Starter House A Novel (39 page)

“Good-bye,” she whispered. Her nose was running; she wiped it on her wrist. At the sound of her voice, he moved upward, pushing hard into her ribs.

By morning she achieved a light, whirling state of mind near sleep. The tears kept sliding, and her cheeks were raw with salt. At some unreasonable hour, Lex came howling down the stairs in the clothes he had slept in, shouting, “Where’s my baby?”

“She’s asleep,” Lacey said. At the sound of her father’s voice, Theo raised an animal howl, and this time she rejected the carrot with contempt.

“She’s hungry,” Lex said. “I’m going to give her oatmeal and applesauce.”

“Good luck with that,” Lacey said. She yawned until her jaw hinge popped. Had she ever been so tired? Five thirty. She used to get up at this hour every day, to be at work in time to supervise the early arrivals in bus-holding. She was out of the habit now, and early morning was a foreign world. She leaned against the kitchen wall, watching as Lex pushed oatmeal at Theo, who squalled and struck the spoon away. Clots of oatmeal flew across the room in every direction, and the applesauce was no better received.

“Please,” Lex begged Theo. “It’s good for you.”

He shoveled in a spoonful of applesauce. Her mouth hung open, and the applesauce dribbled out until she expelled the last slimy smear with her tongue. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “She won’t eat good food, and she’s going to get sick and die and I can’t help her.” He set her on the floor, and she tipped forward to hold her weight on her fists. “She’ll die,” he said. “It’s all my fault, and there’s nothing I can do!” And hungry Theo lifted her shrill cries into his wail of despair.

Harry came into the kitchen. “Let me feed her,” he suggested. “Go on into the other room and think quiet thoughts. Discipline your mind, Junior, or at least your voice.”

Lex fled, and Lacey followed him, wanting to help. As she left the kitchen, she heard Harry ask, “If I put sugar in the oatmeal, would you eat it?” Soothed by his slow voice, Theo squawked. “You’re a roly-poly baby doll, aren’t you,” Harry said. “How about just a taste of brown sugar, pudgy puss.” He sang to a melody from
Mary Poppins,
“Just a spoonful of sugar helps the soluble fiber go down, the soluble fiber go down, the soluble fiber go down . . .”

Lacey found Lex in the living room, Harry’s teaching room, pulling stacks of music out of the bookshelves. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Paper. Somebody showed me. It made my eyes feel good.” He ripped out the end sheet from the piano accompaniment to a book of Mozart sonatas. He snatched a pencil from Harry’s music stand and sprawled on the floor, scribbling like a child. Lacey watched the shapes forming.

They were her own shapes, her circles that the soft edge of the pencil shaded into spheres, her cones and cubes. They were the shapes she taught to her wild children, her noisy boys, to keep their twitching hands busy, a soothing habit for their mind. She had taught dozens of children these shapes. Most recently, Drew.

Lex ripped the end page out of another volume of sonatas. His pencil moved slowly, and the shapes had a darker edge, sure and firm. She loved this moment, whenever it came: exactly now, when order bloomed in a disordered mind. The shapes moved from hand to eye to heart, and she could touch the shoulder of the noisy boy driven wild by his own mute passions, and say, “Tell me about it,” so she did it now, though the suffering child was forty-eight years old.

“She’ll be fat like her mother,” Lex said. He drew an oval, pulled two lines downward to create a curve-topped triangle, and shaded it into a cone. “Jeanne’s got the diabetes already, and so does her mother. Theo could die. People die of it.”

“They do,” Lacey agreed. “You know she’s eating oatmeal now?”

Lex hunched his shoulders in a child’s sulking shrug.

“Harry’s your uncle, isn’t he?” Lacey said.

Another child’s shrug. Lacey felt irritated. He had no right, a grown man with a wife (almost ex) and a baby, to pout on the floor and tear up other people’s books, like a little kid. “You’re Andrew Halliday,” she said. “Junior.”

“Not anymore.”

“You used to live in my house.”

“Not anymore, no no.”

“Somebody’s still there. One of your family. He says he’s called Drew. He’s stuck there and he can’t leave. He needs you.”
He needs you to go home and die for him
. “He needs you to tell him it’s not his house; he has to go on to where your mother is. He needs—”

The pencil ripped through the paper. Lex squeezed both pages into a ball and threw it across the room. He surged to his feet and Lacey pulled herself away, instinctively folding both arms across her belly. She had to get Lex into that house. Lex would recognize Drew and say his real name; this had to work.

“No,” Lex said. “I’m not allowed to go back there. Other people live there now.”

“
I
live there. I want you to come home. Please.”

Lex mirrored Lacey, his arms folded across his body, his shoulders pulled in around his chest. “No. Not allowed. No.”

“He needs you.”

Lacey touched his arm, and he exploded. He flailed and battered, punched her as if he were beating at a cloud of wasps, wild directionless blows around her shoulders and head. With every blow, he cried out, as if some other, heavier hand were striking him. “Leave me alone,” he shouted. He shoved her into the corner, catching her between the fireplace and the bookshelves. He hit her with slanting, diagonal blows, more of rejection than attack. She sank down, clasping her legs against her body to shield the baby.

Chapter Forty-eight

ALTHOUGH THEY COULDN’T
serve alcohol on Sundays in Greeneburg until after two, Abernathy’s opened at ten thirty with a brunch buffet of everything greasy, crunchy, and fried. The kitchen was experimenting with twice-fried cheeseburgers—a beer-battered cheeseburger, deep-fried—and anyone who was willing to critique it could have one for free. By late afternoon, Abernathy’s usual crowd would drag itself in, returning like dogs to roll in their own stink. But at 10:45, when Eric arrived, the place was full of families, satiny girls, boys in Sunday suits with clip-on ties, their halos almost visible. They’d just come from church. Not just church, but early service. They’d earned their twice-fried cheeseburgers, their caramel-apple pie.

Eric’s Bluetooth kept slipping off his ear, and Cambrick MacAvoy’s voice faded, but he wasn’t missing much. Cambrick liked to repeat herself when she had the upper hand. “Custodial interference,” she kept saying, as if it were some playground game she was winning and not a family in pain, a confused baby, and poor crazy Lex who had already suffered so many losses. Even Jeanne. He wasn’t representing her interests, it wasn’t his job, but was anybody looking out for her? Nobody would ever care for her as Lex had. Sammie was right. If there was just a way to get them together and talk sense to them . . . “I’ll call the cops on him,” Cambrick said.

Once, in another life, she had been his aunt Marian. On one of his birthdays, when he was very small, she had given him a Thomas the Tank Engine train set.

“I want,” Eric said, and then realized he was standing at the cashier’s desk, with three respectable families lining up behind him and a four-year-old girl in an Alice-in-Wonderland dress kicking his ankles. “I need two boxes to go, please. Three boxes.”

“Six dollars a pound, no crab legs,” the cashier said, handing him a stack of Styrofoam boxes.

“I’m hungry
now,
” the Alice-child said, and so was Lacey hungry at home. She needed him to feed her, to take care of her and tell her he was sorry; he’d bought the house for her, and if she didn’t want it anymore, they’d sell it. He had to get moving.

“I want to know,” he said to Cambrick MacAvoy, “how long was the baby missing before Jeanne called you?”

Silence from the Bluetooth. Eric wove through the crowd at the buffet, sliding between indecisive children, cutting in front of the slow-moving fat people, who took all-you-can-eat as a command and not an offer. Lacey wanted an onion blossom, roast beef, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a twice-fried cheeseburger. She’d never feared food, unlike the slim expensive girls he had dated before her.

“What do you mean?” Cambrick said.

“Two hours, three hours, not till morning? How long?” Eric felt the taste of truth in his mouth, thrilling and hot, someone else’s blood. “She thought she left the baby in the car overnight, didn’t she? She doesn’t even know for sure if Lex took her. She doesn’t know
where
that baby is. I’ll see your custodial interference and raise you criminal neglect.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” and Cambrick hung up on him.

Eric dropped a tongful of ribs into the second to-go box. The boy standing at his elbow said, “I like coleslaw. And beans, the spicy ones.”

Eric caught himself with the spoonful of beans lifted over the steam table, red-brown sauce dripping from the underside of the spoon in a translucent amber ribbon. He hated baked beans. “Where’s your family?” he said. The boy looked familiar.

“I’m waiting for them.”

“They’re meeting you here?” Ridiculous, a stupid thought. Ten-year-olds did not meet their families for brunch. Eric shook his head, as if he could shake his ideas into place. The taste of truth was gone.

“I’m waiting for my mother.”

Some kind of post-divorce child exchange. Parents who couldn’t stand to be in each other’s presence, the shared air turning to poison in their throats—one would leave a child and the other would pick him up. What if the pickup parent happened to be late? If the mother’s car crashed on the way to Abernathy’s, it could be hours before anybody knew the child was missing. An open, friendly child like this, who would talk to strangers so readily. Terrifying, the risks people took with the thing they should most treasure. Whatever you could say about Lex, he’d never leave Theo alone in a car, not for a second. “How long have you been waiting?”

Tears came into the blue eyes, but not easily. The boy had to squint and wrinkle his nose, hauling them up from some deep well. “Can you help me find her?” he said.

None of this made sense to Eric. Something unsound came off this boy in waves as palpable as smell. He wanted no part of it. He wanted to be gone. Far away, home already. “I guess you’d better keep waiting,” he said.

“I want to go home.” More false tears, dragged up and pushed out onto the bright clean face. “Can you take me home?”

Eric dropped the spoon into the beans. Cries of protest and disgust came from the people around him as the sauce spattered on their Sunday best. “No,” he said. “Go away.” He left his containers at the steam table and pushed through the crowd to the door.

In his car, he locked all the doors and leaned forward to press his forehead against the steering wheel. His heart jumped and skipped, as if he’d escaped a wreck—hit the brakes just in time and barely hard enough, swerved around the spilled bicycle, felt the tires grip the road after two rotations on black ice. He remembered them all at once, his there-by-the-grace-of-God near misses, and felt in a confused way that if things had truly gone wrong, his airbag would have deployed. No airbag, so he was safe. Lie down, lie down, he said to his skipping heart, nothing happened, lie down.

He’d seen that child before—in Dr. Vlk’s office, in the Skyview, in the backseat of his own car, in the bathroom mirror. Was this what Sammie had tried to describe? Had Lacey seen and felt these things, all these months in the house? Nothing happened, yet nothing ever felt more dangerous. He speed-dialed number one but Lacey wasn’t home, and she didn’t answer her cell, so he tried Ella Dane. She answered on the fifth ring.

“I left Lacey with Harry when I went to the hospital,” she said coldly.

“Why are you at the hospital? Are you okay?”

“Jack McMure fell down the stairs.”

People fell down stairs all the time. Second-most-common household accident, after drowning. There was no such thing as bad luck; it was just the way truth looked, working itself out in a messy world. How else were people supposed to die? There was nothing wrong with his house. “Is he hurt?” Eric asked.

“Concussion. He’ll be okay.”

“Does he have health insurance?”

“Do you have homeowner’s insurance?” Ella Dane asked, with a sarcastic tone he considered unnecessary, even redundant. It was going to cost him. Everything cost him; people thought because he was a lawyer, he’d built a tree house in the money tree. Everybody wanted something, and they all wanted it from him.

Harry Rakoczy wasn’t answering his phone. Lacey was in Harry’s house, with Lex and Theo, and if Cambrick MacAvoy called the cops, what might Lex do?

Anything. He might do anything. Eric peeled out of the parking lot, ignoring the no-right-on-red sign and the honks and shouts of other drivers. Home. Now.