Starter House A Novel (9 page)

The idea was so startling, Lacey had to take a moment before she answered. “You mean, don’t go upstairs in the daytime at all?”

“Sleep downstairs, too. Your weight has changed, your ligaments are loose, you’re scared because you could fall. Pretend you live in a one-story house.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Most things are. Try it. Any bleeding, call me. If it’s more than a drop or two, call 911. Make an appointment on the way out. Two weeks.”

Lacey went home dazzled by the revolutionary simplicity of Dr. Vlk’s idea. She was afraid that Eric, who came home exhausted every day, might resent the work and trouble of moving her downstairs. But his reaction was like hers: Was it this easy, solve her problems by keeping her off the stairs? Perfect. He came home early and spent the afternoon organizing Lacey in the dining room. He ordered a twin mattress and a simple metal frame, paying extra for immediate delivery. They still had some old sheets from Lacey’s dorm days.

A twin bed. She wanted to ask why he didn’t order a double, or even a queen, so they could still sleep together, but since the thought had so clearly not entered his mind, she couldn’t quite find the words. She curled in the red armchair, watching him trot up and down the stairs, organizing her new life while her mother brought her a mug of jasmine tea and a plate of gingersnaps; jasmine for serenity, ginger for nausea. It was as if they were breaking up, as if he were moving her out of more than the bedroom. Out of his home, out of his heart. How careful he was to make sure she had everything she needed! He folded her maternity clothes into a couple of the big plastic tubs they’d used for moving; he brought all her things to the downstairs bathroom. He went upstairs again for her sketchbooks and magazines.

Lacey left her tea and gingersnaps on the side table. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and lifted her face, surprised by a rush of sadness. This was a good day: the placenta healed, the baby strong, a doctor who listened. One of the best days of her life. “You should be sitting down,” Eric said, edging around her with his arms full of sketchbooks, boxes of pencils and pastels balanced on top. She hoped he didn’t drop them. Those colored pencils were so brittle, the leads shattered if they were ever dropped. “You should be resting.” He set his pile on the lowest step and took her back to the red chair.

“What if I’m lonely downstairs?” she said.

“I’ll check on you.” He touched the mug. “Your tea’s gone cold; you want me to nuke it?”

“What if I can’t sleep alone?”

“Lacey, be reasonable. That room’s not big enough for a big bed. And this mattress and the frame—this can be the baby’s bed when he’s bigger. It’s only for a little while. I’ll keep my cell phone on at night and you can call me if you need me.”

“The tea’s fine,” she said. Call him at night on the cell phone. Maybe she could send him an e-mail. Train Bibbits to carry messages. Eric was still standing there, as if waiting for permission to complete this separation. “Everything’s fine,” she said. He rubbed her shoulder, then carried her books and art supplies into the dining room.

A wonderful day, she told herself, a perfect day, but she was losing half her house. It hurt unexpectedly; it hurt like a death. Her first real home. Good-bye to the master bedroom, good-bye to the shiny new bathroom, see you in four months, good-bye. Like a child again, she was camping out in a temporary bed. She told herself it was just a makeshift arrangement, but that was what it had always been.
Just for a little while,
Ella Dane said, and now Lacey could not convince herself she would ever sleep in her own bedroom again. Everything she had wanted and worked for, gone. She wiped the tears from her face and tried to smile.

The doorbell rang. “That’s the bed,” Eric said. He directed the men to set it up in the empty room, their formal dining room someday, and by the time they were done, it was past nine. Lacey was as tired as if she’d hauled the furniture around the house herself. Ella Dane made a pizza-shaped article consisting largely of potatoes and seaweed. Lacey, not wanting to eat, sat on her new bed and looked at her white walls.

Eric knocked and entered on the echo of his knock, laughing as he pulled the door shut behind him. “Happy housewarming,” he said as he handed her a greasy paper bag.

“That’s not a cheeseburger? And onion rings?” She hadn’t even heard him leave the house. “I love you,” she said. He was so sweet; she didn’t tell him so often enough.

He kissed her just above the right eyebrow. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

“Can’t you stay?” she said, disappointed.

“I’m in court all morning, got to get these motions written up. You want to go shopping this weekend, look at baby furniture?”

No
. Lacey’s instant revulsion surprised her. Absolutely
no,
no crib, no car seat, no highchair, no. She felt as if he’d asked her to hold a tarantula. “It’s too soon,” she said.
What if the baby dies
. She wouldn’t say it; she shouldn’t have to. He should know. “What if it doesn’t work out,” she said. “Then we’d have all the things and not use them. No.”

He sat beside her on the bed and pulled her into a one-armed hug, pulled her head down onto his shoulder and stroked her hair. “It would be the worst thing ever. But we’d keep the things. We’d still use them sometime.”

“No,” Lacey said, implacable. To buy the furniture before the baby was safe was asking for trouble. To use for a later, living child the things that were bought for the dead—no. Ella Dane would understand this fateful feeling; not Eric.

Eric breathed hard for a moment, and she felt him control his temper: everything he wanted to say to her, things he said when they disagreed, that she was irrational and difficult, her mother’s daughter—his thoughts pressed in on her, but she did not yield. She couldn’t have baby furniture until she was sure she’d have a baby. “Okay,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want.” He hugged her again and pushed her away. “Got to get my work done. Good night.”

Lacey sat on the bed eating onion rings and reasoning with herself. It was all right if Eric didn’t understand. Later, when the baby came, he’d know she was right. He was angry, but he’d get over it. And he had brought her onion rings. She liked to nibble a hole in the crust, suck the onion out, and then eat the crust like a crunchy onion-flavored cookie. Delicious.

A voice snorted under the door, “Huh. Huh. Huh.” Hard claws tapped back and forth, and the snuffling voice traveled from one side of the door to the other. “Huh.”

Poor little Bibbits. Under all his fluffy apricot poodlosity, he was a sweet dog. Lacey pulled off the cheeseburger’s lower patty. She opened the door, and Bibbits stood on his rear legs and danced in a circle for her. She dropped the patty in front of him.

He sniffed it, licked it, nudged it with his paw. Then he looked up and barked. “Seriously?” she said. She tore the patty into four pieces and fed them to him. When he was finished, he trotted back into the kitchen and knocked his bowl of rice upside down.

Lacey brushed her teeth, took off the garnet strand, and went to bed, though it wasn’t yet ten. She let the garnet strand fall into the clay bowl beside her bed, along with all the other gemstone strands and amulets Ella Dane had given her over the last few weeks. Rose quartz for her uterus, amethyst for serenity, citrine for cleansing, moonstone for new life. Ella Dane was concerned for Lacey, but she had not sensed anything wrong with the house itself. The baby rolled inside her. What a busy boy he was, playing peekaboo in the dark.

She fell asleep with the child dancing under her hand, and she woke gradually to a pain above her heart. Too many onion rings. She needed milk. The room was dark. She had a confused sense that it was later than it seemed, that midnight was long gone and yet morning had come no closer. The night had taken a turn into a different kind of time, bubbling out of itself into a circle of nameless hours between three and four.

She needed milk. She pressed her hand against the mattress to lever herself upright, and her palms sank into a swampy warmth. She pressed deeper into the mattress. The slow liquid rose over her fingers, over the tops of her hands.

Blood. So much blood, too much. While she was sleeping, the thing she most feared had happened, and it was already too late. Where was Dr. Vlk’s firm voice now? The window was a gray square in the wall, white with moonlit clouds casting no light into the room. She threw the upper sheet aside, and the bed was a black pool, a deeper black around her hips. She felt the warmth on her left thigh, the dark stain from her waist to her knee. Where the child had danced, stillness. She stood up, expecting pain, feeling only the old pain over her heart, the wetness cooling on her legs and hands. Eight steps to the light switch. Every step was a prayer. Please God no. Let it not be true. No no no.

She touched the light switch, and the bed was blazing white. The lower sheet was translucent, water soaked. Warm water, with drifts of bubble-bath foam, planes of rainbow where the bubbles met in flat walls, a continental mass of bubbles mounding where she had slept. In the middle lay a green-and-blue plastic tugboat.

Impossible, intolerable. She could not believe in the tugboat. She had never owned it, never had it in a classroom, never seen it in her life. It lay in the bubbles and the wet bed, so real and so specific, so exactly that particular tugboat, a real thing.

She had to wake up now. She felt herself standing by the light switch with her hand on the wall. She also felt herself lying in the bed, on her left with her knee drawn up, breathing hard, trying to move a hand, to make a sound. Between the real self and the dream self, only the pain over her heart was the same. She breathed harder but could not engage her voice. She brought her whole mind into her left hand lying softly next to her breast. If she could tighten the fingers, if she could move at all. . . .

The baby kicked. Lacey opened her eyes. She was in her clean dry bed, no blood, no water, no tugboat. The window was lighter than in her dreams, gray clouds scrawled over a deep purple sky, and she could see everything. Even so, she turned on the light and searched for the tugboat. She couldn’t find it in the bed, under the bed, or in her boxes of clothes. There had never been a tugboat. She needed milk.

There was a pale light in the kitchen, where the refrigerator stood open. Everybody was asleep, and Drew was there, pushing plates of leftovers along the shelves. Trouble-at-home was in her house now, hungry at midnight, and she accepted him without surprise or protest, only a dark recognition: she’d known he was coming. Midnight, though. She had to find his parents.

He stood in the refrigerator light in his blue striped pajamas, looking from one shelf to another. “What’s that thing?” he said.

The teacher voice said,
Tell me your phone number,
and Lacey was surprised to hear herself answer his question: “Some kind of pizza. You want milk?”

“Is there Coke?”

“You’re lucky there’s milk.” She took the milk from the refrigerator and closed the door. In the suddenly darker kitchen, the milk jug sent an alarm of cold through her hand. She put the jug on the counter and looked at Drew. Like the tugboat, he was real and not real. “Why are you here?” she said. These words took strength; she had to lift them past a dense weight in her mouth. She pushed her voice out and said, “Go home.”

His eyes glimmered, catching a light from outside. “I live here.”

“It’s my house.”

“It was my house first.”

Child’s logic, unassailable. Two children scuffling over a classroom toy.
I had it first.
“It’s not your house anymore,” she said. There was always one question to ask a lost child. “Where’s your mother?”

“Can’t I stay? You can be my mother.”

“No. That can never happen. Go away.”

“I’ll be good this time, I promise, please.”

Lacey felt herself weaken. This was her failing as a teacher, and when she went back to the classroom, she would have to harden her heart. She let children turn in their homework late. She accepted their excuses, not because they were believable, but because of the urgent young voices, the supplication so utterly sincere. She couldn’t say no. Teachers learned to deny even the pleading of angels; Lacey didn’t know how.

“If you’re good,” she said, hating her own weakness, unable to refuse.

He rushed toward her with a sweep like the wind. She closed her eyes and stepped back, covering her belly with both arms. “Don’t touch me. No, no.” She took another step backward into vertigo, and she stopped moving and sank down. She found herself sitting on her bed, in the dark, her head awash in dreams and echoes of dreams.

None of it had happened. Panic burned in her throat, just the same. She took her pulse and it was one hundred fifty. She’d read an article on YourBabyNow.net about dreams. It was all completely normal. Real. Not real. She listened to the quiet creaking of the walls. There was no blood, no water, no tugboat, no abandoned child. Only the crazy pregnancy dreams, one after the other. They never happened, they meant nothing at all.

She folded her pillow and clutched it under her head. The milk. She saw the milk in her mind, she knew where it was: sitting on the counter where she had left it, the white plastic jug sweating big beads of condensation. By morning, the surface would be dry and the milk sour. Eric would be irritated and Ella Dane would lecture her about waste.

She wasn’t getting up again, to risk walking into another dream. She might be dreaming even now. Better to lie here quietly. In the kitchen, all by itself, the refrigerator door swung shut, and the quality of light coming in under Lacey’s door changed from blue to dull orange.