Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  LACEY LOOPED AN ELASTIC around her hair. She squeezed a pouch of motel shampoo into the bath, and the water battered it into foam. She hadn’t had a real bath since July, when Eric made a list of things pregnant women shouldn’t do. No soft cheese, deli meats, sushi—not a big sacrifice there—no horseback riding, skiing, skydiving, or trampolines—really—but she missed the hot baths.

  She turned the water toward cool. She liked a bath tingling hot, but for the baby’s sake, her someday child with sun in his hair, her future teenage ingrate who would tell her he hated her, she cooled the water until it was like a swimming pool in August, not hot enough to melt the grease off her skin, the way she liked it. She rubbed the hotel soap into lather and scrubbed her skin red, and still the smell of Bibbits crawled on her.

  Eric had smelled it, too. She’d seen the disgust in his face. He said he loved her, please come home, and it must have cost him something to speak so plainly, to open himself. She loved him too, abstractly, as a fact she would think about later, when she had time. He could live without her. The baby couldn’t.

  Ev Craddock saved his children by sending them away. She could save the baby by giving him up, but she’d have to leave the baby with Eric and take Drew with her. If Drew would come with her. If he could. He could leave the house; how long would he stay away? If he went back and found another parent, another child, Eric taking care of the baby alone, how long before Drew demanded Eric’s attention? He followed the Craddocks to Nevada, until a family moved in with children. That must have been CarolAnna’s people, and after that, the Honeywicks.

  If she divorced Eric and forced him to sell the house, if she gave up custody so he would take the baby and move, she could keep Drew attached to her long enough for Eric to get the baby away. Would Eric give up the house and go, stubborn as he was? Even though he called it their starter house, he might dig in his heels and insist on keeping it.

  She could always try explaining it to Eric. Like that would work.

  Just now, there was Drew, a shadow on the pebbled glass of the shower door. She’d known he was coming, and here he was. Tears rushed up. She splashed hot foaming water on her face and cleared her throat. Happy voice. “Hey. I know you’re there,” she said.

  He slid the door back in its tracks. It moved and she saw his fingers come around its edge, she saw the silhouette behind the glass reveal itself as a naked child with a towel around his waist. She saw her own hands floating in the water, and yet, whose hand was on that door—her own hand, moving by his will in a gesture she could neither feel nor see? She swirled the water. The bubbles parted and closed, leaving a seam of finer bubbles where her hand passed. Even as she felt the water’s resistance, the shower door slid open. Drew used her mouth to eat cookies, her hand to move the game piece and to attack Ella Dane with the broken plate, but he’d wrecked Ella Dane’s room on his own, while she was downstairs, with Ella Dane her witness. Even if she could keep him out of her body and mind, she wouldn’t be safe from broken furniture and flying glass.

  “I heard what you said to him,” Drew said.

  “I know you did. I saw you. Don’t you want to go home?”

  “About the baby. You said you don’t want him.”

  Lacey shrugged. She pulled the shampoo foam around herself, building islands of modesty. Her belly mounded up, a crayon color, Strawberry Cream. “I’m not going to be able to take care of him, am I? Not if I’m with you.”

  Drew smiled, bright and happy, the look of the little boy in the Burgoyne Elementary yearbook. “You won’t leave me?”

  “Never.”

  “You’ll stay with me?”

  Lacey took a breath as if it were her last, the sweet bubble-scented air. Drew was in the water already; he was inside her, cold on the underside of her skin. If she made this promise, she had to mean it. He would sense a lie.

  “Always,” she said. “As long as you want.”

  There was a flicker, a leap, and now the shower door was closed at her head and opened at her feet, next to the taps, although neither door visibly moved. Lacey shuddered in the cooling bathwater. Another soaping, and then she’d wash her hair, and maybe the smell would be gone.

  “If you don’t want the baby,” Drew said, and she felt his warm hand on her belly, though he appeared to be standing in the bath, beside the taps, “he can go away.”

  The small invisible hand pressed, and the baby kicked. “Too late,” Lacey said lightly. “He’s too big. I’d bleed and die, and then you’d be alone.” The hand lifted. “It’s only a couple of months. Eric can take the baby, and I’ll stay with you.”

  “You were crying.”

  “There was soap in my eyes.”

  “You love him. You love them both, your husband and your baby, you do; they always do. Nobody ever loves me best.”

  “Yes, yes, I love them,” Lacey said. No lie was possible now. “It doesn’t matter, don’t you see? I promise I won’t leave you. I might have to leave the house, but you can come with me.”

  “It’s my house. Why would you leave it?”

  “Honey, I might have to. I might not be able to stay.”

  Drew’s hand flashed, and the shower was on, full strength and steely cold, rods of water beating against her. She gasped and covered her face. “Andrew, listen! If I have to divorce Eric, I might not be able to keep the house. I might not get a job right away.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “Andrew.” She reached for the side of the tub. Everything was slick with a layer of soap, and her hand found only the glass door. “I found your picture on the Internet. You’re Andrew Halliday.”

  “No, I’m not!” She could not see him through the water in her eyes, but she felt his hands on her ankles. His hands were hot, and larger than she had thought. She turned her face out of the streaming shower and caught a breath, and then he pulled her legs up, and her head slipped down, and the bathwater closed over her head.

  Lacey opened her eyes. The shower pierced the water, every thread of the stream bringing a diamond-chain of bubbles. She saw Drew, a dark tall shape hundreds of miles away, and then the soap burned in and she closed her eyes. She kicked. Drew’s grip yielded with the kick, but the upward pull never faltered, and his hands slid from her ankles to her knees; his hands circled her shin at the thin spot just below the knee. She kicked again, and her right ankle struck the tap, a numbing, stunning blow, a pain that shot all the way up to her hip. The soapy water stung in her nose.

  She had time, many many seconds, before she began to drown, and Drew wanted her alive to take care of him. If he was holding her feet, he must be standing in the bath: he must be standing between her legs, holding her knees straight up. She reached her right arm down and sideways, straining along her body, grasping for his ankle. If she could pull him off balance—she felt only the bathtub’s nubby floor.

  Her chest caught and heaved, her lungs straining to force her mouth open. She stretched her neck and raised her forehead out of the water, not her nose—the bath was too deep. She squinted through the shower and saw nothing, nobody was there, no visible hands grasped her knees. Anyone walking into the room—Ella Dane, where was she?—would see a woman bizarrely drowning herself, legs raised and torso sunk.

  Red lights crept inside her closed eyes. She released a bubble of air to soften the pressure on her lungs, and then another bubble. She had seconds, many seconds left, before she blacked out and opened her mouth underwater. Many seconds. Drew’s hold was elastic and relentless. She could move her legs forward and back, even bend her knees within a small range; she simply couldn’t bring her feet down.

  She kicked again, and something drove in between the first two toes on her left foot, a shockingly hard, metallic blow. She gasped water in and clamped the back of her tongue upward against her throat to clear her mouth, and what was that thing, what had struck her, some part of the bathtub’s machinery, not the tap—her fading mind cried out the lever, the drain. She hit it again, curled her toe
s around it, and pulled the lever down.

  The water flowed along her body, and the sound of the pipes’ starving gulp echoed through the walls of the tub. The shower came down as strong as ever, but Ev Craddock kept his drains clear, bless his heart, and Lacey’s wet skin chilled in the air as the tub drained. She had many seconds left, four or five seconds, long enough for a lifetime, and then she was able to lift her head and take a breath of half water, half air.

  Her feet fell into the tub. She sat up and turned off the shower. A breath and another breath, and she began to cough, deep shattering coughs that shook the baby. She tried to take careful, shallow breaths that wouldn’t irritate her outraged lungs, but she was full of water, she had breathed it and swallowed it, water and soap and Drew’s wild rage. She dragged herself to the toilet in time to vomit it all out, the soap and the foam, Eric and Drew and the house waiting in the hills, until nothing came but clear threads of slime. She flushed the toilet and leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the cool tank furred with clean water. And he loved her; this was what he did for love.

  Chapter Forty-one

  LACEY WRAPPED HERSELF in the big motel towel and set the hair dryer to low, hot, four inches from her left ear. She was safe for a while. Drew had a hit-and-run temper, like so many damaged children. She had a few hours, perhaps even a day, before he sought her again.

  She hated the feeling of cold water worming down her back, and the water in her head was worse. Soap burned in her throat; her sinuses were full of sharp gravel, and the taste of bathwater rolled over itself, a hard slick thing. The hair dryer’s warmth spread in her ears, softening and opening the constricted tubes.

  When she was little and had earaches, Grandpa Merritt held her on his lap with her mother’s hair dryer inches from her head. She tilted against his left shoulder while the warm air flowed into her right ear. He would tell her how when he himself was small, his own grandfather cured his earaches with hot smoke, lighting his pipe and softly blowing into the young Grandpa Merritt’s ear.

  It had made the child Lacey laugh to think of her grandpa as a little boy with an earache. He laughed too, and his stiff beard bristles scraped along her cheek. His arm tightened and she felt safe, loved and comforted and warm all through.

  And then he took those pictures, those and how many others? Lacey turned the hair dryer off. She had been so angry at Ella Dane all these years; if Ella Dane had told her, she would have accepted it. Lacey was suddenly positive that Ev Craddock hadn’t told his own children why he’d sent them away. There were no pictures in his office, no graduation caps or wedding gowns, no grandchildren. He saved them, but he lost them.

  If they had known he loved them, Drew would have known it, too. Drew could travel, he could show up wherever he wanted. Ev kept his secret to set them free. He built a wall between Drew and his children. He himself was the wall. Ella Dane had kept her secret to preserve Lacey’s innocence.

  She would have to do the same, if Eric would let her. All the qualities in Eric that had drawn her to him—his honesty, his constancy, the firm architecture of his mind—all these qualities set him against her now, for he would never abandon the child or the house, or believe he couldn’t have both. If she left the baby at the hospital, Eric would take him home, and in Drew’s house there was room for only one child. She had to get herself into the house, and Eric and the baby out of it.

  She had put him through law school, giving her a claim against his future income. If she gave that up, traded it for the house, and let Eric take the baby . . . How many months would he fight to get himself and the baby back into the house? The parent who took the children got the house, mostly. And family law was his specialty.

  Or she and Eric could leave the house, rent it out cheap, and make sure the right people took it, a young family with children. Soon, Drew would shift his attention to them. The right family, a mother with a baby girl and a couple of elementary-aged boys, and the Miszlaks could get clean away.

  That was life and freedom. That was everything.

  “No,” Lacey said. She put her hands over her ears, as if it were someone else’s idea and she could keep from hearing it. No. Ella Dane had left her father’s house, the security of life with Merritt Kendall, on the strength of a handful of Polaroids and a family rumor. She hadn’t traded another child’s future for Lacey’s.

  Hadn’t she, though? She’d never reported Grandpa Merritt. In Lacey’s case there was so little to report, pictures that barely flirted with the line of innocence, but she had cousins who’d been abused and she hadn’t encouraged them to turn him in. He’d lived freely in a neighborhood with young families on every side, little girls in swimsuits wherever he looked. Ella Dane saved only her own child. That wasn’t enough.

  Lacey pictured herself in an apartment, turning on the local news a year from now, settling in the red leather armchair to read Pat the Bunny to the baby, her own healthy living child, and the announcer would speak solemnly of the unexpected death of a toddler or a young mother in a Greeneburg neighborhood. The screen would flash to a reporter standing under a tree, and Eric would say, Isn’t that our house? Aren’t those our tenants? She couldn’t live with that.

  The door opened, and Ella Dane came in, laptop under her arm. “Talking to yourself?” she asked. She scanned the room. “Are you talking to yourself, or is he here?”

  “He left.”

  “You saw him here?”

  “He was mad about Eric being here. He touched me.”

  “Oh, Lacey. I can’t handle this alone. We need help.”

  Lacey nodded, not wanting to describe that lifetime underwater, twenty seconds at most. “He lost his temper for a minute. I’m fine.” Ella Dane looked doubtful, and Lacey patted the bed. “Sit with me, Mom.”

  Ella Dane opened her laptop on the bed. “Look at this; I was online. Downloaded some old articles.” She opened a folder on her desktop, selected a newspaper article, and turned her computer so Lacey could read.

  It was the front page on April 10, 1972, the day after Andrew Halliday Senior drowned his baby daughter, shot his wife and three sons, and then turned the gun on himself. The picture was the family’s formal Christmas portrait, 1971. The wife, Dora, looked about fifteen, slender in her tight-waisted checked dress, the baby a long fall of lace. Lacey recognized Dora, the tame trammeled adult self of the wild girl with the violin, Harry Rakoczy’s sister. She was not looking at the camera, but down and away from the descending row of freshly combed little boys, down and inward to the unseen Dorothy. Her eyelids were long and pale, her cheeks and lips uncolored, her thick light hair pulled back off her face. No makeup, no hairstyle for this formal picture. How hard did a woman have to work to wear that narrow-waisted dress, with her fourth child not six months old? And then she didn’t even put on lipstick.

  Harry knew. Dora Halliday was Harry’s sister. He knew everything and always had. Lacey filed that for later.

  The row of boys sat with their hands in their laps and their knees together. None of them smiled, though the youngest, Matthew, had a smiler’s dimples tucked into the creases of his mouth. Andrew Halliday, in a jacket and tie that matched his sons’, leaned forward with hands on thighs, legs apart, elbows out, as if caught in the moment of springing from his seat. His hair clung in tense light-colored curls, clipped in polished waves. In 1971, a year of shaggy hair and long sideburns, that haircut made a statement. Leave me alone. None of your business. A military haircut, though the article said he’d taught American history at East Greeneburg High for the last six years and mentioned no military service. He stared straight at the camera, eyes open, brows fiercely lowered.

  He was a teacher. Like Greeley Honeywick, like Lacey. How many teachers had lived at 571 Forrester? Teachers like Andrew Senior, young mothers like Dora. He’d drawn Dora’s portrait, so he was an artist, too. Lacey knew, her knowledge both tentative and tactile, that every family had included either a teacher or a young mother, and someone who could paint or dr
aw. It was like feeling her way down a stairway in the dark. Knowledge came piece by piece; she tested each piece and found it true. Drew gathered his family, time after time, and every time the family failed him.

  Andrew’s portrait of Dora reminded Lacey of that first day. Harry Rakoczy had seen her sketchbook; CarolAnna had mentioned the pregnancy; Lacey herself had told him she was a teacher. Harry knew, he’d always known.

  “He looks like a murderer, that man,” Ella Dane said. “Those angry eyes.”

  To Lacey, Andrew Senior looked shockingly young. Andrew Junior was nine, but people started families younger back then. He was thirty, thirty-two, maybe. He had a hot, eager look, full of energy, an odd match for the modest Dora, so saintly and pale. The scrawling energy of Andrew’s portrait of Dora with her violin, in Harry’s living room—that was Andrew’s spirit, not Dora’s. Or maybe she got quieter after she married him, maybe she put her violin away.

  He drowned the baby in the bathtub, as Beth Craddock drowned Tyler, as Lacey had almost drowned herself (and Bibbits in his bath, that must have been Drew testing how far he could push her; it had seemed so urgently reasonable at the time). The article didn’t say where Andrew Halliday had shot the family, but Lacey knew. Dying, they fell down the stairs. Greeley Honeywick fell, pushed by Drew using someone else’s hand, probably her husband. Others had fallen, no doubt, many others. The question was not how many had died, sucked into the Hallidays’ deaths, but how she could save little not-Merritt, and herself and Eric, too.

  “The article says one of the children was found alive,” Lacey said. If she could find that person, James or Matthew, and ask him to talk to his brother . . . Hard to find him by the name alone; there must be thousands of Hallidays named James or Matthew.

  Ella Dane shrugged that away. “Shot in the head. One of them might have lingered a day or two. I e-mailed Jack McMure in Columbia. He’s been doing spiritual realignment of houses. He’ll come up to Greeneburg tomorrow and have a look. Three hundred bucks for the consult, and he’ll tell you what the therapy costs. Couple thousand.”