Starter House A Novel (5 page)

“Let me buzz the nurse; all you have to do is tell them your name and they’ll take you straight to your mom’s room,” she said.

“No, they won’t. They never will.”

Lacey’s eyes flooded for his sake. It was partly the hormones that made her weepy, partly this one dirty, hopeful, affectionate child, this one loving and wounded heart, the emblem of so many. She pressed the call button, but when she said, “They’re coming,” the child was gone.

“What do you need here, Mom?” the nurse asked.

“There was a little boy. He couldn’t find his mother.”

“I’ll find him.”

Lacey waited for her to come back and tell her the child had been found. She never did. The hospital hummed and whispered, and every time Lacey fell asleep, a door banged, or someone’s footsteps ran fast and hard outside her room. She counted boxes, everything that needed to be unpacked, all that work she had to do tomorrow, the empty house waiting to be filled. She drifted off and spent the night working in her dreams, unloading box after box after box of things she didn’t even know she owned, opening door after door in a house that had no end.

Chapter Five

THE NEXT AFTERNOON,
when Eric brought her home in the Mitsubishi, she discovered he had done more than turn in the U-Haul and pick up the car. He opened the front door and Lacey stepped into a room she didn’t recognize. He laughed at her surprise. “The magic of same-day delivery,” he said. “You like it?”

When they were dating and he’d had money, Eric had been the master of romantic surprises. He took her on the most astonishing extravagant dates: a balloon ride, a cabin in the Smokies, a cruise to Alaska. Even when the money went away, he’d live on peanut butter sandwiches for two weeks to save his lunch budget for a special meal. And now he’d furnished the house. He’d bought real furniture: sofa, loveseat, and chair in dark red leather—end tables and a coffee table, dark walnut—and the most perfect lamps, ornate brass columns with gold linen shades and tassels. Everything had ball-and-claw feet. Her whole life, she had longed for furniture with ball-and-claw feet, furniture that announced itself:
I am here, and here I stay
.

“If you don’t like it, we’ve got three days to exchange it,” Eric said.

“It’s perfect. Oh, bookshelves! Real wood, no more plastic. I feel like such a grown-up.” The bookcase was bolted into the wall, baby-safe already, and Eric had left the bottom three shelves empty, perfect for the baby’s books and toys.

“There’s no art. You can put up some of your things. I always liked that big coffee cup.”

Lacey looked at the blank wall between the two big windows, and her mind flashed to the same wall in Harry Rakoczy’s house next door: his sister, Dora, charcoal under glass, her face tilted against the violin, her long wild hair.

She loved the furniture, but what had Eric done? He’d been counting pennies ever since her last day of school; he’d lost his temper over fifty dollars to keep the moving van overnight, twenty dollars to replace the dishes, and now this? “Are you sure?” she said.

She wanted the furniture. It was everything she wanted: a houseful of things that couldn’t be packed up and moved overnight, a home with weight, an anchor for her life. This was the home she’d drawn in her school notebooks, all those nomadic years with her mother. These beautiful rooms. Eric knew what she wanted; but she knew what he needed. She tried again, knowing she had to voice her doubt as a true question; she had to give him the chance to change his mind.

“Are you sure we can afford this?” she said. “If it’s too much, we could wait.”

“There’s no interest for six months. Don’t you like it?”

He sounded disappointed, and of course she liked it—he always knew what she liked. It would have been fun, though, to have chosen the furniture herself, to have hunted through the store with Eric. An ungrateful thought, and she pushed it away: in the end she would have picked precisely this. “I love it,” she said. The bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, and there were all the books and CDs, along with his grandmother’s Ukrainian Easter eggs in Waterford crystal eggcups. All that work. She knew, without asking, that he had unpacked every box except those marked
Lacey Classroom,
flattened the boxes, and tied them in a stack in the garage. And the
Classroom
boxes were up in the attic, and when she opened them a year from now, maybe two, they would smell of crayons and the future. “And you unpacked all this,” she said, sighing. “I worried about it all night.”

“Come see the bedroom.”

Lacey grabbed Eric’s hand, ignoring the pain that shot across her palm. “How did you do this? All in one night?”

“You don’t get through law school by sleeping. Come and see.”

Eager to see and approve the bedroom, she pulled him to the foot of the stairs. They were finished with the same deep-amber oak flooring as the rest of the downstairs, with a runner of red carpet coming down, held in place by brass rods on each step. That was so typical of Eric, the exact detail, his concern that she might slip on the glassy wood. In the kitchen, she knew, he had already replaced the broken window.

She sensed something—not a sound, but an approach—and she looked up the stairs. Something dark rushed down, something too dense and hectic to see. Blackness seized her by the knees. It hit her all at once, driving into her breastbone. She coughed and pulled for air, and her lungs resisted, unwilling to open again. To breathe felt like an effort against life, as if she had to open her mouth underwater.

“Lacey,” Eric said urgently. “What’s wrong?”

Something in the house. Something pushing back against the furniture—the thing that had tried to keep her out, sealing itself against the key, slashing her with the broken window. When she was eight, her mother had had the chance to house-sit for a friend of a friend who was traveling to Tanzania: six months in a big house, free rent and utilities, and even some extra pay for taking care of the dogs. Her mother had walked into the house and out again.
This house doesn’t want me,
she’d said, and so she and Lacey spent the winter moving from one motel to another. Lacey thought she felt it now, some resentful force pushing down the stairs, pushing her out.

Unacceptable. Not
this
house. This house had loved her from the moment they met, the house stripped of shutters and carpet, Lacey with her hand full of pistachio shells on the sunny street. This dizziness was nothing, loss of blood, maybe. She shook her head. “Some kind of weird vertigo. I’m fine.”

“You looked like you might pass out.” Eric glanced up the stairs, then took her elbow and steered her into the kitchen. “I bet you’re hungry.”

Lacey seized on this explanation. “If you saw what they fed me . . . I’m starved.”

She was disappointed to see their old dinette in the kitchen. “We’re eating in here for now,” Eric said. “We can’t do the dining room till we’ve paid off the rest. Baby’s room first. We’ll do that when you feel better.”

“Maybe in a month.” Yesterday the doctor had told her the baby would be viable in six weeks.
Just barely viable
,
and you have to keep him in the oven as long as you can. Take care of yourself. Don’t lift anything over ten pounds
. Just six weeks to go. She wouldn’t buy a crib until then: it would be tempting fate.

They sat at the Formica dinette, and it was just like back in Columbia, when Eric was in law school and Lacey taught fourth grade, the two of them in their nest, so cozy and sweet. Eric frowned at the chipped orange table and said, “Butcher block. After the dining room.” He slid two slices of pizza onto a paper plate.

She loved it when he made pizza. He made the dough from scratch, and somehow, in the midst of buying the furniture and unpacking all their things, he’d found time to pick up her favorite ingredients. The anchovies and the meaty little black kalamata olives, the artichoke hearts cured in olive oil. She craved such salty, intense flavors since getting pregnant. He’d left one-third of the pizza plain cheese for himself.

“So I called your mother,” he said.

Lacey put the second slice back down onto her plate. “What for?”

“The doctor says you’re on bed rest. Your mother’s coming to help us out.”

“No.” Lacey wasn’t hungry anymore. The anchovies, so delicious a moment ago, turned her stomach. “She makes me crazy.”

How could she make him understand? She knew how to be Eric Miszlak’s wife, hardworking and sensible and supportive, a girl who kept her head in a crisis; she knew how to be Ella Dane Kendall’s daughter, quiet and sensitive, gifted with spiritual talents not yet developed. She could not possibly be both at once. And what if Lacey’s mother came in and felt that force pushing down the stairs, something in the house denying her right to be there? Furniture wouldn’t anchor Ella Dane Kendall to any house; she would insist they leave, which Lacey would never do. Ella Dane wouldn’t believe what it meant to Lacey, to have a real home at last.

It was already too late to explain her mother to Eric, years too late. Lacey had told him stories of her unsettled childhood as adventures, comedies, when they were dating. She hadn’t wanted to be
that
girl, the one who was needy and damaged, the work in progress, the fixer-upper, and so she laughed and made faces and shaped the stories with her hands.
Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ?
she would say. The time Ella Dane’s then boyfriend poured bleach on all their clothes; the time Ella Dane smuggled a litter of puppies into a motel; the time they had spent three weeks one July sleeping in the car outside a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach, sneaking in to the breakfast buffet and the swimming pool. It was too late to tell the stories again as the humiliating horrors they had truly been—to Eric, who had fallen over himself laughing at the idea of a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach. She hadn’t even known that was funny.

“You don’t know how crazy she makes me,” Lacey said.

“She means well.”

“She’ll do some kind of moon ritual and burn weird candles.” She would pray for the baby, in her way; Lacey couldn’t stand the idea. She didn’t want Ella Dane having any opinions about this pregnancy, advising Lacey what to eat and what to avoid. If Lacey had been thinking clearly, those first few weeks of her pregnancy, she wouldn’t have told Ella Dane about it at all—not until the baby was born. After the mess she’d made of Lacey’s childhood, she had no right. “You’ll hate it,” Lacey said.

“You can’t stay here alone all day in bed. What if you need something?”

“I could call you.”

“I’ll be working. You can’t always get me.” He turned his back on her to wash his hands at the sink. “Finish your pizza,” he said. “You’ve got to eat. For the baby.”

Lacey’s stomach twisted again. She couldn’t tell: Was it hunger, nausea, rage? They all felt the same. Eric was right. The baby needed food. She waited until he left the room before she took another bite.

Chapter Six

TWO WEEKS LATER,
on the first day of school, Lacey woke at eight, breathless, with her conscience biting her heart. Having been student and then teacher since the age of five, she could not shake the feeling that she was urgently wanted somewhere else.

By eight thirty she was at the kitchen table, her laptop open and a cup of decaf cooling beside her. She was supposed to be choosing an obstetrician. It had taken her half an hour to find her way into the provider list for Eric’s new insurance; everybody else had grown up with computers and cell phones since elementary school, but Lacey had been lucky to have a working calculator, and she still wasn’t entirely comfortable on the Internet. Now she was passed from one your-call-is-important-to-us hold to another, from receptionist to nurse, each handing her along as soon as she said
placental abruption
. Every nurse told her the doctor’s schedule was full. She jumped to YourBabyNow.net to see what her baby was doing at eighteen weeks. She loved this website, her online home.