Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  The Miszlak lawyer was shorter than Lex expected, and younger, too young to have his name on the front door of the big office. It was thirty years since Lex had much to do with lawyers, but he remembered if your name was on the door, you were the big dog. This was not the big dog. He was short, with reddish-brown hair and a tight mouth. Lex followed him down a white hallway with glass doors.

  The young lawyer’s office was around two corners and past a water fountain. It was a little room with no windows and a torn-up vinyl floor. “Your name’s on the door,” Lex said, to get that clear in his mind. Names were hard. “Miszlak, that’s you.”

  “I’m Eric Miszlak. Floyd Miszlak’s my uncle. Technically it’s his name on the door, not mine.”

  “And you’re my lawyer.”

  “If you retain me, yes.”

  “Really my lawyer. Not the court’s lawyer. Mine.” Lex knew about the court’s lawyers. They promised to do all they could, to help if he told them everything, but they never did. He knew not to talk to any lawyer but his own.

  “Absolutely,” the young lawyer said.

  They weren’t allowed to lie. Lex pulled the old man’s check from his windbreaker. “Mr. Rakoczy’s paying your retainer?” the young lawyer asked. He sounded surprised. Lex didn’t know why. Everybody knew the old man.

  “Can you help me?”

  “What do you want, Mr. Hall?”

  “Can I stop her?” The lawyer was shaking his head. Lex tried to make his question clear. “Can she divorce me? She’s my wife.”

  “It’s the law, Mr. Hall. She can divorce you whenever she wants. All I can do is represent you and make sure the settlement’s fair. I need information. Any kids?”

  “Theo. She’ll be a year old in October. Can she do that? Jeanne? Can she just take her and leave?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She went to her mom’s house and she won’t let me see Theo. Can she do that?”

  “No. You have parental rights. We’ll get a temporary order. The court will appoint someone to represent your daughter. They’re called the guardian ad litem and they’ll get in touch with you.” The lawyer pulled a pad of yellow paper onto the desk and started making notes. “So she left you in the marital home. Do you own or rent?”

  Lex didn’t care about the house. He’d bought it with the money the old man gave him for the other house. Jeanne could have the house, but she couldn’t have Theo. The lawyer had to understand. “I want my baby,” he said.

  “The court usually leaves a baby with the primary caregiver. Is that you?”

  “Are you the court’s lawyer or my lawyer?”

  “Yours, your lawyer. I can’t help you by making false promises. We can go for joint custody. That’s the best you’ll get. Sole custody, not a chance, unless there’s abuse and you can prove it. That gets very ugly, very fast. I’m not going to waste your money and your time fighting for something you’ll never get.”

  Lex reached into the greasy envelope for the pictures he’d brought. There was Jeanne, with her gold-blond curls and her bright pink face that spread out onto her shoulders. Her cheeks were wider than her forehead, her neck wider than her cheeks, her chin a pink bump in the broad meat of her throat.

  “She’s a lot younger than you,” the lawyer said.

  “She’s twenty. She was always big.” Lex knew he wasn’t being clear. “I bring fruit and vegetables. She takes my money that I bring home and she eats cheeseburgers for breakfast, and she feeds my baby.” He brought out the second picture: Theo with her fluff of dandelion-seed hair, her laughing face. She wore a white lace dress. Her arms bulged out of the short sleeves, and her cheeks were round pads of fat.

  “Your wife’s unfit because she feeds the baby too much?”

  “I need to take care of her.” That was as clear as he could be. It had to be enough.

  The lawyer laid the pictures on his printer. “I’ll scan these into your file. We’ll depose the pediatrician. You need evidence. That means you need to be able to prove—”

  “I know what evidence is.”

  The lawyer gave him the pictures. “Mr. Hall, I’ll be honest with you. It’s a long shot. You’re calling it child abuse, the way your wife’s feeding Theo?”

  Lex nodded hard. The lawyer was young, but he was quick. Child abuse.

  “You’d have a better case if you’d filed on her.”

  “I was going to.” And it was true, though he hadn’t known it until he heard himself saying it. “I told her, you keep feeding my baby cupcakes and corn dogs, I’ll take her and leave you. I told her, you can’t do that to my baby.”

  “You said you didn’t want her to divorce you.”

  “What I meant was, I wanted to go first and take Theo, because it’s not right. Jeanne was quicker than me is all.” It should have been true; it was as good as true.

  The lawyer typed as Lex spoke. “Good. You get me Theo’s medical records, and I’ll get your custody hearing on the calendar.”

  Lex stood up. “You’re a good lawyer,” he said. “You like avocados?”

  “What I’d like is evidence good enough to make a family court judge take a ten-month-old baby away from her mother. If every chubby kid got taken into protective custody, we’d have to build a ranch the size of Texas to keep them in.”

  “I can take more pictures. Better pictures.”

  “Do that. I’ll get started on custody and visitation.”

  The lawyer walked around the desk to shake Lex’s hand. People didn’t get close to Lex. Men, when they shook his hand, kept their arms straight to hold him off. Women crossed their arms when he came too close, and they never shook his hand at all. This was the first time a man who had a desk had walked around instead of reaching across. Lex let the hand drop—he was never sure how to stop shaking hands; was he supposed to pull away or let go or squeeze harder? There was a way to do it and he never found out how—and he backed out of the room.

  Chapter Ten

  ERIC WAS RIGHT, as he so often was. It made Lacey tired. One of these days he’d be wrong about something, and his head would explode. She laughed at the childish thought, though she was ashamed of it. He was the living twin of her teacher voice, an essential part of herself. He’d suggested she call the OB who’d seen her at the hospital, because sooner or later she’d end up in the hospital anyway. Dr. Vlk, it turned out, had a private practice, and her nurse found room in the schedule for Lacey on Monday, August 22.

  The baby was twenty-two weeks old. Dr. Vlk, dressed not in scrubs but a gray skirt-suit and pearls, turned the ultrasound machine so Lacey could see him. He grabbed his umbilical cord and pulled on it.

  “Can’t you make him stop?” Lacey said.

  “The placenta’s stabilized. See the white band? That’s scar tissue. It looks good.”

  Lacey wanted to ask will he live? but she didn’t trust her voice—this good news brought her closer to tears than all the weeks of fear and doubt. He was the size of a Cornish game hen. Half his body was head. He turned his face, and Lacey saw his profile, his beautiful little nose, his short upper lip. Dr. Vlk took the picture and said, “We’re getting a good heartbeat and lots of kicking. You can start exercising a little, short walks, but still no heavy lifting.”

  Lacey felt safe in Dr. Vlk’s hands. Will he live? A good heartbeat and lots of kicking: she’d take that. She even tried a little joke. “Dr. Vlk,” she said, “wouldn’t you like to buy a vowel?”

  Dr. Vlk was not a woman for jokes, not with those pearls. She had the look of the veteran teacher who’d mentored Lacey through her first semester of practice teaching, a natural mind reader, terrifying but comforting too. Dr. Vlk looked into Lacey and through her, as Mrs. Ravenel used to look at students. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “If the baby’s fine, I’m fine.”

  “We don’t have time for me to be your psychiatrist.”

  Some bedside manner. “What happens if I start bleeding again?” Lacey asked.

&
nbsp; Dr. Vlk’s eyes were a silvery blue, almost as light as her hair. This was a woman who could not lie. “He’s about viable,” she said. “The longer he cooks, the better he’s done. The outcome’s not what you’d want till you’re past thirty weeks. Thirty-five is better. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Lacey swung her feet off the examination table. “We’re fine,” she said. As a teacher, she’d known when students were in trouble, often before the students knew it themselves. More than once, she’d kept a child in before recess to ask what was wrong and received a wide-eyed Nothing in return, only to find the child in tears a week later: parents divorcing, big brother on drugs, Grandma terminally ill. If Lacey, with only three years in the classroom, could see this much, how much more could Dr. Vlk see, having given good news and bad for thirty years or more.

  “You’re not fine. How does Dad feel about the baby?”

  Lacey wanted to say Eric was thrilled, they were both so happy, and her own voice surprised her: “Scared. He’s got this new job, and we moved. It’s hard.”

  Dr. Vlk handed her a box of tissues and said, “Have you talked with him?”

  “Oh! Talked with him! I’d have to make an appointment. He’s working twelve hours a day, and I’m going to whine about some weird feeling? There are noises.”

  “It’s an older house?”

  “My grandpa had an old house. You could hear things, voices in the walls; it’s only noise, I know that.” Her mother had always said there were ghosts in Grandpa Merritt’s house, but not to be afraid of them, because they were peaceful spirits, interested only in each other, a family from long ago. “But there’s this feeling on the stairs. What’s wrong with me?”

  What a relief to ask the question, to admit something might be wrong—a thing she could never say to her husband or mother. To Lacey’s surprise, Dr. Vlk took her seriously. “Pregnancy makes your body wise,” Dr. Vlk said. “Morning sickness keeps you from eating dangerous food. Fear keeps you from doing dangerous things. Fear is your friend. Trust yourself. Can you live downstairs?”

  The idea was so startling, Lacey had to take a moment before she answered. “You mean, don’t go upstairs in the daytime at all?”

  “Sleep downstairs, too. Your weight has changed, your ligaments are loose, you’re scared because you could fall. Pretend you live in a one-story house.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “Most things are. Try it. Any bleeding, call me. If it’s more than a drop or two, call 911. Make an appointment on the way out. Two weeks.”

  Lacey went home dazzled by the revolutionary simplicity of Dr. Vlk’s idea. She was afraid that Eric, who came home exhausted every day, might resent the work and trouble of moving her downstairs. But his reaction was like hers: Was it this easy, solve her problems by keeping her off the stairs? Perfect. He came home early and spent the afternoon organizing Lacey in the dining room. He ordered a twin mattress and a simple metal frame, paying extra for immediate delivery. They still had some old sheets from Lacey’s dorm days.

  A twin bed. She wanted to ask why he didn’t order a double, or even a queen, so they could still sleep together, but since the thought had so clearly not entered his mind, she couldn’t quite find the words. She curled in the red armchair, watching him trot up and down the stairs, organizing her new life while her mother brought her a mug of jasmine tea and a plate of gingersnaps; jasmine for serenity, ginger for nausea. It was as if they were breaking up, as if he were moving her out of more than the bedroom. Out of his home, out of his heart. How careful he was to make sure she had everything she needed! He folded her maternity clothes into a couple of the big plastic tubs they’d used for moving; he brought all her things to the downstairs bathroom. He went upstairs again for her sketchbooks and magazines.

  Lacey left her tea and gingersnaps on the side table. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and lifted her face, surprised by a rush of sadness. This was a good day: the placenta healed, the baby strong, a doctor who listened. One of the best days of her life. “You should be sitting down,” Eric said, edging around her with his arms full of sketchbooks, boxes of pencils and pastels balanced on top. She hoped he didn’t drop them. Those colored pencils were so brittle, the leads shattered if they were ever dropped. “You should be resting.” He set his pile on the lowest step and took her back to the red chair.

  “What if I’m lonely downstairs?” she said.

  “I’ll check on you.” He touched the mug. “Your tea’s gone cold; you want me to nuke it?”

  “What if I can’t sleep alone?”

  “Lacey, be reasonable. That room’s not big enough for a big bed. And this mattress and the frame—this can be the baby’s bed when he’s bigger. It’s only for a little while. I’ll keep my cell phone on at night and you can call me if you need me.”

  “The tea’s fine,” she said. Call him at night on the cell phone. Maybe she could send him an e-mail. Train Bibbits to carry messages. Eric was still standing there, as if waiting for permission to complete this separation. “Everything’s fine,” she said. He rubbed her shoulder, then carried her books and art supplies into the dining room.

  A wonderful day, she told herself, a perfect day, but she was losing half her house. It hurt unexpectedly; it hurt like a death. Her first real home. Good-bye to the master bedroom, good-bye to the shiny new bathroom, see you in four months, good-bye. Like a child again, she was camping out in a temporary bed. She told herself it was just a makeshift arrangement, but that was what it had always been. Just for a little while, Ella Dane said, and now Lacey could not convince herself she would ever sleep in her own bedroom again. Everything she had wanted and worked for, gone. She wiped the tears from her face and tried to smile.

  The doorbell rang. “That’s the bed,” Eric said. He directed the men to set it up in the empty room, their formal dining room someday, and by the time they were done, it was past nine. Lacey was as tired as if she’d hauled the furniture around the house herself. Ella Dane made a pizza-shaped article consisting largely of potatoes and seaweed. Lacey, not wanting to eat, sat on her new bed and looked at her white walls.

  Eric knocked and entered on the echo of his knock, laughing as he pulled the door shut behind him. “Happy housewarming,” he said as he handed her a greasy paper bag.

  “That’s not a cheeseburger? And onion rings?” She hadn’t even heard him leave the house. “I love you,” she said. He was so sweet; she didn’t tell him so often enough.

  He kissed her just above the right eyebrow. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

  “Can’t you stay?” she said, disappointed.

  “I’m in court all morning, got to get these motions written up. You want to go shopping this weekend, look at baby furniture?”

  No. Lacey’s instant revulsion surprised her. Absolutely no, no crib, no car seat, no highchair, no. She felt as if he’d asked her to hold a tarantula. “It’s too soon,” she said. What if the baby dies. She wouldn’t say it; she shouldn’t have to. He should know. “What if it doesn’t work out,” she said. “Then we’d have all the things and not use them. No.”

  He sat beside her on the bed and pulled her into a one-armed hug, pulled her head down onto his shoulder and stroked her hair. “It would be the worst thing ever. But we’d keep the things. We’d still use them sometime.”

  “No,” Lacey said, implacable. To buy the furniture before the baby was safe was asking for trouble. To use for a later, living child the things that were bought for the dead—no. Ella Dane would understand this fateful feeling; not Eric.

  Eric breathed hard for a moment, and she felt him control his temper: everything he wanted to say to her, things he said when they disagreed, that she was irrational and difficult, her mother’s daughter—his thoughts pressed in on her, but she did not yield. She couldn’t have baby furniture until she was sure she’d have a baby. “Okay,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want.” He hugged her again and pushed her away. “Got to get my work done. Good
night.”

  Lacey sat on the bed eating onion rings and reasoning with herself. It was all right if Eric didn’t understand. Later, when the baby came, he’d know she was right. He was angry, but he’d get over it. And he had brought her onion rings. She liked to nibble a hole in the crust, suck the onion out, and then eat the crust like a crunchy onion-flavored cookie. Delicious.

  A voice snorted under the door, “Huh. Huh. Huh.” Hard claws tapped back and forth, and the snuffling voice traveled from one side of the door to the other. “Huh.”

  Poor little Bibbits. Under all his fluffy apricot poodlosity, he was a sweet dog. Lacey pulled off the cheeseburger’s lower patty. She opened the door, and Bibbits stood on his rear legs and danced in a circle for her. She dropped the patty in front of him.

  He sniffed it, licked it, nudged it with his paw. Then he looked up and barked. “Seriously?” she said. She tore the patty into four pieces and fed them to him. When he was finished, he trotted back into the kitchen and knocked his bowl of rice upside down.

  Lacey brushed her teeth, took off the garnet strand, and went to bed, though it wasn’t yet ten. She let the garnet strand fall into the clay bowl beside her bed, along with all the other gemstone strands and amulets Ella Dane had given her over the last few weeks. Rose quartz for her uterus, amethyst for serenity, citrine for cleansing, moonstone for new life. Ella Dane was concerned for Lacey, but she had not sensed anything wrong with the house itself. The baby rolled inside her. What a busy boy he was, playing peekaboo in the dark.

  She fell asleep with the child dancing under her hand, and she woke gradually to a pain above her heart. Too many onion rings. She needed milk. The room was dark. She had a confused sense that it was later than it seemed, that midnight was long gone and yet morning had come no closer. The night had taken a turn into a different kind of time, bubbling out of itself into a circle of nameless hours between three and four.

  She needed milk. She pressed her hand against the mattress to lever herself upright, and her palms sank into a swampy warmth. She pressed deeper into the mattress. The slow liquid rose over her fingers, over the tops of her hands.