“She’s asleep,” Lacey said. At the sound of her father’s voice, Theo raised an animal howl, and this time she rejected the carrot with contempt.
“She’s hungry,” Lex said. “I’m going to give her oatmeal and applesauce.”
“Good luck with that,” Lacey said. She yawned until her jaw hinge popped. Had she ever been so tired? Five thirty. She used to get up at this hour every day, to be at work in time to supervise the early arrivals in bus-holding. She was out of the habit now, and early morning was a foreign world. She leaned against the kitchen wall, watching as Lex pushed oatmeal at Theo, who squalled and struck the spoon away. Clots of oatmeal flew across the room in every direction, and the applesauce was no better received.
“Please,” Lex begged Theo. “It’s good for you.”
He shoveled in a spoonful of applesauce. Her mouth hung open, and the applesauce dribbled out until she expelled the last slimy smear with her tongue. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “She won’t eat good food, and she’s going to get sick and die and I can’t help her.” He set her on the floor, and she tipped forward to hold her weight on her fists. “She’ll die,” he said. “It’s all my fault, and there’s nothing I can do!” And hungry Theo lifted her shrill cries into his wail of despair.
Harry came into the kitchen. “Let me feed her,” he suggested. “Go on into the other room and think quiet thoughts. Discipline your mind, Junior, or at least your voice.”
Lex fled, and Lacey followed him, wanting to help. As she left the kitchen, she heard Harry ask, “If I put sugar in the oatmeal, would you eat it?” Soothed by his slow voice, Theo squawked. “You’re a roly-poly baby doll, aren’t you,” Harry said. “How about just a taste of brown sugar, pudgy puss.” He sang to a melody from Mary Poppins, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the soluble fiber go down, the soluble fiber go down, the soluble fiber go down . . .”
Lacey found Lex in the living room, Harry’s teaching room, pulling stacks of music out of the bookshelves. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Paper. Somebody showed me. It made my eyes feel good.” He ripped out the end sheet from the piano accompaniment to a book of Mozart sonatas. He snatched a pencil from Harry’s music stand and sprawled on the floor, scribbling like a child. Lacey watched the shapes forming.
They were her own shapes, her circles that the soft edge of the pencil shaded into spheres, her cones and cubes. They were the shapes she taught to her wild children, her noisy boys, to keep their twitching hands busy, a soothing habit for their mind. She had taught dozens of children these shapes. Most recently, Drew.
Lex ripped the end page out of another volume of sonatas. His pencil moved slowly, and the shapes had a darker edge, sure and firm. She loved this moment, whenever it came: exactly now, when order bloomed in a disordered mind. The shapes moved from hand to eye to heart, and she could touch the shoulder of the noisy boy driven wild by his own mute passions, and say, “Tell me about it,” so she did it now, though the suffering child was forty-eight years old.
“She’ll be fat like her mother,” Lex said. He drew an oval, pulled two lines downward to create a curve-topped triangle, and shaded it into a cone. “Jeanne’s got the diabetes already, and so does her mother. Theo could die. People die of it.”
“They do,” Lacey agreed. “You know she’s eating oatmeal now?”
Lex hunched his shoulders in a child’s sulking shrug.
“Harry’s your uncle, isn’t he?” Lacey said.
Another child’s shrug. Lacey felt irritated. He had no right, a grown man with a wife (almost ex) and a baby, to pout on the floor and tear up other people’s books, like a little kid. “You’re Andrew Halliday,” she said. “Junior.”
“Not anymore.”
“You used to live in my house.”
“Not anymore, no no.”
“Somebody’s still there. One of your family. He says he’s called Drew. He’s stuck there and he can’t leave. He needs you.” He needs you to go home and die for him. “He needs you to tell him it’s not his house; he has to go on to where your mother is. He needs—”
The pencil ripped through the paper. Lex squeezed both pages into a ball and threw it across the room. He surged to his feet and Lacey pulled herself away, instinctively folding both arms across her belly. She had to get Lex into that house. Lex would recognize Drew and say his real name; this had to work.
“No,” Lex said. “I’m not allowed to go back there. Other people live there now.”