Her ears rang and she counted her breaths, two counts in, five counts out, her lungs on fire. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and pressed her face into her fists. Her first impulse was to put her shoes on, grab her cell phone, run from the house, and call a taxi. But she was on bed rest. She couldn’t afford to panic and run; she had to rest and let the placenta heal. And Drew was a good boy most of the time. She’d have to keep him in a good temper, that was all. Until she had somewhere safe to go.
Weight shifted at the side of the bed, and there was Drew, appearing in answer to her thought. He rubbed Bibbits’s ears. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said mildly.
Lacey wanted to say something friendly and companionable. Greeley Honeywick’s last words echoed: Remember Beth Craddock. Get out. “Who’s Beth Craddock?” she blurted.
“Leave me alone, leave me alone! Why won’t you leave me alone?”
And he was gone. For the first time, she was looking directly at him when he disappeared, and there was nothing. No change, no fading, no intermediate state. Just Drew and then no Drew, there and gone, vanished more utterly than lightning. He left nothing, not even a sense of warmth where he had been sitting.
“I’m not the only one who’s seen him,” Lacey said to Bibbits.
CarolAnna Grey, Greeley Honeywick, someone called Beth Craddock. And how many others, how many women and children and babies, how many families, over how many years?
Chapter Twenty-three
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the second Saturday in October, Jeanne came to Lex’s house to leave Theo for the weekend. The old man had given him five hundred dollars to pay for her window. When he handed it over, she said, “Don’t think this makes any difference. My lawyer says she can make you pay her fees.”
Lex lifted Theo out of her car seat. She must have gained another pound in the last week. “Da!” she shrieked, and smeared a fistful of melted candy corn along his cheek when she lunged in for a hug. “Da!” she said again, more urgently, and he knew she meant down and not Daddy, so he took her inside and set her down on the floor.
Theo sat in the living room, a pink heap of flesh and polyester, and she would be just like Jeanne and Big Jeanne and all those poor sad women who walked past the produce department like it wasn’t even there, filling their shopping carts with ham and potato chips and wondering why their ankles hurt.
When Jeanne took her away, Theo was crawling and beginning to pull herself up by grabbing on to chairs. She’d been almost ready to walk, a month ago. Lex was forever having to run after her, she scooted around so quickly. Now she sat where he had put her. After a while, she rolled over onto her back and grabbed her feet. He knelt beside her and pulled her up to sit. “You want to stand up?” he said. “Stand up for Dadda?”
He held her hands and tugged her, but she didn’t push up at all. She just sat like a half-melted marshmallow. He pulled her hands. “Stand up!”
She opened her mouth square, just the way Jeanne did, and shrieked. He dropped her hands and ran to the kitchen. While she cried, he stood behind the door with his hands over his ears, because he couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t listen to that noise. After a while, she stopped, and he wondered if she might be hungry.
Jeanne had given him a grocery bag, and Lex laid the things out on the kitchen table. Three cans of Vienna sausages. Three cans of peaches in syrup. A package of Hydrox cookies. White bread. He threw it all away and put a yam in the microwave.
A voice at his feet said, “Bub, bub, bub?” Theo had crawled all the way here.
“Good girl,” he said. She made a wet, demanding noise. “Soon,” he said, “not yet.” The last two years, he’d made Jeanne wait for her food. She could eat as much as she wanted, he couldn’t stop her, but he piled her plate with vegetables. Even when she was pregnant, she lost a little weight. She’d gained it back by now.
Theo didn’t like the yam. He mashed it and added a little formula. She squeezed her red lips tightly together and flung her head from side to side. Gobs of yam flew everywhere. He got some into her mouth, and she poked it out with her tongue. She squared her mouth and screamed. He shoveled in a spoonful of yam, and it came out, an orange spray. Finally, she grabbed the bowl and dumped it over her own head. Mashed yam ran down her neck, and she screamed at him with her mother’s own voice.
“Yummy,” Lex said desperately. Why was she crying? A month ago, mashed yam was her favorite food.
She pounded her yammy fists on the tray. Her pink dress was orange, her white hair was orange, and she was so loud. The neighbors might call the cops. He would call the cops if he heard a noise like this. “Okay, okay,” he said. He dug a can of Vienna sausage out of the garbage, opened it, and dumped it on a plate.