Starter House A Novel (16 page)

“Got to be the bassinet.”

“How come it’s coming here and not to your house?”

He explained Lacey’s odd behavior. Sammie laughed. “My grandma wouldn’t let anybody buy anything for my sister,” she said. “It’s an old-country thing. They think they’re going to jinx the baby. You better quit buying, she’ll want to do it herself.”

“We need the car seat.”

“You’ve got three days after the baby’s born to get the car seat. Listen, your four thirty canceled and I rescheduled your five for Monday. Go home. Try not to buy any diapers on the way.”

Released early, feeling ridiculously free, Eric drove home in daylight for the first time in weeks. He had a boxful of files in the backseat, twenty hours of work for the weekend, but it was only 4:45 and he was home. He sat in the car to admire the house. Lacey had been right about the green door. It welcomed him. Voices came from the backyard, so he walked around the side of the house to see what was going on.

Lacey, looking like a peach in a pale orange dress, was running water into a big plastic tub, while Bibbits chewed the hose and Harry Rakoczy hung around his own back porch, spreading mulch and watching. “Come on, you stinker,” Lacey said. She grabbed the dog and pushed him into the tub, holding him down with one hand while she squirted shampoo on his head.

Ella Dane came out of the house on the wings of her own raised voice. “What are you doing to my dog?”

“He’s filthy. Look at this, his fur’s all matted. Come and hold him while I scrub.”

They hadn’t seen Eric yet, and he hung back, unwilling to get involved with soap and water and matted dog filth in a suit that had to be dry-cleaned. Whatever was going on between Lacey and Ella Dane, he wanted no part of it.

“You haven’t been taking care of him,” Lacey said. This sharp tone surprised him; she’d never spoken to him in that voice.

“Oh, and you know so much about taking care of things. Who’s been washing your dishes and vacuuming your floors and doing your laundry?”

“I was on bed rest. It’s not like I asked you to come here.” Bibbits’s claws slipped on the plastic as he tried to climb out of the tub. Lacey pushed him down and squirted more shampoo over him. She dropped the shampoo bottle and held the dog in the water, working her fingers into the matted fur, scrubbing with both hands.

Lacey must be feeling better. Recovering from sickness always made her angry, and she worked her temper off by cleaning something. He’d learned to stay out of the house on the fifth day after she came down with a cold, so she could have the place to herself, although her furious bleaching usually ruined something, leaving rusty spots on her good black pants, or yellow stains on white Formica. It wasn’t too late to drive back to the office—the women hadn’t seen him yet.

“Let go of my dog!” Ella Dane said. “What’s that stuff you’re putting on him?”

“Shampoo.” Lacey scrubbed the dog into a ball of foam. Bibbits paddled frantically in water three inches too deep for him, and Lacey’s hand plunged through the foam and forced him underwater. “You’ve heard of it. It gets hair clean. Also dog fur. Have you smelled this dog lately? My bed reeks like a kennel.”

The dog’s legs were slowing down. Eric didn’t want to get into the middle of this—it was worse than the breast pumps—but he couldn’t stand there and let the animal drown. Harry laid down his rake. “Ladies,” he called as he walked across the lawn. Lacey turned to look at him, and her hand relaxed on the dog’s back. Bibbits surged out of the tub, and half the water sloshed out as he broke for freedom.

“Catch him!” Lacey and Ella Dane shouted. Ella Dane ran after the dog, and Lacey sank down where she stood, one hand pressed against the base of her throat. Eric stepped in front of Bibbits, who swerved to the right, directly into Harry’s arms.

Harry picked up the still-running hose, held the dog flat in the grass, and worked the water into the fur until there were no more bubbles. Ella Dane picked up the shampoo bottle and read the ingredients out loud in tones of horror. “Sodium laureth sulfate,” she said. “Salvia extract. So they dipped a sage leaf in it, big deal.” She went inside.

Eric helped Lacey up. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need the doctor?”

“No, I was dizzy, there was this feeling. Something came over me.”

“You were rough on the dog.” Such violence—this was a side of Lacey he’d never seen, and he couldn’t help imagining her, a year from now, alone with a baby who needed a bath, angry and impatient as she was with Bibbits. She wouldn’t. She would never lose her temper with a child, never. Of all the things Lacey would never do—but he kept seeing her hand, holding the animal underwater. “It looked like you almost drowned him,” he said. He’d been several yards away; he couldn’t be sure what he’d seen. But some of the things those women said on the Internet . . .

Lacey shrugged herself out of his arms. “Oh, come on. You think I’m going to take the dog outside and drown him right there in front of Harry and Ella Dane, really, you think that? How crazy do you think I am?”

“Of course not,” Eric said, but he added something new to his ever-evolving mental shopping list of things he needed to buy for the baby. One of those plastic bath seats, with a seat belt, the tub formed to support the baby upright. He’d spent half an hour yesterday watching online clips of babies being washed in a variety of tubs and seats and even, one of them, in the kitchen sink, which didn’t look safe at all. A plastic bath seat, for safety.

How crazy did he think she was? Not crazy at all, but maybe Ella Dane could stay on for the first couple of months. Several women on the depression chat wrote about how close they’d come to killing their babies, one way or another. Shaking, dropping, and drowning. Mostly drowning.
It seemed so easy,
one of them had written,
it seemed like a thing I had to do,
and dozens had agreed.

Chapter Nineteen

OVER THE NEXT WEEK,
Ella Dane was sweet and careful with Lacey. She drove her to all the used-car lots that Harry Rakoczy recommended, and when they found a three-year-old Camry, silver, with only forty thousand miles, Ella Dane bundled Lacey back into her car and drove her away, telling the salesman, “We might come back later.”

They came back with Harry. Ella Dane insisted, and she was right. Harry made thoughtful sounds at the engine and doubtful sounds at the brakes, and the car cost three thousand dollars less than Eric had budgeted.

Something had changed between them, on the day Lacey gave Bibbits a bath. Between all of them. Bibbits took to licking her hand, or standing in front of her and wagging so hard his claws rattled on the floor. Gratitude or submission? Either way, it creeped her out, and something was wrong with Eric too. He watched her with a caution she knew well. This was how he evaluated any not-quite-adequate machine—would the car’s transmission last till September? How soon before the air conditioner needed servicing?—but why was he looking at
her
that way? It was only a little water, nobody got hurt. And Ella Dane stopped singing lullabies for Drew, stopped bringing home crystals and sprinkling rock salt in the fireplace. Instead, she began to talk about moving out. She wouldn’t move far, and she’d come back for a few days when the baby was born, but it was time to get her own place. She paused as if waiting for Lacey to protest
Please stay, I can’t manage without you,
but Lacey said, “That sounds great,” although she’d miss Bibbits. The little dog had grown on her.

The weather changed. The sky was bright and open, and the rain came decorously twice a week. Lawns thickened, drooping shrubs revived, and a gilt edge began to show along the outlines of the maples and Bradford pears. Lacey took Dr. Vlk’s advice and began to walk around the neighborhood. In the shining health of these autumn days, with the windows open and every room freshened, even with Drew her constant companion, she found it hard to imagine anything unwholesome in her house. Lately Drew was so sweet, he was good company and she liked him; it took some effort for her to remember his anger and the damage he had done to Ella Dane’s room.

But CarolAnna said it wasn’t a good house for babies. It popped into her mind at odd moments, spoiling her pleasure and making her feel nervous and guilty. She should do something about it—but what? Day after day, she delayed.

The days were so clean, and her skin craved the fresh air. On warm afternoons she put on a bikini and sat on the deck to sun her belly. Did the light come through the tight dome of her flesh, brightening her baby’s dark world into red, like a flashlight shining through a hand? She thought it must; she felt him turn and stretch. One afternoon, when the wind was just a little too cold for sunbathing, she took paper and crayons out to the deck and taught Drew how to make leaf rubbings. It was one of his friendly days. He pressed the crayon too hard and laid the wax down thick and flaky.

“Lightly,” she said. “Let go.” She stripped the paper off the gold crayon. “Here.”

He looked up, smiling. Her eyes prickled at his sweetness, as bright as the tall October sky. Stupid hormones. Only a sentimental idiot would feel like crying because a little boy had a beautiful smile. They all did, all the noisy boys, they all had that bright, soft, vulnerable smile; she had never seen it on a grown man. Something happened to them. Lacey’s private classroom goal, one she never wrote down or told anyone, was not to be the thing that happened. She sent her boys into fifth grade smiling the same undamaged smile.

Lightly he rubbed the gold crayon, picking up the veins and edges. “You carry on,” she told him. “I have to make a couple phone calls.”

Not a good house for babies. Time was running out and she had to know the truth. She remembered the name CarolAnna gave her and found three Honeywicks in the phone book. The first was an insurance agency. The woman who answered the phone said, “There hasn’t been a Honeywick here for years. Would you like Mr. Carruthers?”

“No thanks.” If CarolAnna had been nine, that had to be twenty years ago at least. The Honeywicks might have moved to Oregon, Nevada, anywhere. For a moment, she lost hope. But even if her Honeywicks were gone, some of the others knew where. It wasn’t like calling people named Jones and asking for their cousin Emily.

The second Honeywick number was answered by a teenager who seemed not at all able to understand what Lacey wanted. “How long ago?” she asked.

“Twenty years,” Lacey said.

“Twenty, are you kidding me,
years,
and you’re calling on the
phone
? Why don’t you Google them? Or haven’t you heard of Facebook?”

“I don’t know their first name. I don’t want all the Honeywicks on earth,” she replied, and the teenager snorted and hung up on her.

The third one was an old man who, again, had trouble understanding what Lacey wanted. “Twenty years ago,” she said for the third time.

“And what was the address?” he asked.

“571 Forrester Lane.”

“And where did they move to?”

“Sir,” Lacey said with desperate politeness, “I don’t know. But I need to ask them a question. If you could just give me their first name,” because, now she thought about it, the teenager’s suggestion was not bad. And even if she had to search through all the Honeywicks on earth, how many could there really be?

“That’s the bad house, isn’t it, honey?” the old man said.

“Oh, yes, please,” Lacey said. “Can you tell me their name?”

The old man put the phone down and wandered away. She heard household noises: water, a toilet flushing, more water, doors opening and closing, a burst of thin laughter from a TV or radio.

She could hang up. She didn’t have to know these things. Drew was the same as any other boy, and as for the smashed room—everyone had a bad day, once in a while. Was she going to hold it against him forever, one little tantrum? It wasn’t so bad, she could live with it. She squeezed the phone and wouldn’t let herself put it down.

“Sir?” she said. “Hello? Are you still there?”

Slow footsteps neared the telephone. “Greeley,” he said.

“That’s in Colorado?”

“That’s my niece. Greeley Honeywick. She’s in Utah. The number is, here it is, I have to unfold the paper, the number is seven. Four. One. Four. Two.” He stopped.

Lacey waited. “Are there more numbers?” she asked finally.

“No.”

“Her name’s Greeley Honeywick, and she lives in Utah?”

The old man didn’t answer. He had wandered away from the telephone again. For five minutes, Lacey listened to the vague puttering of his day, and eventually she hung up; there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

“Greeley Honeywick,” she said out loud and turned to find Drew, paper in hand.

“No,” he said. “You can’t talk to her.”

“Let me see your leaf. Look how all the veins came up when you did it lightly.”

“I don’t want people talking about me. They keep doing it. Talking and talking.”

“Drew,” Lacey said in her patience-and-understanding voice, “sweetie, I understand that you’re angry and upset. Can you tell me why?”