Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  Lacey loved her nerds almost as much as she loved her noisy boys, and she yearned to bring them together, for the benefit of both. Last year, she’d experimented with selecting the leaders of both camps and giving them the joint responsibility of caring for the classroom’s most interesting pet. Alpha nerd and noisy boy bonded over feeding crickets to Darth Venomous, the emperor scorpion. Alone of the fourth-grade classrooms, hers had no bullying.

  “Ma’am?” the boy said.

  “Sorry, it’s nothing.” She hefted the fossil tooth in her hand and smiled. “Megalodon. It’s my favorite extinct animal.”

  “Mine’s Andrewsarchus.”

  Lacey felt a chill at the name, but she controlled herself. Andrewsarchus was a real animal. She, like this sweet boy, had watched the Ancient Killers series last year on National Geographic. “That’s the carnivorous sheep thing, am I right?” she said.

  He smiled. “The biggest mammal land predator of all time!” he said. “Giant killer sheep! Do you think my mom will let me buy this shark?”

  “Probably not.” Lacey wasn’t surprised that he asked her this. Children had always been drawn to her, confided in her. That was why she’d gone into teaching in the first place. “But maybe she’d get you this.” She gave him the megalodon tooth. “It’s the best one.”

  He turned the tooth, rubbing his thumb along the striations. She missed this so much, the conversations with children in all their variety. Eric had thought he was giving her a wonderful gift, letting her stay home while he worked, till the baby starts school, he said, which she interpreted to mean preschool at age two although she knew he meant kindergarten. Five years out of the classroom. If they had another child or two, it could be six, seven, ten years. If she’d had a job, two dozen children to handle every day, she would never have accepted Drew: he had used her solitude against her; he had peeled her like an orange.

  She reached the sea at sunset. Spinet Cove was a one-road beach town, essentially a row of two-story motels with a scrabble of low square houses inland. La Hacienda was one of the beach-side motels and consequently had new bedspreads and an electronic marquee, advertising Continental Breakfast, Cable in Every Room, and Wi-Fi, all FREE. On the other side of the street, where the guests had to walk across two lanes of traffic to get to the beach, the motels weren’t nearly so spiffy. A couple of them were closed, and the motel directly opposite La Hacienda had no roof. Its old-style movable-letter sign read PARDON OUR MESS WHILE WE REMODEL, which would have been more convincing had the building not been overgrown with kudzu.

  La Hacienda was all Spanish arches, pink stucco, red tiled roof, geraniums in terra-cotta pots. Ella Dane’s car was parked at the last unit. Lacey wanted to walk on the beach before dark, but Ella Dane came out, rubbing her hands, and gave a shrugging half wave. Lacey walked over to her. “Mom, I need to say something,” she said. She had to apologize now, before it was too late.

  “I don’t think you do.” Ella’s Dane’s voice was steady and firm. So this was how it was going to be. A perfectly reasonable relationship, Ella Dane using her telephone voice to Lacey, not letting their eyes meet.

  Lacey went into the room. The necessary conversation with Ev Craddock oppressed her; she’d have to find out what he knew, tomorrow or the next day, after she’d rested and caught up with all these changes in her life, and after they’d dealt with Bibbits. She piled the pillows at the head of the bed and lay propped up, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes until the tears sank deep. The baby rolled over, and she patted her belly. He pushed back, as if responding to her greeting. It made her laugh, even in her misery. It was worth everything, if she could save him—she’d give up Eric, the house, everything.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  THE SHINY GIRL’S FRONT HAIR was orange. Was she even the same girl? She took Lex to a room with a big table and a lot of mixed-up chairs. Some were office chairs on wheels, some were padded in different colors, some were wooden. Each had something wrong, scratches or torn cloth or broken legs or burns. “Wait here, Mr. Hall,” she said.

  She left him alone and he checked the mirror to make sure it wasn’t one-way glass, with lawyers and cops watching him on the other side. The old man had taken him to dinner last night and had told him how to behave. “Act happy,” he said.

  “What if I’m not happy?”

  The old man sighed over his pizza. “Just play with her.”

  Lex had bought a computer game a few weeks ago, a Chinese game called mah-jongg. It laid out a pattern of tiles, and you had to pull the tiles out in pairs, matching them up. He played it over and over again. When he lost, he went back and played the same game until he won it. Every game could be won. Everything lined up, everything matched, and there was nothing left over.

  Theo wasn’t old enough for mah-jongg. Maybe when she was five or six, they could play together. They could take turns. He could show her what to do. She would let him play his favorite tile, the eight of bamboos. He liked the way the eight bamboo sticks lined up, four on top saying W, four underneath saying M.

  The shiny girl came back with a plastic crate. “We keep a box of toys,” she said. “You didn’t bring anything, did you?” Lex shook his head, and she sighed and said, not to him but to some invisible thing in the ceiling, “They never do. So here’s a couple of dolls, some Duplo blocks, crayons and coloring books, and this noisy Elmo thing—they all like that. Oh, and this is a camera.” She put a video camera in the middle of the table. “Stay where it can see you.”

  “Why?”

  “And the bathroom’s down the hall to your right.”

  She left. Lex laid out the toys on the tabletop. He sorted the Duplo blocks by color, and then by size within colors. They didn’t come out even. There were seventeen crayons, and five of them were broken, but he liked the way they smelled. It reminded him of something.

  The shiny girl came in carrying Theo, and the big dog lawyer came in behind her with a magazine under his arm. “Here you go, Mr. Hall,” the shiny girl said cheerfully. She set Theo on the floor. Theo tipped forward until her hands reached the floor, and sat there, her legs spread, supporting half her weight on her thick little fists. “Anything else?” the shiny girl said.

  “We’re good,” the big dog said.

  “He’s not my lawyer,” Lex said. “Where’s my lawyer?”

  “You haven’t got new counsel yet?” the big dog said. His voice was too loud, big dog barking so everyone could hear. “Eric’s in court. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Hall.”

  Lex backed up, trying to get as many chairs as possible between himself and the lawyer. “How’s that?”

  “Somehow that boy persuaded MacAvoy to change the visitation to this office. Pro bono, and there ain’t a lawyer in a thousand who’d work so hard for a guy who’s not his client. But you got to call those names we gave you, get someone new.”

  “I don’t want a new lawyer. I want my lawyer.”

  “Any lawyer’s yours that you pay for, and Eric says there’s three hundred bucks left on your retainer. You don’t want to do it, Sammie’ll set something up for you.”

  “I don’t want a new lawyer.”

  “Suit yourself.” The lawyer sat at the other end of the conference table, leaned back and crossed his legs, and folded his magazine open. “We’ll refund the retainer.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?” Lex asked.

  “It’s visitation. Visit. Stay where the camera can see you.”

  Lex looked down hopelessly. Theo was rocking on her fists. She tipped herself forward and landed chin-first on the floor. She burbled quietly for a few seconds, then got herself up on her hands and knees to crawl under a wooden armchair. She sat inside the cage of legs, slapping her hands on the floor and laughing at Lex.

  “I see you,” he said. He knelt beside the wooden chair and reached up onto the table for a Duplo block. Blue, rectangle. “Blue,” he said, giving it to her. She chewed on it, made a face, and banged it on a chair leg. He reach
ed for another block. “Red.”

  The lawyer moved the camera to the floor. “Good,” he said. “Educational, interactive, all that happy crappy. Keep it up, Mr. Hall.”

  Theo tasted the red block. She dropped it and covered her ears. Then she pulled her hands away and looked at Lex with her huge, happy, wet smile and said, “Eep-boo!”

  He covered her eyes and then uncovered them. “Peekaboo,” he told her.

  She tried covering her mouth. “Eep-boo!”

  Playing with Theo turned out to be easier than he thought. She liked peekaboo, and after a while he realized she knew she was supposed to cover her eyes. She was playing a trick by covering her ears or her mouth. When he covered his own ears, she laughed so loudly that the big dog put his magazine down. “I don’t recommend tickling,” he said. “Got to watch out for the touching. That kind of thing don’t look good on video.”

  “It’s peekaboo.”

  “Good,” the big dog said. Then Theo discovered some of the chairs moved. She spent the rest of the hour clutching the seat of a rolling chair and staggering around the room, while Lex followed, anxiously stooped over her to keep the chair from rolling too fast. He pulled Theo onto his lap and sat at the table, showing her the coloring books and the crayons. She tasted the crayons, ripped a page out of the coloring book, hooted loudly for a few minutes, and fell asleep with her head resting against his shoulder.

  The shiny girl came to take her away, and he wouldn’t see her again until next Friday.

  “This is good stuff,” the big dog said, playing through some of the video. “She’s a sweet kid. A little chunky, but cute as a peanut pie. All that walking with the chair, that’ll play well in the custody hearing. I’ll have Sammie burn you a copy on disk. That wife of yours. She was raised by hippos, or what?”

  “She lost some weight when we were married, but it’s come back.”

  “Yes, and it brought friends. She’s a lot younger than you, how’d you meet?”

  “She was fourteen. I caught her shoplifting.”

  They were walking down the hallway toward the front office. Lex tried to get a look at each office, because he wanted to talk to his own lawyer. He didn’t realize the big dog lawyer had stopped walking until he crashed into the man’s back. “Sorry!” Lex said, with his hands up and open. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it, sorry, sorry.”

  “Fourteen-year-old runaway, you catch her shoplifting, and then?”

  “I took her home.”

  The lawyer shook his head with his eyes closed. “Lord Jesus. Tell me you didn’t.”

  “I told her mother where I found her.”

  “You took her to her own home. Excellent. And then?”

  “She came to work at MacArthur’s after school. First she stocked, and then when she was sixteen she got to be a cashier.”

  “How old was she when you got married?”

  “Twenty.”

  “You had me worried for a minute. Old man, underage girl. Meeting her when she was fourteen; that’s a little scary. But you weren’t her supervisor?”

  “I mostly never saw her at work.” Was that his own lawyer’s office, the one around the corner, with the closed door? The big dog was walking again, and Lex followed. “I worked night shift and she had afternoons.”

  “Great. Still, a girl that size.” The big dog sighed and blew through his lips. “How do you do it? Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot, I guess. Here we are.” He opened a door and led Lex out into the waiting room.

  “Wait.” The lawyer was trying to work Lex toward the door, but Lex set his heels and wouldn’t move. “When do I get to talk to my lawyer?”

  “He’s off the case.” His hand was on Lex’s elbow, pulling him across the waiting room, closer to the door. “I’ll be taking care of you till you get new counsel. We won’t abandon you, Mr. Hall. Sammie’ll line something up, and we’ll let you know by Thursday.”

  Then Lex was outside, and the door was closing. He wanted to go back in and explain. The shiny girl and the big dog lawyer wouldn’t listen. He needed his own lawyer, the young one. They said he was at court, and his office door was closed. That didn’t matter. Lex knew where to find him. He knew where he lived.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  THE NEXT DAY, Lacey was finishing her third picture of Bibbits. There was no breath of Drew in the sea wind, and every day, Merritt was bigger and stronger. Maybe she could stay here in Spinet Cove until he was born. She’d looked for Ev Craddock earlier but the motel office had been empty, so she’d driven into the landward side of Spinet Cove to find a mall, where she bought textured watercolor paper, oil pastels, and fixative. Her first few pictures were stiff. As her hand began to move more easily over the paper, she produced a few versions that would have looked good on Valentine cards but did not express the quality of Bibbits, until she remembered dogs had eyebrows. She wrinkled the skin over Bibbits’s eyes to give him the cautious, questing look with which he had greeted the smell of meat.

  She layered pinks and reds and yellows, shaded in purples and greens, deepened his eyes. She smudged with her thumb and a paper torchon; she sprayed fixative and let it dry and then worked new layers over it. Now she was working on the final layer of color, adding white and lightest yellow to the highlights of his apricot-blond curls. It looked just like him, and she felt like herself for the first time in months, with flecks of color blending under her fingernails and staining the whorls of her fingertips.

  The real Bibbits, meanwhile, looked less and less like himself, although Ella Dane kept him well iced. Lacey kept the door open for the sea air. Sand filtered in and blended with her pastel work, becoming part of the texture. Lacey wanted to know if they were going to bury the poor little thing. “When the time is right,” Ella Dane said whenever Lacey asked, “when he tells me where.” So far, apparently, Bibbits had not spoken.

  It had rained earlier in the day, and the beach was solid gray, the sand pocked with rain above the tide line, clean and flat below it, with a scum of broken shells to mark the boundary. Lacey watched Ella Dane walking on the beach, and the eastern sky was green, a green unlike any other, like seeing without light. Ella Dane stood above the tide line, the wind pulling her hair and blue skirt north. She stepped forward, back, left and back again, spun in place, hesitated, like someone trying to learn a dance she had heard described but never seen. Then she drew a circle on the sand and came up to the room.

  “It’s time,” she said. “Look what I found on the beach.” She had two weathered sand shovels, one red and one orange.

  “I made this for you,” Lacey said. She laid the pad of watercolor paper on the bed. “It needs another layer of fixative, so don’t touch.”

  “Oh.” Ella Dane sat down slowly, beside the picture, running her fingers along the edge of the paper. “Look at that. His little nose. It’s perfect.”

  “I’m sorry for saying those things,” Lacey said. “I just lost it.”

  Ella Dane looked at the picture for a long time. Eventually, she said, “I went back to Columbia on Tuesday to pick up some things from my friend Patty’s garage.” She had boxes of possessions in garages and attics all over Columbia. “There’s some pictures you need to see. Jack says it’s time. He says the lies have blocked your chi.”

  “What lies? I haven’t lied to you.”

  “I’ve lied to you.” Ella Dane pulled a manila envelope from her duffel bag and handed six pictures to Lacey. They were Polaroids. Lacey recognized the thick paper, the broad white border at the bottom. And old, the colors fading to yellow. Still, the images were clear. A series of moments, a little girl changing out of shorts and T-shirt into a blue swimsuit. One piece, halter back. Lacey remembered the swimsuit, how the elastic had pressed against her neck.

  That was the summer before first grade, the wonderful year with Grandpa Merritt. Six weeks into the school year, sometime around the end of September, her mother had picked her up from school and they had never gone home again.

 
Then what was this? Six-year-old Lacey, dressed, undressing, half dressed, naked; the bare white buttocks and the brown legs, the white ghost of the blue swimsuit on her skin, and then the blue swimsuit drawn up. Lacey laid the picture of her naked self above the others. “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “One day,” Ella Dane said. “One day I was sorting Dad’s laundry, and I found a box of pictures. I tore up most of them, but I kept these.”

  Lacey knew what these pictures would mean if she’d found them in some child’s book bag—they wouldn’t be Polaroids now, but printouts of digital pictures. Maybe not even printouts, but accidentally forwarded e-mail attachments. She’d never found such a thing, but she knew teachers who had. What did it mean, when they were pictures of herself? What did it mean that Ella Dane had kept them? She fanned them, slipped the naked picture back into its place, and closed the fan, so only the first picture could be seen, the innocent image of the little girl in the blue swimsuit, a picture any proud grandpa might frame. The long tanned legs and the tangled yellow hair.

  “Why?” she said.

  “In case I ever needed them. In case he tried to get you away from me. If there was a custody fight between him and me—he knew I had these, so he never dared. In case something happened to me, to make sure he wouldn’t get you.”

  “No, why, why are you telling me now?”

  “I couldn’t tell you before. And also . . .” Ella Dane reached out and touched the baby bump, and the baby kicked under her hand. “And I never knew till you told me the other day, how you felt about the way we lived. You were always so cheerful. All those adventures we had—I thought you were having fun. You looked like you were coping well. You know. Resilient.”