Starter House A Novel (33 page)

She snatched her fist out of his palm and clutched one hand over the other between her breasts. “Yes,” she said, but she wasn’t speaking to Eric; she was looking over his shoulder, at the corner of the room. “Yes, I love you, I’m sorry I tried to run away, I shouldn’t have done it, I’m coming home.” Her voice was dead, flat, like a hostage reading a prepared statement in a language she didn’t understand.

“You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic about it.” He remembered another of his points. “A baby needs a father,” he told her.

“Oh.” She shrugged and looked away from him. “That baby. I don’t want him.”

“You’re six months pregnant; you can’t say you don’t want him now!”

“You can have him. I don’t want him. I don’t love him.” She was speaking to the corner of the room again. “Are you listening?” she said, and now he heard a thick urgency in her voice. “Can you hear me? I don’t want him, I don’t love him. Go home.” She went into the bathroom. “I mean it,” she called. Water gushed behind the door. “I don’t want him. Go home.”

That was the noisy tumble of bathwater, not a shower. “The doctor said you’re not supposed to take hot baths,” Eric said.

“It’s not hot. I need a bath. Could you go? I’ll follow you.”

He remembered another thing he’d meant to tell her. “The new debit cards came yesterday,” he said. “I got a cash advance from Discover to pay off the overdraft. I’m leaving your card by the sink.”

“Fine.”

Eric collected his handfuls of logic. Since she had agreed to come home, there was no further need to convince her, yet he felt she was unpersuaded, unwilling; she was coming home as a captive, resigned to imprisonment for a while, until the chance for escape came again. What had he ever done to her, that she should see him like this? “I love you,” he said to the bathroom door. “Please come home.”

No answer except the water. He thought she was crying and had turned the water up so he wouldn’t hear. He tried the bathroom door: locked. He should break it in, pull her out of the bath or get in there with her, and take her face in her hands and make her look at him; he should ask her and ask her and ask her, until she told him the truth.

But he recognized this feeling. Lex Hall when he threw the camera through Jeanne’s window must have felt exactly this. This was the feeling of the moment before
going too far
. His clients said,
I had to make her understand
.
I had to make her listen to me
.
I had to make her tell me the truth
. Nothing good ever began with
I had to make her
.

He had to make Lacey tell him the truth. Not to break through a locked door, no, that was going too far. “I’ll see you at home,” he said. He hated the weakness in his voice, but this was all he could do for her now, so he did it. He didn’t wait for her answer. He closed the door loudly and revved his engine a few times outside room 117, so she would hear his car and know he was leaving.

All the way back to Greeneburg, he thought about what he should have said. If she didn’t want the baby, why get pregnant in the first place? If she thought he would live with a wife who wouldn’t sleep in his bed, and who gave him her hand like a piece of dead meat, she could think again. If she was just going to turn around and come back home, why had she left? If she wanted a week at the beach, she only had to say so.

Yet he was the one who had left the marriage bed. When she had to move downstairs, he bought her a twin mattress and stayed up in the bedroom, alone.

I love you, please come home
. No, he’d said that. She was coming home, but nothing was settled, nothing was finished. He had no idea what to do next.

Chapter Forty

LACEY LOOPED AN ELASTIC
around her hair. She squeezed a pouch of motel shampoo into the bath, and the water battered it into foam. She hadn’t had a real bath since July, when Eric made a list of things pregnant women shouldn’t do. No soft cheese, deli meats, sushi—not a big sacrifice there—no horseback riding, skiing, skydiving, or trampolines—really—but she missed the hot baths.

She turned the water toward cool. She liked a bath tingling hot, but for the baby’s sake, her someday child with sun in his hair, her future teenage ingrate who would tell her he hated her, she cooled the water until it was like a swimming pool in August, not hot enough to melt the grease off her skin, the way she liked it. She rubbed the hotel soap into lather and scrubbed her skin red, and still the smell of Bibbits crawled on her.

Eric had smelled it, too. She’d seen the disgust in his face. He said he loved her, please come home, and it must have cost him something to speak so plainly, to open himself. She loved him too, abstractly, as a fact she would think about later, when she had time. He could live without her. The baby couldn’t.

Ev Craddock saved his children by sending them away. She could save the baby by giving him up, but she’d have to leave the baby with Eric and take Drew with her. If Drew would come with her. If he could. He could leave the house; how long would he stay away? If he went back and found another parent, another child, Eric taking care of the baby alone, how long before Drew demanded Eric’s attention? He followed the Craddocks to Nevada, until a family moved in with children. That must have been CarolAnna’s people, and after that, the Honeywicks.

If she divorced Eric and forced him to sell the house, if she gave up custody so he would take the baby and move, she could keep Drew attached to her long enough for Eric to get the baby away. Would Eric give up the house and go, stubborn as he was? Even though he called it their starter house, he might dig in his heels and insist on keeping it.

She could always try explaining it to Eric. Like
that
would work.

Just now, there was Drew, a shadow on the pebbled glass of the shower door. She’d known he was coming, and here he was. Tears rushed up. She splashed hot foaming water on her face and cleared her throat. Happy voice. “Hey. I know you’re there,” she said.

He slid the door back in its tracks. It moved and she saw his fingers come around its edge, she saw the silhouette behind the glass reveal itself as a naked child with a towel around his waist. She saw her own hands floating in the water, and yet, whose hand was on that door—her own hand, moving by his will in a gesture she could neither feel nor see? She swirled the water. The bubbles parted and closed, leaving a seam of finer bubbles where her hand passed. Even as she felt the water’s resistance, the shower door slid open. Drew used her mouth to eat cookies, her hand to move the game piece and to attack Ella Dane with the broken plate, but he’d wrecked Ella Dane’s room on his own, while she was downstairs, with Ella Dane her witness. Even if she could keep him out of her body and mind, she wouldn’t be safe from broken furniture and flying glass.

“I heard what you said to him,” Drew said.

“I know you did. I saw you. Don’t you want to go home?”

“About the baby. You said you don’t want him.”

Lacey shrugged. She pulled the shampoo foam around herself, building islands of modesty. Her belly mounded up, a crayon color, Strawberry Cream. “I’m not going to be able to take care of him, am I? Not if I’m with you.”

Drew smiled, bright and happy, the look of the little boy in the Burgoyne Elementary yearbook. “You won’t leave me?”

“Never.”

“You’ll stay with me?”

Lacey took a breath as if it were her last, the sweet bubble-scented air. Drew was in the water already; he was inside her, cold on the underside of her skin. If she made this promise, she had to mean it. He would sense a lie.

“Always,” she said. “As long as you want.”

There was a flicker, a leap, and now the shower door was closed at her head and opened at her feet, next to the taps, although neither door visibly moved. Lacey shuddered in the cooling bathwater. Another soaping, and then she’d wash her hair, and maybe the smell would be gone.

“If you don’t want the baby,” Drew said, and she felt his warm hand on her belly, though he appeared to be standing in the bath, beside the taps, “he can go away.”

The small invisible hand pressed, and the baby kicked. “Too late,” Lacey said lightly. “He’s too big. I’d bleed and die, and then you’d be alone.” The hand lifted. “It’s only a couple of months. Eric can take the baby, and I’ll stay with you.”

“You were crying.”

“There was soap in my eyes.”

“You love him. You love them both, your husband and your baby, you do; they always do. Nobody ever loves me best.”

“Yes, yes, I love them,” Lacey said. No lie was possible now. “It doesn’t matter, don’t you see? I promise I won’t leave you. I might have to leave the house, but you can come with me.”

“It’s my house. Why would you leave it?”

“Honey, I might have to. I might not be able to stay.”

Drew’s hand flashed, and the shower was on, full strength and steely cold, rods of water beating against her. She gasped and covered her face. “Andrew, listen! If I have to divorce Eric, I might not be able to keep the house. I might not get a job right away.”

“What did you call me?”

“Andrew.” She reached for the side of the tub. Everything was slick with a layer of soap, and her hand found only the glass door. “I found your picture on the Internet. You’re Andrew Halliday.”

“No, I’m not!” She could not see him through the water in her eyes, but she felt his hands on her ankles. His hands were hot, and larger than she had thought. She turned her face out of the streaming shower and caught a breath, and then he pulled her legs up, and her head slipped down, and the bathwater closed over her head.

Lacey opened her eyes. The shower pierced the water, every thread of the stream bringing a diamond-chain of bubbles. She saw Drew, a dark tall shape hundreds of miles away, and then the soap burned in and she closed her eyes. She kicked. Drew’s grip yielded with the kick, but the upward pull never faltered, and his hands slid from her ankles to her knees; his hands circled her shin at the thin spot just below the knee. She kicked again, and her right ankle struck the tap, a numbing, stunning blow, a pain that shot all the way up to her hip. The soapy water stung in her nose.

She had time, many many seconds, before she began to drown, and Drew wanted her alive to take care of him. If he was holding her feet, he must be standing in the bath: he must be standing between her legs, holding her knees straight up. She reached her right arm down and sideways, straining along her body, grasping for his ankle. If she could pull him off balance—she felt only the bathtub’s nubby floor.

Her chest caught and heaved, her lungs straining to force her mouth open. She stretched her neck and raised her forehead out of the water, not her nose—the bath was too deep. She squinted through the shower and saw nothing, nobody was there, no visible hands grasped her knees. Anyone walking into the room—Ella Dane, where was she?—would see a woman bizarrely drowning herself, legs raised and torso sunk.

Red lights crept inside her closed eyes. She released a bubble of air to soften the pressure on her lungs, and then another bubble. She had seconds, many seconds left, before she blacked out and opened her mouth underwater. Many seconds. Drew’s hold was elastic and relentless. She could move her legs forward and back, even bend her knees within a small range; she simply couldn’t bring her feet down.

She kicked again, and something drove in between the first two toes on her left foot, a shockingly hard, metallic blow. She gasped water in and clamped the back of her tongue upward against her throat to clear her mouth, and what was that thing, what had struck her, some part of the bathtub’s machinery, not the tap—her fading mind cried out
the lever, the drain
. She hit it again, curled her toes around it, and pulled the lever down.

The water flowed along her body, and the sound of the pipes’ starving gulp echoed through the walls of the tub. The shower came down as strong as ever, but Ev Craddock kept his drains clear, bless his heart, and Lacey’s wet skin chilled in the air as the tub drained. She had many seconds left, four or five seconds, long enough for a lifetime, and then she was able to lift her head and take a breath of half water, half air.

Her feet fell into the tub. She sat up and turned off the shower. A breath and another breath, and she began to cough, deep shattering coughs that shook the baby. She tried to take careful, shallow breaths that wouldn’t irritate her outraged lungs, but she was full of water, she had breathed it and swallowed it, water and soap and Drew’s wild rage. She dragged herself to the toilet in time to vomit it all out, the soap and the foam, Eric and Drew and the house waiting in the hills, until nothing came but clear threads of slime. She flushed the toilet and leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the cool tank furred with clean water. And he loved her; this was what he did for love.