Starter House(13)

“You don’t know how crazy she makes me,” Lacey said.

“She means well.”

“She’ll do some kind of moon ritual and burn weird candles.” She would pray for the baby, in her way; Lacey couldn’t stand the idea. She didn’t want Ella Dane having any opinions about this pregnancy, advising Lacey what to eat and what to avoid. If Lacey had been thinking clearly, those first few weeks of her pregnancy, she wouldn’t have told Ella Dane about it at all—not until the baby was born. After the mess she’d made of Lacey’s childhood, she had no right. “You’ll hate it,” Lacey said.

“You can’t stay here alone all day in bed. What if you need something?”

“I could call you.”

“I’ll be working. You can’t always get me.” He turned his back on her to wash his hands at the sink. “Finish your pizza,” he said. “You’ve got to eat. For the baby.”

Lacey’s stomach twisted again. She couldn’t tell: Was it hunger, nausea, rage? They all felt the same. Eric was right. The baby needed food. She waited until he left the room before she took another bite.





Chapter Six

TWO WEEKS LATER, on the first day of school, Lacey woke at eight, breathless, with her conscience biting her heart. Having been student and then teacher since the age of five, she could not shake the feeling that she was urgently wanted somewhere else.

By eight thirty she was at the kitchen table, her laptop open and a cup of decaf cooling beside her. She was supposed to be choosing an obstetrician. It had taken her half an hour to find her way into the provider list for Eric’s new insurance; everybody else had grown up with computers and cell phones since elementary school, but Lacey had been lucky to have a working calculator, and she still wasn’t entirely comfortable on the Internet. Now she was passed from one your-call-is-important-to-us hold to another, from receptionist to nurse, each handing her along as soon as she said placental abruption. Every nurse told her the doctor’s schedule was full. She jumped to YourBabyNow.net to see what her baby was doing at eighteen weeks. She loved this website, her online home.

He was growing a layer of fur called lanugo all over his body. He was the size of a lime. Lacey cupped her hand. The entire hairy child could fit into her palm, and she wouldn’t even stretch her fingers. And in a month, he’d be big enough to survive on his own—just barely, and two months would be better, or three—she could hardly bear to imagine it, after all that bleeding. Better, safer, to think of other things.

Her mother came up behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. Lacey sighed and let the roots of her neck relax under Ella Dane Kendall’s strong hands. “I can’t find a doctor,” she said. Last week, Eric had taken an afternoon off work to drive her to her old OB in Columbia, but that wasn’t a long-term plan. In all Greeneburg, there had to be one doctor who would take her.

“You should look for a doula and not a Western death doctor.”

“Insurance only covers the Western death doctors. And they don’t want me because, you know, I might die.”

“I know what you need.” Ella Dane stopped rubbing Lacey’s shoulders and busied herself at the stove, making some kind of tea.

“No herbs,” Lacey said. When she went to college, her mother’s life became an unending self-improvement project: cruelty-free cosmetics, organic clothing, veganism, bearded spiritual men. Ella Dane meant well, but what kind of life was it, when the woman’s only long-term relationship was with the world’s nastiest dog? She came to their aid without complaint, keeping their house clean—well, cleanish—even though she refused to use the vacuum cleaner (it scrambled the feng shui, she said). Lacey tried to be grateful, without much success. She means well, means well, means well was Lacey’s mantra; Ella Dane threw out all the cleaners and used vinegar for most purposes, oil with a few drops of essential sage for the furniture, and now the living room smelled like an Italian salad. And Bibbits the vegan poodle, whom Lacey remembered as a frisky thing with a habit of nipping, had taken to vomiting in corners and coughing for hours, rolling his bloodshot eyes in the most pitiable way. Lacey wasn’t the only one who needed a Western death doctor, but Ella Dane had shaken off her suggestion of a vet. Her dog didn’t need chemicals. But she meant well. And she had sensed no angry, unwelcoming presence in the house. A happy house, she’d said. You did well.

Then what was that darkness, the thing that had fallen down the stairs? Nothing at all. Low blood sugar. Vertigo.

“I’m going to lie down for a while,” Lacey said to Ella Dane. She’d find a doctor later.