oldest is seven, and last I checked, their youngest is two.”
“That must be hard,” I say.
Eleanor shrugs against me. “It was a lot harder when she first left, but now I’ve accepted it.”
“No siblings or anything?”
“Nope. Just me. I look like my dad, too. We have the same face and the same eyes. I think that made it harder for her. But, like, I’ve been pregnant for a week, and I could never imagine up and leaving your kid just because it’s hard for you. Isn’t parenting supposed to be about sacrifice or whatever?”
“Grief does funny things to people. My dad’s dead, too,” I say.
“Oh, wow. See, if you would’ve told me first, I would’ve told you about mine.”
“It’s not exactly something you bring up in casual conversation.”
“Fair. How old were you when it happened?”
“I was two. I don’t remember him, but obviously, my mother does. He got in a car crash. A drunk driver swerved and hit him. He was in a coma for three days before they took him off life-support.”
“Joseph, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Like I said, I barely remember him. But my mother said something strange today about the whole thing.”
“What?”
“She said the car crash happened because of Beatrix.”
Eleanor gets up on her elbows and turns on the lamp on the bedside table. “Hold on. What?”
I recounted my earlier conversation with my mother to Eleanor. She looks at me skeptically.
“And she thinks that was Beatrix?”
“I mean, if you think about it, it makes sense. Beatrix’s baby died. It must have been torture for her to be in the house with a baby.”
Eleanor glances down at her stomach and places a protective hand over it, “Do you think she’ll get worse?” she whispers.
“I don’t know. At this point, I don’t know what to believe.”
I can’t breathe. I try to inhale and know before I even open my eyes that Beatrix’s knotty fingers are wrapped around my throat.
“You can’t escape me,” she hisses.
I tell myself it’s a dream and refuse to open my eyes.
“Coward,” she taunts. An icy digit prods at my eyelid, peeling my eye open. She hooks her finger inside my eyelid and pulls like she’s trying to claw my eyeball out with her bare hands. My skin screams, and so do I.
Beatrix looms over me like an animal inspecting prey. A greasy strand of her hair brushes my chest. She’s dripping water. She clutches my face between my hands. “I’ve waited for you.”
“No. No, you haven’t. You’re not real.”
“You know that’s not true. You can feel me. You—” she reaches out and traces my nose with her finger, pausing at my lips. Her flesh tastes like dead fish. I gag, and her other hand tightens around my throat.
“You've known me your whole life. I’ve always been there. I used to watch you sleep when you were a baby. You were so morose.”
She pushes my bangs back against my forehead and grips my scalp hard.
