“That’s in Colorado?”
“That’s my niece. Greeley Honeywick. She’s in Utah. The number is, here it is, I have to unfold the paper, the number is seven. Four. One. Four. Two.” He stopped.
Lacey waited. “Are there more numbers?” she asked finally.
“No.”
“Her name’s Greeley Honeywick, and she lives in Utah?”
The old man didn’t answer. He had wandered away from the telephone again. For five minutes, Lacey listened to the vague puttering of his day, and eventually she hung up; there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
“Greeley Honeywick,” she said out loud and turned to find Drew, paper in hand.
“No,” he said. “You can’t talk to her.”
“Let me see your leaf. Look how all the veins came up when you did it lightly.”
“I don’t want people talking about me. They keep doing it. Talking and talking.”
“Drew,” Lacey said in her patience-and-understanding voice, “sweetie, I understand that you’re angry and upset. Can you tell me why?”
“No!” he shrieked and suddenly he flew at her, into her and through her, breaking against her body in a cold wave. The sense of the real child vanished, and he was a disembodied power, all will and fury. For a moment, the cold crawled over her like a tide of ants. Another moment, and all the ants bit and burrowed inward. Lacey sank into a kitchen chair. She tugged her blouse away from her body, expecting to see blood spurting from every pore: nothing. Was it all illusion, seeing, hearing, touching him?
The cookies disappeared when he ate them. His pictures were real. These things happened, and this, the cold wave, this was the illusion. It had to be; anything else was insupportable. As Lacey sat at her kitchen table, she felt something else that was surely real. The vise of a Braxton Hicks contraction closed over her belly, and then kept tightening. She felt the feather tickle, the tongue of blood on her thighs.
No, no. Not after all this time, she couldn’t lose him now, it wasn’t fair.
Twenty-nine weeks. Third trimester, her baby would live, he would be born alive. She’d looked just this morning and the website said the chances of survival were 84 percent, a high C-plus, almost a B. She grabbed her car keys. No time for an ambulance. Her mind flicked into crisis control, no panic, no fear, time for that later, now she had to act. If the placenta unzipped, he wouldn’t die right away. She had a little time. Dr. Vlk’s office was ten minutes closer than the hospital, so she went there, stopping at red lights, signaling for turns. Careful, careful.
The problem was what to do when she got there. Lacey sat in the car in the parking lot of Women’s Medical Services, Dr. Vlk’s office. She couldn’t get out of the car; standing was too dangerous. She pressed her thighs together, feeling the blood bubbles bursting as steadily as air reaching the surface in a large aquarium. One by one they grew, forced their way out of her body, and opened slickly against her skin. She couldn’t move, but she couldn’t stay in the car. “Help me,” she whimpered, and answered herself with the teacher voice, “Stop whining and think.”
She dug in her purse for her cell phone. She saw it in her mind, brilliantly lit as a stained-glass window in June: her phone, plugged into its charger, on the kitchen counter where she always left it. It drove Eric crazy. Why don’t you carry your cell phone, he always said. What do you have it for, decoration? Help was as close as Dr. Vlk’s receptionist. She dumped her purse on the passenger seat, and there it was. The battery was low, but not fully depleted. And Dr. Vlk’s number was in her queue of recent calls. “Thank you, thank you,” she said to the phone. She called and found herself in a maze of voice-mail options. Future appointments, prescriptions, “and if this is an emergency,” the recorded voice concluded, “please hang up and dial 911.”
What was the point of having a cell phone if no one would answer? She could call 911, they’d send an ambulance. No time. And not safe. 911 meant the hospital, and Drew could find her in the hospital. She’d seen him there.
Ella Dane—no, it would take her forty minutes to get here. Eric was in court. Dr. Vlk’s windows were twenty feet away, and nobody would even pick up the phone. Lacey banged the steering wheel, and the horn beeped softly. This was no good, this stupid horn with its stupid little ladylike tootle. She needed some real noise. She leaned onto it with both elbows and pressed her upper body against the wheel. The horn sang out, and the blood bubbled faster. Nobody came. Were they going to let her sit out here and die—why wasn’t anyone listening? She leaned into the horn again.