her career aspirations had grown as cold as their marital bed. Suddenly she was a stay-at-home mom at thirty. She felt too old to go back to school, but the thought of draining her remaining youth waiting on casseroles made her want to jump off a bridge.
She still had boxes upon boxes of reference books in a storage unit, buried underneath old high school yearbooks and jeans that would never fit again. Medicine. Law. History. On nights like tonight, when she was standing alone in front of the stove, they called out to her. The books were her whetstones, her mind a blade grown dull. Her son was in school, and her daughter would soon be old enough for day care. Perhaps it was time to revive her senses.
In the interim, she needed to rekindle the fire with Brad. Her son had a birthday party down the block on Saturday, and it would take a nuclear explosion to wake her daughter from her afternoon nap. She would drag her man into bed, kicking and screaming if need be. She would end their dry spell—with prejudice.
But in the meantime, the casserole was ready.
She took the dish from the oven, removed the foil, and let the meal stand. She plucked a blonde hair from the bubbling cheese and chastised herself for not paying closer attention. She checked her watch. 6:51. No sign of her husband or son. Now she was growing irritated. And slightly worried.
The table was set. Dinner ready to serve. She called Brad’s cell. It went straight to voice mail. That was odd—Brad never turned his phone off.
She did a loop around the dining room table, straightening out the silverware, smoothing out the napkins. Just when she began to dial the Bloomfield’s phone number, she heard the front door open.
“Mom?” her son shouted from outside. “Can you come here?” There was concern in his voice. And something else . . . a tremor of fear beneath it that sent a shiver up her spine.
“Hon? Everything OK?” she shouted back, chalking her fear up to ordinary mother anxieties. He was fine. Everything was fine. “I’m in the kitchen. Go wash up for dinner. Your father should be home soon.”
“Somebody left something on the porch,” he said, his voice shaky. “Something in a bag. Mom, come here.”
Something in a bag? She hadn’t ordered anything online recently—certainly nothing that might be delivered in a bag. “Is it the dry cleaning?”
“No, it’s not that kind of bag. There’s . . . there’s something wet on it,” he shouted. “It’s red.”
Red?
“Hold on, sweetie. I’m coming.”
Her heart began to thrum in her chest as she went to find her son. The front door was open. She found him kneeling on the front step, untying a large brown burlap sack.
“Honey, stop,” she said. “You don’t know what . . .”
Then she saw what he saw—a spot of red. Not a spot, more like a stain. But the stain appeared to have soaked through the sack from the inside.
“Baby, don’t . . .”
But he had already finished untying it. She watched as he pulled apart the strings and opened the sack.
The look on her son’s face when he saw what was inside would be forever burned into her memory.
His eyes grew wide, wider than she thought possible, his lips trembling, his mouth spread into a horrible O. At first there was no sound. But then a scream welled up from deep within him, a horrifying, anguished howl that rattled her bones.
He fell backward onto the porch, still screaming. She gathered her son in her arms and held him tight, pressing his face into her chest, his screams muffled by her thick cardigan. His whole body shook; his mouth opened so wide she felt his teeth sinking into the flesh of her arm. She tried to pull him away, worried he might choke. He hooked his fingers into her back and continued to wail as she ran her fingers through his hair. Then she looked down into the open sack.
And she began to scream too.
CHAPTER 2
Seven Years Later
Rachel Marin’s heels clacked on the dark, iced-over cobblestone street as she hurried home, shielding herself against the bitter December wind. Her afternoon sitter, Iris, had already threatened to quit twice if Rachel didn’t start getting home on time. She was expected home by 7:00 p.m. It was already 7:42.
The thread securing the top two buttons on her coat had frayed, the cold wind slipping inside her jacket, chilling her to the