by Sonja Condit
Who else, but the daughter who had taken on thirty-eight thousand dollars of student loans (plus another ninety-seven thousand for Eric), in order to qualify for a stable career. Lacey was on the Census Bureau website, trying and failing to get into the records for 1980, when her computer crashed. She slammed the top down and snapped at her mother, “How are we going to pay for this hotel?”
“I’m going down for a facial and a mani-pedi,” Ella Dane announced, “and I made an appointment for you, too.”
“And how are we going to pay for it?”
“That’s the advantage of traveling light. We’ll walk out of here, and they’ll send the bill to Eric. Let’s go downstairs and get all girled up.”
“Really?” Lacey said. “After all that’s happened, that’s all you can think of, really?” She knew she wasn’t being fair. Her fear of Drew, her grief over Bibbits, her terror of the blank, solitary, Eric-less future were all part of the poisonous mix, but everything in her came to a point, aimed at Ella Dane. “Because here we are again,” Lacey said, “stuck in some hotel that we can’t pay for that we’re going to sneak out of”—and where was Eric with his instinctive, bone-deep honesty, Eric who stood in line at the bank and argued with the teller if there was ten dollars too much in the account after he balanced the checkbook, where was he?—“and we’re eating cashew nuts out of the minibar, and then we’re going on the road with barely enough money for gas, and how are we going to eat, how are we going to survive?”
“One thing and then another,” Ella Dane said placidly.
No, no, no. That was the way Lacey organized her school year. It couldn’t be the way Ella Dane organized her life. Lacey was nothing like her mother, no matter what Eric said. Nothing like. “It’s your fault,” Lacey said. “If you hadn’t brought that dog into my house. It was the dog that made Drew so mad. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be home right now, and Eric would be frying me a pork chop and rubbing my feet.”
“Bibbits was a good dog, he was an old soul; he was getting ready to move on but he wasn’t ready yet. I came here for you, Lacey. I came because you needed me.”
“I don’t need you.” Lacey felt breathless, but she hurried recklessly on, because Eric was wrong; she was nothing like Ella Dane. “I never needed you. I always used to wish I could go back and live with Grandpa Merritt like a real person in a real house, so I wouldn’t have to grow up like I did, like a tramp. I never knew from one week to the next where we’d live and I hated it! All I wanted was a real home.” She had a real home with Eric. What if it was over?
“I only ever thought of you.”
“You only ever thought about what you wanted. Why couldn’t you let me stay with Grandpa Merritt? It’s the only real home I ever had.”
“It was time to move on,” Ella Dane said. She gave Lacey a serene, superior smile. This happened every time Lacey brought up the subject of Grandpa Merritt, and the white house with the green door: Ella Dane took a giant step backward and upward onto the moral high ground, leaving Lacey ready to cry with frustration. “It was necessary,” Ella Dane said. “I forgive you. Bibbits forgives you too; he knows you couldn’t help it. And now it’s time to get our nails done. Everything in its own time.”
“Oh, you are so selfish!” Ella Dane had her hand on the doorknob, ready to walk out of the room, taking her unsullied vegan temper with her, and leaving Lacey red-faced and screeching like a spoiled first grader, and Lacey couldn’t let her go. She kept hearing Eric’s voice. Exactly like your mother. “You were the worst mother ever,” she said.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ella Dane said, which was what she always said when Lacey called her names. Never an apology, never an excuse; she just pushed Lacey’s feelings back at her. It made Lacey frantic.
“I hated living with you. I hated never having a real home. It was embarrassing. I always wanted to stay late at school, so I wouldn’t have to go back to you.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“All I wanted was a place to live. I used to wish you’d die, and I’d be adopted by real people and grow up normal. It was my birthday wish every year.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
It was as pointless as arguing with an answering machine. “And another thing,” Lacey said, “we should find a Dumpster. That dog of yours stinks worse than ever.”
“Bibbits was a good dog, and he deserves a good burying.”
That was better. At least it was a reaction. “Bibbits was a rotten dog. And you’re a rotten dog trainer. What kind of dog trainer has a dog that poops on the floor?”
“Bibbits had special needs.” Ella Dane was crying now, silently, with her chin up. She hardly blinked, but her cheeks glistened. “He was my dog, and I loved him.”
“You always had a dog you loved better than me,” Lacey said. She heard herself: she sounded just like Drew. Or any other spoiled, obnoxious child. She pressed her hands over her mouth and sat on the edge of the bed, then wrapped her arms around her belly and rocked the baby. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “I can’t think straight. I want to go home.”
“Go home, then.”
“You know I can’t.” Somehow, she wasn’t sure how, but somehow, it was Ella Dane’s fault. “Drew will kill my baby if I go home.”
“Then stop whining about it.” Ella Dane wiped her face with the back of her arm. She hoisted the cooler. Water sloshed from one side to the other, and the skunky smell wafted out, stronger than before. “Bibbits wants to be buried by the sea, so I’ll meet you at that motel in Spinet Cove. And after that, you know what, since you’re so grown up and responsible and everything, you can take care of yourself.”
Ella Dane balanced the cooler on her left leg while she opened the door; she caught the door on her right forearm and spun out of the room, letting the door slam behind her. Lacey, dissatisfied and jittery, waited for her to come back and finish the argument, but she didn’t.
After a while, Lacey went down to the parking lot. Ella Dane’s car was gone. She returned to the room and e-mailed Greeley Honeywick. She stayed up until two, but Ella Dane didn’t come back.
Ella Dane was still gone the next morning, so Lacey checked out on her own. She’d used the emergency Visa when checking in, and now that Eric had canceled it, she’d have to pay for the room with cash. She counted her money five times. After only two days, she was down to seventeen hundred thirty-six dollars. Two nights in the hotel would eat up three hundred of that. How was she going to live? She couldn’t just drive to a new town and fall on her feet like Ella Dane—find someone she used to know, maybe one of the friends she’d completely ignored for the last four months, not even letting them organize a baby shower for her, and invite herself to sleep on their couch, pick up a few dollars here and there taking care of people’s dogs. This money had to last till she’d worked things out with Eric.
Worked things out: whatever that meant. Another day with no conversation made it even less likely they’d get back together. Sooner or later, they’d have to talk about what came next. Was he going to pay spousal support to her? He’d have to. Maybe there was prenatal child support. This couldn’t be the end. What was she going to do?
She could go home. She could persuade Drew. All he wanted was love, like any child. She’d keep him sweet, make sure he never again thought she loved someone else more than she loved him— No, she couldn’t. As soon as the baby was born, he’d know the truth. He’d had a sister once, baby Dorothy who cried all the time. Lacey would never be able to convince him he was first in her heart, and the baby simply a tiresome responsibility.
She fanned through her handful of twenties again. Even if Eric paid spousal maintenance without fighting her—and if the court went by last year’s tax returns, she’d end up paying him, she having worked while he was in school—it would be weeks before any money came. Seventeen hundred dollars wasn’t much. Fourteen hundred was even less. Ella Dane was right, it was easy to walk out
of a hotel with no luggage. So she did it.
It was easier than it had been when she was twelve or thirteen, and it was her job to haul the duffel bags down the stairs and out of the hotel while her mother came down the elevator and quizzed the desk clerk as to the best place to eat lunch. Now she came down the elevator herself, waddled through the lobby and out the front door, giving the desk clerk a tired smile. It was only nine thirty. She wasn’t skipping the bill; she was stepping out for a breath of air. Out to the parking lot, and there was her car. Left and then right and she was on Airport Road with sixteen hundred dollars rolled up in the zippered inner pocket of her purse, and one hundred thirty-six in her wallet.
She pulled into a gas station for pork rinds, beef jerky, and barbecue potato chips. Back in her car, she tore open the bag of pork rinds, took a bite, and let it melt into grease on her tongue. The nausea she felt had nothing to do with the baby. This was the same way she’d felt when she took up shoplifting at thirteen.
She didn’t steal for fun, the way her friends did—thirty, forty, sixty dollars in their wallets, and they’d snatch up here a lipstick, there a designer clutch or pair of sunglasses. No. Lacey stole only the things she so urgently needed, and Ella Dane couldn’t or wouldn’t buy for her. She stole bras, panties, and even shoes, putting on the new shoes in a style similar to her old, shoving her old pair into the box, and walking out in the new. She was careful and quick, and always knew when someone was watching. The shoes were the riskiest, but if she pulled out at least ten pairs and tried them on, first in pairs and then in mismatched pairs, walking up and down the aisles and eyeing her feet from every angle in the mirrors, the store employees lost interest. They were glad to see her go, grateful she had put all the shoes back in their boxes. The bras and panties she simply slid from their packaging, rolled tight in her hand, and shoved up her sleeves.
She needed them. Ella Dane shopped in thrift stores. Mostly, it wasn’t so bad. The smell came off after a couple of washings. But the shoes never fit right, and as for thrift-store underwear, everybody had to draw the line somewhere. Lacey would rather steal.
When she was fourteen, she started babysitting, and then tutoring, and she didn’t have to steal anymore. This was something she’d never told Eric. He claimed to have no secrets from her, and maybe he really didn’t. He’d told her about the girls he’d been with before her (both of them), and how ashamed he was of the way he’d broken up with his first girlfriend (at her birthday party, just after the cake). He apologized to the girl and gave her a gold necklace for her birthday, and she forgave him and agreed that it was for the best—she was getting ready to dump him, anyway.
“I didn’t feel right until I told her I was sorry,” he’d told Lacey.
She couldn’t tell him about the shoplifting, because he’d insist on her finding some way of making amends. Going back to the stores and giving them their money back, after all these years, like a little girl caught with a candy bar in her pocket. In marrying Eric she had married up, but she hated him to remind her of it.
He’d know about the hotel, because the bill would get back to him. Seventeen hundred dollars wasn’t much, and fourteen hundred was even less, but she couldn’t let Eric think she was a thief. She drove back to the Skyview and turned in her key card. “Thanks,” the clerk said, and went back to tapping on his computer.
She waited. After a while, she said, “Excuse me?”
“Ma’am? Was there a problem with the room?”
“I need to check out.” She put her purse on the counter and dug into it for the roll of twenties. “Two nights. I need to pay cash, if that’s okay.”
He spent a few seconds on the computer. “It’s paid already. Says here, paid in cash, for two nights.”
Ella Dane. Ella Dane had been working, she must have built up a little bit of money, and she had paid Lacey’s bill. Lacey tucked the roll back into her purse. “Thanks,” she said. “I guess I forgot.”
The clerk rolled his eyes, visibly thinking it must be nice to be some people, who couldn’t remember spending three hundred dollars. Lacey returned to her car and discovered she had lost all appetite for beef jerky.
Chapter Thirty-four
DR. VLK GAVE LACEY PERMISSION to drive, walk, even swim, anything. The baby was strong and the placenta looked good. “So I can go for a vacation?” Lacey said.
Dr. Vlk gave her that straight blue stare, the look that needed no x-ray or ultrasound wand. “Absolutely,” she said, and she didn’t ask if Lacey’s husband would join her on the trip. Instead, she looked in her iPhone and pulled out an obstetrician in Spinet Cove, “in case anything comes up,” she said. “There’s a good hospital, and the little one’s viable. He’s laying down fat. Getting big and strong.”
“Merritt,” Lacey said. Now that the baby was officially viable, she could say the name she had been keeping secret even from herself, ever since Dr. Vlk told her it was a boy. “That’s his name. Merritt, after my grandpa.”
“Family names are a good thing,” Dr. Vlk agreed, and she didn’t ask if Lacey would be traveling with her mother. So Lacey, with a clean bill of health and a bag of salty snacks, headed south, stopping only at the mall to pick up maternity jeans, a couple of smocks, underwear, and bras. On the way through the food court, she ate a Philly cheesesteak, which was suddenly the one thing in the world she absolutely had to have, it smelled so good as she walked by.
The weather had cooled, and for the first time since May, she didn’t have to use the air conditioner. It felt wonderful to drive with the windows open, her skin softening in the cool, humid breeze. The landscape changed from the Upstate’s pine and hickory woods and wide green fields, towns thickening together as the highway neared Columbia. She got through Columbia quickly, reaching the major confluence of highways at three in the afternoon, well before the afternoon rush. Twenty minutes south of the city, she saw the first palmetto tree.
As the land flattened, cornfields and vegetable fields gave way to cotton, gray with white puffs, and the golden tapestries of safflower fields. The soil had changed from red to brown, and soon, a full seventy miles from the ocean, gray sand spilled along the highway’s shoulders. The trees were shorter, their branches airily spread instead of knotted and dense, and the palmetto palms looked like a child’s drawing of trees, straight trunks and bushy bunches of fronds at the top. When she pulled into a rest stop south of Florence, the birds fighting over the trashcans were herring gulls, not crows.
And there it was, the magic castle of her childhood, the one place Ella Dane would never stop, no matter how much money Lacey had saved from babysitting. “Nothing but trash,” Ella Dane proclaimed, “and no one but trash buys anything there,” which was kind of snooty for a woman who was never more than one bad week away from homelessness.
SEASIDE EMPIRE, said the signs, LARGEST GIFT SHOP IN THE SOUTH! Lacey believed it. The front was all wheelchair ramps and wind chimes, and the Empire scrawled back from the road in a maze of poorly aligned rectangles, as if someone had bought three different houses standing close together, built covered walkways to connect them, and then surrounded the whole mess with deep porches and billboards. “See the Mermaid. Live Sharks. Souvenirs for All. Shelligami.” What was shelligami? Lacey longed to know, but Ella Dane would never take her to Seaside Empire, and neither did Eric.
She’d never told him. They’d been to the beach five times in the years they’d been together, which meant they’d driven past Seaside Empire ten times, and Lacey hadn’t said, “Let’s stop there, it looks like fun.” She wanted to but was ashamed. It was, as Ella Dane said, trashy, like sugar sandwiches. But Lacey could make long-term plans, as much as Eric could. For a moment, she set it all aside—Drew and Bibbits and Ella Dane and the terrible things she and Eric had said to each other—and she let herself believe everything would be fine. Someday, when Merritt was five or six, they would go to the beach—she could see them, herself having lost all the baby weight, Eric driving with sunglasses on,
and maybe there was a second baby (a girl) in the back next to Merritt, in the silver Odyssey they would have—and she would say, “Eric, I forgot to pack Merritt’s beach shoes. Let’s stop here.”
Seaside Empire, hers at last.
She pulled into the gravel lot. Instead of herself and Eric, Merritt and the little unknown in the silver Odyssey, it was just Lacey and Merritt kicking inside her. “Knock it off, kiddo,” she said, and the baby did something sharp and awful. She gasped and clutched the car door. What was going on? Had he shoved a foot into her liver?
Eventually, he curled into a twitching ball. Lacey walked in, and Seaside Empire was all she had dreamed, and more. The clothes, shoes, towels, and Boogie Boards she ignored; but the shells! Tubs of loose shells, shell nightlights, shell jewelry, shell-encrusted pens, shell sculptures of everything from mice to the White House.
Even shelligami did not disappoint. It was origami folded out of thin aluminum and then encrusted with tiny cowries and snails. The mermaid was deliciously gruesome, a stuffed manatee shaved to the waist and wearing a black Halloween wig. The live sharks were baby dogfish; there were also dead sharks, eight inches long, formaldehyded in glass bottles. She fondled the mineral samples and the fossils. There were shark-tooth earrings; did she need shark-tooth earrings? Well, who didn’t? Seaside Empire with seventeen hundred dollars in her pocket: childhood’s wildest dream come true. Shark teeth. Giant fossil shark teeth! Lacey found the largest intact specimen.
“Megalodon,” she said to herself. The fair-haired child beside her glanced up, startled at her voice, and she stumbled back. “No, no, no,” she said, “it’s not fair, no!”
“Ma’am? Are you okay?”
Lacey’s heart settled. If she was going to have a panic attack every time she saw a blond child, she might as well go home now. This boy was older than Drew, taller, fatter, and he wore glasses with plastic tortoiseshell frames. He was looking at her with an open, adult-friendly expression, and he had chosen a baby hammerhead shark in formaldehyde from the shelf. Pure nerd. Teachers weren’t supposed to say it, but for some children, no other name would do.