“Let me buzz the nurse; all you have to do is tell them your name and they’ll take you straight to your mom’s room,” she said.
“No, they won’t. They never will.”
Lacey’s eyes flooded for his sake. It was partly the hormones that made her weepy, partly this one dirty, hopeful, affectionate child, this one loving and wounded heart, the emblem of so many. She pressed the call button, but when she said, “They’re coming,” the child was gone.
“What do you need here, Mom?” the nurse asked.
“There was a little boy. He couldn’t find his mother.”
“I’ll find him.”
Lacey waited for her to come back and tell her the child had been found. She never did. The hospital hummed and whispered, and every time Lacey fell asleep, a door banged, or someone’s footsteps ran fast and hard outside her room. She counted boxes, everything that needed to be unpacked, all that work she had to do tomorrow, the empty house waiting to be filled. She drifted off and spent the night working in her dreams, unloading box after box after box of things she didn’t even know she owned, opening door after door in a house that had no end.
Chapter Five
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, when Eric brought her home in the Mitsubishi, she discovered he had done more than turn in the U-Haul and pick up the car. He opened the front door and Lacey stepped into a room she didn’t recognize. He laughed at her surprise. “The magic of same-day delivery,” he said. “You like it?”
When they were dating and he’d had money, Eric had been the master of romantic surprises. He took her on the most astonishing extravagant dates: a balloon ride, a cabin in the Smokies, a cruise to Alaska. Even when the money went away, he’d live on peanut butter sandwiches for two weeks to save his lunch budget for a special meal. And now he’d furnished the house. He’d bought real furniture: sofa, loveseat, and chair in dark red leather—end tables and a coffee table, dark walnut—and the most perfect lamps, ornate brass columns with gold linen shades and tassels. Everything had ball-and-claw feet. Her whole life, she had longed for furniture with ball-and-claw feet, furniture that announced itself: I am here, and here I stay.
“If you don’t like it, we’ve got three days to exchange it,” Eric said.
“It’s perfect. Oh, bookshelves! Real wood, no more plastic. I feel like such a grown-up.” The bookcase was bolted into the wall, baby-safe already, and Eric had left the bottom three shelves empty, perfect for the baby’s books and toys.
“There’s no art. You can put up some of your things. I always liked that big coffee cup.”
Lacey looked at the blank wall between the two big windows, and her mind flashed to the same wall in Harry Rakoczy’s house next door: his sister, Dora, charcoal under glass, her face tilted against the violin, her long wild hair.
She loved the furniture, but what had Eric done? He’d been counting pennies ever since her last day of school; he’d lost his temper over fifty dollars to keep the moving van overnight, twenty dollars to replace the dishes, and now this? “Are you sure?” she said.
She wanted the furniture. It was everything she wanted: a houseful of things that couldn’t be packed up and moved overnight, a home with weight, an anchor for her life. This was the home she’d drawn in her school notebooks, all those nomadic years with her mother. These beautiful rooms. Eric knew what she wanted; but she knew what he needed. She tried again, knowing she had to voice her doubt as a true question; she had to give him the chance to change his mind.
“Are you sure we can afford this?” she said. “If it’s too much, we could wait.”
“There’s no interest for six months. Don’t you like it?”
He sounded disappointed, and of course she liked it—he always knew what she liked. It would have been fun, though, to have chosen the furniture herself, to have hunted through the store with Eric. An ungrateful thought, and she pushed it away: in the end she would have picked precisely this. “I love it,” she said. The bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, and there were all the books and CDs, along with his grandmother’s Ukrainian Easter eggs in Waterford crystal eggcups. All that work. She knew, without asking, that he had unpacked every box except those marked Lacey Classroom, flattened the boxes, and tied them in a stack in the garage. And the Classroom boxes were up in the attic, and when she opened them a year from now, maybe two, they would smell of crayons and the future. “And you unpacked all this,” she said, sighing. “I worried about it all night.”