Starter House A Novel (41 page)

“I know you,” she whispered.

“I don’t remember.” He sank before her, slowly to his knees, and crossed his arms over his face, shaking his head, a child’s gesture, a child’s misery. “Please,” he said. “Please can I go. Oh please.”

“But I know you. It’s
you
.” She touched his shoulders, then pulled him in, pulled his head against her belly, cradled the back of his head in her hands. His breath was hot between her breasts, and he clutched the sides of her dress, pulling it tight over her shoulders. “Don’t be scared,” she said into his thin, light hair. Poor thing, poor thing. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”

And it was almost there, the truth, the answer, gathering around them. Lacey sensed its geometry, the turning of a kaleidoscope, lines and angles clicking into place. “I know you,” she said. “I know who you are.”

“I remember,” he said, “Mama lay down for a nap, she was so tired.”

“And then?”

But the door opened and Eric came in with the October wind around him, yellow leaves scurrying at his feet. Lex wailed and pushed himself away from Lacey, and the moment passed, the memory unspoken.

Chapter Fifty

“WHY ARE YOU HERE?”
Lacey asked. She’d known the truth, but it was gone, blown out in the sudden wind.

“What’s going on here?” Eric said. “What is this guy doing in my house?”

“Visiting,” Lex said. He scrambled away from Lacey on his knees. “She made me come here. I didn’t want to.”

“You. I’ll talk to you later. Lacey, where have you been?”

“Next door, at Harry’s.”

“And don’t you ever answer your phone? That’s what it’s for, so I can get in touch with you. I’ve been calling and calling.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed two to show her. Lacey’s cell phone tinkled the “Ode to Joy” on the kitchen counter. “You went out of the house and didn’t take it with you?”

“I was in a hurry.” She couldn’t remember why. Eric was so loud and so sudden. Couldn’t he just shut up and listen? She almost had the answer. “I didn’t have time.”

“How much time does it take to pick up the damn phone?” Eric turned to Lex. “And you. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Why did you take that baby out of that car?”

“Jeanne left her all alone, all by herself alone in the dark! What could I do?”

“You could have called 911. You could have called
me,
for God’s sake. You had Jeanne right where you want her. Child endangerment, neglect, the whole nine yards, that was your whole custody case in that parking lot, and you took the baby, why?”

“I don’t know,” Lex said. “I don’t know what I did.”

Something changed in the air. Lacey looked up, already knowing what she would see, and Drew was there, standing at the top of the stairs. Though he looked as solid as ever, the light from the porthole window flowed through him unimpeded, casting a block of white on the red carpet on every step. “Can you stop, please stop?” Lacey said.

“What were you thinking?” Drew said.

“What were you thinking?” Eric said to Lacey.

“Listen to yourself,” Lacey said. “These aren’t your thoughts. He’s trying to control you, can’t you feel it? Get out of here
now
.” Hopeless; she’d never felt Drew’s approach, there was no way Eric could resist.

“All you have to do is take care of the baby,” Drew said.

“All you have to do is take care of the baby,” Eric said.

Lex pressed his hands over his face and ran up the stairs. Drew flicked out of sight. He reappeared halfway down and said, “I gave up everything for you.”

“I gave up everything for you,” Eric said.

Lacey couldn’t let that pass. “No, you didn’t. This is our life together. Our money, our house, our baby—we did it all together. It’s what we both wanted. Nobody gave up anything. Eric, don’t listen to him!”

“I take care of everything for you,” Drew said.

“Don’t say it.”

“I take care of everything for you,” Eric said.

She turned to run for the door, but he was too quick for her, both of them were too quick. Eric caught her arm just on the elbow and squeezed it hard. Drew said and Eric echoed him—and now the echo came closer, so that she was hearing them both at once, converging—“I want you to understand what you’ve done.” They said the last word together, and Drew disappeared. Lacey and Eric were alone, at the foot of the stairs. “Come and see,” he said, pulling her toward the stairs.

She swung her fist against the side of his head—a soft and clumsy blow, because he was still Eric, and she couldn’t hurt him—but it was enough to surprise him. He let her go, and she ran for the kitchen. She had a second or two, she’d never reach the front door. Long enough to reach the drawer beside the sink. She pulled out a knife at random—a vegetable peeler, no—and the second knife she seized was the spare chef knife, still new, in its cardboard sleeve. She whirled and held it out in front of her just as Eric reached her. He stopped. She waved the knife, absurdly sheathed in white cardboard. She’d entered the house ready to die if she had to—maybe, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary—but she couldn’t let Drew use Eric as he had used Beth Craddock. What it must have been like for Beth, when Drew stepped out of her body and she realized what her hands had done, no, she’d do anything to spare Eric that. If she could separate them, surprise Drew out of Eric—if she could ask Eric a question Drew couldn’t answer, if she could do for Eric what Ella Dane had done for her, she could save him.

“What’s the third-most-common household accident?” she said.

“What?” he said, two voices together, man and child in unison.

“There’s drowning in the bathtub, and falling down the stairs, happens all the time.” She waved the knife again. “How about kitchen accidents?”

“Third,” they said together; and Eric’s voice alone clarified, “Mostly burns.”

“Listen to me!” she said. “Eric, listen. You don’t have to do what he wants. You can move sideways.”

“Sideways,” Eric said alone, and Drew shouted, “Shut up, don’t talk to him!”

She was alive because she had opened the drain with her toes. If only she could get through to Eric, make him listen. “Do something he hasn’t thought of,” she said. Footsteps upstairs, but Drew was inside Eric, so how—? Lex. She’d forgotten him. “Lex!” she screamed. “Go next door and get Harry, go now!”

A door slammed, but he didn’t come down. Instead of fleeing the house, he must have shut himself into a bedroom. Eric caught her left wrist. With the last moment of freedom in her left hand, she snatched the cardboard sheath off the knife. Eric turned her wrist, and the knife sliced across the web between her thumb and her finger. He took the knife from her right hand and held it against her head, alongside her right ear, with her left arm pulled painfully back and twisted against his body. “All right then, if you like,” and the voice was entirely Drew, there was nothing of Eric here, Eric would never hurt her, “let’s move sideways. Up the stairs.”

“I’d rather not,” she said, as if politely refusing a reasonable invitation. “I’d rather stay here.”

He spoke in the double voice again, Eric and Drew together. “I need you to know what you’ve done. I need you to be reasonable.”

Those were Eric’s words. Drew had turned his thoughts against him, as Lacey’s thoughts had been turned. Ella Dane had shown Lacey the truth by holding Drew’s hand until Lacey knew it for her own. Whatever Eric thought he was doing or seeing, she had to find a way to touch him. “Listen,” she said.

They came to the foot of the stairs. Her left hand was slippery with blood. She pushed herself backward against him with all her weight, into the knife instead of away from it. The cut was a fiery line against her cheek and forehead, but she hardly felt it. Eric stumbled and let go of her, and she broke for the door. That same slippery hand slid off the dead bolt, and he came up behind her and held the knife under her belly, blade up, where one stroke would bring the baby’s birth and death at once.

“Upstairs,” he said.

“You don’t want to hurt me,” Lacey said. She walked slowly up the stairs, stopping on each step until he pushed her. The knife traveled around her belly, nudging her forward, and her dress fell from it in ribbons. Why did people have to make knives so sharp these days, why? “Eric, listen. I need to see Dr. Vlk now. Can you drive me to her office?” Some way to distract him, surprise him out of Drew’s control.

“We can’t afford the copays for you to run off to the doctor every five minutes,” Eric said. “This house, we can’t afford this, not with the student loans.”

“I taught summer school every year you were in law school.”

“That paid for my books, no more. I’m not making the kind of money you think I am. We’re barely keeping up with the interest. The house. All that furniture.”

Maybe he thought they were sitting at the kitchen table going over the checkbook. Maybe he thought they were sanely negotiating their future. In his mind, the hand with the knife held a ballpoint pen, tapping a row of subtracted numbers.

“Look at yourself,” she said. “Look at your hand.
Look.
”

He urged her up another step. They were too high. If she fell back on him, made them both fall, down and backward and into the knife, all three of them would die. “It was for you,” he said. “It was all for you. The hospital bills. All I get from Moranis Miszlak is my salary. They’ve got me working the pissant lawsuits and the trailer-trash divorces; there’s no money there. I’ve got to bring in big cases, and how can I, if I have to run home whenever the baby kicks wrong or you see a shadow you don’t like?”

“That is not fair.”

“And I brought your mother here and she’s worse than you are. And that loony-tune who fell down the stairs, do you know what that could have cost us? Thank God we’ve got liability, but it’s only a million bucks, and if he’d broken his neck we’d burn through that in a year. We are
broke
.”

They should have had this conversation three months ago. She knew from his voice that these were not new thoughts. He’d been ruminating for months, and meanwhile buying furniture they couldn’t afford to keep her happy, just as she had kept Drew secret as long as she could. “I’ll go back to work next August,” she said. “We’re keeping up. Eric, please. I might even be able to get a job in January. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do what he wants. Don’t push back. Move sideways. I know you can.”

He couldn’t, that was the truth. He was not a flexible thinker. He was going to kill her and the baby, be tried and convicted for it—death for her, worse than death for him, all their lives wasted, for nothing. She’d lost contact with Drew, he was entirely Eric’s now. When her family died, Drew would, once again, be left behind.

They were at the top of the stairs. Was he going to push her down? She grabbed the banister with both hands. He kept cutting, a silver whisper, light through the cotton dress, heavier at the gathered pleats on her shoulders. A hard snap, and he was through the elastic back of her bra. Frowning in his concentration, his tongue sticking out between his lips like a little child trying to draw equilateral triangles, he cut the bra straps and pulled it off her. Two last snicks, one at each hip, and she was naked.

“You need a bath,” Drew said. “Let’s go.”

He pointed the knife at her belly button, and she let go of the banister and walked into the bathroom.

“We’re broke,” Eric said. “We can’t go on like this.”

“Eric, you can’t listen to him. Look around you, look at what you’re doing.”

He waved the knife, and she got into the bathtub. He leaned over the tub, keeping the knife, sideways in his left hand, between Lacey and the shower curtain, while he reached over with his right hand to turn on the tap. In that moment, when he was so badly balanced, she could have tried to kick him and escape, but by the time she thought of it, it was too late. The water was running in, cold around her toes. He turned the tap to hot, and it began to steam at the other end of the bath.

“Sit,” he said.

“No.” She should have done this ten minutes ago. Drew didn’t want to cut her, he’d never used a knife. She should have made her stand in the kitchen, where he’d never hurt anybody yet. “No, I won’t.”

“Sit.” He pressed the point of the knife at the notch of her collarbone and pulled it downward, and the skin opened in a long straight line between her breasts. She felt a line of cold but not pain; she decided to let it hurt later. “Sit down in the nice hot water.”

“No.” She’d take the blade in her hands if she had to, but she wasn’t getting in a bath with Andrew Halliday again. “Eric, listen!”

“Listen,” Lex said. He stood in the bathroom doorway, his hands kneading the air in front of him. “She didn’t do it.”

“Shut up,” Drew said.

“My mama didn’t kill Dorothy.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Drew shouted.

“Now you can tell the truth,” Lacey said. “You can tell the truth right now, you’ve waited so long. Now you can do it.” Repetition and discipline. “You have to do it.” She threw her voice at him, the teacher’s voice that ruled the room.
“Now.”