“Let me do it. I’m going to be a grandma soon and I’m out of practice.”
Lacey watched. Harry went inside for a bucket of warm water, soap, and a washcloth, and Ella Dane unrolled the baby from the towel and got to work with Bibbits’s help, right there on the grass. She didn’t seem that badly out of practice. In five minutes, Theo was laughing, trying to grab the washcloth. Ella Dane let her chew on it and laughed when Theo stuck out her tongue at the taste of soap.
“We live and learn,” Ella Dane said. “What does she eat, cupcakes and bacon?”
“Fried chicken and white bread,” Harry said.
Lacey sat quietly while Harry explained the situation. She hoped Eric was doing all he could to help Lex.
When Lex arrived with the clothes and diapers, she was happy to see Theo give a shout of laughter and crawl over to him, and even happier to see him smile as he swung her into the air. Theo landed in a laughing bundle on his chest, and she grabbed his nose and said, “Da da da,” in a tone of clear delight. A baby that young had no tact. If she had reason to fear her father, she would have cringed from him.
Ella Dane took Lex and the baby into Harry’s house, and Harry stayed to give Lacey a hand up from the grass. “Thanks,” she said. “So what are you going to do?”
She followed him into his house, where they stood in the doorway and watched Ella Dane and Lex playing with Theo. The man was as innocent as his own child, but something had to be done.
“They can stay here tonight. I’m always here for Lex.”
“Not if you move to Australia.”
Lacey knew about crazy parents. She was still a certified teacher, and as far as she was concerned, a mandated reporter too. She could not go back to her house and pretend everything was fine. A child in the midst of a custody fight would have a volunteer guardian appointed by the court. She had briefly served as one herself, last year, for a girl whose noncustodial father had tried to take her from Lacey’s classroom several times. She’d made contact and left a card with every member of the girl’s extended family, so she said, “The guardian ad litem must have left you their number. This is when you have to call them. The guardian, or the police.”
“Why get the law involved?”
“This is not okay.” If Lacey had seen a parent like Lex with a baby like Theo in the car line at school, waiting to pick up a student—naked baby screaming, dad obviously decompensating—she would have called the police without thinking twice. She had no patience with anyone who put a parent’s feelings above a child’s safety, although she’d give Harry a chance to handle it before she stepped in. “I don’t have the guardian’s contact info,” she said. “I’ll be calling 911. I’m not leaving till it’s done.”
Harry pulled his cell phone from one pocket and his wallet from another, sorted through it for a business card, and made the call.
“You did the right thing,” she said when he closed his phone. She still needed to ask him about Drew, but this was not the time. Thank you for betraying your nephew, now tell me about the ghost: like that would work.
“Lex has had such a hard life.”
“When you’re gone to Australia, and Lex panics, what’s he going to do?”
“He’s not dangerous.”
Lacey wasn’t so sure. She’d seen too many bullied children snap. Last year, she’d been first on the scene when a fourth grader, a quiet boy whose family was so poor that he wore his older sister’s hand-me-down shirts and sneakers, decided his classmates had called him gay often enough. He took off his sister’s blouse, knocked down his cruelest tormentor, and knotted the sleeves around the boy’s neck. It was all so quick, neat and silent, none of the teachers supervising recess noticed. Lacey’s class was in music, so she was in the teachers’ lounge revising her rubric for the big Westward Expansion project, and her eye was drawn to unexpected motion under the slides. She didn’t stop to call for help. She opened the window, kicked out the screen, and arrived at the slides as the bullied child inserted a stick into the knot of his improvised garrote and began to twist.
The look on that boy’s face was one she would never forget. He didn’t seem angry. He was intent, focused on his work, attentive to issues of torque and leverage—keeping his knees on the bully’s upper arms, turning the stick in the knot—oblivious to thought or reason. She had to lift his fingers off the twisted shirtsleeves one by one, and then he turned that deliberate unconscious look on her and rammed his head into her midriff, knocking the breath out of her. He twisted the knotted shirt around the stick again. Breathless, struggling to fill her collapsed lungs, she had no strength to stop him or call for help. When the playground teachers finally noticed something was wrong, it took all four of them to pull him away.