by Sonja Condit
Though Eric called it their starter house, Lacey planned to live in it for ten years and maybe forever. She wanted her someday children to attend the same school from kindergarten through fifth grade, to have teachers who’d seen them grow and friends whose toddler birthday parties they’d attended. Her own childhood had been furnished with cardboard boxes and duffel bags, always moving, always ready to move. Lacey had attended eight different schools, and she couldn’t count the moves or even define them. There were times they’d slept in the car. Was it moving if they parked in a different spot? Did a shift to another room in the same shabby motel count as a move?
She knew what she wanted for her baby. She wanted the home that had been hers when she was six, when she and her mother had lived with Grandpa Merritt in the white house with the green door and the big magnolia tree. Grandpa Merritt’s house, like 571 Forrester Lane, had a smiling face, a sense of welcome. She wanted to be able to walk in the dark and recognize the sound and texture of every room.
Everything would be different when they were settled in the house. She hated moving, but if she had to do it, it might as well be in August, her New Year. For Lacey, a teacher, January was the trough of the year, when the children faced her across a barricade of desks, both sides exhausted beyond compromise. Now in August, the crayons were fresh in their boxes, bright as the children themselves. Every year, she bought new sketchbooks, leaving the last pages blank in the old ones. As soon as they moved in, she’d go from room to room, sketching doors and corners, making it her own.
They’d driven the route a dozen times in June and July, viewing the house, meeting with the Realtor, the bank, the lawyers, Harry Rakoczy, and the painters. They’d both driven it yesterday, coming up in two cars to leave Eric’s Mitsubishi in the Greeneburg U-Haul parking lot. It had always been an easy drive; they’d never seen traffic like this.
Highway construction delayed their arrival until seven thirty. Eric had planned for noon. Being late put him in a terrible mood, and if they didn’t deliver the empty U-Haul by nine, they’d be charged an extra day. “Let’s get started,” Eric said. “We can pile everything on the lawn for now. Just get the van empty.”
“Can’t we pay the fifty bucks and do it in the morning?”
“I’m not paying just so we can park overnight. Come on. I’ll get the books and furniture, you get the light stuff. Forty minutes and we’re done.”
“Can we give it a rest, this once?”
No, they could not. He was right and she knew it; she wished he wouldn’t be so completely right, all the time. He backed the van into 571’s driveway. The west was fat with gold, and most of the houses on the street already had a few lit windows. Harry Rakoczy’s house was dark and his car was gone. Lacey had hoped Harry could talk some sense into Eric, but they were on their own.
“I’d rather unload the futon and finish in the morning,” she said.
“We can do this.” Eric yanked at the van’s back door. It accordioned up into its slot and stuck halfway. He started pulling out boxes and laying them on the lawn. “Get the light stuff,” he said.
Lacey leaned into the van, breathing the smell of their lives, the years of their young-married student poverty: clothes washed with never quite enough cheap detergent, the orange Formica dinette, the futon Lacey bought for fifty dollars from an old roommate. The smell of garage sales and thrift shops, old textbooks, off-brand coffee, slightly irregular sheets worn thready at the hems.
She grabbed the nearest box, which gave a glassy jingle. She balanced it on her belly bump long enough to get her right hand under it, turned toward the house, and tripped over the curb. As she stepped high to get over it she could not see, a bell rang. Surprise made her stumble, and she caught her balance, the box chiming in her arms; she hoped nothing had broken. A child rode a bicycle along the sidewalk. She hadn’t heard him coming until he rang his bell, though the ticking of the wheels was loud enough. He had sprung out of the grass in the tree’s shadow. Her heart closed and opened. She took a breath and talked sense to herself: Just a kid on the street, settle down.
Her teacher’s eye said Nine, but small for his age: a boy with fair, wavy hair and a gray T-shirt stained with long rusty streaks. Trouble at home. Something about the way he stared straight ahead, something about the grip of his small fingers on the handlebars. She hoped he didn’t live too close. He rode his bike along the sidewalk to the edge of Eric and Lacey’s new property, still marked with a row of orange survey flags—he rang the bike’s round bell once, ting, and then turned and rode to the row of flags on the other border. He braked by jamming his heels into the sidewalk and rang the bell again. Ting.
Lacey started across the sidewalk and there he was again, suddenly, pedaling in front of her. His shoulder brushed the box, and she dropped it. Salad plates and dinner plates, bowls and coffee mugs, hit one another in one great shout of destruction. “Do you have to do that?” Lacey cried. “Right here? Do you have to?”
The boy stared at her, a look of challenge, like a dog too long chained: Come closer and see if I bite. “Who asked you to come here talking to me?” he said. The strange ferocity of his response made her step back and raise her hands.
Eric ran to the box. “I said leave it alone!” He opened the box to a mass of splinters and shards, with one intact dinner plate on top from the stoneware set they had bought at the Dollar King last June, on sale for nine dollars (marked down from fifteen). “These were good plates. They could have lasted us for years. Look at this, all this waste.” He laid the pieces out to match the bigger parts together and see if some of them could be saved. White ceramic dust drifted in the bottom of the box.
Lacey could hardly believe how a single impact destroyed the dishes so completely. “We can get another set,” she offered. “They were cheap.”
“Nothing’s cheap when you’re living on borrowed money. You don’t know,” Eric said. So angry, like it was her fault, the traffic eating up the day—like she’d dropped the plates on purpose. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “Just this. Just everything. But if it’s what you want, fine, we’ll do what you want, like we always do. Buy new plates. Buy new silverware while you’re at it. New tablecloths, why not. Spend a hundred dollars. Five hundred. Whatever, what difference does it make, I don’t care.” He pulled the accordion door down in its slot so hard it bounced, and he had to catch it and force it down again.
“Wait,” Lacey said. The day had been just as hard on him as on her—harder, because he’d been driving. “We can finish. We’re almost done.”
He got into the driver’s seat, and the slamming door was his only answer. At the corner, he stopped and signaled before turning left. His carefulness so exasperated Lacey that she had to chew on her knuckles to keep from shouting after him.
She sat on the grass, holding her knees and rocking, with a dozen fragmented conversations rattling in her mind. You should have known—you think you know so much—I could have told you—why don’t you ever listen to me? Another stupid argument, their fourth this week. He said she spent too much, they had no money, why couldn’t she understand—which was good, coming from a guy who’d grown up with all the money in the world, a two-million-dollar trust fund and a vacation home on the Isle of Palms, until it all disappeared. And he was telling her what poverty was like, as if he knew. This wasn’t poverty; this was just a temporary low point between her job ending and his beginning. They were building up some debt, but it would all be gone in two months, except the student loans. If they couldn’t handle the stress of moving, what kind of parents were they going to be?
She breathed quietly and listened to the maple. Eric always left when they fought. When he came back, he would be all love and sweetness, and neither of them would mention this fight again.
She lay back. After a while, she began to hear the sounds of the grass. When the wind brushed her face, the blades rubbed against each other, sharing friendly news. Bees worked the blossoms of the tall purp
le clover and the short white clover, the small sweet buttercups. A wood dove called, “You-u. You-u.” Children’s voices rang, far off. The ticking of wheels gathered in the rustling stillness. And the little boy rode his bicycle up and down the sidewalk, turning at the property line.
The whirring wheels seemed loud but distant, like a recording played back at too high a volume, and each time the rhythm of his stop and turn was identical, his heels bouncing and then scraping on the sidewalk, the wheels slowing, his quiet grunt as he picked up the bicycle and turned it, and then the bell at last: ting. How did he do it exactly the same every time? More and more, Lacey felt she was listening to a recording, and not a real event. If she opened her eyes—which she would not do, nothing could make her look—she would see the sidewalk empty except for a boom box playing a CD on infinite repeat: Ting. Ting.
Chapter Three
THE HOUSE WAITED, its windows golden in the evening light. Lacey yearned to be inside, to open the windows and let the fresh air carry away the smell of new paint, to decide where to put the futon—opposite the window, or diagonally in a corner? She’d have to wait for Eric to come back with the keys. She lay on the grass with her hands lightly woven over the belly bump, sensing the odd fishlike twitches, the clear sense of something in her that was not herself, a stranger in the dark red heart of her life. Her favorite pregnancy website, YourBabyNow.net, said that at eighteen weeks she wouldn’t feel the baby, but she’d felt it from the first day. For two months they tried, and halfway through March she woke up one morning with a blunt, foreign feeling in her cervix. Something new, hello, little stranger. She waited two weeks for the test, but she knew, and she felt it now, though the website said the baby was no bigger than a large olive. She breathed quietly, and the child knocked and twisted, and finally lay still. Even in its stillness she felt it, the hard wall of her womb under a half-inch shield of fat.
Someone alive, someone new. On the day she took the test—the first day of her first missed period—she had parent-teacher meetings, three hours of parents, variously nervous, belligerent, businesslike, guilty, proud. She discussed handwriting and spelling, recommended math-game websites. The only meeting she remembered was the last, a young mother who sat in Lacey’s classroom with her three-month-old daughter on her lap. The baby was bald except for a tuft of transparent hair. She wriggled and murmured, and her round eyes never left her mother’s face. Ten minutes into the meeting, the baby began to fuss. The mother, never missing a word, lifted the baby up to her face, and the baby lunged forward, then latched on and suckled on the mother’s chin. Lacey had never seen a gesture so intimate. She forgot what she was saying about the woman’s older child and simply blurted to this stranger, “I’m pregnant.”
The young mother shifted the baby to her shoulder and rubbed the back of the round fuzzy head. “Your first, right?” she said. “It’s worth it in the end.”
The life inside Lacey was a mystery, not a communion. In its first weeks, this child, a creature smaller than a fruit fly, took her body by storm, three months of nausea. The baby filled her ankles with water, unstrung her knees, and tormented her with a starving hunger worse than she had felt on even the strictest diet.
The world was full of other people’s babies, so beautiful, with their big round eyes; they looked at her with a deep gaze, knowing something she had long forgotten. Even if she’d known it would be this hard, she would have welcomed it, the someday baby coming closer every day. But the struggle was hers alone. Not even Eric could understand.
Cloud shadows shuttered across her eyelids, cool, warm, cool again, and a small wind walked around her, plucking at her hair with teasing fingers. A darker, nearer shadow fell over her. She became aware of presence, the sound of breath, a weight in the air. How vulnerable she had made herself, lying on her back, half asleep, in a place where she knew nobody. She opened her eyes.
Harry Rakoczy from next door, whom she had last seen in Eric’s uncle’s office during the closing, loomed over her like a mild-mannered predatory bird, dangerous only to the fish in his shadow. Most people loomed over Lacey, but Harry was at least a foot taller than she, though he couldn’t weigh a pound more—probably five pounds less.
She felt she was seeing him for the first time. Before this, she’d looked at him through the house, her desire for the house; he was the owner, the opponent, the obstacle, her ally when Eric got cold feet; his was the signature that made the house hers. Now she looked at him as if she meant to draw him. He had the habitual stoop of the unusually tall. The length of his strong narrow hands and the height of his thin face rising to the black widow’s peak of hair made him seem even taller. She gathered herself out of the grass, brushing the dry bits of thatch off her clothes, hating to be caught like this, sweaty and scruffy, waiting for Eric to come home.
“Are you okay out here?” Harry said.
“Eric took the van and he forgot to leave the key.” She was appalled to feel herself on the verge of weeping. “And I left my phone in the van, so I can’t call him. It’s just the whole day, I don’t know. Moving. And then we got stuck in traffic forever.”
“Moving is hard,” Harry said. “Come inside and have some tea.”
In five minutes, Lacey was in Harry’s kitchen with a glass of sweet tea. His house was everything she hoped hers might someday be. The maple floors shone, and every piece of furniture had its own light, from the red sun shining off the polished tabletop to the rainbows flaring from the beveled edges in the china cabinet’s doors.
He seemed restless in the beautiful room, putting down his glass and picking it up again, fidgeting with a dishcloth. “Come to the front room and see where I teach,” he said. She thought he’d been about to say something else and had changed his mind at the last moment.
In the front room, she found the same glossy oak floors, two wooden music stands, a framed five-by-six-foot charcoal drawing of a young woman playing the violin in a whirl of long hair, and a collection of amethyst carnival glass on the mantel. Harry raised his glass of tea to the drawing. “My sister, Dora. When she was very young.”
“It’s beautiful. Who drew it?”
Harry’s face smoothed to a deliberate flatness, a public face, neutral as the image on a coin. “Her husband. They lived next door, in your house.”
Lacey nodded, abashed, unable to fathom what she had done wrong. She bounced on her toes and wished she could find a way to leave without seeming rude. She followed Harry to the kitchen and accepted more tea. “Did the painters do a good job?” he said.
“I can’t get in.” Eric could at least have left the key. She forced her mind away from the house, still withholding itself from her after all those weeks, the forms they’d signed, the down payment, and she couldn’t even get inside. A thought came to her. “The little boy on the bike. Who’s he?”
She didn’t like the way he’d turned at the property line and kept himself so exactly in front of her house, as if he had a right to be there. It made her uneasy. Harry looked like the neighbor who knew everyone’s business, the plant waterer for friends on vacation, the third name on everyone’s emergency contact list. Lacey’s mother depended on people like this to hold her mail when she was vagrant. Lacey hoped the boy was someone’s grandson visiting, or the child of renters who were leaving in a month. Someone she wouldn’t have to worry about.
Harry set his glass down hard in surprise, and tea spilled onto the bright tabletop. “You’ve seen him?” he said.
“You know the one I mean?” Lacey was disappointed; if Harry knew the child so well, he must live nearby and be a problem in the neighborhood.
“Children on bicycles, they come, they go. . . .” He busied himself with a napkin and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She leaned forward across the table. “Does he live on the street?”
Long after the table was dry, Harry kept rubbing the napkin in circles, staring at his hands. At last, he looked across the table, but his eyes were fixed on Lacey’s glass, n
ot her face. “No. He’s never shown himself to me.”
Lacey had seen this kind of evasion when she asked other teachers about certain children. If the child’s first-grade teacher said, I didn’t know him well or he’s probably changed since then, she knew she had trouble. Refusal to answer was the answer. “Thanks for the tea,” she said. She’d watch for this neighbor boy and get to know him; trouble was her specialty. “I’d better get back. Eric will be home soon.” Maybe—she hoped.
“I’m thinking, CarolAnna changed the locks, but did she get the back door?” He opened a drawer next to his sink. “Key, key. Let’s see if this works.”
She followed him out the back door, looking over her shoulder for one last glimpse of his sister, Dora, with her violin in the front room, her predecessor in the house. They walked between the two Cape Cods, underneath the maple where no grass grew. New mulch left a sulfured scent in the evening air. The back lawn was mowed in diagonals down to the row of cypresses, and around the brick patio the sentry boxwoods stood neat and tight. Lacey knew that Harry had been maintaining the Miszlaks’ yard along with his own. She hoped she and Eric would be able to keep it this nice.
Harry offered her the brass key. “Give it a try.”
Lacey wriggled the key into the lock. She pressed it hard, and something pushed back. Her hand jerked with a reflexive shock, as if she’d touched a centipede. She hated the touch of many-legged things, so wrong, unnatural. The key dropped to the doorstep. When she picked it up, it was warm in her hand, and it wouldn’t enter the lock at all.
“No,” she said, suddenly furious. The whole bitter, frustrating day came down to this: the door, the key, the lock. She wasn’t about to let Eric find her waiting to be let in, like some stray. She had found this house and chosen it—it was hers. She forced the key. The lock yielded slightly, then seized and would not let the key release or turn.