Starter House A Novel (20 page)

Drew killed children. If Lacey doubted it, she could go upstairs (when it was safe, whenever that might be) and look at the ceiling of Ella Dane’s room, the demolished plaster, the beams, the drooping swaths of pink fiberglass. The handyman still hadn’t come to fix it; there was all the evidence a person could want.

“I have to go,” Greeley said. “You’d better get out now, that’s all I can say to you; get out now and hope it’s not too late. He was in the hospital, and he touched my feet. . . . I felt them die. I felt the baby dying inside me. Don’t you remember Beth Craddock? Get out.” She hung up the phone.

Lacey laid her own phone on the nightstand and lay back against the cushions. Dying inside. She realized she’d felt no motion from the baby for an hour or two. With both hands, she bounced her belly, waited for some answering motion, shook it again.
Wake up, be alive
. Strong as an eel, the baby pushed against her hands and slid away.

Her ears rang and she counted her breaths, two counts in, five counts out, her lungs on fire. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and pressed her face into her fists. Her first impulse was to put her shoes on, grab her cell phone, run from the house, and call a taxi. But she was on bed rest. She couldn’t afford to panic and run; she had to rest and let the placenta heal. And Drew was a good boy most of the time. She’d have to keep him in a good temper, that was all. Until she had somewhere safe to go.

Weight shifted at the side of the bed, and there was Drew, appearing in answer to her thought. He rubbed Bibbits’s ears. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said mildly.

Lacey wanted to say something friendly and companionable. Greeley Honeywick’s last words echoed:
Remember Beth Craddock. Get out.
“Who’s Beth Craddock?” she blurted.

“Leave me alone, leave me alone! Why won’t you leave me alone?”

And he was gone. For the first time, she was looking directly at him when he disappeared, and there was nothing. No change, no fading, no intermediate state. Just Drew and then no Drew, there and gone, vanished more utterly than lightning. He left nothing, not even a sense of warmth where he had been sitting.

“I’m not the only one who’s seen him,” Lacey said to Bibbits.

CarolAnna Grey, Greeley Honeywick, someone called Beth Craddock. And how many others, how many women and children and babies, how many families, over how many years?

Chapter Twenty-three

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON,
the second Saturday in October, Jeanne came to Lex’s house to leave Theo for the weekend. The old man had given him five hundred dollars to pay for her window. When he handed it over, she said, “Don’t think this makes any difference. My lawyer says she can make you pay her fees.”

Lex lifted Theo out of her car seat. She must have gained another pound in the last week. “Da!” she shrieked, and smeared a fistful of melted candy corn along his cheek when she lunged in for a hug. “Da!” she said again, more urgently, and he knew she meant
down
and not
Daddy,
so he took her inside and set her down on the floor.

Theo sat in the living room, a pink heap of flesh and polyester, and she would be just like Jeanne and Big Jeanne and all those poor sad women who walked past the produce department like it wasn’t even there, filling their shopping carts with ham and potato chips and wondering why their ankles hurt.

When Jeanne took her away, Theo was crawling and beginning to pull herself up by grabbing on to chairs. She’d been almost ready to walk, a month ago. Lex was forever having to run after her, she scooted around so quickly. Now she sat where he had put her. After a while, she rolled over onto her back and grabbed her feet. He knelt beside her and pulled her up to sit. “You want to stand up?” he said. “Stand up for Dadda?”

He held her hands and tugged her, but she didn’t push up at all. She just sat like a half-melted marshmallow. He pulled her hands. “Stand up!”

She opened her mouth square, just the way Jeanne did, and shrieked. He dropped her hands and ran to the kitchen. While she cried, he stood behind the door with his hands over his ears, because he couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t listen to that noise. After a while, she stopped, and he wondered if she might be hungry.

Jeanne had given him a grocery bag, and Lex laid the things out on the kitchen table. Three cans of Vienna sausages. Three cans of peaches in syrup. A package of Hydrox cookies. White bread. He threw it all away and put a yam in the microwave.

A voice at his feet said, “Bub, bub, bub?” Theo had crawled all the way here.

“Good girl,” he said. She made a wet, demanding noise. “Soon,” he said, “not yet.” The last two years, he’d made Jeanne wait for her food. She could eat as much as she wanted, he couldn’t stop her, but he piled her plate with vegetables. Even when she was pregnant, she lost a little weight. She’d gained it back by now.

Theo didn’t like the yam. He mashed it and added a little formula. She squeezed her red lips tightly together and flung her head from side to side. Gobs of yam flew everywhere. He got some into her mouth, and she poked it out with her tongue. She squared her mouth and screamed. He shoveled in a spoonful of yam, and it came out, an orange spray. Finally, she grabbed the bowl and dumped it over her own head. Mashed yam ran down her neck, and she screamed at him with her mother’s own voice.

“Yummy,” Lex said desperately. Why was she crying? A month ago, mashed yam was her favorite food.

She pounded her yammy fists on the tray. Her pink dress was orange, her white hair was orange, and she was so loud. The neighbors might call the cops. He would call the cops if he heard a noise like this. “Okay, okay,” he said. He dug a can of Vienna sausage out of the garbage, opened it, and dumped it on a plate.

Theo hummed. She poked a Vienna sausage into her mouth, keeping her hand pressed against her lips. She ate the whole can in two minutes and shrieked again. Lex gave her two Hydrox cookies and a sippy cup of formula, slightly diluted. She made a suspicious face but was too tired to fight. He couldn’t put her to bed like this, covered with yam. He carried her into the bathroom.

Lex had done everything for Theo since she was born. He had changed diapers, dressed her, fed her, played with her, and talked to her. Everything but the bath. That was one thing Jeanne always did. He couldn’t do it; many times he’d put Theo to bed grimy or sticky rather than wash her, but this was too much. Trying to remember how it was done, he ran the water, half an inch at the deep end, barely covering the tub at the shallow end. Was it too hot? It felt like room temperature. Maybe it was too cold.

His mother used to test the water with her elbow. Lex lowered his elbow into the tub, and the bottom was higher than he expected. He whacked his funny bone on the bottom of the tub, the strength went out of his arm, and he collapsed against the tub, the tub’s hard wall catching him under his armpit.

Theo screamed. She’d used the toilet seat to pull herself up, and then her fat little feet slid out, and she hit her chin on the toilet. Lex’s right arm was useless, throbbing and tingling with funny-bone pain. He gathered her in with his left arm—he was wearing his last clean white shirt, and now he was covered with yam, but that didn’t matter. “Baby, baby, baby,” he sang to her.

Bit by bit, his right hand came to life, and he undressed Theo and lifted her into the bath. Instantly, she screamed and beat the water with both hands. “No!” she yelled. “No, no!”

The water was too hot. Or too cold. Lex retreated to the bathroom door. He wanted to go back to the kitchen and stay there for a while, but he couldn’t leave Theo in the bath.
Never, never,
he said to himself.

Theo’s screams crumbled into sobs. He’d never heard her sound so unhappy. The water must be too cold, because if it was too hot, she’d be crying in pain. Lex knelt beside the tub and turned the water on again, tilting the knob slightly toward warm.

Theo fell backward. Her head hit the back of the tub, and the shrieks began again. That big square mouth, just like Jeanne’s. Lex pulled the towel off the rack, grabbed Theo, and ran from the house with her in his arms. He couldn’t do this on his own. He needed help. He had to get to the old man right away.

Chapter Twenty-four

SATURDAY WAS BRILLIANT AND CLEAR,
a perfect day, and Lacey was stuck in bed. Yesterday, Dr. Vlk had given her permission to get up for a couple of hours and maybe walk around the backyard. “Nothing strenuous,” Dr. Vlk said. “Avoid stress,” which made Lacey laugh. Whenever she tried to sleep, she heard Greeley Honeywick:
There hasn’t been a live baby born in that house since 1972
. And
remember Beth Craddock,
whoever that was.

Google would tell her, in seconds. She’d rather talk to a real person, so she would know she wasn’t imagining the whole thing, so she could ask questions, find out what Google couldn’t know. What did it mean, and what could she do? There was no app for that. And every time she logged on, Drew was there, watching where she went.

Eric had grown up here in Greeneburg; he might know the name. Where was he on this gorgeous Saturday, when she had the doctor’s permission to go outside? Was he enjoying the day with her, mowing the lawn while she sat on the Adirondack lounge and pointed out the spots he missed? No, he was at the office, meeting some rich old people about writing their will, showing them how to leave all their money directly to their grandchildren, bypassing their wastrel children. She missed him and resented his freedom to go where he liked and work as hard as he needed, while she was trapped by her leaky, defective, inadequate womb.

Harry Rakoczy was mowing the Miszlaks’ yard. Lacey leaned against the cushions. Her bed stank like a swamp. She suspected that Bibbits had wet it. Even if he hadn’t soiled her bed on purpose, he was old and getting weaker. She’d seen him at his business. He dribbled down his leg sometimes, and other times his aim was off and he peed on his chest, and that oily brown smell had grown on him again.

“I want cookies,” Drew said. He was standing at the door, as if he had just entered the room, though the door hadn’t opened. “You haven’t made cookies for ages.”

Not again. Not now. Lacey shut her eyes and thought,
Go away, don’t be here.
Without opening her eyes, she said, “The doctor told me to stay in bed.”

“You got out of bed yesterday,” Drew said.

“That was to go see the doctor.”

“If you can go see the doctor, you can make cookies.”

Nothing strenuous. After what he’d done the last time he lost his temper, she didn’t dare refuse. She’d never feared a child—but she’d also never taught a child who could kill her. She dragged herself out of bed and took her laptop into the kitchen, where she found black and orange construction paper and set Drew to cutting out pumpkins and hunchbacked cats while she put a batch of sugar cookies in the oven.

“This is nice,” she said. She poured a glass of milk and sat next to Drew. The smell of warm vanilla filled the room. This wasn’t so bad—maybe she could live with it. It was like having her own private classroom, a class of one.

He crumpled up the cat he was working on. “I messed up again!”

“It’s for Halloween. There’s no such thing as messing up; it’s a monster cat.”

“It’s only got three legs and its ears are weird.”

“We’ll name it Frankenkitty. Look how ferocious it is.” Lacey smoothed out the crumpled cat and made it dance along the table. “Look at me, I’m big and bad. Oh no!” Frankenkitty bumped against the glass of milk. “Poor Frankenkitty, he can’t see where he’s going, what shall we do?”

Drew looked sideways at the paper cat. “Make eyes for it?”

Lacey cut eyeholes in the paper cat’s head: one, two, and then a third, right in the middle. She taped over the eyeholes and then colored the clear tape with red marker, adding a black slit to the center of each eye. “Monster three-eyed cat!”

“Cool,” Drew said. “What’s that smell?”