Starter House A Novel (4 page)

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go in.” He hurried across the grass to his own back door.

She saw a roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter, so she reached through the broken window and unlocked the door. Fat handfuls of blood spread on the newly grouted floor. They had chosen light blue tile for the floor and gray granite for the countertops. She hoped her blood wouldn’t turn the blue grout black. She squeezed her hand around a clump of paper towels. Numb cold rayed through her wrist.

Inside, the dining room and hallway were unexpectedly dim with a darkness gathering like water in a cup, and pressing into Lacey’s eyes and filling her throat. Her teacher voice, the careful adult Lacey, warned her to stop, go out and wait for Harry, but she ignored it because the house was
hers
. Nothing could keep her out. She clenched her injured hand between her breasts and reached out with the other hand to feel her way.

She could not understand this darkness, here where the lowest step turned in a full circle and she had seen her someday children and their maybe dog in the bright afternoon. Evening light came in through the two windows in the living room and reflected off the newly polished and sealed floors, a sheet of brilliant amber. In the kitchen, red sunlight glittered in the granite’s mica flecks. Yet no light reached here, where the stairs began, though it should have poured in a shower of gold down the porthole window. She looked up to see what was wrong—had the painters blocked the window with cardboard and forgotten to remove it? Was the glass broken and boarded up?—and she saw nothing, not even darkness. A mist pressed against her eyes, and her mouth tasted of cold gray water, the taste of fear.

There was a step on the front porch, too light for Harry, and a hand tapped the door. Lacey held her breath and pressed her hand over her breastbone to muffle her rushing heart. She felt like a child put to bed in a strange room, knowing silence was safety, head under the blankets no matter how hot, suffocating on terror and her own used breath. But the teacher voice said,
It’s time to
act like a
grown-up,
and the hand tapped again.
Nothing to be afraid of,
it said,
just a neighbor at the door
.

“Coming,” Lacey called. Something caught her ankle. Something that gripped and squeezed. Her feet flew out behind her and she tumbled forward, twisting as she fell.

She landed hard on her right side and curled around the belly bump. “No,” she said. “No, no.” This could not happen. She held her breath, keeping the child in through will alone; she clenched her fists, regardless of the pain in the slashed palm.

The back door opened, and with Harry’s entrance, light flowed into the hall, rising from the polished floor. The porthole window burned. “Lacey? Where are you?”

“I fell.” The middle of her body tightened, relaxed, and tightened again around a feeling too dense and slow to call pain.

“Are you hurt?”

Something touched her thigh. “I’m bleeding.”

He took her right hand and pulled her fingers away from the red clot of paper. “You’ll need stitches.”

“No. I’m
bleeding
.” Lacey reached under the pink dress to touch the thing on her thigh, soft and insinuating, a wet feather, a tickling tongue, the faintest sticky stroke of warmth sliding on her skin. “Ambulance,” she said, her voice perfectly steady. Her heart hummed in her ears, and she kept her face stony. If she let go, let her mouth shake even once, she would fall apart and the baby would die. She tightened her thighs to hold everything in, blood and baby and all. She would not allow this to happen.

“This is too soon,” Harry said. He reached down to take her elbows, as if to pull her to her feet. She shook her head. His hands jumped away from her.

“Ambulance,” she said again. She showed him her left hand, the blood on her fingertips. “Please.”

Chapter Four

AFTER TEN MINUTES
in the emergency room, Lacey was wheeled into a semiprivate room in Labor and Delivery. Pink and blue balloons floated above the doorknobs in the hall, each announcing someone else’s baby. She waited for a long time and no one came to tell her if her baby was alive or dead. If only she had her phone so she could call Eric—even if she had the phone, the battery was probably drained; she was forever forgetting to plug it in. It made Eric so impatient with her; he was always waiting for her to call, or trying to call her. Where was he? She closed her eyes and whispered to the baby, “Hold on, hold on,” and still the blood trickled, sticky and slow.

The door opened. “The cut’s closed up on its own,” Lacey said without opening her eyes. “There’s no point stitching it now.” They’d brought her into this room and left her here, surrounded by other people’s happy balloons, and didn’t care enough to come in with so much as a stethoscope, let alone an ultrasound. It was so unfair, and she was all alone; she needed help and no one cared. Not even Harry had come with her, and where was Eric? Her underwear was soaked through, and every time she touched it, the blood was still warm and fresh.

“Lacey, what did you do to yourself?” Eric, at last. “All you had to do was sit there in the shade. I wasn’t gone for fifteen minutes, and I come back and there’s the window broken, blood all over the floor, anything could have happened, I had no idea.”

“You shouldn’t have left me.”

“I was only gone a minute. Just to get my temper under control. My parents used to fight about money. They went on for hours, shouting, breaking things. I don’t want to be them.”

“Then you can’t leave. You have to stay and talk to me.”

He sat on the bed and lowered his face to hers, kissed her forehead, her eyelids, and her mouth. His face was wet. He was crying, right out in the open, defenseless. “Lacey, can you ever forgive me? I am so sorry.”

It terrified her, the way Eric could turn like this. He dropped everything all at once, all his competence, his confidence, everything that made him right, and gave her his naked heart, a thing she was afraid to see, let alone touch. No one else had ever seen him like this—and now, when she didn’t know if the baby was dead or alive, now
she
had to comfort
him
. She knew he needed more, but she couldn’t make herself speak.

His face sank into her neck and he lifted her shoulders into a dense, trembling embrace. “I was so scared,” he whispered into her skin. “I thought you were dead, I thought the baby was dead.”

And he assumed the baby was fine, that she’d taken care of everything while he was out soothing his own hurt feelings. “Nobody’s looked at the baby yet,” she said. “Nobody’s told me anything.”

He pushed himself off the bed. “They haven’t looked? Are you still bleeding?”

“I can’t tell.” Her voice cracked, and she closed her mouth hard. As the blood dried, her skin tightened and itched. She didn’t want to touch whatever was happening under the sheet, fearing to find something more than blood—a tiny curled body, already cooling in the mess. No; her fingers imagined it, but she shut her mind. She wanted a doctor. Someone who would tell her quickly, as quickly as the pregnancy test:
yes
or
no
.

“I’ll be right back,” Eric said.

He returned in four minutes with ultrasound machine and doctor in tow, a dry small woman with pearl earrings and the cleanest hands Lacey had ever seen, fingernails like bleached shells, palms pure white. “Let’s look at you, Mrs. Miszlak,” she said. The gel was cold, and the doctor slid the wand over Lacey’s belly and said brightly, “There’s the heartbeat.”

“Are you sure?” Lacey couldn’t let go of the fear so easily. The doctor touched a panel on the machine, and the heartbeat sounded through the speakers, a quick watery
hush-hush, hush-hush
. Lacey cried without noise, weak in relief, pressing the backs of her hands against her cheekbones.

Eric sank into a chair. “Thank God.”

“You want to know what you’re having?” They nodded. She slid the ultrasound wand over Lacey. “Definitely a boy.” It looked like a star map to Lacey, a sweep of cloudy constellations, gray in a black sky. “There’s his profile. Look at that pretty face. Now, about this bleeding.”

The ultrasound machine printed out a picture, and Lacey saw the child in the gray stars, the large curve of his head, hands under chin, thin legs drawn up and crossed. There he was, a real person, already alive. It was good to think
he
instead of
it.
She was bleeding, the doctor told her, because the placenta had partly torn away from the wall of her womb. There was no surgery and no medication, no help but rest, and no promise that rest would help. If the placenta tore away—
unzipped,
the doctor said, if it unzipped itself from the wall—the baby would die. If it scarred, the baby would survive. She spoke as calmly as if she were reading a recipe. “We want to keep you overnight for observation,” she said.

Lacey wished the doctor would leave the machine hooked up to her so she could listen to it all night.
Hush-hush, hush-hush
. Even more, she wished the doctor would stay and interpret the pictures and sounds.
Still alive,
the doctor would say every hour, on the hour.
It’s a boy, and he’s still alive
. “Will he be okay?” Lacey asked, and the teacher voice admonished her,
Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.

“Most likely,” the doctor said. “You relax.” She left, taking the ultrasound machine with her. Lacey put the picture on the bedside table. Every few seconds, she touched it, imagining the baby’s heart,
hush-hush
.

Eric slumped in the chair with his hands over his eyes. After a while, he said slowly, with a weight in his voice, “I have to get down to the office.”

“The office?” Resentment flowed up Lacey’s left arm into her heart. “You’re not staying?”

“I’ve got to. Uncle Floyd’s given me a dozen divorces, and I’ve got to get up to speed.” He stroked her belly and then bent down to kiss her. She let him do it, holding her lips stiff under his mouth. Then she was sorry, and it was too late, he was gone, because his work was important.

Eric’s work was always more important than hers; when they were dating, he would cancel on her without a second thought if he had a big test or paper due, and she never did. Even when she was working to put him through school, his work was a career and hers was a job. The first thing he said when Uncle Floyd offered him the position was
now you can stay home till the baby starts school,
as if that had been their plan all along. She thought not, and she’d let him know in good time.

Eventually, the nurses fed her a flat gray piece of turkey, or possibly a boiled sponge, along with a dinner roll, boiled carrots, boiled spinach, and a boiled potato, with cherry Jell-O. She drowsed, propped up in the bed with her hands folded over the belly bump, feeling her son spinning and dancing inside her. “We’ll go home tomorrow, baby,” she said. “We’ll get moved in; I just have to unpack a few boxes.”

The door opened. If it was another nurse with another needle, Lacey would beat her off with the dinner tray. But it was the bicycle boy from Forrester Lane, little mister trouble-at-home. “I could help,” he said. “Maybe I could.”

Grayness whirled over her, the same strange gray panic that had closed her sight on the stairs; she disappeared into it. This child should not be here. It was wrong. She searched for the call button, but it had slipped away and its cord was caught in the machinery of the bed.

“Why are you here?” she said. She found the cord and pulled it sideways. It gave an inch and then stopped.

“My mom came here.”

“Your mom had a baby?” Though Greeneburg was a small city, it surprised her to land in the hospital at the same time as some near neighbor. She yanked the cord, and the call button jumped into her hand. Its solidity in her palm gave her strength. Why was she so flustered by this ordinary child? Stupid hormones. “Why aren’t you with her?”

“I can’t find her.”

The child looked terrible, dirty around the hairline and neck, clean-faced as if he had been washed carelessly and against his will. He sniffled and smeared the back of his hand against his nose. “Have you been lost for long?” she asked him.

“Ages. They left me and they took the baby and I can’t find them.”

“I’ll call the nurse.”

“They’re no good. Nobody listens to me.”

“I’m listening. What’s wrong?”

His body swayed, as if he meant to run over to the bed and cast himself upon her. He held himself tense by the door, twisting his dirty hands. “It’s the baby,” he said. “She cries, and Mom’s real tired all the time, and I only wanted to help.”

Parents never knew how sweet their children were. At conferences, when Lacey said something good about a child, especially a boy, the parents often responded with
Are you sure that’s my kid?
right in front of the child. So this little guy wanted to help, and his parents wouldn’t let him. Probably they were afraid he’d drop the baby.