Starter House A Novel (14 page)

“I want my baby,” Lex said. He brought the knife down on the pineapple and skinned off half its peel in one stroke. Four more strokes, and juice trickled from the naked pineapple, oozing into Eric’s files and documents.

Eric set the laptop on the chair behind him and snatched his iPad out of the spreading pool. “Mr. Hall, please.” The chain of broken light along the machete’s edge sparked in his dizzy eyes, quick as his own pulse. Now the danger was past, fear crashed over him, and he tightened his hold on the iPad so Lex wouldn’t see his hands shaking.

“My baby needs fruit.” Lex cleaved the pineapple in two. Then he wedged the knife into the woody core and flicked it out, one half and then the other. “Jeanne won’t feed her right. You have to tell them. Whose lawyer are you? Mine or theirs?”

“Yours,” Eric said. He buzzed Sammie, to stop her if she was on her way in to see what he needed. He might need help; he certainly didn’t need to see Sammie getting her throat cut in his office. “Okay out there?” he said.

“Enjoying your Thursday?” she asked cheerily before she hung up.

Lex’s knife whirled over the desk, dismembering the pineapple in tidy slices. “This is a good pineapple,” he said. He put the knife in his bag and left the room.

Eric moved the laptop to a dry corner of the desk. He sank backward into his chair, blinking the panic haze out of his eyes. As soon as the door shut, he buzzed Sammie again and said, “Does Lex Hall owe us money?”

“I need to go over his account.”

“Don’t. Just let him out. Lock the door behind him.”

Eric heard doors opening and closing, and Sammie’s professional voice: “Have a nice afternoon, sir.” Then she was back, asking urgently, “Do you need the cops? What’s going on in there?”

Eric looked at the pictures: the car seat, the woman forcing the baby’s hand closed around the chicken leg. What must it be like to be Lex Hall, frustrated, indignant, boiling over with desperate love, lacking even the most basic vocabulary to explain himself? The pineapple wasn’t a threat. It was a moral argument.

“Sure,” he said, “everything’s fine.”

The pineapple was beautiful, translucent gold rayed with deeper gold veins, and it tasted sweeter than canned fruit, rich and fresh, without the gummy aftertaste of syrup. As a moral argument, it was pretty damn convincing. But it wouldn’t go over well in court.

Chapter Seventeen

A WEEK AFTER
Lacey questioned Harry Rakoczy, while she was still wondering how to find someone else to ask besides the obvious (Drew himself), Ella Dane came home with a sort-of-not-really-a-futon, a sofa-sized thing similar to a dog bed, stuffed with buckwheat.

Lacey nudged the sack with her foot. “We’ll never eat this much buckwheat.”

“It’s a bed. My friend Jack McMure says buckwheat is a natural psychic buffer.”

Ella Dane didn’t want to sleep upstairs after what Drew had done to her room. She’d been camping out on the living room sofa, and now she dragged the buckwheat sack into the other front room, the future formal parlor. The next morning she claimed she had never slept better in her life, there was nothing for the spine like sleeping on buckwheat, and the grain gave off a life energy so beneficial to the lungs, “much better than your metal coils,” she said, “and the cover’s a mixture of bamboo and hemp.” Lacey noticed Bibbits gnawing a corner of it and wondered how long it would take him to open it.

Lacey went online and searched for haunted houses in Greeneburg. She found dozens of websites for Halloween attractions, and surprisingly few reports of real hauntings, most of them not in the city of Greeneburg but in mountain palaces in the north of the county, summer homes of wealthy nineteenth-century families, all of them a hundred years old at least and most of them well into their second lives as bed-and-breakfast inns. Romantic haunted weekends abounded. Ladies in white could be seen in rose gardens, Confederate soldiers walked on porches, and phantom carriages raced down old roads, bearing doomed lovers to tragedy. The Confederate Museum in downtown Greeneburg was so thronged with haunted relics that no dog would enter the building, and a blind tourist from Pennsylvania had filed suit against it. There was a photograph of glowing orbs outside the old county courthouse; it reminded her of Ella Dane’s ideas about ghosts. She found no information about 571 Forrester, and she preferred not to discuss her search with Ella Dane.

Though Lacey slept alone, Drew never came. Eric visited her room every evening, but he was far away even when present, doing something important in his mind, drafting documents and planning depositions. Dutifully he asked her about her day. Her day was fine. She was reading a book about Piaget. She had walked around the block. “Great,” he said heartily and left her to sleep alone.

She saw less of him now than when they were first dating. She’d fallen in love with his car, to begin with, the powder-blue BMW Z4, a noticeable car on campus; she’d wanted to be seen in that car to make another guy jealous. Her friends, especially her roommate, Phyllis, warned her the driver of a car like that couldn’t help but be a spoiled rotten kid and a jerk. She wondered if Eric’s friends advised him he could never be sure if a girl wanted him or his car. He’d been shy of her and so respectful she wasn’t sure why he’d asked her out at all. When the time came for him to make the move, he didn’t, for weeks. Finally, one evening in his apartment, she took off her clothes and asked him what he planned to do about it. He said, “I wasn’t sure you wanted to.” She laughed, but it worried her; the next morning he said he loved her, so that was all right.

Was he doing that again? Waiting for her to make the move, to be certain she wouldn’t reject him? She was off bed rest and Dr. Vlk assured her that sex was safe, but Lacey thought it wasn’t—not with Drew in the house. It might upset him, and after what he’d done to Ella Dane’s room, that was not a risk she was willing to take.

When Eric’s family money disappeared, he sold the car so she could keep her ring. He said it was because the ring would keep its value but the car would only depreciate. He’d done that for her, and so she had to deal with Drew for him, and for that, obviously, she’d have to make Drew show himself. Now or never, she decided.

“Drew,” she called when Eric and Ella Dane were both at work, “come here, I want to talk to you.”

Then she listened to herself.
Come here, I want to talk to you.
No noisy boy would obey a summons like that. When she wanted her noisy boys’ attention, she turned her back on them and got involved in something they couldn’t see. Chase them and they run. Lead them and they follow.

She pulled a tube of sugar-cookie dough out of the refrigerator. Ella Dane said a person might as well eat marshmallows—the worst thing she could think of—but it was Eric’s weakness. The only thing he loved better than a cookie fresh from the oven was a chunk of raw dough hacked off the tube. He ate it in the middle of the night, went through three tubes a week, and probably thought she didn’t notice.

She sliced the cookies onto a tray and slid them into the oven. It was going to work. She felt it already, a sense of gathering in, of presence, the feeling her senses had interpreted as darkness when she first entered the house. It wasn’t darkness, though she couldn’t see through it. It was more like pressure, breathlessness, as if the air had curdled into some denser substance. Like souring milk, or scabbing blood. Drew was watching.

Her body reacted with fear. The muscles of her belly pulled tight, and her womb hardened—breathlessness, pressure, and the baby shoved a knee into her ribs. A contraction, not a real one: they were called Braxton Hicks contractions, Dr. Vlk said at her last appointment, and they were for practice. Not to panic, it wasn’t really labor. Lacey asked how she would know when real labor started, and Dr. Vlk laughed out loud.

Lacey practiced breathing. This was what she wanted: Drew to appear, so she could question him. She spread her school supplies over the kitchen table. The beautiful white paper, the colored construction paper, the crayons and markers and scissors and glue, the green binder. Lacey felt another pain under her heart, and this was no contraction. She wished she could be in the classroom right now, any classroom. Even if only as a substitute or an aide, she should be with real children, not Drew.

She took the latest ultrasound out from under the strawberry magnet on the refrigerator and laid the picture on the table. Crescent streaks of lighter and darker gray marred the black-and-white image. She chose a piece of light green construction paper and a gray crayon. When she had a good outline of the baby’s profile, she reached for the blue, and then the oven timer went off.

The cookies were gold coins with bronze edges. She stirred cinnamon and sugar and sprinkled the mixture over the hot cookies, then spatulaed two of them onto a plate. When she turned, Drew was there. How real he seemed, down to the sunlight glistening white on the few individual hairs that haloed his blond mop, and the shadows of his eyelashes on his cheeks. He hunched over a sheet of paper, drawing fast and hard, the way little boys drew, concerned not so much with accuracy as with getting the idea down on paper while it was whole in their minds.

“Hey,” she said lightly, while her heartbeat whirred in her ears. “Want a cookie?”

Could he eat? He’d been hungry the night she’d met him in the kitchen, but maybe it was a dream. “Sure,” he said. He took the black crayon and drew hard, using the flat end. That was never good. She put the plate of cookies next to him.

His left hand crawled over to the cookies. He grabbed one and munched it, and the sticky crumbs fell on his picture. The black crayon whirled over them, pressing cinnamon and hot grease into the paper.

He ate the cookie. The cookie disappeared. Where could it be going?

“Milk?” Lacey suggested, and she interpreted his grunt as a yes. He drank the milk, and it beaded on the transparent down of his upper lip. “Can I see?” she asked.

He shoved the picture toward her. A thick black whirling of lines, disturbingly similar to her ultrasound, and behind the whirl, a stick figure family. Father, mother, three boys.

“That’s your family? I’m drawing my baby,” she said. She let the blue crayon float over the gray lines she had already drawn. She drew in rapid, nervy jabs, spidery lines, light shapes thickening as she became sure. She shaded the baby’s arm and sketched a suggestion of umbilical coils, fleshy and serpentine.

“I didn’t draw the baby yet,” Drew said. He scrawled a stylized cradle with a big head and a stick-figure body, and a ram’s-horn curve on the side of the baby’s head. This was his symbol for female hair, because he’d drawn the same sign on his mother. “She was noisy,” he said. “She cried all the time.” He wrote WAH in huge letters over the baby’s head, pressing with the flat end of the crayon to lay the wax down in thick flakes.

“All babies cry.”

“All the time.” Drew used the red crayon to change the flat mouths of his family to bloody downturned frowns.

“Some babies cry more than others,” Lacey observed. She couldn’t tell much about her baby’s face in the ultrasound, so she drew a slight lift in his mouth, not quite a smile but a disposition to smile. Then she used the white crayon to touch up the highlights in the image. The illusion of three dimensions appeared under her hand. Drew left his own picture, having whirled a scarlet cyclone over his family, and stood next to her.

He was so real. She felt heat from his body, or maybe it was cold, or an electric charge—some palpable change in the quality in the air around him. He leaned against her left arm. She felt the cotton of his T-shirt against her skin, the yielding of his muscle, the solid bone beneath, the sturdy, resilient texture of boy. She cherished these moments with her noisy boys, when they dropped their shielding energy and let her touch the sweet child within. Soon he would hold her hand. Even as she thought it, she felt his fingers crawl into her palm. He had the prickly, grimy feel of a child who played hard and had no time for soap, with an overlay of warm sugar.

“I like your picture,” he said. “How do you make it look round?”

“Here, get a new piece of paper, and let’s start with a circle.”

She taught him to use the lighter and darker colors over the construction paper’s middle shade to turn the circle into a ball, and to draw the lines and angles of cubes and pyramids. Was he doing something like this in her mind, creating an illusion of surface, reality, wholeness? She pushed the thought away: to deal with him, she had to accept him as real. “Now you decide where the light’s coming from,” she said, “and let it be the bright side of your pyramid. Where do you think the shadows will go? Light moves in a straight line,” she reminded him, just before he put the shadow in front of the lighted face, and he moved the brown crayon. “What’s your baby sister’s name?” she asked.

“Dor.othy.”

“That sounds good together, Drew and Dorothy. Do your brothers’ names begin with D? David and Donald?”

“No.”

“Dexter and Dennis? Daryl and Dwayne? Help me out, kiddo. On Dasher, on Dancer, on Donner and Blitzen?” This would have drawn a smile, however grudging and shy, from even the noisiest boy. From Drew, nothing. “Doc and Dopey? Dimplecheeks and Droopydrawers? I’m running out of options here.”