Starter House A Novel (43 page)

“I can’t file for custody,” Harry said, and Lacey’s mind whirled. Custody? Of whom? “But there’s a grandparent relationship, so I can get visitation. Floyd Miszlak’s working it out with Ms. MacAvoy.”

Theo Hall. “You’re not her grandfather.”

“Legally, I am. I adopted Lex when he was twelve.” Harry took a shivering breath, and Lacey turned away. “It’s my fault,” Harry said. “If I’d gotten the truth out of him, all those years ago . . .”

“I don’t think he knew it himself, until just then.”

“Ah, poor Lex. He never meant to hurt anyone. The things that happened in the house; he couldn’t have known what he was doing. It wasn’t really him.”

“Yes, it was,” Lacey said. “Drew was real, and he was really part of Lex. I don’t think Lex knew about it. Not consciously, anyway.” She hated that she had yielded to Harry’s pain, let herself be drawn into his future. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m moving downtown. You won’t see me anymore.”

“Good.” Ella Dane’s car turned onto Forrester Lane. “They’re here,” Lacey said. She waited until Ella Dane parked, and then she walked, large and stately, belly first, down the ramp. Ella Dane popped the trunk and unfolded the wheelchair from it, like a magic trick, and she got Eric from the backseat into the chair as Lacey reached them.

They hadn’t mentioned Drew in the hospital. Eric had been unconscious, then heavily medicated, then more lightly medicated but worn out from the first stages of physical therapy. And there were always people watching and listening. Cops at first, then nurses. Two weeks, and they hadn’t said a word about it, and every day made the words harder to speak, the memories more distant and estranged. They had to talk about it—only once, but it had to be spoken. She wasn’t sure how to begin. He might not even remember.

“So,” she said, hands on hips, shaking her head in mock accusation, “this is an extreme way to get out of diaper duty, don’t you think?”

“Extreme?” Eric said. He laughed, winced, groaned.

“Some people might even call it
lame,
” Lacey said.

“Oh, Lacey!” Ella Dane said with reproach, but Eric and Lacey were both laughing now, Eric in light, painful syllables and Lacey effortfully, but it was better than nothing. “After what he did for you,” Ella Dane said.

“Look at this ramp; some of Harry’s students built it. He’s moving.”

“You know I’ll only need it for a couple of months,” Eric said. “Two more operations on the left ankle, and I’ll be on my feet again.”

“It’ll be good for the stroller after that. I’ll push you up to the door.”

“No, you won’t,” Eric said. He rolled from the driveway to the ramp, and Ella Dane took over from there. “Did you know I could hear you the whole time?” he said.

So he remembered. “Why didn’t you do something?”

“I did. He was so strong. But you kept saying
sideways,
and I thought, when my parents took me to the Isle of Palms when I was little, my dad said if you get caught in a rip current, you don’t try to swim inshore, you swim sideways till the current lets go. He wanted to push you down the stairs, but I made him think the bathtub was better.”

“Thank you so much, I was really looking forward to drowning.”

“It was a little more time. I didn’t mean those things I said; it was all for more time. I kept looking for
sideways,
like you said. There had to be a way. I listened to you all the time, Lacey, I did. All the time. Then when he was fighting Lex, there it was, a way to get us both down the stairs, away from you. I pushed, and we fell.”

“You could have died,” Lacey said. They reached the top of the ramp, where Harry was waiting, smiling between the cabbages.

“I didn’t care. Somebody had to die. As long as it wasn’t you.”

Harry opened the door for them with a flourish. Eric put his hands on the wheels and stopped Ella Dane from pushing him inside. He looked at Lacey. “Is it safe now?” he said. “Are we going to be able to live here?”

“Look,” Lacey said. The afternoon light spilled through the porthole window and pooled brightly at the foot of the stairs, as it always did, and the house stood empty, remembering nothing.

About the author

Meet Sonja Condit

SONJA CONDIT received her MFA from Converse College, where she studied with Robert Olmstead, Leslie Pietrzyk, R. T. Smith, and Marlin Barton. Her short fiction has appeared in
Shenandoah
magazine, among other publications. Condit plays principal bassoon in the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra and for the Greater Anderson Musical Arts Consortium. She teaches at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

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About the book

Author’s Note

T
HIS BOOK HAD ITS ORGINS
about ten years before I wrote it, in a dream I had when pregnant with my first child. I was sleeping with a teddy bear, because we had a very devoted cat (Siamese, affectionate but possessive), and we were afraid the baby would upset him. Our plan was to sleep with the bear in the bed with us for a couple of weeks, then put it in the bassinet in the hospital. Before bringing me home with the baby, my husband would give the bear to the cat. We thought that in this way, the cat would recognize the baby, by scent, as being part of his family.

One night I woke up in the middle of a dream. In the part of my mind that was still dreaming, I thought the bear was the baby. In the part that was awake, I knew it wasn’t breathing. So I believed I had rolled over on the baby and suffocated him. This dream seemed to go on forever and is still one of the worst experiences of my life. When I started to write a ghost story, I tried to capture those feelings of horror, grief, and guilt. 

Author Q & A

What inspired you to write this particular book?

Pregnancy was hard for me, especially the first one. I had four months of bleeding and seven months of nausea, and for most of that time I was certain the baby would die. There is nothing in the pregnancy books about how to get through a situation like this. It was lonely; my husband was right there with me, but I felt completely alone. The baby was fine in the end. When I wanted to write about a haunted house, I instinctively made the protagonist a pregnant woman, because I knew that a pregnant woman is a haunted house. My son was ten when I started putting together the idea for this book, and he was fairly noisy, so Drew and the baby really are the same person.

Have you ever lived in a haunted house?

Supposedly, yes. Our house in London had a ghost. People would hear a crying baby. I never heard it, and I don’t really believe in ghosts. But I was terrified of the stairs. The stairs in
Starter House
don’t look anything like those stairs, but they have the same feeling. Are you a southern writer?

I didn’t grow up in the South. I grew up mostly in the UK and Canada, but I had a southern grandmother who told stories, and maybe that’s all you need. My stepgrandfather used to threaten me; he’d tell me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up in South Carolina. And he must have been right, because here I am in Greenville.

So where is Greeneburg?

Greeneburg is my sandbox. I have set several short stories there, and places and even characters reappear from one story to another. I erased the northwestern corner of South Carolina, brought the Blue Ridge Mountains a little farther south to make the summers five degrees cooler and keep the spring flowers blooming a little longer, and put the combined population of real-life Greenville and Spartanburg into my Greeneburg. And the extra
e
is for our Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. In downtown Greenville, on the corner of Broad and Main, there is a lovely statue of Greene holding a telescope; he was famous for saying he would recover the country or die in the attempt. Using Greeneburg instead of Greenville frees me to have only what I need in the stories, without having to worry about real-life geography. And returning to the same places grounds the stories, I hope, in a sense of larger reality. The characters aren’t trapped in their own story. They can show up in the background of someone else’s life.

Does the ghost represent something?

Sometimes he does. There’s the hauntedness of pregnancy, the fact that you have another human being alive inside you, yet you really don’t know anything about this person. Haunting in general makes me think about the ways that violence, drug addiction, and other kinds of abuse are passed down through a family, as if behavior were inherited just as much as hair color. But mostly I just wanted to scare people.