Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  He glowered at her. He was so angry, and yet so small; at that moment she could not fear him in spite of everything. “You came back,” he said.

  “I told you I would.”

  “You said you loved me, but it was all a lie.”

  Lacey knew angry children. They would do the worst thing they could, but mostly she could cozen them out of their rage. And then there was Allan Montego. Two weeks into her first year, he refused, utterly and passionately refused, to take a note to his parents about his homework. She insisted and demanded, she asked him why, why?, and he swung his book bag against the Smartboard and cracked the screen. Although she argued on his behalf at the hearing, he was expelled, because it wasn’t his first violent act, but it was her fault. She had pushed him farther than he could go.

  And now she had pushed Drew. Allan Montego broke the Smartboard. Drew could kill her. She said, “Are you Andrew Halliday?”

  Drew opened his mouth. Starless night cracked open the creases of his lips, darted up the smile lines into his eyes, blackened and spread in the blue veins of his forehead. The blackness split and swallowed him, reached up and over Lacey like a raised fist, a tall wave on the point of breaking, the vertigo of nightmare balanced on the point of swallowing her forever. It shattered on her, sank into her body, pulled itself upward and out of her, and was gone. She spun in its wake, turned to follow the direction it had taken.

  It was the thing that had fallen past her, the bloody screaming thing, now racing up the stairs, where Ella Dane was waiting with Jack McMure, ready to banish it from the house with—what? Burning herbs, mostly sage? What were they thinking?

  She ran up the first five steps, and every muscle tightened, squeezing inward on the baby. She fell forward on her knees, grabbing for the banister to keep from falling downstairs on her belly. The pain tightened until she thought her spine would crack. Then, when she could bear no more, it sank down, water into sand. The baby kicked against this outrageous assault.

  Thirty weeks. Too soon, too young, too small. “Please don’t,” Lacey said to not-Merritt inside her, not-Merritt not ready to be born. “We haven’t bought a crib.”

  He wouldn’t need a crib. He’d sleep in a bright womb of Plexiglas and white plastic. Too soon. Lacey waited for another contraction. The baby rolled. She slipped a hand under her dress to touch the wet spot on her underpants. Blood? No, it was colorless. Amniotic fluid? She sniffed her fingers and laughed. Imagine, that there could be time in her life when wetting herself was good news! She went upstairs on her knees, pausing on each step for balance before moving her right hand to the next banister post.

  It took five minutes to get up the stairs. She knew, because she had marked the time of the first contraction on her watch, ready to time the second one when it came. She reached the top of the stairs at 7:21. Tightness rippled across her belly, but it wasn’t really a contraction, so she didn’t count it.

  Just in case she had to tell a doctor, later, she noted the time. Six minutes.

  Voices from the bathroom. A man’s voice, loud and deep, and a lighter voice in a hurried response. Was Jack making peace with Drew? Could that actually work?

  If the child Andrew had survived, then the spirit Drew might be Andrew Senior, a man who had worn a crew cut to teach American history in 1972. What was Jack McMure doing in 1972? Lacey would bet he wasn’t wearing a crew cut, or if so, then not by choice. Maybe he and Andrew Senior could talk about it man to man, instead of the way she had tried to talk with Drew, teacher to child. She had to get to them. But the stairs were so steep, and if she stood, she would fall.

  Lacey crawled to the first bedroom door and used the doorknob to pull herself up. It felt good to be on her feet, but there was something wobbly about her hips, the joint unlocked. She kept one hand on the wall as she went toward the bathroom.

  It was a long walk from bedroom to bathroom, each step a deliberate act. Too quiet—she’d only lain down for a minute. Why hadn’t the baby woken her up? The light on the stairs was the golden blond of late afternoon. She’d slept through lunch, slept through the afternoon feeding, slept until it was almost time to start cooking supper, how had she slept so long?

  Lacey stopped, pressing her hand against the wall, feeling the texture of the paint against her palm. She looked at her watch, which said 7:23, so she’d only been in the hallway for two minutes, yet she could not shake off this heart-squeezing sense that it was too long, too much time had passed, she was too late. And the porthole window framed a starless night, clouded and moonless darkness, not the flood of late spring sunshine she had seen. Imagined. Not seen. Imagined. Remembered.

  “Mom?” she said. So many children had stood outside this bathroom door calling for their mothers. “Ella Dane? What’s going on in there?”

  The door opened. Smoke twisted out, and Jack McMure roared out of the smoke, shouting in another man’s voice, “You did this, you, you, you did this!”

  Lacey’s hand slid down the wall and she knelt with her hands over her face. “I’m sorry,” she wept. “I didn’t mean to, I just lay down for a minute, I was so tired!”

  “After all I do, six hours a day with those freaks and hooligans, and I come home to this.” He carried something in his left arm, pressed against his shoulder and his heart, something small as a cat. A clear stain spread from it, turning his white shirt to glass. She could not stop looking. Soon the stain would sink into him. His skin would fade away, his muscles turn pink, then white, then clear, his ribs would turn to glass and his lungs to water, until only the wild red heart was left, hammering unbearable pain. He grabbed her shoulder and dragged her to the top of the stairs. “Call them,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Call them!”

  “Junior,” she said. “James. Matthew. Can you come here?”

  Three boys came out of the smoke. The youngest had a smiler’s dimples, even with his face pulled downward in concern and fear. The oldest came slowly, with his hands jammed into his pockets, looking at his feet. The middle child came most fearfully, tucking himself into his older brother’s shadow. His black-framed glasses slid down his nose, and he pushed them up and coughed, and then ducked his head, as if the cough were a guilty secret he wished he could deny.

  “Your sister is dead.” The wet, clarifying stain was a baby’s body wrapped in a white towel. Blue lips pulled back from purple gums, blue irises gleaming under the half-shut eyelids. “How did this happen?”

  The boys shuffled their feet, all but the oldest, who flashed a glance to the kneeling mother and shook his head.

  “She did it.” There was a gun in the man’s hand and a sense that time had passed. The light in the porthole window had deepened to red. “She put the baby in the bath and then she—lay—down—for—a—nap. She’s guilty. Say it.”

  “Guilty,” all three boys muttered, one after the other by age, youngest to oldest.

  “But is she guilty alone? Because there’s such a thing in the law as a conspiracy. She killed the baby by her laziness, but she didn’t do it alone, boys.” The baby’s hair was dry, now, and one small hand was fisted against her left cheek. “No, you were here, too. And didn’t I tell you to help your mother, didn’t I tell you all?”

  “Yes,” they said, oldest and youngest, but the middle boy’s answer was an exploding sob.

  “Look what you did. All of you did it. All of you.”

  He held the baby up in front of them. The towel fell off her bare body. In death, she had drawn herself inward, legs and arms folded into the chest, as if she still slept in her mother’s body. The wedge-shaped feet were crossed at the ankles. He held her up to show her to them, then he dropped her, threw her down the stairs. “No,” the mother said. She heard the three shots, one after the other, but she felt the fourth shot as a surge of white in her mind and body. She fell after the falling children. It was like flying.

  Something caught her by her left elbow and shoulder. She cried out, struggled and kicked agai
nst it, but it pulled her back, and a panting voice in her ear called a name she did not know, “Lacey, Lacey, Lacey, listen to me!”

  The pain pressed harder, a crushing and grinding intensity, and Lacey looked at her watch. Seven forty-eight, and if the first one started at 7:16, that meant, what? For the moment, she couldn’t remember how to subtract, she couldn’t remember anything. The pressure eased, and she said, “Thirty-two minutes.”

  “Lacey, is it you?”

  Lacey was leaning against her mother’s body on the top step. “Is what me?”

  “Are you you? Because you and Jack said awful things— Jack! We’ve got to call an ambulance. If I let you go, are you going to throw yourself down the stairs?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Stay here and don’t move.” Ella Dane pulled Lacey backward down the hallway to the bedroom door. “I’m getting my cell phone.”

  “Where’s Jack? What happened?” Lacey hadn’t felt this disoriented since coming out of anesthesia when her wisdom teeth were pulled. As then, she felt a sense of weird loss, something hollowed out that had been solid, some pain already present though not yet perceptible. She touched her belly, and the baby pushed her hand.

  Ella Dane ran into her bedroom and came out with cell phone in hand. “Let me call 911 first. We need an ambulance! 571 Forrester Lane. My friend fell down the stairs.” She covered the phone with her hand and said to Lacey, “He started yelling at you. Saying things that didn’t make sense. You were both falling. I grabbed you.”

  “Did I push him?” Lacey asked. “Did he push me?”

  “Nobody pushed anybody,” Ella Dane said. She repeated it into the phone, as the dispatcher asked another question. “Nobody pushed anybody! It was an accident.”

  “I’m having contractions,” Lacey said. “I might be in labor.” She lay against the wall and looked at the ceiling, the corner of the hallway above the bathroom. The shadows crawled over each other; the air whispered guilty, guilty, guilty.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. No mother would walk away from a baby in a bathtub to lie down for a nap. And the other vision, Dora kneeling by the bathtub to drown Dorothy. They couldn’t both be true. Maybe they weren’t either of them true.

  “I haven’t touched him,” Ella Dane shouted. “I’m up here with my daughter; she’s pregnant. Can’t you send the ambulance and quit asking me these questions?”

  “He’s dead,” Lacey said. “He killed them all and he killed himself. Because he was guilty too.” Something occurred to her. “You’d better get rid of the herbs before the cops come.” She pushed her mother away and stood up. “I’m going next door. The hospital’s not safe. Drew’s found me there before.” She saw the picture, the small fair boy next to the great piano, tucked in with a dozen other pictures on Harry’s windowsill. “I need to find out what Harry knows.” And this time she wasn’t going to be polite and let him change the subject or slide her out of his house. This time she was going to keep asking until he answered.

  Chapter Forty-four

  UNLESS HE WAS GOING TO VISIT the old man, Lex avoided Austell Road. It sucked him toward home, where he could not go, no, never. It was worst in April, when the dogwoods bloomed white and pink, each one a tall fair woman in a wide-skirted dress, and memory rubbed like a stone in his shoe.

  Tonight, he found himself on Austell Road driving west. He knew the names of every side street (Green Acre, Valley Church, Eston’s Farm), because his dad taught him to read maps, and made him draw maps of the neighborhood, with all the streets and names. There was no church on Valley Church Road and no farm on Eston’s Farm Way. “Names remember,” his dad told him, “even when people forget.”

  Lex forgot names. That didn’t make him crazy. He could remember if he tried. On Austell Road, the streets said their names in his father’s voice, remembering, as he followed Jeanne’s gray Corolla, license plate PTY 796. PTY for pretty, he said when he bought the car for her, so she would remember. Where was she going, seven at night, fifty-eight miles an hour when the sign said forty-five?

  She slowed at Burgoyne’s Crossing; Lex jammed his brakes, and the car behind him honked. If she turned left at Burgoyne’s Crossing, she’d drive past his school, and then she’d turn left on Forrester Hills Avenue and right on Forrester Lane and go home, and take the baby inside where everything was waiting for her and for him. Everything, a shadow full of names, remembering.

  Still honking, the car behind him changed lanes and pulled alongside. Jeanne carried on past Burgoyne’s Crossing, and he accelerated after her, cutting off the other car just as it swerved to rejoin his lane. Honking and shouts followed him. Jeanne passed the big mall and the little mall. She turned left without signaling into a confetti burst of yellow, green, and red, neon and trumpets, a building with a roof like a huge Mexican hat and some kind of party in the parking lot.

  Jeanne found a spot near the entrance. Lex nosed his car past hers and parked far back in the lot. He turned his lights off and stayed in the car. It looked dangerous. Jeanne slammed her door and turned her face toward the party.

  No baby. Was the baby at home? Big Jeanne’s car was gone. That was why he followed Jeanne, to find out where she was taking the baby. And he’d seen her put the car seat in the back.

  He should go home. There was no time. Time, time, time; his dad kept them all on a schedule, homework from four to seven and if you run out of homework, boy, I’ll pick a name from the encyclopedia and you can write me an essay on him, remember all the names, remember; Lex hadn’t heard his father’s voice so clearly for years. He used to set fires, and the roaring voice of fire would swallow up his father’s roaring voice. Time, time, time is running out. You forgot something. What did you forget?

  It wasn’t just a party, here in the new building with the Mexican hat for a roof. It was a fiesta. With a mariachi band, men in bright colors with gold braid on their shoulders, and trumpets tongued with gold. Not just the building, but all the people wore broad-brimmed Mexican hats with bright striped ribbons around the crown.

  Remember the names of things. Sombrero. “Bienvenidos, amigo!” a girl said. She had long, straight hair, pure red from root to tip, and she jammed a sombrero onto Lex’s head. “Arriba!” she trilled. “Welcome to the grand opening of Taco Mania.” She swung her hips, and her wide striped Mexican skirt spiraled around her, released itself from her knees, and spiraled the other way. Her beauty amazed him. “These are Taco Pesos.” She gave him a book of coupons. Buy Two Tacos Get One Free, Free Coffee with Purchase of Donut Burrito.

  “I’m looking for my wife.”

  “She’s wearing a hat,” the red-haired girl said. She laughed. “There’s free tacos inside, beef, chicken, bean, and our fudgy dessert taco! Kids’ meals come with a free bean.” She pressed a large plastic bean into Lex’s hand.

  His thumb found a button on the side. The bean opened to reveal a smaller bean dressed like a mariachi musician with a tiny plastic trumpet. Time is running out—what did you forget? “Free tacos,” he said. That’s where Jeanne would be.

  The red-haired girl pushed him toward the huge sombrero and turned from him to meet the next new customer. “Bienvenidos, amigo; would you like a hat?”

  The building was too bright, too crowded, and everyone wore a sombrero. Where was Jeanne? Young people carried trays of tacos through the room, and mariachi music crashed through the speakers, louder than the band outside. In the old man’s house, there was always music. The steam of so many hungry bodies pushed Lex against the wall, where a smiling young face offered him a tray of tacos, and he took one. He put it in his pocket. Somebody gave him another taco, this one spilling chocolate goo onto his fingers, and he put that in his other pocket.

  He saw Jeanne near the counter, with three tacos neatly rayed between the fingers of her left hand while she ate another, in two bites, crunch through the middle of the taco, four chews and it was down, and she poked the rest of the taco into her mouth, sucking her finger cl
ean as she pulled it out. She snatched two more tacos off another tray. Lex leaned against the door and forced himself out of the building, against the crush of customers crowding in. Where was Jeanne’s car? “Adios, amigo,” the red-haired girl shouted as he passed her, and for a moment he was tangled in the mariachi band, guitars everywhere and a trumpet right in front of him.

  Then he was through the crowd, out among the cars, next to Jeanne’s car. Theo was in the back with a bag of minidonuts. All alone in the cold and the dark, with donuts she could choke on, choke and suffocate and die. Drowning in sugar.

  Lex banged his fists on the car window. Theo smiled through sugar. He wanted a rock, but the parking lot was smooth and black. Mariachi trumpets thronged in his mind. He pressed the button on the toy in his hand, and his own tiny musician played silently. The real band in the parking lot started “La Cucaracha.” The simple melody helped him think, and he laughed at himself. He didn’t need a rock. He had keys to Jeanne’s car, because it was half his car. He opened it and took Theo out of his half.

  Chapter Forty-five

  LACEY SAT AT HARRY’S KITCHEN TABLE. “A friend of my mother’s,” she said, as the ambulance pulled away from her house. “He had an accident.” Harry stood with his back to her, pouring boiling water into two mugs. Now that she was here, she found it hard to begin this necessary conversation. Why did you sell me your haunted house? wasn’t easy to say, just like that. She had to work into it. She said, “He fell down the stairs.”

  Harry’s shoulders pulled up and in, a slow flinch, and he said, “Tea or cocoa?”

  “Cocoa.” She was surprised to see him dump an envelope of powder into a mug; she’d thought of Harry as a man who made cocoa with milk, from scratch, whisking sugar and real cocoa powder into the hot milk, whisking continuously so it wouldn’t scald. He poured boiling water over the Nestlé mix just like everyone else. “Thank you,” she said.