Starter House A Novel (37 page)

She slowed at Burgoyne’s Crossing; Lex jammed his brakes, and the car behind him honked. If she turned left at Burgoyne’s Crossing, she’d drive past his school, and then she’d turn left on Forrester Hills Avenue and right on Forrester Lane and go home, and take the baby inside where everything was waiting for her and for him. Everything, a shadow full of names, remembering.

Still honking, the car behind him changed lanes and pulled alongside. Jeanne carried on past Burgoyne’s Crossing, and he accelerated after her, cutting off the other car just as it swerved to rejoin his lane. Honking and shouts followed him. Jeanne passed the big mall and the little mall. She turned left without signaling into a confetti burst of yellow, green, and red, neon and trumpets, a building with a roof like a huge Mexican hat and some kind of party in the parking lot.

Jeanne found a spot near the entrance. Lex nosed his car past hers and parked far back in the lot. He turned his lights off and stayed in the car. It looked dangerous. Jeanne slammed her door and turned her face toward the party.

No baby. Was the baby at home? Big Jeanne’s car was gone. That was why he followed Jeanne, to find out where she was taking the baby. And he’d seen her put the car seat in the back.

He should go home. There was no time. Time, time, time; his dad kept them all on a schedule, homework from four to seven and if you run out of homework, boy, I’ll pick a name from the encyclopedia and you can write me an essay on him, remember all the names, remember; Lex hadn’t heard his father’s voice so clearly for years. He used to set fires, and the roaring voice of fire would swallow up his father’s roaring voice. Time, time, time is running out. You forgot something. What did you forget?

It wasn’t just a party, here in the new building with the Mexican hat for a roof. It was a fiesta. With a mariachi band, men in bright colors with gold braid on their shoulders, and trumpets tongued with gold. Not just the building, but all the people wore broad-brimmed Mexican hats with bright striped ribbons around the crown.

Remember the names of things.
Sombrero
. “Bienvenidos, amigo!” a girl said. She had long, straight hair, pure red from root to tip, and she jammed a sombrero onto Lex’s head. “Arriba!” she trilled. “Welcome to the grand opening of Taco Mania.” She swung her hips, and her wide striped Mexican skirt spiraled around her, released itself from her knees, and spiraled the other way. Her beauty amazed him. “These are Taco Pesos.” She gave him a book of coupons. Buy Two Tacos Get One Free, Free Coffee with Purchase of Donut Burrito.

“I’m looking for my wife.”

“She’s wearing a hat,” the red-haired girl said. She laughed. “There’s free tacos inside, beef, chicken, bean, and our fudgy dessert taco! Kids’ meals come with a free bean.” She pressed a large plastic bean into Lex’s hand.

His thumb found a button on the side. The bean opened to reveal a smaller bean dressed like a mariachi musician with a tiny plastic trumpet. Time is running out—what did you forget? “Free tacos,” he said. That’s where Jeanne would be.

The red-haired girl pushed him toward the huge sombrero and turned from him to meet the next new customer. “Bienvenidos, amigo; would you like a hat?”

The building was too bright, too crowded, and everyone wore a sombrero. Where was Jeanne? Young people carried trays of tacos through the room, and mariachi music crashed through the speakers, louder than the band outside. In the old man’s house, there was always music. The steam of so many hungry bodies pushed Lex against the wall, where a smiling young face offered him a tray of tacos, and he took one. He put it in his pocket. Somebody gave him another taco, this one spilling chocolate goo onto his fingers, and he put that in his other pocket.

He saw Jeanne near the counter, with three tacos neatly rayed between the fingers of her left hand while she ate another, in two bites, crunch through the middle of the taco, four chews and it was down, and she poked the rest of the taco into her mouth, sucking her finger clean as she pulled it out. She snatched two more tacos off another tray. Lex leaned against the door and forced himself out of the building, against the crush of customers crowding in. Where was Jeanne’s car? “Adios, amigo,” the red-haired girl shouted as he passed her, and for a moment he was tangled in the mariachi band, guitars everywhere and a trumpet right in front of him.

Then he was through the crowd, out among the cars, next to Jeanne’s car. Theo was in the back with a bag of minidonuts. All alone in the cold and the dark, with donuts she could choke on, choke and suffocate and die. Drowning in sugar.

Lex banged his fists on the car window. Theo smiled through sugar. He wanted a rock, but the parking lot was smooth and black. Mariachi trumpets thronged in his mind. He pressed the button on the toy in his hand, and his own tiny musician played silently. The real band in the parking lot started “La Cucaracha.” The simple melody helped him think, and he laughed at himself. He didn’t need a rock. He had keys to Jeanne’s car, because it was half his car. He opened it and took Theo out of his half.

Chapter Forty-five

LACEY SAT AT HARRY’S KITCHEN TABLE.
“A friend of my mother’s,” she said, as the ambulance pulled away from her house. “He had an accident.” Harry stood with his back to her, pouring boiling water into two mugs. Now that she was here, she found it hard to begin this necessary conversation.
Why did you sell me your haunted house?
wasn’t easy to say, just like that. She had to work into it. She said, “He fell down the stairs.”

Harry’s shoulders pulled up and in, a slow flinch, and he said, “Tea or cocoa?”

“Cocoa.” She was surprised to see him dump an envelope of powder into a mug; she’d thought of Harry as a man who made cocoa with milk, from scratch, whisking sugar and real cocoa powder into the hot milk, whisking continuously so it wouldn’t scald. He poured boiling water over the Nestlé mix just like everyone else. “Thank you,” she said.

He must have caught the tone of disappointment, because he turned toward her with his eyebrows high in his long face. He set the mugs on the table, said, “Hang on a second,” and pulled a jug of cream from the refrigerator. Real cream, in a white ceramic jug. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said.

The cocoa slopped over the edge of Lacey’s mug and scalded her knuckles as the contraction began. It began with a grinding shift in the bones of her pelvis, bones she had not thought could move. Agony yawned and swallowed her whole. She pushed the mug away. It wobbled on its farther edge, took half a turn, balanced, and tipped, spilling cocoa all over Harry’s table. This pain, so much worse than the others, ran out more quickly, a foaming wave, already gone. She rubbed her face.

Harry was all around her, fluttering with a damp washcloth, a dry tissue, paper towels for the table, and a second mug of cocoa for her, while his own cup cooled and the cream separated into a scum of oily bubbles on its surface.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” he said.

So he was going to play innocent to the end. She was tired of him. Her right hand worked the tissue, rolling it hard and tight. “Because it used to be your house and you lived in it and you left it and you lived next door to it and you saw what happened to them, the Craddocks and the Honeywicks and all of them. Where’s that picture?”

She roamed the kitchen, scanning through the family snapshots of children on the beach, children in plaid uniforms, a little girl with a giant white rabbit, a boy next to a bicycle with a big red bow on it. So many pictures. The refrigerator was paved with them, and pictures of every dimension, from wallet-sized school photos to ten-by-fourteen portraits, paneled the kitchen walls. These hundreds, every race and age, many of them posing with violins, must be students and children of students, a teacher’s gallery.

The picture of the boy who looked like Drew had stood on the windowsill, above the sink, tucked behind three or four others. There was the frame on top of the microwave, clean silver with a beveled edge, but it held an Asian girl aged about twelve, in a plaid Christmas dress with violin at port arms.

“Where is he?” She shook the frame at Harry. “Where is he,
who
is he?”

Harry took the frame. He turned her to face the opposite wall of the kitchen and guided her to the middle, and there he was, the serious blond boy beside the gleaming piano. Drew. Not Drew. So much alike. “I told you last time. That’s my son, Ted, when he was seven.”

“It looks just like Drew.” Not quite. Drew’s eyebrows were straight, as if drawn with a ruler, but this boy’s eyebrows lifted in a curve of slight surprise, giving him a look of mild and pleasant eagerness, as if someone had unexpectedly given him candy.

“Everybody says so,” Harry said. “Everybody who’s seen him. I never saw him. I used to go over there, in between tenants, and call him and call him, and he never came.”

“Then why don’t you live in the house yourself?”

“When we lived there, my wife saw him. Teddy was six. She got scared. She went back to her family in Australia. Whenever I’m in the house, Drew goes after Ted.”

“In Australia?” And she’d thought she could escape by driving to the beach.

“He’s got kids. My grandchildren. I can’t live in that house.”

“Burn it. Tear it down.”

“You think that’ll stop him?”

“Maybe.” But if Drew didn’t have a home of his own to return to, maybe he’d go to Australia, a cuckoo in Ted Rakoczy’s nest. “I don’t know.”

Harry put an arm around Lacey’s shoulders and urged her back to the table. As she drank her cocoa, her right hand worked the tissue, her thumb rubbing and rubbing along the oily dent in the felted paper. “So he’s still calling himself Drew?” he said. “You know he’s lying, because Junior survived?”

“Eric found out. I wondered if he was the father. Andrew Senior.”

“He was an artist. Andy Halliday. He was my best friend in high school. He drew that picture, Dora with her violin. She was fifteen . . . oh God, fifteen. I have students older than that. Sixteen when they got married. They had to. You had to, back then, if you got a girl in trouble. Not in some places, but in Greeneburg you still had to.”

“What did they do?”

“He enlisted right out of school and broke both his ankles on an obstacle course in basic. Dora was seventeen and Junior was a baby then.”

Injured in basic training and discharged, still wearing his crew cut nine years later. Lacey felt a remote pity, like an archaeologist finding a mummified murder victim. A tragedy, so long ago. “What did they do?”

“He went to college, got a teaching degree. She waitressed all those years, put him through school. Twelve hours a day on her feet and a baby every year.”

Greeley Honeywick broke both her ankles and lost her feet. Lacey put Eric through school. The house knitted them together, all their lives in the same pattern. The same life, repeating itself in fragments. Mosaic, pastiche, collage.

“He never forgave her,” Harry said.

“
He
never forgave
her
? She did everything for him!”

“And he couldn’t get over it. Those years when she was earning and he was in school. I sent them money, but they wouldn’t take it. So young and so proud. Andy was a hard man and he got harder. His students hated him.”

Lacey wasn’t surprised. Her students were too young to hate their teachers, but she knew of people who’d left the classroom forever, driven out by the mob revulsion of middle-school and high school students. The stories, repeated by older faculty to student teachers as cautionary tales, always ended with the failed teacher entering some more lucrative field.
And he got another degree and became an accountant, but he never taught again
. She checked her watch. If the contractions kept coming every half hour, she was due for another in four minutes or so. “What did he do?”

“Beat up a kid. So he was fired, just after Dorothy was born. Dora went back to work. I sent them two thousand dollars, all the money I had on hand. They never cashed the check. Next thing I knew, they were all dead except Junior. Margaret and I moved down here with Teddy. And then, well . . .” Harry opened his long fingers. “You know the rest.”

Lacey sat back, thinking. “My mom’s friend Jack,” she said, “the guy they took away in the ambulance. He was trying to help. Greeley says it’s been tried before.”

“I tried once. Got a fellow in, a psychology professor from a college in Indiana. He wasn’t in there but five minutes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said Drew is lost. He’s trying to get out, he’s, what was the word? He’s
recruiting
mothers and children, to be his guides, but he’s too hurt and too slow to follow them. The fellow said Drew would keep doing it unless someone could take him the rest of the way. Then he refunded his fee and never came back.”

Lacey laid the crushed tissue on the table, beside her empty mug. She checked her watch. Eight forty-five, forty minutes since the last contraction. Was she safe, was the baby safe? What a question. Safe. “Do you think . . .” she said, and the house was suddenly full of noise, hammering and shrieking.