Starter House A Novel (17 page)

“No!” he shrieked and suddenly he flew at her, into her and through her, breaking against her body in a cold wave. The sense of the real child vanished, and he was a disembodied power, all will and fury. For a moment, the cold crawled over her like a tide of ants. Another moment, and all the ants bit and burrowed inward. Lacey sank into a kitchen chair. She tugged her blouse away from her body, expecting to see blood spurting from every pore: nothing. Was it all illusion, seeing, hearing, touching him?

The cookies disappeared when he ate them. His pictures were real. These things happened, and this, the cold wave,
this
was the illusion. It had to be; anything else was insupportable. As Lacey sat at her kitchen table, she felt something else that was surely real. The vise of a Braxton Hicks contraction closed over her belly, and then kept tightening. She felt the feather tickle, the tongue of blood on her thighs.

No, no. Not after all this time, she couldn’t lose him now, it wasn’t
fair
.

Twenty-nine weeks. Third trimester, her baby would live, he would be born alive. She’d looked just this morning and the website said the chances of survival were 84 percent, a high C-plus, almost a B. She grabbed her car keys. No time for an ambulance. Her mind flicked into crisis control, no panic, no fear, time for that later, now she had to act. If the placenta unzipped, he wouldn’t die right away. She had a little time. Dr. Vlk’s office was ten minutes closer than the hospital, so she went there, stopping at red lights, signaling for turns. Careful, careful.

The problem was what to do when she got there. Lacey sat in the car in the parking lot of Women’s Medical Services, Dr. Vlk’s office. She couldn’t get out of the car; standing was too dangerous. She pressed her thighs together, feeling the blood bubbles bursting as steadily as air reaching the surface in a large aquarium. One by one they grew, forced their way out of her body, and opened slickly against her skin. She couldn’t move, but she couldn’t stay in the car. “Help me,” she whimpered, and answered herself with the teacher voice, “Stop whining and
think
.”

She dug in her purse for her cell phone. She saw it in her mind, brilliantly lit as a stained-glass window in June: her phone, plugged into its charger, on the kitchen counter where she always left it. It drove Eric crazy.
Why don’t you carry your cell phone,
he always said.
What do you have it for, decoration?
Help was as close as Dr. Vlk’s receptionist. She dumped her purse on the passenger seat, and there it was. The battery was low, but not fully depleted. And Dr. Vlk’s number was in her queue of recent calls. “Thank you, thank you,” she said to the phone. She called and found herself in a maze of voice-mail options. Future appointments, prescriptions, “and if this is an emergency,” the recorded voice concluded, “please hang up and dial 911.”

What was the point of having a cell phone if no one would answer? She could call 911, they’d send an ambulance. No time. And not safe. 911 meant the hospital, and Drew could find her in the hospital. She’d seen him there.

Ella Dane—no, it would take her forty minutes to get here. Eric was in court. Dr. Vlk’s windows were twenty feet away, and nobody would even pick up the phone. Lacey banged the steering wheel, and the horn beeped softly. This was no good, this stupid horn with its stupid little ladylike tootle. She needed some real noise. She leaned onto it with both elbows and pressed her upper body against the wheel. The horn sang out, and the blood bubbled faster. Nobody came. Were they going to let her sit out here and die—why wasn’t anyone listening? She leaned into the horn again.

Dr. Vlk’s office doors opened, and a nurse in Strawberry Shortcake scrubs ran out. Lacey lowered her window and waved. “Here!” she shouted.

The baby moved. Lacey laid her head on the steering wheel and held her breath to hold the life inside her. He moved again, pushing under her ribs. “Hold on,” she told him. “Don’t worry, you’re okay, hold on.”

The nurse dashed inside and came out moments later with a colleague in Hello Kitty scrubs, pushing a wheelchair. Strawberry Shortcake took Lacey’s information while Hello Kitty lowered the wheelchair’s right armrest; they slid her into the chair and rolled her through the lobby straight into the exam room. “You really should have called an ambulance,” Hello Kitty scolded, while Strawberry Shortcake helped her onto the examination table, shoved the thermometer in her mouth, and strapped the blood-pressure cuff on her left arm.

“I don’t have a fever,” Lacey mumbled around the thermometer. “I’m bleeding, can you look?”

“Dr. Vlk will be right with you.”

“It’s an emergency, I need help
now,
” and Dr. Vlk entered the room, pushing the ultrasound machine herself.

“I’d rather have my ladies go to the hospital in emergencies,” Dr. Vlk said, cool and superior, as if she were ordering fruit salad instead of fries. Before the ultrasound machine even stopped rolling, she pulled the stool up beside the exam table and drew a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter. “Now let’s see what’s going on here. Nina, get the feet.”

Strawberry Shortcake slipped Lacey’s feet out of her shoes, pulled her underwear off, and tucked her heels into the stirrups. “There’s some light spotting,” she announced.

Light spotting, they called it. Another bubble opened. “I’m bleeding,” Lacey said. “It’s twenty-nine weeks, is he okay?” She hadn’t felt him move since that moment in the car. If the answer was
no, he’s already gone,
she needed to know immediately, before she suffocated on the hope writhing in her throat. Light spotting, that sounded not too bad; it sounded survivable. “Can you tell me?”

“This will be cold,” Dr. Vlk said as she squirted gel onto Lacey’s belly. She slid the ultrasound wand over Lacey’s tight, slippery skin. She was quiet for a long time, and one of the nurses slid a pad under Lacey’s backside. Another bubble burst. It was death, certainly death.

“There’s the heartbeat,” Dr. Vlk said at last, and Lacey broke into tears; the nurse was ready with tissues. Dr. Vlk turned the monitor so Lacey could see the gray swirling image. “There’s a bit more placental abruption just at the top edge.”

“It could unzip,” Lacey said. She blew her nose and tried to control her hiccuping breath. Unzip, such an ugly word.

“We’ll keep an eye on it. Nina, hand me the speculum.”

Lacey braced herself, and Dr. Vlk told her to
just relax, now,
which was easy for her to say, as the cold metal slid into Lacey and opened inside her. She stopped her breath as if by doing so she could pretend that this most intimate door forced wide in her body had nothing to do with her.

“Good,” Dr. Vlk said. She withdrew the metal tool and dropped it into a plastic bin marked
biohazard
. “There’s no dilation, no effacement.” Stripping off the latex gloves, she dropped them in a different biohazard bin. Gently, she squeezed Lacey’s left arm. “It looks worse than it is. You’re closed up tight, so all you need to do is rest and keep your feet up.”

“The baby’s not coming today?”

“He shouldn’t. We need to get you home. Can we call your husband?”

“He’s in court. You can try his office.”

“I want to have another look, as long as the machine’s here.” Dr. Vlk put on a new pair of latex gloves and squeezed more gel on Lacey. She slid the ultrasound wand to the left. “Hey, little guy. Such a monkey. How did you get that bruise?”

“What bruise?”

Dr. Vlk touched a spot on Lacey’s left side, below her rib cage. “There.”

“That hurts! What is it?”

“Did someone hit you?”

“No. I must have bumped myself.” Lacey tried to think of something that would hit her body at that height and leave a round bruise. “Maybe a doorknob.”

“And you turned around and hit it on the other side?” Dr. Vlk asked, touching Lacey on the same spot on her right side. Lacey gasped. “Who touches you?”

“Nobody.” Drew had touched her, Drew had rushed toward her with his arms open, and his hands would have touched her just where she was hurt.

Dr. Vlk was as smooth and elegant as ever, and her voice was calmly light as she said, “You don’t have to go home. There are safe places for you and your baby. The hospital, to begin with.”

“Can you call Moranis Miszlak and ask them to get Eric out of court?”

“You have choices.”

Better to go home and face Drew there than to wait in the hospital, surrounded by strangers who couldn’t see and wouldn’t believe. Better to be home, where she had her things, crayons and paper to distract him, cookies, games, all the tools and tricks to keep him friendly and engaged. She couldn’t go to the hospital to lie in the white bed in the empty room waiting for him to say,
I came here to find you
.

There was no way to explain any of this to Dr. Vlk. No way to explain it to Eric. She hadn’t discussed it with Ella Dane recently—she’d let Ella Dane develop the idea that Drew had been soothed away. The silence between herself and her mother was uncomfortable, oppressive, but so was the communication; at least it was a change. She was all alone with Drew, and she had to do all she could to keep him happy, because if he got angry, he might kill her, or the baby, or both. He’d be sorry afterward, but he was only nine, just beginning to predict consequences, still impulsive and reactive. If she stayed away too long, what might he do, angry and alone? If he went on the rampage, and Eric arrived— She saw the shattered bed in Ella Dane’s room, the book driven into the wall. She couldn’t let Eric walk into that.

“I’d rather go home,” she said. “Could you call my husband, please?”

Chapter Twenty

LEX HELD ON TO HIS PICTURES,
waiting for his lawyer to call him back. After a week, he started calling Moranis Miszlak, but the shiny girl at the desk never put him through. “He’s with a client,” she said. An hour later, he was in court, then with another client, then taking a deposition.

“There’s nothing new,” the shiny girl told him in her bright, bored voice. “He’ll let you know when the custody hearing is scheduled.”

He kept calling, hour after hour—he wasn’t sure she understood the danger Theo was in, drowning in cheeseburgers and white bread and fries—and by Wednesday afternoon, she stopped taking his calls. On Thursday afternoon, Lex printed out his shots of Jeanne shoving the chicken into Theo, copied the video to a CD, and drove down to County Place. If the lawyer wouldn’t help him, he’d help himself.

He parked in the Heart Healthy Visitors section, as far from the front door as he could get. The buildings were gray and low and square, with big concrete triangles jutting out like broken bones sticking out of gray flesh.

Nothing good ever happened here. All the courts were here: the family court, where Jeanne would try to take Theo away from him forever. Criminal court, civil court. The county jail was here, in a back building hidden from the street, looking just like the big court building only with no broken-bone triangles and no windows. Juvenile detention was here, sharing a wall with the county jail, but with a different entrance. It used to have a playground, where the larger boys had put the smaller boys on the swings and tried to push them all the way over the top. Later, the playground disappeared, replaced by a community garden where all the vegetables died and only wild garlic grew. Probate court was here, where the judge gave him his parents’ house. . . .

Nothing good. Nothing good ever happened here.

All the hallways looked the same. They were gray, like the outside walls, and colored stripes on the floor crossed each other, turning in different directions at each intersection. They meant something but he didn’t know what, and all the doors were the same gray steel, and every third door had a red Exit sign, but none of them led outside. A person could get lost in here forever.

Long ago, once upon a time, his mother told him if he was lost, look for police. They were everywhere, cops or security guards at every intersection, and sitting on chairs next to the elevators. The courtrooms and the important offices were underground, two or three levels down. Some of the hallways underground, Lex remembered, connected the courtroom elevators to the jail elevators. What if he got into the wrong elevator and accidentally wandered into the jail? Was that a crime? Would they arrest him again?

He walked past three security guards, quickly, with his eyes on the colored stripes on the floor, hoping he looked like he knew where he was going. Like he was supposed to be there. Then he found himself at another set of three elevators, or maybe the same ones. The security guard sat with his knees splayed wide and his pants wrinkled. All the colored stripes headed into the elevators. Lex held back.

The middle elevator opened and a new security guard came out, a young woman with black hair in big waves around her face and a coffee cup in her hand. Lex smiled at her. He liked her. She looked like the Mexican women who came into MacArthur’s. He always asked if he could help them, and he led them to the jicamas and the chili peppers. For them, he had persuaded the management to order sugarcane and mangoes and all the beautiful tropical fruits. She said, “Sir, are you lost?”