His eyes glimmered, catching a light from outside. “I live here.”
“It’s my house.”
“It was my house first.”
Child’s logic, unassailable. Two children scuffling over a classroom toy. I had it first. “It’s not your house anymore,” she said. There was always one question to ask a lost child. “Where’s your mother?”
“Can’t I stay? You can be my mother.”
“No. That can never happen. Go away.”
“I’ll be good this time, I promise, please.”
Lacey felt herself weaken. This was her failing as a teacher, and when she went back to the classroom, she would have to harden her heart. She let children turn in their homework late. She accepted their excuses, not because they were believable, but because of the urgent young voices, the supplication so utterly sincere. She couldn’t say no. Teachers learned to deny even the pleading of angels; Lacey didn’t know how.
“If you’re good,” she said, hating her own weakness, unable to refuse.
He rushed toward her with a sweep like the wind. She closed her eyes and stepped back, covering her belly with both arms. “Don’t touch me. No, no.” She took another step backward into vertigo, and she stopped moving and sank down. She found herself sitting on her bed, in the dark, her head awash in dreams and echoes of dreams.
None of it had happened. Panic burned in her throat, just the same. She took her pulse and it was one hundred fifty. She’d read an article on YourBabyNow.net about dreams. It was all completely normal. Real. Not real. She listened to the quiet creaking of the walls. There was no blood, no water, no tugboat, no abandoned child. Only the crazy pregnancy dreams, one after the other. They never happened, they meant nothing at all.
She folded her pillow and clutched it under her head. The milk. She saw the milk in her mind, she knew where it was: sitting on the counter where she had left it, the white plastic jug sweating big beads of condensation. By morning, the surface would be dry and the milk sour. Eric would be irritated and Ella Dane would lecture her about waste.
She wasn’t getting up again, to risk walking into another dream. She might be dreaming even now. Better to lie here quietly. In the kitchen, all by itself, the refrigerator door swung shut, and the quality of light coming in under Lacey’s door changed from blue to dull orange.
Chapter Eleven
ERIC HATED TO ADMIT IT, and he’d never say it to Lacey who loved the house so much and had been determined to buy before the baby was born, but the Realtor had been right. They should have rented for a year or two. Yes, it was a bargain, ninety-five thousand for a house that would be worth twice as much in five years, but he couldn’t afford problems at home; he had to focus. There was the stickiness of the air at the threshold, the house’s resistance every time he entered, the sense of a complete life, compact, hidden, self-sufficient, going on without him.
Lacey needed the house. All pregnant women nested, and it had hit Lacey hard. And he was the same—he’d bought the furniture, he’d summoned Ella Dane Kendall to live with them. They’d rushed into everything together, on the run from the families that had failed them, wanting the marriage, the house, the baby all at once. They should have waited.
Too late; they were committed now, and they’d have to see it through. Even though he had no money, less than no money, he went out to eat with his uncle and colleagues. He needed better cases, and so he had to stay in communication with the firm, not lurk in his office like a guilty secret shut away in the dark. It was better than going home, where every day he felt less necessary and less welcome—Ella Dane made little shrines on plates, here a lavender candle on a layer of rock salt, there an amethyst crystal in a dirty old bird’s nest, and she was furious if he moved them. And now that Lacey was sleeping downstairs, her memory dwindled from the bedroom along with the light rose-citrus scent of the sachet in her lingerie drawer. It was no longer their room, it was any room; he slid his shirt hangers into her side of the closet, put his razor by one of the double sinks and his toothbrush by the other, and it was as if she’d never lived there. Her room downstairs was a different world, smelling of dog and Ella Dane’s spices. Some days, Lacey didn’t even brush her hair. Who was this woman?
Uncle Floyd had a standing reservation for Abernathy’s large corner booth. For the third evening in a row, Eric joined the rest of Moranis Miszlak for beer and wings. “Good work today,” Uncle Floyd said. “It helps when the judge is a moron.”
“Can’t count on that,” Eric said. He’d argued in family court on behalf of a client who had discovered his six-year-old wasn’t really his; surprisingly, the judge rescinded the child support order until the ex-wife located the child’s biological father.