“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, birthdays, 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.”