Starter House A Novel (30 page)

Then Lex was outside, and the door was closing. He wanted to go back in and explain. The shiny girl and the big dog lawyer wouldn’t listen. He needed his own lawyer, the young one. They said he was at court, and his office door was closed. That didn’t matter. Lex knew where to find him. He knew where he lived.

Chapter Thirty-six

THE NEXT DAY,
Lacey was finishing her third picture of Bibbits. There was no breath of Drew in the sea wind, and every day, Merritt was bigger and stronger. Maybe she could stay here in Spinet Cove until he was born. She’d looked for Ev Craddock earlier but the motel office had been empty, so she’d driven into the landward side of Spinet Cove to find a mall, where she bought textured watercolor paper, oil pastels, and fixative. Her first few pictures were stiff. As her hand began to move more easily over the paper, she produced a few versions that would have looked good on Valentine cards but did not express the quality of Bibbits, until she remembered dogs had eyebrows. She wrinkled the skin over Bibbits’s eyes to give him the cautious, questing look with which he had greeted the smell of meat.

She layered pinks and reds and yellows, shaded in purples and greens, deepened his eyes. She smudged with her thumb and a paper torchon; she sprayed fixative and let it dry and then worked new layers over it. Now she was working on the final layer of color, adding white and lightest yellow to the highlights of his apricot-blond curls. It looked just like him, and she felt like herself for the first time in months, with flecks of color blending under her fingernails and staining the whorls of her fingertips.

The real Bibbits, meanwhile, looked less and less like himself, although Ella Dane kept him well iced. Lacey kept the door open for the sea air. Sand filtered in and blended with her pastel work, becoming part of the texture. Lacey wanted to know if they were going to bury the poor little thing. “When the time is right,” Ella Dane said whenever Lacey asked, “when he tells me where.” So far, apparently, Bibbits had not spoken.

It had rained earlier in the day, and the beach was solid gray, the sand pocked with rain above the tide line, clean and flat below it, with a scum of broken shells to mark the boundary. Lacey watched Ella Dane walking on the beach, and the eastern sky was green, a green unlike any other, like seeing without light. Ella Dane stood above the tide line, the wind pulling her hair and blue skirt north. She stepped forward, back, left and back again, spun in place, hesitated, like someone trying to learn a dance she had heard described but never seen. Then she drew a circle on the sand and came up to the room.

“It’s time,” she said. “Look what I found on the beach.” She had two weathered sand shovels, one red and one orange.

“I made this for you,” Lacey said. She laid the pad of watercolor paper on the bed. “It needs another layer of fixative, so don’t touch.”

“Oh.” Ella Dane sat down slowly, beside the picture, running her fingers along the edge of the paper. “Look at that. His little nose. It’s perfect.”

“I’m sorry for saying those things,” Lacey said. “I just lost it.”

Ella Dane looked at the picture for a long time. Eventually, she said, “I went back to Columbia on Tuesday to pick up some things from my friend Patty’s garage.” She had boxes of possessions in garages and attics all over Columbia. “There’s some pictures you need to see. Jack says it’s time. He says the lies have blocked your chi.”

“What lies? I haven’t lied to you.”

“I’ve lied to you.” Ella Dane pulled a manila envelope from her duffel bag and handed six pictures to Lacey. They were Polaroids. Lacey recognized the thick paper, the broad white border at the bottom. And old, the colors fading to yellow. Still, the images were clear. A series of moments, a little girl changing out of shorts and T-shirt into a blue swimsuit. One piece, halter back. Lacey remembered the swimsuit, how the elastic had pressed against her neck.

That was the summer before first grade, the wonderful year with Grandpa Merritt. Six weeks into the school year, sometime around the end of September, her mother had picked her up from school and they had never gone home again.

Then what was this? Six-year-old Lacey, dressed, undressing, half dressed, naked; the bare white buttocks and the brown legs, the white ghost of the blue swimsuit on her skin, and then the blue swimsuit drawn up. Lacey laid the picture of her naked self above the others. “What does it mean?” she asked.

“One day,” Ella Dane said. “One day I was sorting Dad’s laundry, and I found a box of pictures. I tore up most of them, but I kept these.”

Lacey knew what these pictures would mean if she’d found them in some child’s book bag—they wouldn’t be Polaroids now, but printouts of digital pictures. Maybe not even printouts, but accidentally forwarded e-mail attachments. She’d never found such a thing, but she knew teachers who had. What did it mean, when they were pictures of herself? What did it mean that Ella Dane had kept them? She fanned them, slipped the naked picture back into its place, and closed the fan, so only the first picture could be seen, the innocent image of the little girl in the blue swimsuit, a picture any proud grandpa might frame. The long tanned legs and the tangled yellow hair.

“Why?” she said.

“In case I ever needed them. In case he tried to get you away from me. If there was a custody fight between him and me—he knew I had these, so he never dared. In case something happened to me, to make sure he wouldn’t get you.”

“No, why, why are you telling me now?”

“I couldn’t tell you before. And also . . .” Ella Dane reached out and touched the baby bump, and the baby kicked under her hand. “And I never knew till you told me the other day, how you felt about the way we lived. You were always so cheerful. All those adventures we had—I thought you were having fun. You looked like you were coping well. You know. Resilient.”

“It wasn’t all bad. But I didn’t feel resilient,” Lacey said. She still didn’t, not a bit resilient. Shattered, maybe. Overwhelmed. And Ella Dane was dealing with all this—threats of a custody fight, from the man who had taken these pictures—during those first terrible weeks of homelessness and confusion. “That day you picked me up from school, was that the day you found these?”

“The very same day. I just flung our stuff in plastic bags and went for you. That was it, we were gone. Some of my cousins had told me nasty things, but I never believed them, till that day.”

Lacey gave the pictures back. “I thought it was the worst day of my life.”

“You’d have had a worse worst day than that, if we’d stayed.”

“So why did you leave?”

Ella Dane looked startled. “What do you mean? It’s what you do. Your kid’s in danger, you get them away safe.”

“Lots of women don’t,” Lacey said. She hadn’t identified any victims of sexual abuse in her classes. She knew the numbers. About 8 percent of girls under ten were abused. Three years, twenty-five kids per class, thirty-eight girls altogether. The odds were she’d seen at least three victims. One every year had slipped past her, children she could have saved as Ella Dane had saved her. Some of those girls, those very quiet girls . . . She’d been so busy with the noisy boys, she would never know how many children in desperate need had sat in her classroom, quiet and mild, their suffering invisible to her teacher’s eye. “Lots of women stay for lots of reasons.”

“You didn’t,” Ella Dane said. “That’s why we’re here. I understand what you’re going through, I really do. What he might have done to you. What that thing might do to your baby. Better to sleep in the car than one more night under his roof.”

Were they talking about Drew or Grandpa Merritt? “I wish you’d told me,” she said. All these years, she’d carried that vision of the white house with the green door, her perfect home. She’d painted her own door green. It made her sick.

“I’m telling you now. I didn’t want you to grow up scared. I didn’t want you to think you’d ever been touched. Because you weren’t; you were never touched. I asked you some questions, not to give you any ideas but to find out what you knew. . . . He took the pictures, but he never did the next thing.”

“What was that?”

“He would have dressed you up and taken more pictures. That’s what my cousin Maureen said. And then other things, but first it was pictures in costumes.”

The swimsuit was almost a costume, in those Polaroids. Maybe he’d been further along than Ella Dane wanted to think. “He wanted to get me a special dress for Halloween, a princess dress. He said something.” Lacey wasn’t sure if she truly remembered this; she remembered that first night in the car, she remembered the palmetto bug in her book bag, and she remembered wanting to go home. She remembered the deep, bitter, adult rage she had felt against her mother for taking away that comfortable life. “I wish you’d told me.”

“There was a silver dress in his closet,” Ella Dane said. “Sequins and sparkles. I found the pictures, I saw the dress, I remembered what Maureen said, and that was it. We had to go. You’ll do what you have to do, to keep that baby safe.” She put the pictures in their envelope and handed Lacey the orange shovel. “Bibbits is ready.”

Several days past ready. Lacey took the orange shovel and waited outside as Ella Dane hauled the cooler down to the beach. The courage it must have taken Ella Dane, with no money, no job, no skills, to take her child and run for safety. She had fled, but Beth Craddock hadn’t. Maybe she hadn’t sensed danger until too late. Greeley Honeywick moved to the other side of the country, but CarolAnna had stayed in Forrester Hills, and Harry lived next door. Lacey had to get Ev Craddock to talk to her.

“This is the place,” Ella Dane said.

They dug into the sand. It was harder work than Lacey had expected, and she had to do most of it, because Ella Dane’s arm hurt. Nine inches below the surface, she reached a layer of splintered shells. She put all her strength into digging so she wouldn’t have to think about the little girl in the blue swimsuit, and the story of the life she hadn’t lived behind Grandpa Merritt’s green door. She had to recast all her memories. The things she’d been most bitter about—Ella Dane taking her away, Grandpa Merritt dying alone—were things she had to be grateful for, now. It was more than she could manage all at once, so she concentrated on the sand. It was like digging through broken glass. The green sky faded to gray-violet in the east, and then deepest blue, although the landward horizon was all in flames, great red and yellow clouds towering into a city of fire. The sea sighed in a quiet rhythm, shallow waves fainting along the shore, and the air crawled cold off the water.

Ella Dane opened the cooler. Lacey took a few steps back and upwind, hoping it looked like a gesture of respect. Had she ever thought Bibbits smelled bad in life? This was worse, a sticky smell, thick, gummy, an invisible glue. It clung, even in the sea air. She’d have a shower when they went inside.

“Bibbits,” Ella Dane said solemnly, “was a good dog, even though a lot of people didn’t think so. He had an old, wise soul and a loving heart. I have had other dogs before, and I will have other dogs again, but there will never be another Bibbits.”

Ella Dane stood with her head down. Lacey did the same, wondering how long they would wait in quiet respect—and then, she realized that Ella Dane was waiting for her to speak. She took a deep breath, and the smell of Bibbits lodged in her throat, so her voice was thick and her eyes streamed as she said, “Bibbits wasn’t an easy dog to get to know, but he was sweet.” He’d kept her company. At the end, he’d tried to protect her from Drew. He had done everything a dog needed to do, but that was private, between the two of them. Ella Dane waited another half minute. Lacey said no more.

Ella Dane tipped the cooler over the hole, and Bibbits slithered reluctantly out, his hips catching on the cooler’s rim. Ella Dane shook the cooler, and the dog came loose with a tearing sound. The smell blossomed. Lacey quickly shoveled sand into the hole while holding her breath, and Ella Dane stood weeping without sound or motion, like a statue in the rain.

Chapter Thirty-seven