When Eric’s family money disappeared, he sold the car so she could keep her ring. He said it was because the ring would keep its value but the car would only depreciate. He’d done that for her, and so she had to deal with Drew for him, and for that, obviously, she’d have to make Drew show himself. Now or never, she decided.
“Drew,” she called when Eric and Ella Dane were both at work, “come here, I want to talk to you.”
Then she listened to herself. Come here, I want to talk to you. No noisy boy would obey a summons like that. When she wanted her noisy boys’ attention, she turned her back on them and got involved in something they couldn’t see. Chase them and they run. Lead them and they follow.
She pulled a tube of sugar-cookie dough out of the refrigerator. Ella Dane said a person might as well eat marshmallows—the worst thing she could think of—but it was Eric’s weakness. The only thing he loved better than a cookie fresh from the oven was a chunk of raw dough hacked off the tube. He ate it in the middle of the night, went through three tubes a week, and probably thought she didn’t notice.
She sliced the cookies onto a tray and slid them into the oven. It was going to work. She felt it already, a sense of gathering in, of presence, the feeling her senses had interpreted as darkness when she first entered the house. It wasn’t darkness, though she couldn’t see through it. It was more like pressure, breathlessness, as if the air had curdled into some denser substance. Like souring milk, or scabbing blood. Drew was watching.
Her body reacted with fear. The muscles of her belly pulled tight, and her womb hardened—breathlessness, pressure, and the baby shoved a knee into her ribs. A contraction, not a real one: they were called Braxton Hicks contractions, Dr. Vlk said at her last appointment, and they were for practice. Not to panic, it wasn’t really labor. Lacey asked how she would know when real labor started, and Dr. Vlk laughed out loud.
Lacey practiced breathing. This was what she wanted: Drew to appear, so she could question him. She spread her school supplies over the kitchen table. The beautiful white paper, the colored construction paper, the crayons and markers and scissors and glue, the green binder. Lacey felt another pain under her heart, and this was no contraction. She wished she could be in the classroom right now, any classroom. Even if only as a substitute or an aide, she should be with real children, not Drew.
She took the latest ultrasound out from under the strawberry magnet on the refrigerator and laid the picture on the table. Crescent streaks of lighter and darker gray marred the black-and-white image. She chose a piece of light green construction paper and a gray crayon. When she had a good outline of the baby’s profile, she reached for the blue, and then the oven timer went off.
The cookies were gold coins with bronze edges. She stirred cinnamon and sugar and sprinkled the mixture over the hot cookies, then spatulaed two of them onto a plate. When she turned, Drew was there. How real he seemed, down to the sunlight glistening white on the few individual hairs that haloed his blond mop, and the shadows of his eyelashes on his cheeks. He hunched over a sheet of paper, drawing fast and hard, the way little boys drew, concerned not so much with accuracy as with getting the idea down on paper while it was whole in their minds.
“Hey,” she said lightly, while her heartbeat whirred in her ears. “Want a cookie?”
Could he eat? He’d been hungry the night she’d met him in the kitchen, but maybe it was a dream. “Sure,” he said. He took the black crayon and drew hard, using the flat end. That was never good. She put the plate of cookies next to him.
His left hand crawled over to the cookies. He grabbed one and munched it, and the sticky crumbs fell on his picture. The black crayon whirled over them, pressing cinnamon and hot grease into the paper.
He ate the cookie. The cookie disappeared. Where could it be going?
“Milk?” Lacey suggested, and she interpreted his grunt as a yes. He drank the milk, and it beaded on the transparent down of his upper lip. “Can I see?” she asked.
He shoved the picture toward her. A thick black whirling of lines, disturbingly similar to her ultrasound, and behind the whirl, a stick figure family. Father, mother, three boys.
“That’s your family? I’m drawing my baby,” she said. She let the blue crayon float over the gray lines she had already drawn. She drew in rapid, nervy jabs, spidery lines, light shapes thickening as she became sure. She shaded the baby’s arm and sketched a suggestion of umbilical coils, fleshy and serpentine.
“I didn’t draw the baby yet,” Drew said. He scrawled a stylized cradle with a big head and a stick-figure body, and a ram’s-horn curve on the side of the baby’s head. This was his symbol for female hair, because he’d drawn the same sign on his mother. “She was noisy,” he said. “She cried all the time.” He wrote WAH in huge letters over the baby’s head, pressing with the flat end of the crayon to lay the wax down in thick flakes.