Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  He walked past three security guards, quickly, with his eyes on the colored stripes on the floor, hoping he looked like he knew where he was going. Like he was supposed to be there. Then he found himself at another set of three elevators, or maybe the same ones. The security guard sat with his knees splayed wide and his pants wrinkled. All the colored stripes headed into the elevators. Lex held back.

  The middle elevator opened and a new security guard came out, a young woman with black hair in big waves around her face and a coffee cup in her hand. Lex smiled at her. He liked her. She looked like the Mexican women who came into MacArthur’s. He always asked if he could help them, and he led them to the jicamas and the chili peppers. For them, he had persuaded the management to order sugarcane and mangoes and all the beautiful tropical fruits. She said, “Sir, are you lost?”

  “I need help,” Lex said. His voice was too loud. “I need the police.”

  “Do you want to report a crime?” she asked.

  “Yes!” She was so kind and so beautiful. Tears ran down the inside of his nose, and he wiped his sleeve across his face. “A crime. I need to report a crime.”

  She handed the coffee to the fat guard. “Here, Jim, I’ll be right back. This way, sir.” She led Lex along the purple line through several identical gray turns and into a glass-brick lobby he hadn’t seen before. He liked her young, strong walk, not panting and pigeon-toed like poor Jeanne. She took him past the lobby and into a maze of desks and cubicles, big messy offices with their doors flung open, telephones and shouts. It was worse than Moranis Miszlak. He wished he hadn’t come.

  “Here,” she said, and sat him down at one of the desks in the middle of the room, opposite another messy cop, maybe the same one from the elevator, come here by a faster and more secret way. They looked just alike. “Officer Bennet will help you,” she said firmly, and took herself away.

  He held out his disk, and the messy cop didn’t take it. People didn’t like to take things from Lex’s hands. He had learned not to touch the produce when the customers could see him. “It’s a crime,” Lex explained. “I had a camera.”

  The messy cop took the disk and slid it into the drive on his laptop. After he watched the scene, he looked at Lex, his face turning red. “You wasting my time?”

  “She’s poisoning my baby. It’s a crime.”

  The messy cop sucked his big, pink lips and pressed a button on the phone. “Code L over here,” he said, “family court type,” and a few minutes later a woman appeared, not the kind Lex liked to look at but one of the other kinds, a short solid woman with stiff gray hair standing up in triangles just like the County Place building.

  “Is there a problem, sir?” she said to Lex. She had a friendly voice.

  “My wife is poisoning my baby. I took pictures.” He gave her the pictures. She stood behind the cop and watched the video on his computer.

  “Has your wife left you, by any chance?” the gray woman asked.

  Lex nodded.

  “And there’s a custody hearing coming up, correct me if I’m wrong.”

  He nodded again.

  “You have a lawyer? What’s your lawyer’s name?”

  “Miszlak.”

  The cop pressed another button on his desk phone and said to someone, “Miszlak still down there? I got a Code L, one of his.” Then he turned back to Lex. “Your lawyer’s coming,” he said.

  But it was some other lawyer, an old man in a pink checkered suit with a yellow bow tie. “That’s not my lawyer,” Lex said. “Mine is a young one.”

  “You’re one of Eric’s clients?” the new lawyer asked.

  The cop and the gray woman explained. The new lawyer gathered the pictures and the disk, took Lex’s elbow, and led him out through the glass lobby. “You can’t come to the cops with this,” he said. “You let Eric take care of you. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “My wife’s lawyer says I’m crazy.”

  “Who’s your wife’s lawyer?”

  “MacAvoy.”

  They had reached the front entrance of County Place. The new lawyer pushed Lex toward the big smoked-glass doors. “Oh, you’re that one. Are you crazy?”

  “I just want to take care of my baby girl.”

  “Eric never told you to come here with pictures. You’ve brought the cops into a custody case. You bring a gun to a knife fight, you better know how to use it, or you’ll get yourself shot. You want your kid in foster care? Let Eric do his job.”

  “What’s Code L?”

  “That’s L for loony.”

  Lex turned back. He could find his way along the purple line. “They can’t call me that. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  The new lawyer grabbed his arm and towed him outside. “They call you whatever they want, and you say, Yes, sir, may I have another? Got that? Come here again before your court date, and you’ll be finding yourself a new law firm.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lex mumbled, and he began the long walk back to his Heart Healthy parking spot. Halfway along the first aisle of cars, he stopped and looked back. The new lawyer was standing by the glass doors, watching him walk away.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ERIC WAS GLAD to have been called out of court. The case was the judiest of judies: a young man who had bought his ex-girlfriend a car and was suing her because she wouldn’t pay the insurance. He was as passionate about it, as desperate and sincere, as Lex Hall about his baby, or any of the almost exes about their children, dogs, and houses.

  The judge wanted to know why the young man didn’t cancel the insurance and let the girlfriend fend for herself. Eric wanted to know that, too. This case, like so many others, should have been heard in small claims, but the young man was suing for the car as well as for the insurance, even though Eric had explained for twenty minutes (half a billable hour) that his having bought the car on the girlfriend’s birthday and having the dealer put a big red ribbon on it made it incontrovertibly a gift.

  “It’s not right,” the young man said. “She owes me. It’s not right.”

  “For future reference,” Floyd murmured as he stepped next to Eric to make his apologies to the judge and take over the case, “the customer ain’t always right. You should never have let this goober near a court.”

  “Couldn’t stop him,” Eric said. “What’s wrong?”

  Floyd raised his voice. “Family emergency, Your Honor. Your wife’s at Women’s Health,” he said to Eric, more softly, but loudly enough that everyone in court heard, while believing they were not meant to hear. Eric marveled at Floyd’s instincts, using this trick on such a worthless case. “Trouble with the baby. Better get there fast.”

  Eric drove with his mind full of blood, unable to clear away the hateful, pragmatic questions his legal mind laid out as for a deposition: Would Lacey want to touch it, hold it, and say good-bye? He knew she would, and she’d want him to do it, too. Could he hold in his arms this not-quite-a-person who had never lived? Would he remember it forever, would it pollute his feelings for the living child who might be born someday? Would they have a funeral? Was there some law about disposal of medical waste, and would a funeral home be legally permitted to take a stillborn fetus? They hadn’t chosen a name. They’d need a good name but not too good, not a name they would regret having wasted.

  Dr. Vlk met him when he arrived, and the baby was fine, and Lacey was fine. All his questions disappeared, leaving a residue of shame. Before letting him see Lacey, the doctor questioned him stringently about Lacey’s daily activities. “She bruises easily,” Eric said. “Half the time she doesn’t know what she did.” He kept his tone concerned, eager to help, distracted: “You’re sure the baby’s okay?” he asked again. As if he didn’t know what this was about. Lacey had a suspicious bruise, and the doctor wanted to know why. “I blame myself,” he said, with sincerity worthy of Uncle Floyd. “I should be home more, taking care of her.”

  That did it, finally. The doctor led him down the hall to Lacey’s exam room. Lacey was asl
eep. Seeing her in this medical light, pale and shadowless, Eric was struck by how terrible she looked. She was so small, and the huge round belly bulged like a parasite that had almost drained its host, a grossly overgrown caterpillar on a flower stem. The skin around her eyes was stained purple and black, and her mouth fell in as she slept. No wonder Dr. Vlk thought he’d been beating her. If a client came to Eric looking like that, he’d file a restraining order and drop her off at the women’s shelter himself.

  What could he do, what more could he do? He’d bought her the house, the car, the furniture; he’d called her mother here to take care of her; and he had to work to earn money for all that. He’d bought the bassinet and the newborn clothes, dozens of things they’d need for the baby, without troubling her about any of it. He planned to change diapers, get up in the middle of the night, hold her hand during delivery, all those good-father things his mother always complained his own father never did. Right now, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t take one moment of her pregnancy for her.

  “Hey,” he said, taking her right hand.

  She blinked, turned her head toward him, and smiled. The smile hurt him, false and difficult, an ill-fitting shoe squeezed back onto yesterday’s blisters. She shouldn’t have to smile like that. Without his noticing, something had gone badly wrong between them, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t reach her. “Bad day,” he said.

  “Not so bad as it might have been. We’re still pregnant, anyway.”

  “So I’ve been thinking,” which wasn’t true, because the idea came to him only as he spoke, “I should get a house-cleaning service. Ella Dane shouldn’t have to clean our house.” Especially since she was so bad at it. “And if Dr. Vlk says bed rest, then you’re going to bed. I’ll cut down on my hours and ask Uncle Floyd if I can work at home more. You don’t have to be alone.”

  She rolled her face away on the pillow. “I’m not alone. Never.”

  He waited for her to say more, but she drifted off to sleep again, unself-conscious as a little girl. He kissed her, and then touched her belly, feeling the baby rush up against his hand and slide away. Amazing. And still alive. Now, how was he going to get Lacey home, with two cars, not letting her drive?

  He’d have to call Ella Dane. That would leave him with three cars and two drivers. If he drove Lacey home in his car, and met Ella Dane at home, and drove Ella Dane back here in his car, then she could drive Lacey’s car home. . . . Planning and calculating, he walked from the room, his cell phone in his hand, and tripped over a little boy in the doorway. “Sorry, kid,” he said, “you looking for someone?”

  “I followed her back here,” the boy said. A nice-looking child with thick blond hair and a late-summer tan, not yet faded in mid-October, a boy who’d spent the last seven months outside, climbing trees and playing baseball every minute he wasn’t in school. Wholesome. Eric thought of the tiny being curled inside Lacey. He might be blond like her; he might have a strong body and an open face like this boy. “I can’t find her,” the boy said.

  “Your mom’s here somewhere? You’re not supposed to be wandering around.” What if he opened a door and found her with her feet up on one of those medieval-torture tables? That was no way for a boy to see his mother. “She won’t leave without you.”

  He seemed unsure, but he allowed Eric to lead him back through the white hallways to the waiting room, where he slumped in one of the cushioned chairs and hid himself behind a ragged copy of Highlights for Children. Eric stepped outside to call Ella Dane, and when he came back in, the little boy was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  LACEY LET ERIC help her up the porch steps. After all her fears, the house was as radiantly peaceful as October sun could make it. Eric brought the leather sofa cushions from the living room and set them at the head of Lacey’s bed. She hadn’t had so much attention from him in weeks. “Good?” he said.

  She wriggled her shoulders against the cushions. “Perfect.”

  They looked around her room. Someday the china cabinet would stand here, where the head of her bed now touched the wall. They’d have an oval table in the middle of the room, mahogany with ball-and-claw feet. She’d take down the miniblinds and put curtains across the bank of three windows that looked out on the backyard, brocade and tassels and a layer of lace, a rich and elegant room. Now, her sheets smelled like an old motel, like dirty feet and sour nighttime breath. And Bibbits.

  “Can you open a window?” she said.

  He was so sweet, but already he was looking past her. He checked his watch; he was thinking about the courtroom she’d called him out of and all the work he still had to do. He put up a good show, she had to give him that. He opened the window, made sure she had a glass of water, and told her to stay in bed unless she needed to go to the bathroom, not to get up for anything. He brought her drawing supplies, her laptop, and the television from the living room. He went out to buy liver and bacon and even cooked it, although she knew the smell of liver made him gag. The smell would be his excuse to leave her alone; he would take his laptop upstairs.

  The front door slammed in a meaningful way as Ella Dane left the house to avoid the smell of meat. Sulking. What was it now, apart from the liver? Maybe she was upset because Lacey had called for Eric’s help and not hers.

  “Your mom’s got a bee up her butt,” Drew said. Suddenly he was at the foot of her bed, as if he’d always been there, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin. His light hair flopped over his eyebrows, and she couldn’t see his eyes. He had mosquito bites on his ankles, some of them freshly raised welts, others scratched, scabbed, scratched again. He stuck his left pinky in his ear and rooted for wax, and Lacey marveled again at his persuasive reality. When he moved, the mattress shifted under her.

  “Language,” she said.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “She’s going out because she doesn’t like liver.”

  Drew pulled his knees in closer and dropped his face, so all she could see of him was the crown of his head, the flat wavy locks of hair springing like separate leaves from the uneven part, the whorl at the back. He muttered something into his legs.

  “Didn’t hear you,” Lacey said.

  “I said.” He burrowed his face into his knees and shouted through his own body. “I said I was sorry, okay? I only wanted to make you listen.”

  “You could have hurt me. You could have hurt the baby.” Outrage and terror sank into the sand of her mind. So exhausting. She’d had this conversation before. Children in classrooms had knocked over desks; they had thrown book bags, pencils, and binders at her; they’d hooked their feet around her ankles trying to trip her; twice, she’d been bitten bloody. Teaching was a perilous art. She coaxed, comforted, and challenged her difficult boys. Use your words, she said, and then she taught them better words. She’d never given up on a child, however troubled and strange.

  “I said, I know! You have to be careful of babies. I know.”

  “Okay. Thank you.” As in a classroom after talking down a tantrum-prone boy, Lacey sat quietly next to Drew and felt peace rising within him. She could do this, keep him calm, keep her baby safe. The heavy scent of liver cooked in bacon grease came under the door, and she swallowed again and again. She was hungry enough to eat the liver half raw, as long as there was a lot of it. But Eric, ever conscientious, would cook it gray, safe and sanitary.

  Her door bumped open, and Bibbits trotted in, his nails tapping as he crossed the room. He stood up on his back feet so that he could see up to the bed, and when he looked at Drew, he whimpered and fell back to the floor.

  Bibbits could see him, though not all the time. Ella Dane never had, nor CarolAnna at the kitchen table. Ella Dane was sensitive—she should have known there was something in the house. As a child, CarolAnna had actually seen Drew. Drew was in control of their awareness, he must be. Drew smiled at Bibbits, and the dog whined in the back of his throat. Eric called from the kitchen, “Almost done!” and Lacey patted the blanket nex
t to her. Bibbits barked once at Drew, then jumped into the bed next to Lacey’s shoulder.

  “So,” Lacey said. “Think you can tell me what upset you?” There was always a reason for the tantrum, and children liked to be taken seriously.

  “You know.” Drew plucked at the blanket. He raised his chin up to his knees and peered at her under the fall of hair. “I don’t want you to talk to her.”

  “Who?”

  “That lady. The one whose name you found out.”

  Greeley Honeywick. “Why?”

  “She’ll tell you bad things.”

  “Are there bad things?”

  “She’ll tell you I hurt her.”

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “She was mean to me.”

  “What did she do that was mean?”

  Bibbits barked, one shrill word. Lacey glanced up at the doorway, and there was Eric, with a tray in his hands. Liver with bacon, hash browns, and a big glass of orange juice. “I heard you talking,” he said.

  The weight still pressed at the foot of the bed, but Drew was gone. The weight gradually lifted, leaving her left foot numb. She could still smell his salty hair, the smell of a child who had spent a long day playing in the sun.

  “Who were you talking to?” Eric asked.

  And she couldn’t say, Smell that, it smells like a little boy, because he didn’t know children the way she did, and anyway the room smelled of liver now, also of poodle. Bibbits barked again and pulled at the blanket with his front feet. “Just the dog,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.” Eric waited as Lacey pulled herself up against the cushions. He set the tray on her lap and sat next to her, holding Bibbits firmly in spite of the little dog’s growls. “Who got hurt? Who was mean? What’s going on, Lacey?”