Starter House A Novel (7 page)

Eric picked up the phone to call Sammie Vandermeijn, Moranis Miszlak’s office manager. “I need you to order flowers for my wife,” he said.

“What do you think this is, 1963?” she demanded.

“What?” Eric said, completely thrown.

“I don’t work for you. I don’t order flowers, and you can make your own damn coffee. You got something for me to do, it better be a billable hour with a client’s name on it. Your wife doesn’t want flowers.”

“I want to do something nice for her. She’s having a hard time.”

“She asked for it, marrying a Miszlak.” His door opened, and Sammie entered, phone in hand. She leaned against the door frame, her gray skirt pulled tight across her hips. He didn’t take it personally. Sammie flirted by instinct. Everybody knew she was sleeping with Floyd. “You know what’s nice?” she said. “Sapphires.”

“What about food?”

“Miszlak. The little birds in the trees have a name for you. Cheap, cheap, cheap.”

She swayed out of the doorway, and he watched her walk down the hall. He could watch Sammie enter and leave rooms all day long. Sapphires: that showed how shallow she was. The way to Lacey’s heart was through onion rings.

Chapter Eight

ELLA DANE HAD BEEN E-MAILING
her clients. She had taken to the Internet with astonishing ease and had become an online pet psychic. Mostly she tried to persuade people their dogs wanted to be vegan. She told them dogs felt compassion for all living things and truly preferred hydrolyzed soy protein to beef, and in return, the owners deposited twenty dollars a month into her PayPal account. Surprisingly, she had over fifty clients. Lacey couldn’t understand it.

Somehow, Ella Dane had supported herself and Lacey ever since the day they left Grandpa Merritt’s house forever, a day just as hot and sticky as this, though it had been September. Lacey was six, a first grader, when her teacher held her back at the end of school to say, “You’re not riding the bus today, your mom’s picking you up.”

Ella Dane arrived at school not in Grandpa Merritt’s extended-cab Ford pickup but in a blue car Lacey didn’t recognize, a sickly hatchback lunging against its wheels. She had to get in the driver’s door and slide over Ella Dane, because the passenger door was punched in, and it was terribly hot. “Can’t you turn the air on?” she said.

“There’s no air.” Ella Dane lowered her window. The passenger’s side had no window, only a sheet of thick plastic duct-taped to the crumpled frame.

The hatchback was full of black garbage bags. One of them was open, and Timmy the bear peered out of it. Lacey grabbed him and said, “Why’s my stuff in garbage bags?”

“I packed our things, we’re leaving.”

That was all Ella Dane would say, then or later. That morning, Lacey had kissed Grandpa Merritt good-bye and gotten onto the school bus with her Barbie backpack and sparkly sneakers. That night, she and her mother slept in the car on a strange street. A week later, they moved into a motel in a new town halfway to the coast, and Lacey found a palmetto bug in her book bag. It ran across her hand. Each individual thorned foot clutched her at a particular point. She couldn’t get the feeling off her skin.

Grandpa Merritt had lived in an old neighborhood in Columbia. The magnolia was twice as tall as the house, and in September when the furry cones fell, little Lacey picked out the ruby-red seeds. Grandpa Merritt suspended a hula hoop from the ceiling and hung gauze curtains from it, so she could have a princess bed. After that day, she never saw that house or that room again. By the time she was old enough to visit Grandpa Merritt on her own, he had suffered three strokes and was trapped in the nursing home bed. He clutched her with his dry claw and mouthed words she couldn’t understand. The hair on his arms was a wiry white fleece. Long ago, he used to swing her up over his head and catch her, swing her and catch her again.

They’d lived with him for a year. One year of coming home to the same house every day, one year of having a real house, her own home, and then back on the road with Ella Dane, always on the way to somewhere else, just as it had been for the first five years of Lacey’s life, since before she could remember.

“Because we can’t,” Ella Dane said, whenever Lacey wanted to go home, when things were worse than usual and they were sleeping in the car again. “Because I had to,” she said, when Lacey wanted to know why, why, why had they left Grandpa Merritt. “Because I had no choice.”

After his stroke, Grandpa Merritt lay on his kitchen floor for two days, the telephone out of reach on the wall. If the Kendalls had been there, he might not have been reduced to the wet-mouthed stammering thing strapped in the nursing home bed. There had to be a reason.

“That’s done,” Ella Dane said. “Now I’ve got to write the blog.” She blogged about the challenges of raising a vegan dog. She’d taken Bibbits off his vet-prescribed medication and was treating his heart condition with a tincture of
Taraxacum,
which when Lacey Googled it turned out to be dandelion. Hundreds of people read what Ella Dane wrote and took her advice for their own dogs. Astonishing.

Eric passed through the kitchen, on his way to somewhere else. “I’m going back to the office,” he said. “A client’s coming to give a deposition.”

“At night?” Lacey asked.

“I’ll call if I’m going to be later than eleven.”

For a moment she had felt the old connection with him, the sympathy that had been the root of their love. Now he was gone again, living a real life in the real world while all she had to do was keep the baby alive inside her, a thing even a sheep could do. Lacey tried to be understanding. Eric’s life was so much harder than he’d thought it would be. He was supposed to be writing contracts in Foothills Financial, making a six-figure income on four days a week, not putting in twelve-hour days in the back room of Moranis Miszlak. And she couldn’t even look at Ella Dane without seeing Grandpa Merritt’s green door in the shadow of the magnolia. She hauled herself out of the kitchen to relax on the living room sofa with the latest issue of
Early Learning,
to read about literacy readiness for at-risk kindergartners.

Dizziness walked through her. She closed her eyes and leaned back into the new-leather smell of her sofa. She breathed deeply, four, five, six times, and the doorbell rang on a single note, like a clock chiming the half hour. She waited for the second, falling tone. It didn’t come. She folded her magazine open on the kindergarten article and dragged herself into the hallway.

She didn’t want to answer the door. That black vertigo was gathering on the stairs, the terrifying sense of something spinning inward, closing in, pulling her down. She reached out to the banister as if she were groping in the dark, as if she could pull herself up the stairs. From nowhere, something tumbled toward her, a plunging boneless thing, falling without will and without resistance, all blood and hair. Lacey grabbed the banister with both hands. The thing fell into her, fell through her, leaving her hollow and cold.

She wanted to scream and run, cover her face and sob like a child; she bit her lip and stared right into it, the whirling vertigo. Whatever it was, it was
wrong
. Standing just here, she had seen her someday children and their maybe dog on the stairs, that first day. That was the truth, not this. There was nothing to see. Ella Dane would have sensed it and warned her.

She lifted her face. Light filled the porthole window and overflowed in the stairwell like water in a clean glass. Her beautiful house. Her family’s life would be beautiful here. It wasn’t yet, but it would be. The vertigo drained down her throat, leaving her head clear but her stomach full and sour.

The bell rang again and she opened the door. The evening light slanted on the porch. She blinked into the glare, blazing red with the blood in her own eyelids, and she swayed for a moment. The house at her back supported her, and she rubbed her eyes clear. “What do you want?”

It was little mister trouble-at-home. He smiled and said in one quick rush, “Hello-my-name-is-Drew-I’m-selling-popcorn-for-my-school-how-many-boxes-would-you-like-please-and-thank-you-ma’am-you-can-write-a-check.”

What kind of predatory PTA fund-raisers did they have in Greeneburg, sending the kids out to start their sales on the first day of school? “No,” Lacey said.

He clutched a clipboard in one hand and a plastic bowl of popcorn in the other. “Don’t you want a sample? Just one piece.” He shook the bowl. The unpopped kernels rattled, and Lacey choked on the hot chemical smell of artificial butter.

“No,” she said with her hand on the inner knob, ready to swing the door shut.

“There’s low fat,” he offered.

“I don’t eat low fat.”

“Yes, ma’am, I can see that. If you wanted to, you could.”

“I’m pregnant. I’m supposed to look like this.”

Drew’s blond eyebrows jumped, a surprisingly adult expression. “Yes, ma’am, if you say so. There’s also extra butter. It’s only fifteen dollars a box.”

Bad trouble,
said her teacher’s eye.
Shut the door, shut it quick
. But what kind of teacher was she, what kind of human being, to feel revulsion rather than pity? There was something wrong with him, and it wasn’t his fault. It never was. She was shocked by his condition: the flush on his fair face, the light hair sweat-browned along the hairline, his sunburned ears, and the white dead scale on his lips. “Sweetie—Drew, how long have you been out here in this heat?”

“Since school was out, six hours, ma’am. If I sell ten more boxes, I get a pocketknife with three blades and a screwdriver,” he said.

A warning sounded deep in her. Since when did a PTA fund-raiser offer a knife as a selling prize? “How about you come inside and cool off?” She would persuade him to give her his number and call his parents to take him home. And she could get a look at these parents. “I’ve got orange juice,” she said.

She stepped back to let him in. The whole house quivered like water just below the boil, and Lacey’s heart stuttered into the rhythm of the baby’s heart, three times as fast as her own. Blood whistled in her ears. She pressed her right hand against her throat, and the boy caught her left hand and said, “Are you okay?”

In the kitchen, Bibbits barked once, and Lacey clutched Drew’s hand. “I have to sit down,” she said. Threads of black whirled in her vision. She’d never fainted, but she’d felt like this after she and Eric double-dog-dared each other to ride the Bungee Slingshot at Myrtle Beach; when she landed, the earth felt rubbery and unreliable, and this was worse. Drew pushed her down, and she sat on the second step of the stairway, her left side and shoulder pressed against the banister post.

“Can I come back another time?” Drew said.

“Yes, yes,” she said, panting, “later.” She closed her eyes and pressed her head against the post, breathing slowly to steady her heart and make the world stop spinning.

Bibbits’s claws rattled on the hallway floor, loud enough to make Lacey wince. Her mother was there, a hand on Lacey’s shoulder and an urgent voice, “Do you need an ambulance, baby?”

Cautiously, she opened her eyes. The house had stopped shivering; the sense of near-to-the-boil anticipation was gone. Through the open door, the sounds of distant traffic pulsed smoothly, calm waves washing on sand, and her home was all peace and brightness, just as she meant it to be.

“I got dizzy for a second,” Lacey said.

“Stay right there,” Ella Dane said briskly. “I’ll bring a hot honey and lemon. I got these for you.” She draped a strand of rough red gems over Lacey’s head. Garnet, to strengthen the blood.

Low blood sugar. Hormones. Perfectly normal. Lacey relaxed against the banister post and watched as the front door gradually pulled itself closed, hesitated, than latched with a solid click. Bibbits licked her hand. Was this going to happen every time a sound surprised her—doorbell, footstep, sudden voice? She’d spent too much time online, reading about everything that could go wrong with the pregnancy. The Internet was full of terrible pictures, warnings of disaster, horror behind every click of the mouse. She had to limit herself to YourBabyNow, and not go browsing in the Google wilderness, crowded with new fears. Blood pressure too high or too low, preeclampsia, diabetes, blood clots. This body was not her own, it had become a house of death.