by Sonja Condit
“I’d rather not,” she said, as if politely refusing a reasonable invitation. “I’d rather stay here.”
He spoke in the double voice again, Eric and Drew together. “I need you to know what you’ve done. I need you to be reasonable.”
Those were Eric’s words. Drew had turned his thoughts against him, as Lacey’s thoughts had been turned. Ella Dane had shown Lacey the truth by holding Drew’s hand until Lacey knew it for her own. Whatever Eric thought he was doing or seeing, she had to find a way to touch him. “Listen,” she said.
They came to the foot of the stairs. Her left hand was slippery with blood. She pushed herself backward against him with all her weight, into the knife instead of away from it. The cut was a fiery line against her cheek and forehead, but she hardly felt it. Eric stumbled and let go of her, and she broke for the door. That same slippery hand slid off the dead bolt, and he came up behind her and held the knife under her belly, blade up, where one stroke would bring the baby’s birth and death at once.
“Upstairs,” he said.
“You don’t want to hurt me,” Lacey said. She walked slowly up the stairs, stopping on each step until he pushed her. The knife traveled around her belly, nudging her forward, and her dress fell from it in ribbons. Why did people have to make knives so sharp these days, why? “Eric, listen. I need to see Dr. Vlk now. Can you drive me to her office?” Some way to distract him, surprise him out of Drew’s control.
“We can’t afford the copays for you to run off to the doctor every five minutes,” Eric said. “This house, we can’t afford this, not with the student loans.”
“I taught summer school every year you were in law school.”
“That paid for my books, no more. I’m not making the kind of money you think I am. We’re barely keeping up with the interest. The house. All that furniture.”
Maybe he thought they were sitting at the kitchen table going over the checkbook. Maybe he thought they were sanely negotiating their future. In his mind, the hand with the knife held a ballpoint pen, tapping a row of subtracted numbers.
“Look at yourself,” she said. “Look at your hand. Look.”
He urged her up another step. They were too high. If she fell back on him, made them both fall, down and backward and into the knife, all three of them would die. “It was for you,” he said. “It was all for you. The hospital bills. All I get from Moranis Miszlak is my salary. They’ve got me working the pissant lawsuits and the trailer-trash divorces; there’s no money there. I’ve got to bring in big cases, and how can I, if I have to run home whenever the baby kicks wrong or you see a shadow you don’t like?”
“That is not fair.”
“And I brought your mother here and she’s worse than you are. And that loony-tune who fell down the stairs, do you know what that could have cost us? Thank God we’ve got liability, but it’s only a million bucks, and if he’d broken his neck we’d burn through that in a year. We are broke.”
They should have had this conversation three months ago. She knew from his voice that these were not new thoughts. He’d been ruminating for months, and meanwhile buying furniture they couldn’t afford to keep her happy, just as she had kept Drew secret as long as she could. “I’ll go back to work next August,” she said. “We’re keeping up. Eric, please. I might even be able to get a job in January. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do what he wants. Don’t push back. Move sideways. I know you can.”
He couldn’t, that was the truth. He was not a flexible thinker. He was going to kill her and the baby, be tried and convicted for it—death for her, worse than death for him, all their lives wasted, for nothing. She’d lost contact with Drew, he was entirely Eric’s now. When her family died, Drew would, once again, be left behind.
They were at the top of the stairs. Was he going to push her down? She grabbed the banister with both hands. He kept cutting, a silver whisper, light through the cotton dress, heavier at the gathered pleats on her shoulders. A hard snap, and he was through the elastic back of her bra. Frowning in his concentration, his tongue sticking out between his lips like a little child trying to draw equilateral triangles, he cut the bra straps and pulled it off her. Two last snicks, one at each hip, and she was naked.
“You need a bath,” Drew said. “Let’s go.”
He pointed the knife at her belly button, and she let go of the banister and walked into the bathroom.
“We’re broke,” Eric said. “We can’t go on like this.”
“Eric, you can’t listen to him. Look around you, look at what you’re doing.”
He waved the knife, and she got into the bathtub. He leaned over the tub, keeping the knife, sideways in his left hand, between Lacey and the shower curtain, while he reached over with his right hand to turn on the tap. In that moment, when he was so badly balanced, she could have tried to kick him and escape, but by the time she thought of it, it was too late. The water was running in, cold around her toes. He turned the tap to hot, and it began to steam at the other end of the bath.
“Sit,” he said.
“No.” She should have done this ten minutes ago. Drew didn’t want to cut her, he’d never used a knife. She should have made her stand in the kitchen, where he’d never hurt anybody yet. “No, I won’t.”
“Sit.” He pressed the point of the knife at the notch of her collarbone and pulled it downward, and the skin opened in a long straight line between her breasts. She felt a line of cold but not pain; she decided to let it hurt later. “Sit down in the nice hot water.”
“No.” She’d take the blade in her hands if she had to, but she wasn’t getting in a bath with Andrew Halliday again. “Eric, listen!”
“Listen,” Lex said. He stood in the bathroom doorway, his hands kneading the air in front of him. “She didn’t do it.”
“Shut up,” Drew said.
“My mama didn’t kill Dorothy.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Drew shouted.
“Now you can tell the truth,” Lacey said. “You can tell the truth right now, you’ve waited so long. Now you can do it.” Repetition and discipline. “You have to do it.” She threw her voice at him, the teacher’s voice that ruled the room. “Now.”
“Mama was asleep. I wanted to help. I put the baby in the bath. And I went to my room to get a boat for her. And I came back. And she was under the water and she wasn’t moving. So I turned the water off and I went back to my room. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Shut up.” Drew turned away from the bathtub and held the knife up as if it could protect him from Lex’s words, cut them from the air. “I didn’t do it,” Drew said.
“I did it,” Lex said. “I let her die, and Daddy killed everybody and I never told, I never told that it was me; it was my fault and I never told.”
“It wasn’t me,” Drew said. He ran at Lex, head down and fists waving, a child so angry he had forgotten how to fight, forgotten the knife in his hand. Lex fell back before him, both hands out, backward into the hall.
Lacey turned the water off and pulled Eric’s brown bathrobe from the hook beside the towels. She ran out of the bathroom but stopped in the doorway as a contraction turned her knees to water. Braxton Hicks, not real labor—if only she were in Dr. Vlk’s office right now, anywhere but here. She sank to her knees in the hallway between the bathroom and the stairs. Sideways, Eric, sideways. Lex Hall is Andrew Halliday Junior, and Drew is all that he could not bear to remember, Drew is all that he left behind; let them fight it out between them. Move sideways.
“Make him stop,” she said. “Don’t let him hurt himself.”
“Stay back,” and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was Eric’s voice or Drew’s. “Stay back,” he said again, whoever he was. “Lacey, stay back.”
They were at her feet. She put out her bleeding hand as if she could stop them. Lex clung to Drew, arms and legs wrapped tight, and Lacey pulled up the teacher’s voice one last time: “Sideways. Now.”
They rolled over each other at t
he top of the stairs, and Eric’s foot shot out and felt for the banister post, braced and pushed. They fell, Eric and Lex and Drew and the knife together, into blood and silence. Lacey waited for the contraction to pass, so she could go and call for help.
Chapter Fifty-one
THE NURSE ADJUSTED THE STRAP around Lacey’s belly, and the baby’s pulse flashed on the monitor’s screen, 183. “Is that fast?” Lacey said. She preferred the other machine, the one that said hush-hush. This one showed the baby’s pulse in a jagged blue line with a red number. She tugged the strap; the line flattened, the red number dropped to zero, and the nurse made an impatient noise and pulled it back into position. The number jumped to 208, and adrenaline prickled in Lacey’s veins. She pretended not to see the watcher by her bed, the cop with his clipboard, waiting to question her. “It’s getting faster,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s normal,” the nurse said. She turned the machine so Lacey could see the screen without craning her neck. “He’s fine; you’re both fine. Dr. Vlk will be here soon. I’ll go find out how Dad’s doing, okay?”
Lacey had come to the hospital in the ambulance, holding Eric’s hand; he was unconscious but breathing, the EMTs said, monitoring his breath, flashing lights into his eyes. He was stretchered into the emergency room, and a nurse came with a wheelchair to take her up to Labor and Delivery, depositing her in a curtained cubicle with a frighteningly narrow bed. She clutched the sides to keep from rolling off. Lex had come in a different ambulance, followed by police.
“Can you talk now, Ms. Miszlak?” There were two cops. One was waiting in the ER for news of Eric, and this one had followed her upstairs. She liked him; he had a warm, basset-hound face, creased by years of sympathy. He was not her ally, she reminded herself. He was no friend of hers. “Tell me what happened,” he invited.
Lacey settled into the pillows. After everything they’d gone through, they weren’t out of danger yet. She was exhausted; she wanted to cry, she wanted to sleep, but first she wanted an ultrasound to tell her the baby was safe. What did the police want from her—what kind of trouble was this? She needed time to think.
“I need to know if my husband’s okay,” she said. She had squeezed his hand in the ambulance, until the EMT pushed her aside, and his hand had been utterly unresponsive, all expression and personality wiped out of his face; she had never seen him like that, even in his deepest sleep.
“The man in your house. He’s someone you know?”
“Lex Hall. My husband’s a lawyer, he’s a client. And he’s my neighbor’s nephew. What about Lex, is he okay?”
Oh, that sympathetic look; she didn’t trust him at all. “We don’t know yet.”
That meant he was dead. Lacey laid her hands over the monitor belt and made her fingers relax. The baby’s pulse stayed steady at 179. Lex dead. Surely this meant Drew was gone, Andrew Halliday was made whole, the lost child and the broken man. Her eyes overflowed, and she reached for the tissues on the table and blew her nose.
The curtain opened and Eric’s uncle Floyd sailed in, jovial in his pink seersucker suit and a maroon bow tie. “You answering questions without me, girl?” he boomed.
Lacey gaped at him. “Why not?”
“You been cautioned?”
“She needs to be cautioned?” the cop said.
“Does she?” Floyd said.
That was all the caution she needed. Drew had killed Lex, destroying the memory he could not endure. For the world and the law, there was no Drew. If Lex was dead, Eric had killed him. His freedom, their future, depended on Lacey’s words. She gathered her shattered thoughts. Water in the tub, blood on the stairs—Lacey in a bathrobe, Eric with a knife. What narrative could make sense of this? The stranger in the house, always the same stranger, from the beginning.
“Uncle Floyd,” she said. “How is Eric? Have you seen him?”
He dragged a metal chair through the curtain and sat at the head of her bed, where he could watch the fetal monitor. “Baby’s still good,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”
“He’s conscious?”
“Not yet. Docs say there’s a bad concussion and a lot of broken bones. They’re putting him back together. The knife stayed in Hall. I knew he was trouble. We told him to get a different lawyer,” he said to the cop, “and he took it bad.”
“What bones?” Lacey said. “He’s not—it’s not his spine? He’s not paralyzed?”
“Legs, hip, arm, skull fracture. Don’t worry, girl, he’ll pull through.”
“Tell me what happened,” the cop said.
Someone was interviewing Harry Rakoczy, right now. Someone was interviewing Lex Hall’s wife. Ella Dane, somewhere in this same hospital with Jack—someone would find her soon and question her. Lacey braced herself and said, “Okay, so. This is how it is. I only met Lex a couple times at Harry’s house when he brought the baby over. Something happened last night with him and his ex, I guess, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me what you don’t know, ma’am. Tell me what you know. Where were you last night?”
“I stayed at Harry’s.” How odd that must sound to them; why hadn’t she been in her own house, right next door? “Eric and I had a fight. Mom’s boyfriend fell down the stairs so she was here with him, and I didn’t want to be alone. You know, in case I went into labor.”
“Lots of people fall down those stairs, seems like,” the cop said.
He had no idea. “We need to get a contractor to look at them,” Lacey said.
“What did you and your husband fight about?”
“Money. It was stupid. He spent the night I don’t know where . . .”
“With me,” Floyd said, to Lacey’s surprise. “At my girlfriend’s condo.”
“And this morning?” the cop said.
The baby’s pulse surged to 210. They all watched it, the living lie detector. What would Harry and Ella Dane say—what could they say? Ella Dane might say anything. “My mom thinks the house is haunted,” Lacey said. Floyd buzzed his lips, and the cop gave him a reproachful look. “I can’t help it, that’s what she thinks. She and her boyfriend were doing a ritual to make it safe; that’s when he fell.” The baby’s pulse fell to 180. “It sounds crazy, I’m sorry, but that’s what they did. I stayed with Harry. Lex came over with his baby.”
“When?”
“How would I know? I had a lot on my mind. In the morning I went home.” Theo. Theo had gone back and forth between the Miszlak and Rakoczy houses. There would be evidence of that. “I took Lex’s baby for a few minutes so Lex and Harry could talk. Then Harry came and took her back. And then Lex came over, and he was shouting, crazy.” And he was dead, the one witness who could never refute her testimony. “Yelling, screaming, I don’t know what. He broke a plant on my porch.” Would Harry admit to breaking the plant? If he did, she’d say she’d only heard the smash and had assumed it was Lex. “I don’t know what he wanted.”
“I do,” Floyd said. “He wanted Eric.”
Corroboration. She must be doing all right. “So Eric came home and they talked, him and Lex. I was . . .” And where was she? If they questioned Eric before she had a chance to talk to him—his concussion would cover any discrepancies. “I was running a bath. Lex came upstairs, and he had the knife.” Eric had been holding the knife; her fingerprints were on it, too. Her knife from her kitchen, why not. “Eric got the knife away from Lex, they were fighting and they fell down the stairs.”
“Did you let Hall in?” the cop said.
“I might have left the door unlocked, I don’t remember.”
The cop shook his head at her, Stupid woman, leaving the door unlocked, you think your neighborhood’s so nice but if you knew what I knew, and she knew he was convinced. Floyd patted Lacey’s hand and said to the cop, “You got enough? This girl needs to rest, now.”
“We might have some more questions later.”
“You got more questions, you come to me,” Floyd said. He waited until the co
p left and added, “That goes double for you. They got questions, you call me. Got it?”
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Lacey said.
“You keep telling them that.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “You done good. I’ll keep an eye on the boy for you.”
Left alone, Lacey watched the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, steady at 180. Safe and whole. She grabbed the sheet with both hands and pulled it up, bunching it in a mass on her knees. The thought of the house she now possessed, the family she had defended, left her desolate. Dropping her face into the bundled sheet, she sobbed for that wasted, lost, and ruined life, the child she had failed to save, for Lex, for Drew.
Chapter Fifty-two
ON HER RELEASE from the hospital, Lacey spent a few days at the Skyview, until it was time for Eric to come home. She stood for three minutes on the front porch, waiting for the courage to open it. Then she got tired of waiting and opened it anyway, the adrenaline running so hot she could almost see the nerves blazing under her skin, and the house was empty.
Harry had been busy while she was gone. He’d brought in some young people—college-aged students and former students—to build a ramp from the driveway to the front door, and stained the wood and painted the railing to match the porch. He also brought over some orange chrysanthemums, and two purple curly-leaf cabbages in stone urns, one for either side of the front door.
“In May, you can replace them with geraniums,” he said.
“Stop giving me things,” she told him. They stood in the doorway between the cabbage urns, watching the road, waiting for Ella Dane and Eric. She’d seen those urns at Home Depot, seventy dollars each. “No more things. I don’t want anything from you.”
“How’s the baby?” Harry asked.
“You don’t have the right to ask me that.”
She had pictures of the baby in her wallet, yesterday’s ultrasounds. The lower part of his body was a blur of angles and loops, but Dr. Vlk assured her he wasn’t half octopus, he had tangled himself up in the umbilical cord in an entirely normal way.