Starter House(69)
She touched his nose. It was cold and beginning to dry. She already knew what had happened, but she opened her palm in front of his mouth and waited for the touch of breath anyway.
“Mom,” she said carefully.
Her mouth and throat filled with tears. Bibbits, how she’d hated him for so long, but he’d been a good dog, a comfort to her over the last couple of months; he’d kept her from being alone. Poor old boy. All those months dosed with Taraxacum, dandelion essence, instead of real medication, and then Drew had been too much for his thick, exhausted heart.
“Mom,” she said again. “I think something happened.”
Ella Dane was still surfing on Lacey’s laptop. “Just a minute.”
“Mom, there’s something wrong.”
“Don’t worry, the arm’s stopped bleeding. I probably won’t need stitches after all.”
“Mom.” Lacey didn’t want to say it. She wanted to crawl into the hotel bed, under the clean strange sheets and the scratchy blanket, and close her eyes and pretend she didn’t know what was happening in the small body curled at the foot. She’d be careful not to kick him off the bed; she wouldn’t have to say anything, eventually Ella Dane would notice. But Drew had done this. Drew had given the old dog’s heart its final shock. And Lacey was responsible for whatever Drew did. She forced herself to speak. “Mom, there’s something wrong with Bibbits.”
Ella Dane came over with her brown glass vial. “Just a drop of Taraxacum and he’ll be good as new.”
“I don’t think he’s breathing, Mom. I’m sorry.”
Chapter Thirty
IN THE SKYVIEW LOBBY, Eric turned on his heel and headed back to the elevators. Away from Lacey and her outrageous complaint, his mind worked clearly again. He had a plan, fully formed: sell the house and take the loss—twenty thousand dollars, a hundred dollars a month, he’d borrow the money to get out of the mortgage—rent some quiet apartment—ask Ella Dane to stay when the baby came—Lacey could go back to work, subbing if she couldn’t get a full-time job in the district; or back to school, to get her master’s in special ed, as they’d planned she eventually would. Money would be tight for a year or two, but by the time the baby was in school, they’d be back on track.
Sell the house, take the loss. And the ceiling in Ella Dane’s room, he’d have to get that repaired and the whole room repainted before the house went on the market; they could even use the same Realtor. Those were only details: sell the house and take the loss, or Lacey would be the loss, and the baby with her, leaving him with a house he’d never meant to keep more than five years in the first place. He’d go back and tell her right now.
But as he turned toward the elevator, it opened. A blond child on old-fashioned roller skates swooped in front of him, pressed all the buttons with both fists, and swerved directly toward Eric. Eric stepped back, hands up to fend off or catch the child, who surprisingly bared his small teeth and gave a high whoop of exhilarated rage, a monkey shriek. The elevator door closed, and the other three elevators were all stopped on upper floors.
Another whoop echoed in the lobby. Eric couldn’t see where the child had gone, and none of the other travelers in the lobby seemed at all distressed by his strange passage. Eric felt disproportionately troubled by the encounter, as if a stranger’s voice had shouted in the dark to save him from an unseen danger, a cliff over deep water.
The pieces of his plan, broken by the child’s shout, settled in a new pattern. What good would it do to sell the house? Lacey would take some crazy dislike to the next place, and the next and the next. Ella Dane had raised her that way, always moving, always leaving. Lacey complained about it, but she and Eric had lived together for three years, moving every year, once to a large apartment with two roommates, then to a smaller apartment with just the two of them, and last to married student housing, which was why they married when they did, and it was Lacey’s idea to move, each time. She’d never settle. Year after year, for the rest of their lives, she’d uproot him.
Eric’s cell phone rang. Someone was calling from his home phone, giving him a moment of weirdly dislocated horror—who, who, how?—until he remembered that Sammie had come to help him find Lacey, and she was still there. “Hello?” he said, and it was Sammie, wanting to know if he’d found his wife.
“She’s here,” he said. “She’s staying.”
Sammie gave him silence with room for words, information, confession, but he could do that trick in his sleep. He said nothing back at her, and she broke first. “I’ll clean up this blood,” she said. “Unless you need to keep it for the cops, for some reason.”