by Sonja Condit
“Come see the bedroom.”
Lacey grabbed Eric’s hand, ignoring the pain that shot across her palm. “How did you do this? All in one night?”
“You don’t get through law school by sleeping. Come and see.”
Eager to see and approve the bedroom, she pulled him to the foot of the stairs. They were finished with the same deep-amber oak flooring as the rest of the downstairs, with a runner of red carpet coming down, held in place by brass rods on each step. That was so typical of Eric, the exact detail, his concern that she might slip on the glassy wood. In the kitchen, she knew, he had already replaced the broken window.
She sensed something—not a sound, but an approach—and she looked up the stairs. Something dark rushed down, something too dense and hectic to see. Blackness seized her by the knees. It hit her all at once, driving into her breastbone. She coughed and pulled for air, and her lungs resisted, unwilling to open again. To breathe felt like an effort against life, as if she had to open her mouth underwater.
“Lacey,” Eric said urgently. “What’s wrong?”
Something in the house. Something pushing back against the furniture—the thing that had tried to keep her out, sealing itself against the key, slashing her with the broken window. When she was eight, her mother had had the chance to house-sit for a friend of a friend who was traveling to Tanzania: six months in a big house, free rent and utilities, and even some extra pay for taking care of the dogs. Her mother had walked into the house and out again. This house doesn’t want me, she’d said, and so she and Lacey spent the winter moving from one motel to another. Lacey thought she felt it now, some resentful force pushing down the stairs, pushing her out.
Unacceptable. Not this house. This house had loved her from the moment they met, the house stripped of shutters and carpet, Lacey with her hand full of pistachio shells on the sunny street. This dizziness was nothing, loss of blood, maybe. She shook her head. “Some kind of weird vertigo. I’m fine.”
“You looked like you might pass out.” Eric glanced up the stairs, then took her elbow and steered her into the kitchen. “I bet you’re hungry.”
Lacey seized on this explanation. “If you saw what they fed me . . . I’m starved.”
She was disappointed to see their old dinette in the kitchen. “We’re eating in here for now,” Eric said. “We can’t do the dining room till we’ve paid off the rest. Baby’s room first. We’ll do that when you feel better.”
“Maybe in a month.” Yesterday the doctor had told her the baby would be viable in six weeks. Just barely viable, and you have to keep him in the oven as long as you can. Take care of yourself. Don’t lift anything over ten pounds. Just six weeks to go. She wouldn’t buy a crib until then: it would be tempting fate.
They sat at the Formica dinette, and it was just like back in Columbia, when Eric was in law school and Lacey taught fourth grade, the two of them in their nest, so cozy and sweet. Eric frowned at the chipped orange table and said, “Butcher block. After the dining room.” He slid two slices of pizza onto a paper plate.
She loved it when he made pizza. He made the dough from scratch, and somehow, in the midst of buying the furniture and unpacking all their things, he’d found time to pick up her favorite ingredients. The anchovies and the meaty little black kalamata olives, the artichoke hearts cured in olive oil. She craved such salty, intense flavors since getting pregnant. He’d left one-third of the pizza plain cheese for himself.
“So I called your mother,” he said.
Lacey put the second slice back down onto her plate. “What for?”
“The doctor says you’re on bed rest. Your mother’s coming to help us out.”
“No.” Lacey wasn’t hungry anymore. The anchovies, so delicious a moment ago, turned her stomach. “She makes me crazy.”
How could she make him understand? She knew how to be Eric Miszlak’s wife, hardworking and sensible and supportive, a girl who kept her head in a crisis; she knew how to be Ella Dane Kendall’s daughter, quiet and sensitive, gifted with spiritual talents not yet developed. She could not possibly be both at once. And what if Lacey’s mother came in and felt that force pushing down the stairs, something in the house denying her right to be there? Furniture wouldn’t anchor Ella Dane Kendall to any house; she would insist they leave, which Lacey would never do. Ella Dane wouldn’t believe what it meant to Lacey, to have a real home at last.
It was already too late to explain her mother to Eric, years too late. Lacey had told him stories of her unsettled childhood as adventures, comedies, when they were dating. She hadn’t wanted to be that girl, the one who was needy and damaged, the work in progress, the fixer-upper, and so she laughed and made faces and shaped the stories with her hands. Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ? she would say. The time Ella Dane’s then boyfriend poured bleach on all their clothes; the time Ella Dane smuggled a litter of puppies into a motel; the time they had spent three weeks one July sleeping in the car outside a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach, sneaking in to the breakfast buffet and the swimming pool. It was too late to tell the stories again as the humiliating horrors they had truly been—to Eric, who had fallen over himself laughing at the idea of a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach. She hadn’t even known that was funny.
“You don’t know how crazy she makes me,” Lacey said.
“She means well.”
“She’ll do some kind of moon ritual and burn weird candles.” She would pray for the baby, in her way; Lacey couldn’t stand the idea. She didn’t want Ella Dane having any opinions about this pregnancy, advising Lacey what to eat and what to avoid. If Lacey had been thinking clearly, those first few weeks of her pregnancy, she wouldn’t have told Ella Dane about it at all—not until the baby was born. After the mess she’d made of Lacey’s childhood, she had no right. “You’ll hate it,” Lacey said.
“You can’t stay here alone all day in bed. What if you need something?”
“I could call you.”
“I’ll be working. You can’t always get me.” He turned his back on her to wash his hands at the sink. “Finish your pizza,” he said. “You’ve got to eat. For the baby.”
Lacey’s stomach twisted again. She couldn’t tell: Was it hunger, nausea, rage? They all felt the same. Eric was right. The baby needed food. She waited until he left the room before she took another bite.
Chapter Six
TWO WEEKS LATER, on the first day of school, Lacey woke at eight, breathless, with her conscience biting her heart. Having been student and then teacher since the age of five, she could not shake the feeling that she was urgently wanted somewhere else.
By eight thirty she was at the kitchen table, her laptop open and a cup of decaf cooling beside her. She was supposed to be choosing an obstetrician. It had taken her half an hour to find her way into the provider list for Eric’s new insurance; everybody else had grown up with computers and cell phones since elementary school, but Lacey had been lucky to have a working calculator, and she still wasn’t entirely comfortable on the Internet. Now she was passed from one your-call-is-important-to-us hold to another, from receptionist to nurse, each handing her along as soon as she said placental abruption. Every nurse told her the doctor’s schedule was full. She jumped to YourBabyNow.net to see what her baby was doing at eighteen weeks. She loved this website, her online home.
He was growing a layer of fur called lanugo all over his body. He was the size of a lime. Lacey cupped her hand. The entire hairy child could fit into her palm, and she wouldn’t even stretch her fingers. And in a month, he’d be big enough to survive on his own—just barely, and two months would be better, or three—she could hardly bear to imagine it, after all that bleeding. Better, safer, to think of other things.
Her mother came up behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. Lacey sighed and let the roots of her neck relax under Ella Dane Kendall’s strong hands. “I can’t find a doctor,” she said. Last week, Eric had taken an afternoon off work to drive her to her old OB in Colum
bia, but that wasn’t a long-term plan. In all Greeneburg, there had to be one doctor who would take her.
“You should look for a doula and not a Western death doctor.”
“Insurance only covers the Western death doctors. And they don’t want me because, you know, I might die.”
“I know what you need.” Ella Dane stopped rubbing Lacey’s shoulders and busied herself at the stove, making some kind of tea.
“No herbs,” Lacey said. When she went to college, her mother’s life became an unending self-improvement project: cruelty-free cosmetics, organic clothing, veganism, bearded spiritual men. Ella Dane meant well, but what kind of life was it, when the woman’s only long-term relationship was with the world’s nastiest dog? She came to their aid without complaint, keeping their house clean—well, cleanish—even though she refused to use the vacuum cleaner (it scrambled the feng shui, she said). Lacey tried to be grateful, without much success. She means well, means well, means well was Lacey’s mantra; Ella Dane threw out all the cleaners and used vinegar for most purposes, oil with a few drops of essential sage for the furniture, and now the living room smelled like an Italian salad. And Bibbits the vegan poodle, whom Lacey remembered as a frisky thing with a habit of nipping, had taken to vomiting in corners and coughing for hours, rolling his bloodshot eyes in the most pitiable way. Lacey wasn’t the only one who needed a Western death doctor, but Ella Dane had shaken off her suggestion of a vet. Her dog didn’t need chemicals. But she meant well. And she had sensed no angry, unwelcoming presence in the house. A happy house, she’d said. You did well.
Then what was that darkness, the thing that had fallen down the stairs? Nothing at all. Low blood sugar. Vertigo.
“I’m going to lie down for a while,” Lacey said to Ella Dane. She’d find a doctor later.
She paused at the foot of the stairs. Something had moved in the living room. She closed her eyes against the gray wash of panic and forced herself to look straight into the room. Her mother, who had refused to spend a winter in a comfortable house because it felt unfriendly, had entered 571 Forrester with a smile two weeks ago, telling Lacey she had never felt a home so glad to be lived in. There was nothing wrong. There could be nothing wrong.
The thing in the chair was Bibbits, turning and clawing the red leather seat, nesting in the shredded remnants of a green and gold brocade cushion. Relief made Lacey furious. “Down!” she shouted. “Off! Bad dog.” A thing her mother had forbidden her ever to say, because all dogs were naturally good. The fringe of the cushion hung from either side of Bibbits’s mouth in an extravagant green mustache. “Bad,” she said, and swept him off the chair with her hand.
He landed hard, with a yelp of more surprise than pain, and instead of bouncing to his feet, he jerked backward as if something had struck him and shrieked aloud.
“Bibbits?” Ella Dane rushed into the room with her hands full of letters and catalogs and scooped him up. “What’s wrong, baby love?”
In Ella Dane’s arms, Bibbits bared his teeth at Lacey. His body twitched, and he stretched his lips and began to cough, dry and deep. Ella Dane pulled a brown glass vial from her pocket and squirted a dropperful of something into Bibbits’s mouth. His cough eased, though he still panted.
“He fell,” Lacey said. She couldn’t admit having hit him. She hadn’t hurt him; something else had made him shriek. The red leather was clawed and the cushion ruined beyond repair. “Keep him off the furniture, please,” she said, hoping she sounded patient and reasonable, and not like a whining child. She picked up the mail and went upstairs.
Lacey had been thirteen when Ella Dane picked Bibbits up from the side of the road. His vet bills used up Lacey’s birthday present, all the money Grandpa Merritt sent—it was one of those times when Ella Dane was in grudging contact with her father, though she wouldn’t let Lacey talk with him—and for years Ella Dane maintained the fiction that Bibbits was Lacey’s dog. How many friends’ houses, garage apartments, basements, and motel rooms had the Kendalls been evicted from, because of Bibbits. . . . That dog had made her life miserable.
Ella Dane loved him. Lacey went upstairs, carefully, two feet on each step, gripping the banister hard. Downstairs, Bibbits began to cough again.
Chapter Seven
ERIC SAT AT HIS DESK looking at his lunch. It was the most depressing sandwich he had ever seen. Nobody else at Moranis Miszlak brought their lunch to work, but whenever he went to a restaurant, the money he’d spent over the last month sprang up and seized his throat. They had good reasons for every cent, and yet the more reasons he thought of, the weaker they seemed. He felt like the criminal defendant who wouldn’t stop explaining why he walked into the drugstore with a gun. Because his girlfriend’s ex was threatening him. He forgot it was in his pocket. He was going to the pawnshop to sell it and only stopped for a Coke. It wasn’t even his gun, he’d never seen it before.
So Eric bought furniture because it was on sale, and they needed all those things anyway, and a pregnant woman on bed rest couldn’t sleep on a futon, and it was all delivered for one fee, and, and, and.
Because. Because Lacey looked so small in the hospital bed. Because of the long, long ten seconds before the doctor found the baby’s heartbeat. Seven thousand dollars on the Discover Card. Because he walked into the house and it was empty except for the bloody footprints, and one small handprint, still sticky, on the lowest step.
He bought the furniture so the house would never be so empty again.
Seven thousand dollars, and then the hospital bill. Eric’s uncle created this job for him when the firm could have gone another year without hiring. Uncle Floyd and many of his clients had lost money when Eric’s parents’ investment firm, Foothills Financial, went bankrupt, so Eric’s salary was maybe half what it should be, and Floyd expected Eric to be grateful.
Lunch at the desk. It was nice of Lacey’s mother to make his lunch. He wished she wouldn’t. She was a gluten-free vegan, and what looked like cheese in his sandwich was actually some kind of pressed fermented soy by-product, and the bread was made of turnips and rice. Lacey had warned him Ella Dane would light candles and sing strange chants, but it wasn’t that bad, apart from the food. And that rotten little dog.
Voices washed through the front office as the personnel of Moranis Miszlak returned. They brought a wonderful smell, becoming even more wonderful as it approached his office. Uncle Floyd opened the door. The old man was fabulous in his pink three-piece seersucker suit, green bow tie, and white shoes. He shoved Eric’s untouched files to the side of the desk and set down a white Styrofoam box. “Brought you Abernathy’s orange bourbon ribs. Baked potato. And”—he indicated the slice of orange, twisted and stuck into the ribs with a toothpick—“salad.”
“Thanks, Uncle Floyd.”
“Heard from your parents lately?”
“No.” After the Foothills pyramid collapsed, Eric’s mother had gone to Indiana to stay with her sister, and his father was still in jail. Eric wondered if Floyd had given him the job to find out if there was money hidden somewhere. If only. “Mom wrote once, but not Dad. I guess he’s ashamed.”
“He should be.” Floyd reached across Eric’s desk to finger the files. “Loaded you up with judies, huh?” Those were the clients who picked Moranis Miszlak because they saw the ads on afternoon television, airing during Judge Judy: cheap cases, hardly worth the cost of his time. People suing each other over undocumented loans, minor car accidents, and of course the low-income divorces. These cases belonged in small claims court, except for the clients’ inflated value of their own pain and suffering. The divorces were people who had seen trouble coming and married it anyway. “Poor people need lawyers too,” Floyd said. “You’ll get better cases soon.”
Eric straightened the picture of Lacey in its clear plastic frame. She stood beside the bumper cars at Myrtle Beach, with a snowcone in her hand, her hair blowing across her face in wavy strands of brown and gold. When Foothills went down, two weeks after Lacey and Eric
got engaged, she kissed him and comforted him and promised to get him through law school. And she did it. Now she lay in bed with her feet elevated, wearing an adult diaper to catch the trickling blood.
“I’ve got enough to keep me busy,” Eric said.
Floyd took the picture from his hands. “It ain’t good enough to be busy. You got to be smart.” He laid the picture on the desk, facedown, and took the orange slice off Eric’s ribs and ate it, peel and all. “You know why they call this a doggy bag?”
Eric nodded. This sounded like the beginning of an Uncle Floyd life-skills seminar, and the quickest way through it was to nod and smile.
“Because you are that little girl’s bitch is why,” Floyd said. “Women all over God’s earth have babies and they don’t whine and carry on.”
Eric couldn’t let this pass unchallenged. “She put me through law school.”
“Good for her. Now she’s putting you through hell.”
Eric pushed his keyboard away and tore a rib off the rack. It was still hot. These weren’t leftovers. Floyd must have ordered for him just before leaving the restaurant. He was such a terrible old man, and then he had moments of disarming generosity.
“You got to be ready,” Floyd said. “You were smart about the house, not spending much; she’ll get half, but in a few years you’ll hardly notice.”
“She’s my wife. I love her.”
“There’s never another wife like the first. My Marian, I still dream of her. Doc gives me Xanax for it. That girl of yours, her mother’s some kind of witch.”
Eric and Lacey had a courtroom wedding; Floyd Miszlak and Ella Dane Kendall, their witnesses, had made a bad impression on each other. Ella Dane interrupted the ceremony to invoke the four elements and the four directions to bless the young couple, bringing them fertility, abundance, harmony, and joy. Floyd followed her incantation by declaring it the deepest pile of crap he’d ever stepped into, including the summer he’d worked cleaning the elephant habitat in the Greeneburg Zoo when he was sixteen. “It prepared me for the law,” he concluded, “but it didn’t prepare me for this.” He never missed a chance to remind Eric that all women turned into their mothers.