Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  Lacey took a bite of liver, for time, and handed a piece to Bibbits, for peace. She took a mouthful of hash browns. Eric had cooked them in the bacon grease and they were wonderful. “There’s something in the house,” she said, “and I know you won’t believe me.” She should stop talking; the teacher voice warned her, Stop before you say another word, but it was too late. She had to tell him; she couldn’t do this on her own, and nobody who made such perfect hash browns could be unsympathetic. “There’s something in the house, and it’s dangerous.”

  “Something?” Eric said.

  “Somebody.” She still couldn’t say ghost. The weight on the bed, the part in his hair. He was too real. “A person. He’s angry about something.” A thought came to her. “Angry, or maybe sad.” She gave a little bounce, and Bibbits took advantage of the motion to lunge for her plate and snatch a piece of bacon. Lacey grabbed the plate, and the liver slid off; she caught it with her right hand, and Eric pulled away from her with a sound of disgust. “Sad,” she said, brandishing the liver at him, “that’s what he is. Being sad makes him angry.”

  “So this person, what kind of person is he, and where did he go?”

  He wanted to make her say it, but she wouldn’t. Let him ask Ella Dane. “A sad person,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She closed her face, a trick she had learned from Eric; nobody could slam shut the way he could. He couldn’t make her say, This house is haunted, because then she’d be as crazy as her mother, and that was a thing no one could ever say about her. She bit the last piece of liver in two, ate half herself, and held the other half over the side of the bed. Bibbits licked it from her hand.

  “Okay.” Eric stood up and took the plate. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m going upstairs to get caught up on my work.” He left, just as she had predicted.

  She sighed and rolled over. Bibbits fell asleep next to her. She jiggled her feet, rolled over again, and blew puffs of air on Bibbits’s closed eyes. He wrinkled his little nose with each puff, but didn’t wake up. She was so bored. She wished she could get up and walk around the room, run screaming from the house, drive to a mall, anything. But the baby needed her to stay still and behave. Rock the cradle gently, rock him only with her breath. He turned, and she watched the bulge slide under her skin. What was that—his knee, his whole body? What was going on in there, double Dutch with the umbilical cord?

  Her thoughts clattered, what-if chasing maybe-then. If she left the house, where would she go? Her beautiful house with the beautiful furniture Eric had chosen just for her, their first real home; it wasn’t like filling up a couple of old backpacks with clothes and putting the boyfriend-of-the-month’s stereo in a box and walking out toward the next place, the way Ella Dane had done so often, dragging Lacey along. To stand up, walk away, leave—to abandon her own real adult life, like a refugee—she couldn’t.

  And even if she left, Drew might follow, as he had followed her to the hospital. No point running, unless she knew she was running to a safe place. Not a good house for babies: How bad was it? She had to stop these racing thoughts. She had to rest. She had to give the placenta a chance to heal, to save the baby. She hitched herself up to a sitting position, dragged her laptop from the nightstand, and logged on.

  First, she visited her favorite maternity-clothing website and ordered a new dress, dark brown cotton printed with purple flowers, all pintucks and lace, the skirt opening out in long elegant gores. She also bought a pair of amethyst earrings, because they matched. Then she remembered she was stuck here in bed, so Eric would see the mail before she did. He would open the Visa statement, and he would want to know what she needed a new dress for when they hadn’t paid for the furniture yet. So she canceled the order. She’d order them again when she could get out of bed. Now that was motivation.

  The room felt empty. “Drew?” she asked. Nothing, so it was safe to search.

  Greeley Honeywick wasn’t anywhere near Utah, as her ancient uncle had said. She lived in Vancouver, Washington, where she was a high school gym teacher and triathlete. She smiled out of the computer screen, her auburn hair in shining waves in publicity shots, ponytailed and severe at finish lines. She was a double amputee, having lost her left leg below the knee and her right foot at the ankle in a domestic accident.

  A domestic accident. Lacey checked the time. Nine P.M., so it was only six in Washington. Greeley Honeywick was on Facebook, with a pair of six-year-old twins, as smiling and auburn haired as herself, with the confident, well-brushed look of children born to middle-aged parents, and a tall husband who stood behind her in the pictures and looked away to the left or down at one of the twins, never at Greeley herself. Trouble at home, the teacher’s eye said, looking at the children’s smiles, so wide and bright. Domestic accident. Greeley Honeywick had taught at Burgoyne Elementary in Greeneburg eighteen years ago.

  That was the school Drew must have attended. Greeley couldn’t have taught him, though; CarolAnna had known Drew before Greeley lived in the house. Lacey raised her hands from the keyboard and let her senses spread through the room, feeling for Drew’s weight. Nothing—she was still safe. Maybe he didn’t understand computers.

  She found a phone number in the Vancouver, Washington, telephone book, attached to Honeywick Auto Repair. Lacey called, and within minutes she was talking with the tall husband. Lacey told him she had been a student of Ms. Honeywick’s at Burgoyne Elementary. “In second grade,” she burbled, “and I loved her so much, she was my favorite teacher! And now I’m a gym teacher myself, and I just wanted to get in touch with Ms. Honeywick and tell her how much she meant to me. She changed my life. She really, really did.”

  “Let me give you her number,” the tall husband said, and Lacey noted: not our number. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear from you.”

  Lacey called the number, and a small girl, one of the auburn-haired twins, answered the telephone. “Can I talk to your mom?” Lacey asked.

  “I don’t know,” the little girl said slyly, “can you?” She giggled.

  “Aren’t you the cutest thing, you. May I speak to your mother?”

  The little girl handed the phone over, and Greeley Honeywick said, “Who’s this?” She had a PTA-mom voice, no time for nonsense. This was a woman who held a full-time job, kept her house perfect, was active in her children’s school, and ran triathlons, all with no feet.

  Lacey heard all that in those three words, so she said briskly, “Ms. Honeywick, I’m calling from Greeneburg, South Carolina, and we’re doing a piece in the newspaper on alums and teachers from Burgoyne Elementary. Your name came up.”

  “How?”

  “Somebody remembered, and I Googled you. Honeywicks aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Do you have a minute?”

  Greeley launched into a well-practiced lecture on the importance of physical fitness for young people, and an upcoming fund-raising triathlon for the Special Olympics. It was like listening to Ella Dane explain how to sprout wheat. All that sincerity and well-meaningness. Please, no more. Drew could appear any second; there was no time for this. “And I understand you lost both feet?” Lacey interrupted.

  “Yes. A domestic accident.”

  “Did it happen while you were teaching here at Burgoyne?”

  “It happened at home. Domestic, that’s what it means.”

  That vertigo, the terror on the stairs. Lacey held her breath for a moment, for courage, and said, “Did you fall down the stairs?”

  “You’re not from any paper. Who are you?”

  “Did you live at 571 Forrester Lane?” Lacey asked.

  Silence, so long that Lacey began to wonder if she’d been cut off, and then Greeley said, “Do you?”

  “There’s this thing on the stairs, something falling.”

  “It’s not me. I mean, I fell down the stairs, but the thing was there when I moved in. It kind of came over me one time; it overtook me and I fell. I never told anyone what happened. The thing on the stairs. Nobody would believe me.” />
  It was true. It was all true. After everything she’d felt and seen in the house, Lacey was still amazed. Ella Dane believed it, but Ella Dane believed anything. This sane stranger, her faith mattered. Maybe she felt the same about Lacey, maybe she had held her secret for eighteen years, waiting for this call.

  “I believe you,” Lacey said. “Was it a little boy?”

  “My legs were broken, and then I got this infection in the hospital and lost my feet. And I was pregnant when I fell. Three months. What’s it to you?”

  That child should be seventeen. There was no teenager next to the auburn-haired twins in any of the pictures. Also, Greeley had sidestepped the question of Drew. “I’m pregnant,” Lacey said. “Twenty-nine weeks.”

  “How’ve you kept it so long?” This question took Lacey’s breath away. Greeley went on, “I did some research on the house after we moved. There hasn’t been a live baby born in that house since 1972. He doesn’t like babies.”

  Madison Grey had known the truth: It eats babies, she’d said. That meant Drew, when he was angry. Lacey saw Ella Dane’s room smashed. That could be her baby’s room, six months from now. Stuffed animals shredded, cardboard books exploded in confetti, slats of the crib driven like spears into the walls. The corner of a blue blanket showing under the overturned body of the crib—blue satin turning red. And silence. Lacey’s eyes burned. She swallowed and swallowed but could not speak.

  Drew killed children. If Lacey doubted it, she could go upstairs (when it was safe, whenever that might be) and look at the ceiling of Ella Dane’s room, the demolished plaster, the beams, the drooping swaths of pink fiberglass. The handyman still hadn’t come to fix it; there was all the evidence a person could want.

  “I have to go,” Greeley said. “You’d better get out now, that’s all I can say to you; get out now and hope it’s not too late. He was in the hospital, and he touched my feet. . . . I felt them die. I felt the baby dying inside me. Don’t you remember Beth Craddock? Get out.” She hung up the phone.

  Lacey laid her own phone on the nightstand and lay back against the cushions. Dying inside. She realized she’d felt no motion from the baby for an hour or two. With both hands, she bounced her belly, waited for some answering motion, shook it again. Wake up, be alive. Strong as an eel, the baby pushed against her hands and slid away.

  Her ears rang and she counted her breaths, two counts in, five counts out, her lungs on fire. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and pressed her face into her fists. Her first impulse was to put her shoes on, grab her cell phone, run from the house, and call a taxi. But she was on bed rest. She couldn’t afford to panic and run; she had to rest and let the placenta heal. And Drew was a good boy most of the time. She’d have to keep him in a good temper, that was all. Until she had somewhere safe to go.

  Weight shifted at the side of the bed, and there was Drew, appearing in answer to her thought. He rubbed Bibbits’s ears. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said mildly.

  Lacey wanted to say something friendly and companionable. Greeley Honeywick’s last words echoed: Remember Beth Craddock. Get out. “Who’s Beth Craddock?” she blurted.

  “Leave me alone, leave me alone! Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  And he was gone. For the first time, she was looking directly at him when he disappeared, and there was nothing. No change, no fading, no intermediate state. Just Drew and then no Drew, there and gone, vanished more utterly than lightning. He left nothing, not even a sense of warmth where he had been sitting.

  “I’m not the only one who’s seen him,” Lacey said to Bibbits.

  CarolAnna Grey, Greeley Honeywick, someone called Beth Craddock. And how many others, how many women and children and babies, how many families, over how many years?

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the second Saturday in October, Jeanne came to Lex’s house to leave Theo for the weekend. The old man had given him five hundred dollars to pay for her window. When he handed it over, she said, “Don’t think this makes any difference. My lawyer says she can make you pay her fees.”

  Lex lifted Theo out of her car seat. She must have gained another pound in the last week. “Da!” she shrieked, and smeared a fistful of melted candy corn along his cheek when she lunged in for a hug. “Da!” she said again, more urgently, and he knew she meant down and not Daddy, so he took her inside and set her down on the floor.

  Theo sat in the living room, a pink heap of flesh and polyester, and she would be just like Jeanne and Big Jeanne and all those poor sad women who walked past the produce department like it wasn’t even there, filling their shopping carts with ham and potato chips and wondering why their ankles hurt.

  When Jeanne took her away, Theo was crawling and beginning to pull herself up by grabbing on to chairs. She’d been almost ready to walk, a month ago. Lex was forever having to run after her, she scooted around so quickly. Now she sat where he had put her. After a while, she rolled over onto her back and grabbed her feet. He knelt beside her and pulled her up to sit. “You want to stand up?” he said. “Stand up for Dadda?”

  He held her hands and tugged her, but she didn’t push up at all. She just sat like a half-melted marshmallow. He pulled her hands. “Stand up!”

  She opened her mouth square, just the way Jeanne did, and shrieked. He dropped her hands and ran to the kitchen. While she cried, he stood behind the door with his hands over his ears, because he couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t listen to that noise. After a while, she stopped, and he wondered if she might be hungry.

  Jeanne had given him a grocery bag, and Lex laid the things out on the kitchen table. Three cans of Vienna sausages. Three cans of peaches in syrup. A package of Hydrox cookies. White bread. He threw it all away and put a yam in the microwave.

  A voice at his feet said, “Bub, bub, bub?” Theo had crawled all the way here.

  “Good girl,” he said. She made a wet, demanding noise. “Soon,” he said, “not yet.” The last two years, he’d made Jeanne wait for her food. She could eat as much as she wanted, he couldn’t stop her, but he piled her plate with vegetables. Even when she was pregnant, she lost a little weight. She’d gained it back by now.

  Theo didn’t like the yam. He mashed it and added a little formula. She squeezed her red lips tightly together and flung her head from side to side. Gobs of yam flew everywhere. He got some into her mouth, and she poked it out with her tongue. She squared her mouth and screamed. He shoveled in a spoonful of yam, and it came out, an orange spray. Finally, she grabbed the bowl and dumped it over her own head. Mashed yam ran down her neck, and she screamed at him with her mother’s own voice.

  “Yummy,” Lex said desperately. Why was she crying? A month ago, mashed yam was her favorite food.

  She pounded her yammy fists on the tray. Her pink dress was orange, her white hair was orange, and she was so loud. The neighbors might call the cops. He would call the cops if he heard a noise like this. “Okay, okay,” he said. He dug a can of Vienna sausage out of the garbage, opened it, and dumped it on a plate.

  Theo hummed. She poked a Vienna sausage into her mouth, keeping her hand pressed against her lips. She ate the whole can in two minutes and shrieked again. Lex gave her two Hydrox cookies and a sippy cup of formula, slightly diluted. She made a suspicious face but was too tired to fight. He couldn’t put her to bed like this, covered with yam. He carried her into the bathroom.

  Lex had done everything for Theo since she was born. He had changed diapers, dressed her, fed her, played with her, and talked to her. Everything but the bath. That was one thing Jeanne always did. He couldn’t do it; many times he’d put Theo to bed grimy or sticky rather than wash her, but this was too much. Trying to remember how it was done, he ran the water, half an inch at the deep end, barely covering the tub at the shallow end. Was it too hot? It felt like room temperature. Maybe it was too cold.

  His mother used to test the water with her elbow. Lex lowered his elbow into the tub, and
the bottom was higher than he expected. He whacked his funny bone on the bottom of the tub, the strength went out of his arm, and he collapsed against the tub, the tub’s hard wall catching him under his armpit.

  Theo screamed. She’d used the toilet seat to pull herself up, and then her fat little feet slid out, and she hit her chin on the toilet. Lex’s right arm was useless, throbbing and tingling with funny-bone pain. He gathered her in with his left arm—he was wearing his last clean white shirt, and now he was covered with yam, but that didn’t matter. “Baby, baby, baby,” he sang to her.

  Bit by bit, his right hand came to life, and he undressed Theo and lifted her into the bath. Instantly, she screamed and beat the water with both hands. “No!” she yelled. “No, no!”

  The water was too hot. Or too cold. Lex retreated to the bathroom door. He wanted to go back to the kitchen and stay there for a while, but he couldn’t leave Theo in the bath. Never, never, he said to himself.

  Theo’s screams crumbled into sobs. He’d never heard her sound so unhappy. The water must be too cold, because if it was too hot, she’d be crying in pain. Lex knelt beside the tub and turned the water on again, tilting the knob slightly toward warm.

  Theo fell backward. Her head hit the back of the tub, and the shrieks began again. That big square mouth, just like Jeanne’s. Lex pulled the towel off the rack, grabbed Theo, and ran from the house with her in his arms. He couldn’t do this on his own. He needed help. He had to get to the old man right away.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  SATURDAY WAS BRILLIANT AND CLEAR, a perfect day, and Lacey was stuck in bed. Yesterday, Dr. Vlk had given her permission to get up for a couple of hours and maybe walk around the backyard. “Nothing strenuous,” Dr. Vlk said. “Avoid stress,” which made Lacey laugh. Whenever she tried to sleep, she heard Greeley Honeywick: There hasn’t been a live baby born in that house since 1972. And remember Beth Craddock, whoever that was.