The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

board books. I lied and said Sam wouldn’t settle after Violet had been in his room and that’s why I’d brought him into our bed. I rolled into you, missing your warmth. You reached for your phone and I studied you. Your chest, the new gray hairs, the way you twirled them between your fingers while you read your emails.

‘You’re probably making something out of nothing. Again.’

But here’s what you didn’t understand: There weren’t many places my mind wouldn’t go. My imagination could tiptoe slowly into the unthinkable before I realized where I was headed. While pushing a swing or peeling sweet potatoes. The thoughts I had were awful, they were harrowing, but there was something satisfying about letting myself go there. The extent of how far she might go. What could happen. How my worst fears might feel if they came true. What I would do. What would I do?

Enough. I’d snap back and cleanse my mind: The children. The squeals. The life in their eyes. Everything is just fine.

I left the kids with the babysitter after school and joined Grace for a pedicure. The sitter was coming once a week then, a small break I cherished. I picked a color called Charcoal Dreams that felt suitable for the new chill in the air and tried not to breathe too deeply as the woman picked at my unloved cuticles. She put my foot on her thigh and seemed to be bracing herself for the work of a tradesman – the skin on my heels could have been shaved with a cheese grater. Petroleum jelly at night, she suggested, under a thick pair of socks. I didn’t care enough about my heels to do something like that and almost told her, but this was her life after all – feet – so I simply thanked her for the tip.

Grace talked about the vacation she’d just returned from. Cabo with her mother for her seventieth birthday. The bartender had made them prickly pear margaritas at the swim-up bar. Something about a new self-tanner. I tuned her out. I thought of the kids at home, of how the babysitter said she would tidy the kids’ bedrooms. Of how Violet would want to play in the basement instead, and Sam would whine until he was plopped down there, too. He wanted nothing more than to be near her lately, always reaching for her when she walked by, and calling out for her from the crib – ‘Bye-ette! Bye-ette!’ – when he woke up in the morning. That made me smile, thinking of his broken baby talk. Grace moved on to some brothers she had met, something about a rancher from Iowa. Were there ranches in Iowa? I thought of that space down there in the basement where they’d be. It was unfinished, slightly damp, but clean enough for Sam to cruise around now that he was on the move. I thought of how we needed a new carpet. Something with a low pile, easy to clean. And some storage for toys. I thought of how you stored your sports stuff down there, too, how your golf bag barely fit down the narrow staircase. Of how you’d put your clubs down there the day before. Of how Violet liked to pull them out and pretend she was at the driving range. I thought of the sitter always wanting to clean, even though I told her she didn’t have to. Of Sam obsessed with Violet’s every move. Of the weight of the driver in her hand. Of the way I’d seen her swing it. Like a weapon. Of his small, feathery head. Of how easily she could do it. Of how it would take only a second. Of the crack. Of whether or not there would be blood. Brain damage, or just blood?

Now Grace talked about an open invitation to the ranch. She was thinking of March. The acetone started to hurt my lungs and I pulled my feet away from the woman’s hands, the polish finished only on one foot. I leaned away to find air that didn’t sting but the entire room felt toxic and my chest was closing in. I had to go. I grabbed my purse and I left the woman stunned, polish brush in hand. Grace called out about my shoes, about where I was going, and I started to run. The clubs. She could do it. She would do it. The sitter wouldn’t watch them closely enough. I ran and didn’t stop for the two red lights, holding my hand out for the cars to slow down as my numb feet carried me home.

‘You’ll kill yourself!’ shouted a man on a bike.

No! I wanted to yell. She will kill him. She hates me that much. You don’t understand.

‘Violet!’ I threw open the door. I ran to the basement stairs and screamed her name again. Nobody answered. ‘Sam! Where is Sam?’

The babysitter came rushing down the hall with a finger on her lips.

Sam was asleep. Violet was resting in her room with a book.

I fell back against the wall. Nothing had happened.

Nothing had happened.

41

‘Anxiety attacks are very common. Especially for new moms. This is normal.’

I wondered if I should have said more. The doctor blew on the end of her pen as though it were hot. She wrote me a prescription and explained when I should take them. I left the building thinking of my mother’s translucent orange containers filled with tiny white tablets, dwindling over the course of each month.

I knew something wasn’t right. At first it was the emptiness she’d had in her eyes ever since I found her in Sam’s room, the way she seemed to look through me when I was with him now. Her contempt had shifted from the wildly exhausting tantrums that had once left me in tears to a manipulative, premeditated coldness. Her calm, steadfast dismissal