Starter House A Novel (12 page)

Ella Dane shook her head. “You’ve got big problems here, Lacey. You’ve got to take it seriously.”

Lacey picked up a handful of shredded rags, something that used to be one of Ella Dane’s long cotton dresses. “Go get some garbage bags,” she said. “We can get most of this picked up before Eric comes home.”

“The window,” Ella Dane said. “The ceiling.”

“I’ll ask Harry; he’s got to know a handyman. I don’t want Eric to worry about this.”

“
I’m
worrying,” Ella Dane grumbled, but she caught Lacey’s urgency and ran downstairs for the box of garbage bags.

Chapter Fourteen

THE YOUNG LAWYER
needed evidence. Lex well knew what evidence was. It was what they showed in court, to tell the things you did and make a story of it. The lawyers told the story to each other until the thing that really happened disappeared. When you tried to remember, only the story was left, until in the end you told the story yourself, the same story everybody else was telling. Evidence, they called it.

If he wanted to save Theo, he had to tell his own story. Nobody else was going to do it. The lawyer? Five hundred bucks wouldn’t pay the lawyer to find out the truth. Lawyers on TV did that, not real lawyers. Lex bought a camera for seventy bucks and spent another twenty for the memory card. He took pictures of cars in the drugstore parking lot, figuring out how to zoom and take video. By then it was dark.

The streets around Autumn Breeze Apartments, where Jeanne had taken Theo to stay with her mother, Big Jeanne, were busy as always. People drove through the complex’s parking lots at all hours, with their car stereos so loud the Dumpsters in the back lot shivered like big metal drums. The complex had twenty buildings, twelve units per building, three stories each with one apartment in each quarter.

He liked the design. It made sense, like a stack of oranges. He didn’t like the yellow lights, too few and too far apart. He didn’t like the skateboarding kids who zoomed out from the darkness between the buildings. They didn’t care what kind of place they lived in or what it would do to them. The place was loud and senseless; everybody shouted, and laughter sounded like screams. The only good thing about it was the azalea bushes around the back walls of the buildings, so he could get right up to Jeanne’s windows and nobody could see him.

It was after nine at night, and Theo wasn’t in bed. He’d been raising her right, training her to sleep and wake and eat on a schedule, the way he lived his own life, the way the old man taught him: now you do your homework, now you practice the violin. Here it was 9:15 and Theo was strapped in her car seat on the kitchen table, alone, red-faced, shiny around the nose and chin. She’d been crying. Lex took out the memory card and put it back in again twice, to be sure. He zoomed on the window.

Theo started crying again. Lex had a perfect view, and he couldn’t hear a thing. It was like watching a life-sized TV screen with the sound muted.

Jeanne came in with a bucket of chicken, a thigh piece in her left hand. She tore off a chunk of the skin and waved the thigh piece toward the next room, talking with her mouth full.

Seeing her mother, Theo waved her arms and legs. Lex knew from the look on her face that she wanted a clean diaper. Theo hated to be dirty. Jeanne gave the baby a chicken leg. Theo threw the chicken leg on the table. Jeanne gave it back to her. Theo threw it again. Jeanne put it in the baby’s left hand, wrapped the fingers around it, and forced the chicken leg toward the baby’s mouth. Theo turned her head away. The car seat held her in place, and with the chicken in her mouth she had to eat it or suffocate.

Lex threw the camera through the window. It was all he had. He realized, as it left his hand, that it was a bad idea; he needed the camera. Too late. The window shattered, and the noises of the apartment started, as if he’d turned the mute button off. For a moment, he couldn’t quite believe what he’d done. Because he couldn’t have thrown the camera through the window. It was the kind of thing crazy people did.

Theo threw the chicken leg, and it fell in the broken glass. Jeanne shouted, “Call the cops, Mom! He’s busted out the window!”

Evidence. The memory card was evidence, even if the camera was broken. He had to get it back. He took off his windbreaker, wrapped it around his left arm, and broke the rest of the window glass. “Get out, get away from me, get away,” Jeanne panted. She couldn’t shout for long. She couldn’t do anything for long, the way the fat squeezed around her heart, and this was what she wanted for Theo.

He wanted to tell her. “You’ll die,” he said. “What you’re doing. You’ll die.”

Jeanne crushed her small white hands together over her sick heart. She had such pretty hands, the prettiest part of her. “He says he’ll kill me,” she said.

“I called them,” Jeanne’s mother said from the living room. She didn’t come into the kitchen. She hardly ever got out of the recliner because her knees hurt. “The cops are coming, Lex!” she shouted. “They gone shoot you in the head.”

He didn’t believe her. The phone was on a sideboard across the room from the recliner. Big Jeanne wouldn’t be out of the chair yet.

He hadn’t meant to threaten her. It was so hard. His thoughts were real, and the words never came right. Jeanne’s pretty hands. There was a pleat where the fat folded over her wrists, and then the fine small hands, like they were sewn on. The rest of Jeanne could be like that, fine and pretty and perfect. “You’re sick,” he said.

“
You’re
the one who’s sick, taking pictures through my window!”

“I love you,” he said. That could never be the wrong thing to say.

“That’s some sick crazy love,” Jeanne said. “I was fourteen when we met.”

Lex unbuckled Theo from the car seat. “She needs a clean diaper.”

“I’m her mama and I’m the one who says what she needs. You put her down.”

The camera was next to Jeanne’s right foot. Another second and she’d see it and stomp on it, and where would his evidence be then? “I need to take care of you,” he said.

“Mama! Call the cops. He’s threatening me.”

“I need you to listen to me. I need to take care of you. You’re sick.”

“Mama!”

A metallic groan and a thump came from the other room: big Jeanne lowering the footrest of the recliner. Lex had no time, and he had to get the camera. “Here,” he said, pushing Theo into Jeanne’s arms. Theo laughed and grabbed her mother’s cheeks. Lex lunged for the camera. The view screen was broken off, but the memory card looked okay. “I want to take care of you,” he said. He took out his wallet and gave Jeanne a twenty-dollar bill.

She laughed angrily. “Twenty bucks, and what about the window?”

“I’ll send you a check tomorrow.” The old man would have to pay for it. Lex couldn’t afford it, that big window, three or four hundred bucks. And it must have been cracked already, otherwise there was no way the camera could have broken it. He wasn’t going to argue with Jeanne, though. “Don’t call the cops.”

“I got my finger on the nine,” Big Jeanne said from the other room.

Jeanne looked at the camera and the window. Too late, Lex remembered she was clever; people forgot that about her. Her eyes looked dull and small, but her mind belonged to the pretty hands, so clever and so quick. “I can take pictures, too,” she said. “My lawyer knows your lawyer. She says she can eat him for lunch. I’ll get a restraining order. I’ll have you arrested. Get out of my house.”

“I only want to help you.”

“I’ve had enough of your help.” She held the baby out to him. The thick little legs, thicker than zucchinis, kicked in the air, and the baby fussed, protesting against the lack of support. “Say good-bye,” Jeanne said. “In five years, she won’t know your name.”

Lex left through the window. He grabbed the frame as he jumped from the room, and the broken glass cut his hand. He bled all the way back to his car. When he took the memory card out of the camera, it was still whole. He had his evidence.

Chapter Fifteen

ELLA DANE CLEANED THE ROOM
while Lacey went outside to pick up the glass. Lacey kept looking over her shoulder, sensing Drew’s proximity. She never saw him, and the house had a dull, sulky feel that made her lower the thermostat, though it wasn’t exactly heat. The air pressed in through her pores and left a sour taste in her mouth.

Eric rolled his eyes at Lacey’s story about how the wind had thrown a branch through Ella Dane’s window, but he was glad to let Lacey take care of the repairs, and Harry Rakoczy’s handyman was quick about the window, though he kept promising to come back to finish the ceiling and then canceling at the last minute. Had something in the house disturbed him? More likely it was Lacey’s own fault, for paying him in full for the entire job instead of withholding half until the ceiling was done.

All through Labor Day weekend, Ella Dane filled the house with lavender candles and spent ten minutes in every room each day, meditating and singing lullabies. She phoned her friend Jack and told him her experiences. A chill in the kitchen, another in the hallway. Lacey didn’t think the candles and lullabies would help, yet there was no sign of Drew, so maybe there was something to it after all. She felt uneasily that Drew was only waiting, biding his time; lullabies would not sing him away.

Whatever their effect on Drew, the lullabies got rid of Eric very effectively. He spent the whole weekend holed up in his office, and he didn’t ask why Ella Dane had switched from “Om Mani Padme Hum” to “Hush Little Baby,” which was just as well. Lacey had no intention of telling him.

Lacey felt less married every day. The last time she’d felt truly in harmony with Eric was—when? Coming home from the hospital, when she saw the furniture—could she truly be that shallow? Now she was just a chore on his list: water the grass, answer e-mail, check on Lacey. Solitude gave her time to think, but the time did her no good; her thoughts chased each other in an endless circle. Was Drew a trespasser—was he a ghost, so tangible, so real? Should she ask for Ella Dane’s help or should she deal with Drew (whatever he was) on her own? Should she tell Eric, and if she did, then
what
should she tell him? The only way Eric would believe in Drew’s existence would be if they met face-to-face, and maybe not even then. Lacey imagined herself saying to Eric, “This house is haunted”—no, there was no possible way that conversation could end well.

She had to take care of Drew herself. To hand that responsibility to Ella Dane would be to abdicate control of the house. Whatever he was, she could handle him—civilize the trespasser, tame the ghost. Real or not, he was a noisy boy, and she a teacher who kept a lively room. By her third year, her principal knew her strengths and gave her the loudest of the loud, the unmedicated ADHDs, the brilliant and bored, the illiterate and belligerent, the squirmy worms. Usually those boys were separated, spread out two or three per room. This last year, Lacey’d had ten of them. They all ended reading at or above grade level, not one of them suspended or expelled. If she could handle that crowd, she could take care of Drew.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, she went shopping for school supplies as if buying for a classroom: crayons, construction paper, copy paper, safety scissors—the talismans of her competence. Though she waited for Drew all day Wednesday, and Thursday morning, the house was quiet. Nothing fell but sunlight from the porthole window. On Thursday afternoon, she came home from her appointment with Dr. Vlk full of good news with no one to tell.

The baby weighed slightly more than a pound, by Dr. Vlk’s estimate, perfect for his age, and he could hear. Lacey laid her hand over the bump, and when Dr. Vlk clapped, the baby twitched. She didn’t want to disturb Eric at work, and Ella Dane had picked up a part-time job in the gift shop of a holistic spa. But she had to tell
someone
.

She paid off the taxi and stood in her driveway as it left. She really needed a car of her own. Dr. Vlk said she could drive again, and she was officially off the semi-bed-rest limitations, except she still should stay away from the stairs.