Starter House(12)
“Come see the bedroom.”
Lacey grabbed Eric’s hand, ignoring the pain that shot across her palm. “How did you do this? All in one night?”
“You don’t get through law school by sleeping. Come and see.”
Eager to see and approve the bedroom, she pulled him to the foot of the stairs. They were finished with the same deep-amber oak flooring as the rest of the downstairs, with a runner of red carpet coming down, held in place by brass rods on each step. That was so typical of Eric, the exact detail, his concern that she might slip on the glassy wood. In the kitchen, she knew, he had already replaced the broken window.
She sensed something—not a sound, but an approach—and she looked up the stairs. Something dark rushed down, something too dense and hectic to see. Blackness seized her by the knees. It hit her all at once, driving into her breastbone. She coughed and pulled for air, and her lungs resisted, unwilling to open again. To breathe felt like an effort against life, as if she had to open her mouth underwater.
“Lacey,” Eric said urgently. “What’s wrong?”
Something in the house. Something pushing back against the furniture—the thing that had tried to keep her out, sealing itself against the key, slashing her with the broken window. When she was eight, her mother had had the chance to house-sit for a friend of a friend who was traveling to Tanzania: six months in a big house, free rent and utilities, and even some extra pay for taking care of the dogs. Her mother had walked into the house and out again. This house doesn’t want me, she’d said, and so she and Lacey spent the winter moving from one motel to another. Lacey thought she felt it now, some resentful force pushing down the stairs, pushing her out.
Unacceptable. Not this house. This house had loved her from the moment they met, the house stripped of shutters and carpet, Lacey with her hand full of pistachio shells on the sunny street. This dizziness was nothing, loss of blood, maybe. She shook her head. “Some kind of weird vertigo. I’m fine.”
“You looked like you might pass out.” Eric glanced up the stairs, then took her elbow and steered her into the kitchen. “I bet you’re hungry.”
Lacey seized on this explanation. “If you saw what they fed me . . . I’m starved.”
She was disappointed to see their old dinette in the kitchen. “We’re eating in here for now,” Eric said. “We can’t do the dining room till we’ve paid off the rest. Baby’s room first. We’ll do that when you feel better.”
“Maybe in a month.” Yesterday the doctor had told her the baby would be viable in six weeks. Just barely viable, and you have to keep him in the oven as long as you can. Take care of yourself. Don’t lift anything over ten pounds. Just six weeks to go. She wouldn’t buy a crib until then: it would be tempting fate.
They sat at the Formica dinette, and it was just like back in Columbia, when Eric was in law school and Lacey taught fourth grade, the two of them in their nest, so cozy and sweet. Eric frowned at the chipped orange table and said, “Butcher block. After the dining room.” He slid two slices of pizza onto a paper plate.
She loved it when he made pizza. He made the dough from scratch, and somehow, in the midst of buying the furniture and unpacking all their things, he’d found time to pick up her favorite ingredients. The anchovies and the meaty little black kalamata olives, the artichoke hearts cured in olive oil. She craved such salty, intense flavors since getting pregnant. He’d left one-third of the pizza plain cheese for himself.
“So I called your mother,” he said.
Lacey put the second slice back down onto her plate. “What for?”
“The doctor says you’re on bed rest. Your mother’s coming to help us out.”
“No.” Lacey wasn’t hungry anymore. The anchovies, so delicious a moment ago, turned her stomach. “She makes me crazy.”
How could she make him understand? She knew how to be Eric Miszlak’s wife, hardworking and sensible and supportive, a girl who kept her head in a crisis; she knew how to be Ella Dane Kendall’s daughter, quiet and sensitive, gifted with spiritual talents not yet developed. She could not possibly be both at once. And what if Lacey’s mother came in and felt that force pushing down the stairs, something in the house denying her right to be there? Furniture wouldn’t anchor Ella Dane Kendall to any house; she would insist they leave, which Lacey would never do. Ella Dane wouldn’t believe what it meant to Lacey, to have a real home at last.
It was already too late to explain her mother to Eric, years too late. Lacey had told him stories of her unsettled childhood as adventures, comedies, when they were dating. She hadn’t wanted to be that girl, the one who was needy and damaged, the work in progress, the fixer-upper, and so she laughed and made faces and shaped the stories with her hands. Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ? she would say. The time Ella Dane’s then boyfriend poured bleach on all their clothes; the time Ella Dane smuggled a litter of puppies into a motel; the time they had spent three weeks one July sleeping in the car outside a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach, sneaking in to the breakfast buffet and the swimming pool. It was too late to tell the stories again as the humiliating horrors they had truly been—to Eric, who had fallen over himself laughing at the idea of a fancy hotel in Myrtle Beach. She hadn’t even known that was funny.