by Sonja Condit
“You were perfect, you even look like Dora. Your hair’s the same color. And you were a teacher and an artist. I thought you could help Drew, if anyone could.”
“Help him? How?”
Harry ducked under the table to give Theo a metal spoon. He showed her how to hit the pans with the metal spoon, and how the two spoons made different noises. Theo gave a baby screech of pure joy and banged louder than ever.
“You thought I would die there,” Lacey said.
“No, no,” Harry said from under the table.
“Yes, yes. I’d die and I’d go on and Drew would go with me. He would recruit me to be his guide, like you said.”
“No, no.” Harry came up from under the table. His face was red. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I thought you could talk to Drew.”
“Talk to him? You sold us the house so I would die there, me and my baby both. Don’t you lie to me.” This sweet old man, whom everyone liked and respected: she was going to make him face what he had done.
“So many people have died.” Harry leaned across the table to grasp Lacey’s hands. She pushed her chair back. “When I put people in the house, people die, babies die. When I live in the house myself, Ted’s kids start seeing him in Australia. Same thing when I leave it empty. They’re my grandchildren. If only one more person had to die, I thought, someone who could take Drew away, it would be the last one.”
“Two people,” Lacey said. “You had no right.”
“There wasn’t any other way.”
“Why not take Lex inside and let him talk to Drew?”
“No. I owe it to Dora. He’s all that’s left.”
Lacey rolled her shoulder. It was only bruised, and the frozen peas had soothed away the pain. “He’s all that’s left? Then you won’t mind if I do this.” She stood up and dragged Theo from under the table. Lacey got her hands under the baby’s armpits and hauled her up to balance her on her right hip. Theo’s left leg pressed against the undercurve of Lacey’s pregnant belly, and the baby kicked in greeting. Lacey turned toward the door, and Theo gave her a wet, soft kiss.
Harry started toward her, but the telephone rang, and Lex raised a new shriek of despair, and his uncertainty trapped him in the conflict of demands. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he called after her.
At the front door, Lacey looked back. “Home,” she said. She walked out of Harry’s house with her double burden, her right leg almost buckling with each step. She crossed their two lawns and hurried up the front steps, getting herself and Theo inside and the door locked just as Harry reached the front door.
“I’ll call the police!” he shouted.
“You do that.” She slid the dead bolt home. “I’ll call them myself. Lex kidnapped this baby and he beat me up. Call them.”
Silence. Lacey set Theo down in the hall and ran through the house, reaching the kitchen door just as Harry did on the other side. She locked it as the knob began to turn. “What do you want?” he said through the door.
“Send Lex over here, and I’ll give him his baby,” Lacey said.
“Or what?”
“Or nothing. I’m not making any threats. Here’s me in the house, a teacher, an artist, a perfect fit, and here’s Theo. She’s Drew’s cousin or his niece or whatever; you think she’s got an hour, ten minutes, how long before he notices her?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“CarolAnna Grey never told me what happened to her. I bet her mom looked at her funny one day and said, This little girl needs a bath. CarolAnna was smart and fast, and she got away. Maybe Theo needs a bath.”
“No!”
Lacey waited twenty seconds, long enough to have carried that heavy child up the stairs, and then she turned on the kitchen tap. The kitchen door shivered under a variety of blows, flesh, metal, ceramic; Harry must be using the patio furniture and the planters to hit the door. She opened it. He was covered in dirt, bloody handed in the wreckage of the planter, chrysanthemums at his feet. “What,” she said fiercely.
“I want it to stop. I want it to not happen anymore.”
“I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it.”
Theo crawled across the kitchen floor to grab a chrysanthemum from Harry’s foot. She crammed it in her mouth, then took it out, and poked her tongue in and out, clearing the dirt from her lips. “You think Lex can stop it?” Harry asked.
“It’s his brother. One of his brothers, using his name. Or his father.”
Very quietly, in one of the empty rooms upstairs, a door opened.
Harry picked Theo up and gently pulled the chrysanthemum from her hand. “I’ll send Lex over,” he said. “Give me a minute.”
It was more like ten minutes, long enough for Lacey to shovel her mutilated chrysanthemum back into its broken pot, shaping the dirt into a rough pyramid and laying the terra-cotta fragments over it. She stood in the kitchen doorway and the sense grew in her that someone was behind her, staring at the back of her head. She did not turn.
Bringing Theo into the house!—what was she thinking? She told herself it made no difference. If Drew had a hit list, Theo was on it already. If he could reach all the way to Harry’s grandchildren in Australia, then Dora’s granddaughter on the other side of town had lived in deadly danger from the moment she was conceived.
Lacey accepted no excuses in her classroom. Never mind telling me why you did it, she said to her guilty children, and if she didn’t hold herself to that standard, what kind of teacher was she?
She had tried to save herself and her baby by putting someone else’s baby in danger. Theo Hall, human shield. That was no different from what Harry had done, renting the house out to young families for all those years.
“No, no,” she said out loud, and the maple tree shook its yellow leaves at her in the afternoon sunlight. Yes, yes. She was guilty. But what else could she do?
What else could Harry Rakoczy have done?
He could have gone into the house and faced it himself.
She could do that, too. Her whole body shouted no and the contraction took hold of her pelvic bones again. Slowly she sat in the doorway and waited for the pain to sink. It didn’t change the truth. She could do what she demanded of Harry: she could go back into the house and face it herself.
Yes, and take her baby into danger with her? She wasn’t living for herself alone.
Neither was Harry living for himself alone. Drew could touch his grandchildren on the other side of the world. There was no way out. She could go into the house, face Drew, and die; she could hold on to him and not let go, take him with her and leave the house clean. Eric wouldn’t understand, but Ella Dane would. The baby—but the baby had no chance anyway. Sometimes you have to let them go, Ev Craddock said. Her golden child.
Lex wandered across the back lawn, kicking his feet every third or fourth step, reluctant, sulky and slow. She resisted the urge to call him to hurry up, because he had the look of a child who would slow down even further. You’re not the boss of me. Every inch of his body said it, a six-foot-tall gray-headed pouty preteen. She was not ready for this, not one bit.
“I’m here,” he said as he climbed onto the patio.
Lacey gave him her sweetest and most welcoming first-day-of-school smile. “I’m so glad you came.”
“The old man sent me.”
She pulled him into the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee?”
At once, she knew it was absurd to offer coffee to this man, and he said, “Pop?”
“I don’t think so.” Lacey checked the refrigerator. Eric drank Pepsi, but Ella Dane had a habit of draining Pepsi bottles and refilling them with her own concoction of dandelion root and powdered carob. “There’s orange juice, guava juice, some kind of sugarcane thing that my mom likes, and milk.”
“Milk.”
She gave him a glass of milk. She’d been so eager to get him into the house, and now here he was, and what could she do with him? She’d expected some sign—doors slamming
, water running, noises, voices—but the house sat quiet in the October sun. Every gust of wind was followed by a light pattering as a wave of leaves jittered across the roof. Occasionally a car drove by, and the more distant sound of Austell Road was a constant faraway surf. Where was Drew?
Lacey cleared her throat. She took the empty glass from Lex’s hand and rinsed it in the sink. “So,” she said. Now she had him here, she wasn’t sure why she’d wanted him. It had felt important. Now she felt nothing. “It’s a long time since you were here.”
“I was never here.”
“I guess not.” Lacey looked around the kitchen. What was the same as 1972? Nothing but the walls, the size and location of the windows—only the bones of the room, and those were identical to Harry’s kitchen next door. “How about if I show you around?” she said, as if he were any ordinary guest.
“I don’t care.”
She led him across to the future dining room, where she’d been sleeping for the past three months. “I’m going to move upstairs when the baby comes,” she said. “We’ll get a real table in here.” The air in the room was thick, not precisely foul, but heavy with animal presence. She needed to change the sheets. Bibbits had slept beside her for weeks. “This was your dining room, right?”
Lex shrugged.
She hurried him past that spot at the foot of the stairs—did he remember lying there, brothers dying beside him, sister already dead? She hoped not. Maybe the bullet had torn the memory from him. “This is the living room.” Stupid. He knew that.
He didn’t answer, and she talked into the increasingly dangerous silence. “So this is where Harry teaches lessons in his house; that’s the most beautiful room, with that gorgeous picture. . . .” Dora Rakoczy, by Andy Halliday. Harry said she looked like Dora. Maybe Lex thought so, too. What about Drew? Did he think she looked like Dora and would it matter to him?
“Would you like to see upstairs?” she asked.
“Can I leave now?”
“Don’t you want to see your old bedroom?”
“I’m not supposed to be here. Can I leave now? Please?”
“Do you remember the Honeywicks? A family called Honeywick?”
“I don’t remember anything. Something bad happened to them.”
“What about the Craddocks?”
“Can I leave?”
“What about—” What was CarolAnna Grey’s maiden name? She’d forgotten, if she’d ever known it. “A little girl called CarolAnna, do you remember her?”
“A bad thing almost happened. Can I go?”
“What about the Hallidays?”
“I don’t remember anything at all.”
These answers. How could he know these things? She stopped looking for Drew and instead stared straight at Lex. His face was tired and anxious, old, so old. His eyes were those of the girl on Harry’s wall—Dora’s eyes, no, Drew’s eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Here she was watching and waiting for Drew, and he was right in front of her all the time. Recognition poured over her skin, combing every hair upright.
“I know you,” she whispered.
“I don’t remember.” He sank before her, slowly to his knees, and crossed his arms over his face, shaking his head, a child’s gesture, a child’s misery. “Please,” he said. “Please can I go. Oh please.”
“But I know you. It’s you.” She touched his shoulders, then pulled him in, pulled his head against her belly, cradled the back of his head in her hands. His breath was hot between her breasts, and he clutched the sides of her dress, pulling it tight over her shoulders. “Don’t be scared,” she said into his thin, light hair. Poor thing, poor thing. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”
And it was almost there, the truth, the answer, gathering around them. Lacey sensed its geometry, the turning of a kaleidoscope, lines and angles clicking into place. “I know you,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“I remember,” he said, “Mama lay down for a nap, she was so tired.”
“And then?”
But the door opened and Eric came in with the October wind around him, yellow leaves scurrying at his feet. Lex wailed and pushed himself away from Lacey, and the moment passed, the memory unspoken.
Chapter Fifty
“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” Lacey asked. She’d known the truth, but it was gone, blown out in the sudden wind.
“What’s going on here?” Eric said. “What is this guy doing in my house?”
“Visiting,” Lex said. He scrambled away from Lacey on his knees. “She made me come here. I didn’t want to.”
“You. I’ll talk to you later. Lacey, where have you been?”
“Next door, at Harry’s.”
“And don’t you ever answer your phone? That’s what it’s for, so I can get in touch with you. I’ve been calling and calling.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed two to show her. Lacey’s cell phone tinkled the “Ode to Joy” on the kitchen counter. “You went out of the house and didn’t take it with you?”
“I was in a hurry.” She couldn’t remember why. Eric was so loud and so sudden. Couldn’t he just shut up and listen? She almost had the answer. “I didn’t have time.”
“How much time does it take to pick up the damn phone?” Eric turned to Lex. “And you. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Why did you take that baby out of that car?”
“Jeanne left her all alone, all by herself alone in the dark! What could I do?”
“You could have called 911. You could have called me, for God’s sake. You had Jeanne right where you want her. Child endangerment, neglect, the whole nine yards, that was your whole custody case in that parking lot, and you took the baby, why?”
“I don’t know,” Lex said. “I don’t know what I did.”
Something changed in the air. Lacey looked up, already knowing what she would see, and Drew was there, standing at the top of the stairs. Though he looked as solid as ever, the light from the porthole window flowed through him unimpeded, casting a block of white on the red carpet on every step. “Can you stop, please stop?” Lacey said.
“What were you thinking?” Drew said.
“What were you thinking?” Eric said to Lacey.
“Listen to yourself,” Lacey said. “These aren’t your thoughts. He’s trying to control you, can’t you feel it? Get out of here now.” Hopeless; she’d never felt Drew’s approach, there was no way Eric could resist.
“All you have to do is take care of the baby,” Drew said.
“All you have to do is take care of the baby,” Eric said.
Lex pressed his hands over his face and ran up the stairs. Drew flicked out of sight. He reappeared halfway down and said, “I gave up everything for you.”
“I gave up everything for you,” Eric said.
Lacey couldn’t let that pass. “No, you didn’t. This is our life together. Our money, our house, our baby—we did it all together. It’s what we both wanted. Nobody gave up anything. Eric, don’t listen to him!”
“I take care of everything for you,” Drew said.
“Don’t say it.”
“I take care of everything for you,” Eric said.
She turned to run for the door, but he was too quick for her, both of them were too quick. Eric caught her arm just on the elbow and squeezed it hard. Drew said and Eric echoed him—and now the echo came closer, so that she was hearing them both at once, converging—“I want you to understand what you’ve done.” They said the last word together, and Drew disappeared. Lacey and Eric were alone, at the foot of the stairs. “Come and see,” he said, pulling her toward the stairs.
She swung her fist against the side of his head—a soft and clumsy blow, because he was still Eric, and she couldn’t hurt him—but it was enough to surprise him. He let her go, and she ran for the kitchen. She had a second or two, she’d never reach the front door. Long enough to reach the drawer beside the sink. She pulled out a knife at random—a vegetable peeler, no�
�and the second knife she seized was the spare chef knife, still new, in its cardboard sleeve. She whirled and held it out in front of her just as Eric reached her. He stopped. She waved the knife, absurdly sheathed in white cardboard. She’d entered the house ready to die if she had to—maybe, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary—but she couldn’t let Drew use Eric as he had used Beth Craddock. What it must have been like for Beth, when Drew stepped out of her body and she realized what her hands had done, no, she’d do anything to spare Eric that. If she could separate them, surprise Drew out of Eric—if she could ask Eric a question Drew couldn’t answer, if she could do for Eric what Ella Dane had done for her, she could save him.
“What’s the third-most-common household accident?” she said.
“What?” he said, two voices together, man and child in unison.
“There’s drowning in the bathtub, and falling down the stairs, happens all the time.” She waved the knife again. “How about kitchen accidents?”
“Third,” they said together; and Eric’s voice alone clarified, “Mostly burns.”
“Listen to me!” she said. “Eric, listen. You don’t have to do what he wants. You can move sideways.”
“Sideways,” Eric said alone, and Drew shouted, “Shut up, don’t talk to him!”
She was alive because she had opened the drain with her toes. If only she could get through to Eric, make him listen. “Do something he hasn’t thought of,” she said. Footsteps upstairs, but Drew was inside Eric, so how—? Lex. She’d forgotten him. “Lex!” she screamed. “Go next door and get Harry, go now!”
A door slammed, but he didn’t come down. Instead of fleeing the house, he must have shut himself into a bedroom. Eric caught her left wrist. With the last moment of freedom in her left hand, she snatched the cardboard sheath off the knife. Eric turned her wrist, and the knife sliced across the web between her thumb and her finger. He took the knife from her right hand and held it against her head, alongside her right ear, with her left arm pulled painfully back and twisted against his body. “All right then, if you like,” and the voice was entirely Drew, there was nothing of Eric here, Eric would never hurt her, “let’s move sideways. Up the stairs.”