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The baby was starting to move. The sensation always caught Isabella off-guard, sometimes startling her into skipping a stitch in her knitting, or pricking her finger during needlework.
She wondered if the baby knew what world she would be bringing it into. Its kicks felt less like spasms to test its new muscles, and more like struggles of a caged animal rebelling against its prison.
There had been times where she'd been kinder to it, fondly patting it through the stretched skin and tributaries of murmuring blood vessels, whispering wishes for it to grow clever and healthy. Another game of make-believe, really, pretending she would see this child cry, cut and lose their milk teeth, and grow into the frame of a young adult with hope gleaming in their eyes.
But with the contractions that seized her abdomen worsening day by day, and residue of morning sickness still searing in her throat, pregnancy was becoming so unbearable.
She does not, must not have regrets.
I chose this.
Yet, that same thought that had always reassured her brings her dangerously close to despair now.
Something delicate flitted past her eyelids.
Eyes adjusting to her startlement, she saw a butterfly fluttering its way around the room, the swoop and fall of its colourful wings spinning colour like a kaleidoscope in the blanched sterility of the room.
And she thought of Leslie. Leslie, with freckles like a butterfly's light footsteps over his nose. Leslie, whose gentle voice had sung that secret tune in the nights when they were up alone, and she was crying from a bad dream.
“Hey, Leslie. Does your song have any words?”
His face had gone all thoughtful. Leslie always knew the right words to say to make her feel better, but looking at him then, Isabella had wondered if words were perhaps unnecessary to him altogether, when his music seemed to speak of more wondrous things.
"Hmm. The words… are whatever you need them to be.”
She never cried like that anymore. In this grown-up world, nightmares were no longer dreams you could wake up from.
But she still had her lullaby. And she still had the memory of his voice in her head. And the song was supposed to be for two people, but this time she let it belong to one more. The baby would be whisked away in a matter of weeks anyway. She should at least be allowed to sing one last lullaby to send them off.
*
Ray was a fussy baby. Every time she gently rubbed her fingers along the ridge of his ear, which usually made the children laugh, he would scrunch his eyes up tight and cry. He seemed to never be able to sleep through the night, always needing her to rock him until he finally relented and dozed off.
One particular midnight he had been completely inconsolable. Her usual assurances no longer effective, she took him to her room alone, waiting for him to stop so she could return him to the nursery without waking the others. She checked his nappy, made sure that his clothes were not chafing him, and after finding everything as it should be, waiting was all there was left to do.
She lowered herself into her rocking chair, hugging him through the swaddling.
“What have you been dreaming of?” she wondered softly, rocking the child. Ray’s face crumpled, and she had to quickly wipe away the sticky tears and snot before it bubbled all over his face.
“Shh,” she rubbed his back. “Rockabye, baby…” She swayed back and forth, like the tree in the song. On other children, this often did the trick, but it did little to calm Ray down. She tried it again, but each time only seemed to make it worse. She tried humming Brahms. Twinkle twinkle little star. None of the songs in the repertoire she'd so diligently memorised seemed to work. Defeated, she lay back with a sigh, futilely waiting for the crying to pass.
Perhaps she could try Leslie’s lullaby? It was a secret, but Ray wasn't the only person who could use a soft, slow tune right now.
“Mm-hmm…mm-mm--”
She’d barely faltered past the first bars when it stuck in her throat. Too much. This was too much of a mockery. She was no mother, she was an overseer of premium produce. Who was she to sing this song of a sacrificed child for this new little one, who would soon be offered up on the same altar?
“I’m sorry, Ray,” she whispered, faltering. “But I’m not doing that again.”
Ray had quietened a little despite that, and his face had one of its rare expressions of content. His lips quivered, and she was afraid that he would cry again, but instead, as he nestled into her, a feeble voice uttered,
“Ma… ma.”
*
“Mama.” A small push on her shoulder in the dark, a hushed voice. “Mama.”
She opened her eyes to the little silhouette backlit by the corridor’s lamps in her room. The nervous glimmer in Ray’s eyes met hers.
“Can I sleep here with you?”
“Did you have a bad dream again?” she said sleepily, elbowing out a space under the blanket to let him huddle inside.
“I dreamt of the monsters again,” he whispered.
Her gaze fixed on the child's face, sharpening with just the slightest edge of wariness.
“Monsters,” she repeated.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “With lots of eyes, claws, teeth. They were coming for everyone–”
“Well, they’re not here now,” she said, softly hugging him. “You’re in the House. There’s no such thing as monsters here.”
Ray said nothing, and clung to her tighter, carding through the loose dark tresses that flowed over her chest.
“... why don’t I tell you a story?”
She felt him nod.
“Alright then...” she began, dragging her voice in the suspenseful way the children loved. “Once upon a time… there was a butterfly and a little girl who were good friends.”
"How good?" Ray asked.
Isabella smiled, a little sadly.
“The very best. Now, the butterfly loved to sing, and the little girl loved listening to the butterfly. One night, the butterfly found the little girl crying by herself in her room.”
“Butterflies don’t sing or make sounds,” Ray said. “And the encyclopedia says that butterflies don’t come out at night.”
“Oh, well, this one does. He’s a different sort of butterfly. The butterfly asked the little girl why she was crying. ‘I had a bad dream,’ she told the butterfly.”
“What kind of bad dream?”
“Scary,” she smiled, hugging him so suddenly he let out a caught squeak. “So scary they made her cry. But this isn’t a story about the bad dreams.”
“Go on,” he said, half-tentative.
“‘Why don’t I sing something for you?’ asked the butterfly. ‘I’ll sing you a song that’s just for both of us. Whenever you feel like crying, sing that song to yourself, and I’ll be with you.’”
Idly, Ray twirled a lock of her hair between his fingers. “What was the song?”
“‘The song,’ the butterfly said. ‘Is whatever you need it to be.’”
Isabella smiled. “Come, I’ll sing one for you. Is ‘hush little baby' alright?”
“Mm.”
The song rose from the deep recesses of her chest, lilting with the mother's presents to the crying baby: the mockingbird, the diamond ring, the looking glass. Ray’s eyes lulled, then fluttered shut. She continued, quietly trailing off where she thought Ray must have already dozed off, when she heard a sleepy murmur from under the blanket.
“Mama, can I have a different song?”
*
How she wished that he had been singing a different song under that tree on that day. It could have been anything else, and both of them could have stayed under that warm blanket of playing pretend.
She could only stare in disbelief as he stopped humming and looked up. Those eyes that knew too much looked at her plaintively, a small rueful smile under them. The last time anything had made her feel like that was when she was the little girl on the wall; now she was falling down, falling down, holding the eggshell fragments of their world that nothing could put back together again.
She'd known that kind of wishing was silly, even back then. Both of them already knew that the lullaby's spell had been utterly, irrevocably, broken.
The cradle had fallen.
*
"...you’re singing again."
She glanced at Ray standing at the threshold of her office, skulking catlike where the light of the paraffin lamp didn’t reach him. Her son's hands were in his pockets, gaze avoiding hers.
“Oh, I didn’t hear you come in.”
"I have no idea why you like that song so much,” he said, appropriating the armchair in the corner for himself. “It’s a lullaby, isn’t it? Are there words to them?"
Isabella stacked her paperwork smartly on the table. “If there were any, they must have been forgotten over the years by the time I first heard it.”
“May as well. Bet they were some kinda twisted shit like the other ones. Like the one you’d sing about babies falling out of trees.”
She quirked a corner of her lips. “Teaches little children not to climb tall trees. Speaking of which, you were toeing the line today while I was dealing with Emma.”
“Couldn’t help it,” he said. She cast him a stern look, and he lowered his eyes.
“Sorry.”
She accepted it with a nod, arms crossed on the table.
“Alright then. What have all the others been up to?”
“Nothing much,” he said, draping his legs over the armrests one after the other. “Well, Emma’s been taking her recovery in stride, you know that. Norman’s all worried over her as always. Don's making a new kite..."
She smiled inward as Ray recounted the children's activities. She caught flickers of fondness in the edge of his fleeting grins, as he talked about Don’s kite and all the aerodynamic engineering that went into its redesign. The dark gaps of his missing front teeth showed whenever he did that. Sitting there in his white pyjamas, curled up on the chair, he looked like just another little boy telling mom about his day before going to bed.
“And that concludes my report,” he ended curtly. "My reward for this spying business for this month should be in by now, shouldn't it?"
She smiled. "But of course."
She pulled her drawer open, retrieving a nutcracker and sliding it across the table to where he sat. No mockingbird or diamond ring, but it put a smile on Ray's face nonetheless.
"About time." He reached for it, turning it over his hands. "Thanks, Mama."
Isabella's face softened infinitesimally.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind if you call me ‘mom’ here when the other children aren’t around.”
Something seemed to come over Ray, sending a freezing ripple of tension up to his shoulders. The nutcracker went still in his hands.
Then he snorted, a choppy, unsettled sound.
“Haha. Funny joke.”