Dr. Vlk was as smooth and elegant as ever, and her voice was calmly light as she said, “You don’t have to go home. There are safe places for you and your baby. The hospital, to begin with.”
“Can you call Moranis Miszlak and ask them to get Eric out of court?”
“You have choices.”
Better to go home and face Drew there than to wait in the hospital, surrounded by strangers who couldn’t see and wouldn’t believe. Better to be home, where she had her things, crayons and paper to distract him, cookies, games, all the tools and tricks to keep him friendly and engaged. She couldn’t go to the hospital to lie in the white bed in the empty room waiting for him to say, I came here to find you.
There was no way to explain any of this to Dr. Vlk. No way to explain it to Eric. She hadn’t discussed it with Ella Dane recently—she’d let Ella Dane develop the idea that Drew had been soothed away. The silence between herself and her mother was uncomfortable, oppressive, but so was the communication; at least it was a change. She was all alone with Drew, and she had to do all she could to keep him happy, because if he got angry, he might kill her, or the baby, or both. He’d be sorry afterward, but he was only nine, just beginning to predict consequences, still impulsive and reactive. If she stayed away too long, what might he do, angry and alone? If he went on the rampage, and Eric arrived— She saw the shattered bed in Ella Dane’s room, the book driven into the wall. She couldn’t let Eric walk into that.
“I’d rather go home,” she said. “Could you call my husband, please?”
Chapter Twenty
LEX HELD ON TO HIS PICTURES, waiting for his lawyer to call him back. After a week, he started calling Moranis Miszlak, but the shiny girl at the desk never put him through. “He’s with a client,” she said. An hour later, he was in court, then with another client, then taking a deposition.
“There’s nothing new,” the shiny girl told him in her bright, bored voice. “He’ll let you know when the custody hearing is scheduled.”
He kept calling, hour after hour—he wasn’t sure she understood the danger Theo was in, drowning in cheeseburgers and white bread and fries—and by Wednesday afternoon, she stopped taking his calls. On Thursday afternoon, Lex printed out his shots of Jeanne shoving the chicken into Theo, copied the video to a CD, and drove down to County Place. If the lawyer wouldn’t help him, he’d help himself.
He parked in the Heart Healthy Visitors section, as far from the front door as he could get. The buildings were gray and low and square, with big concrete triangles jutting out like broken bones sticking out of gray flesh.
Nothing good ever happened here. All the courts were here: the family court, where Jeanne would try to take Theo away from him forever. Criminal court, civil court. The county jail was here, in a back building hidden from the street, looking just like the big court building only with no broken-bone triangles and no windows. Juvenile detention was here, sharing a wall with the county jail, but with a different entrance. It used to have a playground, where the larger boys had put the smaller boys on the swings and tried to push them all the way over the top. Later, the playground disappeared, replaced by a community garden where all the vegetables died and only wild garlic grew. Probate court was here, where the judge gave him his parents’ house. . . .
Nothing good. Nothing good ever happened here.
All the hallways looked the same. They were gray, like the outside walls, and colored stripes on the floor crossed each other, turning in different directions at each intersection. They meant something but he didn’t know what, and all the doors were the same gray steel, and every third door had a red Exit sign, but none of them led outside. A person could get lost in here forever.
Long ago, once upon a time, his mother told him if he was lost, look for police. They were everywhere, cops or security guards at every intersection, and sitting on chairs next to the elevators. The courtrooms and the important offices were underground, two or three levels down. Some of the hallways underground, Lex remembered, connected the courtroom elevators to the jail elevators. What if he got into the wrong elevator and accidentally wandered into the jail? Was that a crime? Would they arrest him again?
He walked past three security guards, quickly, with his eyes on the colored stripes on the floor, hoping he looked like he knew where he was going. Like he was supposed to be there. Then he found himself at another set of three elevators, or maybe the same ones. The security guard sat with his knees splayed wide and his pants wrinkled. All the colored stripes headed into the elevators. Lex held back.