Starter House(113)

“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.”

“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.”