Starter House A Novel (29 page)

Even shelligami did not disappoint. It was origami folded out of thin aluminum and then encrusted with tiny cowries and snails. The mermaid was deliciously gruesome, a stuffed manatee shaved to the waist and wearing a black Halloween wig. The live sharks were baby dogfish; there were also dead sharks, eight inches long, formaldehyded in glass bottles. She fondled the mineral samples and the fossils. There were shark-tooth earrings; did she need shark-tooth earrings? Well, who didn’t? Seaside Empire with seventeen hundred dollars in her pocket: childhood’s wildest dream come true. Shark teeth. Giant fossil shark teeth! Lacey found the largest intact specimen.

“Megalodon,” she said to herself. The fair-haired child beside her glanced up, startled at her voice, and she stumbled back. “No, no, no,” she said, “it’s not fair, no!”

“Ma’am? Are you okay?”

Lacey’s heart settled. If she was going to have a panic attack every time she saw a blond child, she might as well go home now. This boy was older than Drew, taller, fatter, and he wore glasses with plastic tortoiseshell frames. He was looking at her with an open, adult-friendly expression, and he had chosen a baby hammerhead shark in formaldehyde from the shelf. Pure nerd. Teachers weren’t supposed to say it, but for some children, no other name would do.

Lacey loved her nerds almost as much as she loved her noisy boys, and she yearned to bring them together, for the benefit of both. Last year, she’d experimented with selecting the leaders of both camps and giving them the joint responsibility of caring for the classroom’s most interesting pet. Alpha nerd and noisy boy bonded over feeding crickets to Darth Venomous, the emperor scorpion. Alone of the fourth-grade classrooms, hers had no bullying.

“Ma’am?” the boy said.

“Sorry, it’s nothing.” She hefted the fossil tooth in her hand and smiled. “Megalodon. It’s my favorite extinct animal.”

“Mine’s Andrewsarchus.”

Lacey felt a chill at the name, but she controlled herself. Andrewsarchus was a real animal. She, like this sweet boy, had watched the
Ancient Killers
series last year on National Geographic. “That’s the carnivorous sheep thing, am I right?” she said.

He smiled. “The biggest mammal land predator of all time!” he said. “Giant killer sheep! Do you think my mom will let me buy this shark?”

“Probably not.” Lacey wasn’t surprised that he asked her this. Children had always been drawn to her, confided in her. That was why she’d gone into teaching in the first place. “But maybe she’d get you this.” She gave him the megalodon tooth. “It’s the best one.”

He turned the tooth, rubbing his thumb along the striations. She missed this so much, the conversations with children in all their variety. Eric had thought he was giving her a wonderful gift, letting her stay home while he worked,
till the baby starts school,
he said, which she interpreted to mean preschool at age two although she knew he meant kindergarten. Five years out of the classroom. If they had another child or two, it could be six, seven, ten years. If she’d had a job, two dozen children to handle every day, she would never have accepted Drew: he had used her solitude against her; he had peeled her like an orange.

She reached the sea at sunset. Spinet Cove was a one-road beach town, essentially a row of two-story motels with a scrabble of low square houses inland. La Hacienda was one of the beach-side motels and consequently had new bedspreads and an electronic marquee, advertising Continental Breakfast, Cable in Every Room, and Wi-Fi, all FREE. On the other side of the street, where the guests had to walk across two lanes of traffic to get to the beach, the motels weren’t nearly so spiffy. A couple of them were closed, and the motel directly opposite La Hacienda had no roof. Its old-style movable-letter sign read
PARDON OUR MESS WHILE WE REMODEL
, which would have been more convincing had the building not been overgrown with kudzu.

La Hacienda was all Spanish arches, pink stucco, red tiled roof, geraniums in terra-cotta pots. Ella Dane’s car was parked at the last unit. Lacey wanted to walk on the beach before dark, but Ella Dane came out, rubbing her hands, and gave a shrugging half wave. Lacey walked over to her. “Mom, I need to say something,” she said. She had to apologize now, before it was too late.

“I don’t think you do.” Ella’s Dane’s voice was steady and firm. So this was how it was going to be. A perfectly reasonable relationship, Ella Dane using her telephone voice to Lacey, not letting their eyes meet.

Lacey went into the room. The necessary conversation with Ev Craddock oppressed her; she’d have to find out what he knew, tomorrow or the next day, after she’d rested and caught up with all these changes in her life, and after they’d dealt with Bibbits. She piled the pillows at the head of the bed and lay propped up, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes until the tears sank deep. The baby rolled over, and she patted her belly. He pushed back, as if responding to her greeting. It made her laugh, even in her misery. It was worth everything, if she could save him—she’d give up Eric, the house, everything.

Chapter Thirty-five

THE SHINY GIRL’S FRONT HAIR
was orange. Was she even the same girl? She took Lex to a room with a big table and a lot of mixed-up chairs. Some were office chairs on wheels, some were padded in different colors, some were wooden. Each had something wrong, scratches or torn cloth or broken legs or burns. “Wait here, Mr. Hall,” she said.

She left him alone and he checked the mirror to make sure it wasn’t one-way glass, with lawyers and cops watching him on the other side. The old man had taken him to dinner last night and had told him how to behave. “Act happy,” he said.

“What if I’m not happy?”

The old man sighed over his pizza. “Just play with her.”

Lex had bought a computer game a few weeks ago, a Chinese game called mah-jongg. It laid out a pattern of tiles, and you had to pull the tiles out in pairs, matching them up. He played it over and over again. When he lost, he went back and played the same game until he won it. Every game could be won. Everything lined up, everything matched, and there was nothing left over.

Theo wasn’t old enough for mah-jongg. Maybe when she was five or six, they could play together. They could take turns. He could show her what to do. She would let him play his favorite tile, the eight of bamboos. He liked the way the eight bamboo sticks lined up, four on top saying W, four underneath saying M.

The shiny girl came back with a plastic crate. “We keep a box of toys,” she said. “You didn’t bring anything, did you?” Lex shook his head, and she sighed and said, not to him but to some invisible thing in the ceiling, “They never do. So here’s a couple of dolls, some Duplo blocks, crayons and coloring books, and this noisy Elmo thing—they all like that. Oh, and this is a camera.” She put a video camera in the middle of the table. “Stay where it can see you.”

“Why?”

“And the bathroom’s down the hall to your right.”

She left. Lex laid out the toys on the tabletop. He sorted the Duplo blocks by color, and then by size within colors. They didn’t come out even. There were seventeen crayons, and five of them were broken, but he liked the way they smelled. It reminded him of something.

The shiny girl came in carrying Theo, and the big dog lawyer came in behind her with a magazine under his arm. “Here you go, Mr. Hall,” the shiny girl said cheerfully. She set Theo on the floor. Theo tipped forward until her hands reached the floor, and sat there, her legs spread, supporting half her weight on her thick little fists. “Anything else?” the shiny girl said.

“We’re good,” the big dog said.

“He’s not my lawyer,” Lex said. “Where’s my lawyer?”

“You haven’t got new counsel yet?” the big dog said. His voice was too loud, big dog barking so everyone could hear. “Eric’s in court. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Hall.”

Lex backed up, trying to get as many chairs as possible between himself and the lawyer. “How’s that?”

“Somehow that boy persuaded MacAvoy to change the visitation to this office. Pro bono, and there ain’t a lawyer in a thousand who’d work so hard for a guy who’s not his client. But you got to call those names we gave you, get someone new.”

“I don’t want a new lawyer. I want
my
lawyer.”

“Any lawyer’s yours that you pay for, and Eric says there’s three hundred bucks left on your retainer. You don’t want to do it, Sammie’ll set something up for you.”

“I don’t want a new lawyer.”

“Suit yourself.” The lawyer sat at the other end of the conference table, leaned back and crossed his legs, and folded his magazine open. “We’ll refund the retainer.”

“But what am I supposed to do?” Lex asked.

“It’s visitation. Visit. Stay where the camera can see you.”

Lex looked down hopelessly. Theo was rocking on her fists. She tipped herself forward and landed chin-first on the floor. She burbled quietly for a few seconds, then got herself up on her hands and knees to crawl under a wooden armchair. She sat inside the cage of legs, slapping her hands on the floor and laughing at Lex.

“I see you,” he said. He knelt beside the wooden chair and reached up onto the table for a Duplo block. Blue, rectangle. “Blue,” he said, giving it to her. She chewed on it, made a face, and banged it on a chair leg. He reached for another block. “Red.”

The lawyer moved the camera to the floor. “Good,” he said. “Educational, interactive, all that happy crappy. Keep it up, Mr. Hall.”

Theo tasted the red block. She dropped it and covered her ears. Then she pulled her hands away and looked at Lex with her huge, happy, wet smile and said, “Eep-boo!”

He covered her eyes and then uncovered them. “Peekaboo,” he told her.

She tried covering her mouth. “Eep-boo!”

Playing with Theo turned out to be easier than he thought. She liked peekaboo, and after a while he realized she knew she was supposed to cover her eyes. She was playing a trick by covering her ears or her mouth. When he covered his own ears, she laughed so loudly that the big dog put his magazine down. “I don’t recommend tickling,” he said. “Got to watch out for the touching. That kind of thing don’t look good on video.”

“It’s peekaboo.”

“Good,” the big dog said. Then Theo discovered some of the chairs moved. She spent the rest of the hour clutching the seat of a rolling chair and staggering around the room, while Lex followed, anxiously stooped over her to keep the chair from rolling too fast. He pulled Theo onto his lap and sat at the table, showing her the coloring books and the crayons. She tasted the crayons, ripped a page out of the coloring book, hooted loudly for a few minutes, and fell asleep with her head resting against his shoulder.

The shiny girl came to take her away, and he wouldn’t see her again until next Friday.

“This is good stuff,” the big dog said, playing through some of the video. “She’s a sweet kid. A little chunky, but cute as a peanut pie. All that walking with the chair, that’ll play well in the custody hearing. I’ll have Sammie burn you a copy on disk. That wife of yours. She was raised by hippos, or what?”

“She lost some weight when we were married, but it’s come back.”

“Yes, and it brought friends. She’s a lot younger than you, how’d you meet?”

“She was fourteen. I caught her shoplifting.”

They were walking down the hallway toward the front office. Lex tried to get a look at each office, because he wanted to talk to his own lawyer. He didn’t realize the big dog lawyer had stopped walking until he crashed into the man’s back. “Sorry!” Lex said, with his hands up and open. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it, sorry, sorry.”

“Fourteen-year-old runaway, you catch her shoplifting, and then?”

“I took her home.”

The lawyer shook his head with his eyes closed. “Lord Jesus. Tell me you didn’t.”

“I told her mother where I found her.”

“You took her to her
own
home. Excellent. And then?”

“She came to work at MacArthur’s after school. First she stocked, and then when she was sixteen she got to be a cashier.”

“How old was she when you got married?”

“Twenty.”

“You had me worried for a minute. Old man, underage girl. Meeting her when she was fourteen; that’s a little scary. But you weren’t her supervisor?”

“I mostly never saw her at work.” Was that his own lawyer’s office, the one around the corner, with the closed door? The big dog was walking again, and Lex followed. “I worked night shift and she had afternoons.”

“Great. Still, a girl that size.” The big dog sighed and blew through his lips. “How do you do it? Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot, I guess. Here we are.” He opened a door and led Lex out into the waiting room.

“Wait.” The lawyer was trying to work Lex toward the door, but Lex set his heels and wouldn’t move. “When do I get to talk to my lawyer?”

“He’s off the case.” His hand was on Lex’s elbow, pulling him across the waiting room, closer to the door. “I’ll be taking care of you till you get new counsel. We won’t abandon you, Mr. Hall. Sammie’ll line something up, and we’ll let you know by Thursday.”