Starter House

by Sonja Condit

  He must have caught the tone of disappointment, because he turned toward her with his eyebrows high in his long face. He set the mugs on the table, said, “Hang on a second,” and pulled a jug of cream from the refrigerator. Real cream, in a white ceramic jug. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said.

  The cocoa slopped over the edge of Lacey’s mug and scalded her knuckles as the contraction began. It began with a grinding shift in the bones of her pelvis, bones she had not thought could move. Agony yawned and swallowed her whole. She pushed the mug away. It wobbled on its farther edge, took half a turn, balanced, and tipped, spilling cocoa all over Harry’s table. This pain, so much worse than the others, ran out more quickly, a foaming wave, already gone. She rubbed her face.

  Harry was all around her, fluttering with a damp washcloth, a dry tissue, paper towels for the table, and a second mug of cocoa for her, while his own cup cooled and the cream separated into a scum of oily bubbles on its surface.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” he said.

  So he was going to play innocent to the end. She was tired of him. Her right hand worked the tissue, rolling it hard and tight. “Because it used to be your house and you lived in it and you left it and you lived next door to it and you saw what happened to them, the Craddocks and the Honeywicks and all of them. Where’s that picture?”

  She roamed the kitchen, scanning through the family snapshots of children on the beach, children in plaid uniforms, a little girl with a giant white rabbit, a boy next to a bicycle with a big red bow on it. So many pictures. The refrigerator was paved with them, and pictures of every dimension, from wallet-sized school photos to ten-by-fourteen portraits, paneled the kitchen walls. These hundreds, every race and age, many of them posing with violins, must be students and children of students, a teacher’s gallery.

  The picture of the boy who looked like Drew had stood on the windowsill, above the sink, tucked behind three or four others. There was the frame on top of the microwave, clean silver with a beveled edge, but it held an Asian girl aged about twelve, in a plaid Christmas dress with violin at port arms.

  “Where is he?” She shook the frame at Harry. “Where is he, who is he?”

  Harry took the frame. He turned her to face the opposite wall of the kitchen and guided her to the middle, and there he was, the serious blond boy beside the gleaming piano. Drew. Not Drew. So much alike. “I told you last time. That’s my son, Ted, when he was seven.”

  “It looks just like Drew.” Not quite. Drew’s eyebrows were straight, as if drawn with a ruler, but this boy’s eyebrows lifted in a curve of slight surprise, giving him a look of mild and pleasant eagerness, as if someone had unexpectedly given him candy.

  “Everybody says so,” Harry said. “Everybody who’s seen him. I never saw him. I used to go over there, in between tenants, and call him and call him, and he never came.”

  “Then why don’t you live in the house yourself?”

  “When we lived there, my wife saw him. Teddy was six. She got scared. She went back to her family in Australia. Whenever I’m in the house, Drew goes after Ted.”

  “In Australia?” And she’d thought she could escape by driving to the beach.

  “He’s got kids. My grandchildren. I can’t live in that house.”

  “Burn it. Tear it down.”

  “You think that’ll stop him?”

  “Maybe.” But if Drew didn’t have a home of his own to return to, maybe he’d go to Australia, a cuckoo in Ted Rakoczy’s nest. “I don’t know.”

  Harry put an arm around Lacey’s shoulders and urged her back to the table. As she drank her cocoa, her right hand worked the tissue, her thumb rubbing and rubbing along the oily dent in the felted paper. “So he’s still calling himself Drew?” he said. “You know he’s lying, because Junior survived?”

  “Eric found out. I wondered if he was the father. Andrew Senior.”

  “He was an artist. Andy Halliday. He was my best friend in high school. He drew that picture, Dora with her violin. She was fifteen . . . oh God, fifteen. I have students older than that. Sixteen when they got married. They had to. You had to, back then, if you got a girl in trouble. Not in some places, but in Greeneburg you still had to.”

  “What did they do?”

  “He enlisted right out of school and broke both his ankles on an obstacle course in basic. Dora was seventeen and Junior was a baby then.”

  Injured in basic training and discharged, still wearing his crew cut nine years later. Lacey felt a remote pity, like an archaeologist finding a mummified murder victim. A tragedy, so long ago. “What did they do?”

  “He went to college, got a teaching degree. She waitressed all those years, put him through school. Twelve hours a day on her feet and a baby every year.”

  Greeley Honeywick broke both her ankles and lost her feet. Lacey put Eric through school. The house knitted them together, all their lives in the same pattern. The same life, repeating itself in fragments. Mosaic, pastiche, collage.

  “He never forgave her,” Harry said.

  “He never forgave her? She did everything for him!”

  “And he couldn’t get over it. Those years when she was earning and he was in school. I sent them money, but they wouldn’t take it. So young and so proud. Andy was a hard man and he got harder. His students hated him.”

  Lacey wasn’t surprised. Her students were too young to hate their teachers, but she knew of people who’d left the classroom forever, driven out by the mob revulsion of middle-school and high school students. The stories, repeated by older faculty to student teachers as cautionary tales, always ended with the failed teacher entering some more lucrative field. And he got another degree and became an accountant, but he never taught again. She checked her watch. If the contractions kept coming every half hour, she was due for another in four minutes or so. “What did he do?”

  “Beat up a kid. So he was fired, just after Dorothy was born. Dora went back to work. I sent them two thousand dollars, all the money I had on hand. They never cashed the check. Next thing I knew, they were all dead except Junior. Margaret and I moved down here with Teddy. And then, well . . .” Harry opened his long fingers. “You know the rest.”

  Lacey sat back, thinking. “My mom’s friend Jack,” she said, “the guy they took away in the ambulance. He was trying to help. Greeley says it’s been tried before.”

  “I tried once. Got a fellow in, a psychology professor from a college in Indiana. He wasn’t in there but five minutes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said Drew is lost. He’s trying to get out, he’s, what was the word? He’s recruiting mothers and children, to be his guides, but he’s too hurt and too slow to follow them. The fellow said Drew would keep doing it unless someone could take him the rest of the way. Then he refunded his fee and never came back.”

  Lacey laid the crushed tissue on the table, beside her empty mug. She checked her watch. Eight forty-five, forty minutes since the last contraction. Was she safe, was the baby safe? What a question. Safe. “Do you think . . .” she said, and the house was suddenly full of noise, hammering and shrieking.

  “Let me in, let me in,” a wild voice shouted from the porch.

  Lacey grabbed Harry’s arm. “Who’s there?” she whispered.

  “It’s just Lex. And he’s got the baby with him.” Harry pushed her hand off his sleeve. “Don’t worry, he’s harmless.” He went to open the door.

  Chapter Forty-six

  ERIC SLEPT MORE DEEPLY than he had in months, a sleep so black that he became conscious during it, aware of himself floating, a leaf on a quiet sea. Blue-black weightlessness heaved and he drifted on the skin of it, breathing the pulse of its slow caress. As the night rolled toward morning, a sparkle of memory-dreams crowded behind his eyes, warmly vanilla scented. The Christmas morning when he and his brothers all got bicycles, three in a row, blue Schwinns with a red bow on each; the cornmeal pancakes his mother made for special mornings, first day of school, b
irthdays, and sometimes just Wednesdays. The first day of third grade, when he turned away from her good-bye-and-good-luck kiss, too old to be kissed in front of everyone. All that long day he felt heat on his face, the kiss he had rejected burning him, and when he walked his brothers home, he walked into the smell of sugar and vanilla. She had made cupcakes.

  Sleep sank away, and Eric struggled for reason in the swarming dreams. He had no little brothers. His brothers were fourteen and seventeen years old when he was born; they’d gone to college, one in California, the other in Texas, and had never come back. He hardly knew them; he’d grown up practically as an only child. His mother never made pancakes or walked him to school. He got a new bike every spring, not Christmas. Even as he puzzled over them, the dreams shredded, leaving a sense of affectionate nostalgia that he reflexively distrusted. When he was in third grade, he toasted his own Pop-Tart and walked out to catch the bus. His parents were already at the office, so he locked the house and set the security alarm. His mother had never made a cupcake in her life. Millions of dollars, yes, imaginary and criminal millions. No cupcakes.

  The dream scent remained, and he was in an unfamiliar room, small, lined with bookshelves full of secondhand paperbacks. He had slept on an airbed with a puffy pink quilt and a flat pillow that smelled of cat. Somebody was cooking something.

  Someone tapped on the door. “Are you decent?”

  Sammie. “Yes,” Eric said, hoping it was true. Was he decent? What was he doing in Sammie’s apartment? He identified the quality of his hangover: red wine and self-pity. He fell back against the pillow, shaken by shame. Sammie came in with a small tiger at her heels, and the scent of his dream came in with her. “Waffles?” he said. The cat jumped on the bed and sat with its paws curled under its chest, staring at him with golden eyes full of inexpressible thought.

  “Donnie Osmond says you’re in his bed,” Sammie said.

  He pulled himself up against the pillows, working around the cat. It purred so loudly its shoulders quivered. “I dreamed about my mother,” he said.

  “That’s pathetic. Get over it and eat your breakfast.”

  Uncle Floyd came in, wearing a knee-length blue bathrobe that suggested all too strongly that he wasn’t wearing anything else. Eric fixed his eyes on the tiger-cat in order to avoid any more wrinkled pink glimpses. The cat stood up, hunched its back, and patted Eric’s hand with one heavy velvet paw. “Coffee,” Floyd said to Sammie.

  “In a minute. Donnie Osmond likes waffles.” Sammie left, and Floyd sat on the bed with his knees a little too far apart. Eric tore off a bit of waffle for the cat, who took it delicately, with his whiskers fanned forward.

  “You still working for Lex Hall?” Floyd said.

  This brought back a third element of Eric’s hangover: red wine, self-pity, and a bracing lecture on marriage from Uncle Floyd. “I guess,” Eric said. “He’s supposed to get a new lawyer and call me for the files.”

  Floyd shook his head. “He’ll never do it. You got to find a new lawyer for him. And you got to hire Cambrick MacAvoy yourself, before that little girl gets her.”

  “You said having Cambrick on a case is like having flesh-eating strep.”

  “Get her on your side, it’s the other guy watching his ass melt. You want Cambrick, and you can’t have her if she’s against you on the Hall case. Get rid of the nut and latch on to that woman. Best advice I can give. Or you’ll be paying off your ex for the next twenty years. She’s got her hooks into your future income and don’t you forget it.”

  “She’s not my ex.”

  “It’s all over but the shouting.”

  “Coffee!” Sammie called from the kitchen.

  Floyd leaned forward to pat Eric’s shoulder. Eric shut his eyes, half a second too late. “You’ll be good,” Floyd said. “It’s only the first divorce that hurts.”

  Floyd and Sammie passed in the doorway. Sammie slithered up against him and shimmied in a way that made Eric close his eyes again, his body impaled on a pulse of emotion either lust or envy, he couldn’t tell which, but definitely sin. Gluttony, the tiger-cat, patted his arm, and he fed it another piece of waffle dripping with butter. Sammie took Floyd’s place on the bed.

  “It’s not necessarily over,” she said. “Half the people who come through Moranis Miszlak, if I could give them a cup of coffee”—she handed him his coffee—“and a piece of lemon chess pie, or a pile of cookies, I could talk sense into them. Go home.”

  “Try talking sense into Lacey. She’s trying to exorcise my house. Her mother dug up some shaggy old bum with trash in his hair. You have no idea.”

  “You are not ready to walk away from her. You’re all up in each other’s mess.”

  Donnie Osmond took advantage of Eric’s distraction to slide his head under the coffee cup and seize the waffle. The cat whirled, kicked off with both his hind legs against Eric’s arm, and shot from the room, leaving a trail of melted butter. The coffee fountained from his cup, scalding the fresh cuts. “Oh, grow up,” Sammie snapped, and Eric bit back his moan of pain. “Grow up and go home.”

  “I can’t.” The phone rang in the other room. She kept her eyes on Eric, and he kept talking. “I can’t go back to that. It’s crazy. It’s messy. It’s wrong.” It’s low-class; but he wouldn’t say that about Lacey to anyone.

  Sammie heard it. “So she didn’t come up like you. Why did you marry her?”

  “Because she ate three doughnuts without even worrying about it.”

  Sammie handed him tissues to clean the blood and coffee off his arm, and he thought about Lacey and the doughnuts. It was their third date and he had reservations at Amaranth, Columbia’s most expensive low-country restaurant, a test for Lacey: Did she have the clothes, the shoes, the manners? She wore a dress obviously bought for the occasion, white eyelet lace, light blue low-heeled shoes, and a necklace of blue glass beads, summery and modest. She smiled too much but didn’t say, This looks real fancy, as he had feared. The evening was perfect, until the maître d’ said, “Miszlak? I think not.”

  “I called yesterday. We have reservations.” The man was immovable. All the tables were booked and there were no cancellations; Eric, feeling the evening slip away, said, “Can we wait?”

  “There will be no cancellations,” the maître d’ said.

  Lacey waited in her bright new dress and perfectly appropriate shoes. He’d meant to test her, and now she would test him, find out if he was the man he meant to be, or only a kid with his daddy’s credit card. She touched his arm and said, “Let’s go somewhere else.” A moment of pure grace and he loved her. She didn’t test him; she didn’t even know there were tests. They went to Krispy Kreme and bought half a dozen doughnuts, fresh hot now, and she ate three and never said a word about the fat and the sugar, nor a syllable of regret for the elegant dinner they were not having.

  The third date, and he was hers. That moment at Amaranth when she touched his arm, and the second moment, when she took the third doughnut.

  She was still that same Lacey. When the money disappeared, she planned for how they would live now. Crazy and messy she might well be. But she was true. He needed her, or he’d look in the mirror in thirty years and see Uncle Floyd.

  “I’d better get home,” he said.

  “Did I tell you what happened the last time I went to the Halliday house?”

  “You threw eggs.”

  “Another time, later, I was twelve. There was a kid standing in the front yard.”

  “What happened?”

  Sammie shivered and pulled her arms across her chest. “Nothing. He just stood there. It was horrible. I slept with the light on for a week.”

  “Did anybody else see him—did anything happen?”

  “We all saw him. It was the single creepiest thing that ever happened to me in my life.” She huffed impatiently. “I can’t say it the way it was. But it was awful. Awful, that’s all. It’s something you don’t forget. Anyway. That’s my story.”

  “It’s
not much. As stories go.”

  She gave him a nasty look. “I just can’t tell you how it was.”

  Floyd came into the room. “That was Cambrick MacAvoy,” he said.

  Sammie blanched. “She knows my number?”

  “She’s got the devil’s own Rolodex; she knows everybody’s number.”

  “What’s a Rolodex, old man?”

  Floyd said to Eric, “Theo Hall disappeared last night.”

  Eric’s mind tilted sideways for a moment. Theo, Theo, he didn’t know anyone called Theo. “Lex Hall’s baby? Disappeared how?”

  “Out of Jeanne Hall’s car, in the parking lot of Taco Mania on Austell Road. So Jeanne waits till morning, and she calls Cambrick, and Cambrick says you’ll have the baby back to her in an hour, or she’s calling an Amber Alert. You get shut of that man.”

  “I’ll call Lex.”

  “Already done. He’s not home. Where else would he go?”

  Where else, in the whole of Greeneburg, would Lex Hall take Theo? “Harry Rakoczy’s house. I’ll go see if he’s there.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  LACEY SLEPT IN HARRY’S HOUSE, in the reclining chair with her feet up. She called Dr. Vlk’s answering service at midnight, and Dr. Vlk called within five minutes to explain that these were Braxton Hicks contractions and she was not in labor; it was perfectly normal. “Should I take two aspirin and call you in the morning?” Lacey asked.

  “No aspirin,” Dr. Vlk said briskly. “Do I hear a baby crying?”

  Harry was settling Lex into his guest bedroom, and Lacey had volunteered to hold Theo, who hadn’t stopped crying for the last three hours.

  “It’s Theo Hall.”

  “Hall. Not one of mine. How old?”

  “Eleven months. I’ve changed her diaper, I’ve given her food and water and formula and burped her and everything, and she won’t stop!”