Starter House(8)

“No,” she said, suddenly furious. The whole bitter, frustrating day came down to this: the door, the key, the lock. She wasn’t about to let Eric find her waiting to be let in, like some stray. She had found this house and chosen it—it was hers. She forced the key. The lock yielded slightly, then seized and would not let the key release or turn.

“Wait,” Harry said. “I’ll go get the WD-40.”

It was too much. Her house had shut her out—her house, the house she had loved when it was broken and dirty—now clean and beautiful, it shut her out? No. She found a chunk of gray stone under the boxwoods and hammered the window, ignoring Harry’s protest. Her anger felt entirely reasonable to her; one way or another, she was going in. The glass clung to the frame for three seconds before releasing to shatter on the kitchen floor. She put her hand through to reach the inner lock, and something bit her—no, it was broken glass in the window frame. Blood ran down her palm from a diagonal gash, shockingly cold, as if she’d reached into a freezer and grabbed the coils. She gripped her wrist and looked at Harry, so disoriented by her own behavior that she could not imagine what to do next. And the angry thought, rooted in her mind as deeply as the baby in her body, pulsed relentlessly, My house, mine, mine.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go in.” He hurried across the grass to his own back door.

She saw a roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter, so she reached through the broken window and unlocked the door. Fat handfuls of blood spread on the newly grouted floor. They had chosen light blue tile for the floor and gray granite for the countertops. She hoped her blood wouldn’t turn the blue grout black. She squeezed her hand around a clump of paper towels. Numb cold rayed through her wrist.

Inside, the dining room and hallway were unexpectedly dim with a darkness gathering like water in a cup, and pressing into Lacey’s eyes and filling her throat. Her teacher voice, the careful adult Lacey, warned her to stop, go out and wait for Harry, but she ignored it because the house was hers. Nothing could keep her out. She clenched her injured hand between her breasts and reached out with the other hand to feel her way.

She could not understand this darkness, here where the lowest step turned in a full circle and she had seen her someday children and their maybe dog in the bright afternoon. Evening light came in through the two windows in the living room and reflected off the newly polished and sealed floors, a sheet of brilliant amber. In the kitchen, red sunlight glittered in the granite’s mica flecks. Yet no light reached here, where the stairs began, though it should have poured in a shower of gold down the porthole window. She looked up to see what was wrong—had the painters blocked the window with cardboard and forgotten to remove it? Was the glass broken and boarded up?—and she saw nothing, not even darkness. A mist pressed against her eyes, and her mouth tasted of cold gray water, the taste of fear.

There was a step on the front porch, too light for Harry, and a hand tapped the door. Lacey held her breath and pressed her hand over her breastbone to muffle her rushing heart. She felt like a child put to bed in a strange room, knowing silence was safety, head under the blankets no matter how hot, suffocating on terror and her own used breath. But the teacher voice said, It’s time to act like a grown-up, and the hand tapped again. Nothing to be afraid of, it said, just a neighbor at the door.

“Coming,” Lacey called. Something caught her ankle. Something that gripped and squeezed. Her feet flew out behind her and she tumbled forward, twisting as she fell.

She landed hard on her right side and curled around the belly bump. “No,” she said. “No, no.” This could not happen. She held her breath, keeping the child in through will alone; she clenched her fists, regardless of the pain in the slashed palm.

The back door opened, and with Harry’s entrance, light flowed into the hall, rising from the polished floor. The porthole window burned. “Lacey? Where are you?”

“I fell.” The middle of her body tightened, relaxed, and tightened again around a feeling too dense and slow to call pain.

“Are you hurt?”

Something touched her thigh. “I’m bleeding.”

He took her right hand and pulled her fingers away from the red clot of paper. “You’ll need stitches.”

“No. I’m bleeding.” Lacey reached under the pink dress to touch the thing on her thigh, soft and insinuating, a wet feather, a tickling tongue, the faintest sticky stroke of warmth sliding on her skin. “Ambulance,” she said, her voice perfectly steady. Her heart hummed in her ears, and she kept her face stony. If she let go, let her mouth shake even once, she would fall apart and the baby would die. She tightened her thighs to hold everything in, blood and baby and all. She would not allow this to happen.