Starter House(81)

Then Lex was outside, and the door was closing. He wanted to go back in and explain. The shiny girl and the big dog lawyer wouldn’t listen. He needed his own lawyer, the young one. They said he was at court, and his office door was closed. That didn’t matter. Lex knew where to find him. He knew where he lived.





Chapter Thirty-six

THE NEXT DAY, Lacey was finishing her third picture of Bibbits. There was no breath of Drew in the sea wind, and every day, Merritt was bigger and stronger. Maybe she could stay here in Spinet Cove until he was born. She’d looked for Ev Craddock earlier but the motel office had been empty, so she’d driven into the landward side of Spinet Cove to find a mall, where she bought textured watercolor paper, oil pastels, and fixative. Her first few pictures were stiff. As her hand began to move more easily over the paper, she produced a few versions that would have looked good on Valentine cards but did not express the quality of Bibbits, until she remembered dogs had eyebrows. She wrinkled the skin over Bibbits’s eyes to give him the cautious, questing look with which he had greeted the smell of meat.

She layered pinks and reds and yellows, shaded in purples and greens, deepened his eyes. She smudged with her thumb and a paper torchon; she sprayed fixative and let it dry and then worked new layers over it. Now she was working on the final layer of color, adding white and lightest yellow to the highlights of his apricot-blond curls. It looked just like him, and she felt like herself for the first time in months, with flecks of color blending under her fingernails and staining the whorls of her fingertips.

The real Bibbits, meanwhile, looked less and less like himself, although Ella Dane kept him well iced. Lacey kept the door open for the sea air. Sand filtered in and blended with her pastel work, becoming part of the texture. Lacey wanted to know if they were going to bury the poor little thing. “When the time is right,” Ella Dane said whenever Lacey asked, “when he tells me where.” So far, apparently, Bibbits had not spoken.

It had rained earlier in the day, and the beach was solid gray, the sand pocked with rain above the tide line, clean and flat below it, with a scum of broken shells to mark the boundary. Lacey watched Ella Dane walking on the beach, and the eastern sky was green, a green unlike any other, like seeing without light. Ella Dane stood above the tide line, the wind pulling her hair and blue skirt north. She stepped forward, back, left and back again, spun in place, hesitated, like someone trying to learn a dance she had heard described but never seen. Then she drew a circle on the sand and came up to the room.

“It’s time,” she said. “Look what I found on the beach.” She had two weathered sand shovels, one red and one orange.

“I made this for you,” Lacey said. She laid the pad of watercolor paper on the bed. “It needs another layer of fixative, so don’t touch.”

“Oh.” Ella Dane sat down slowly, beside the picture, running her fingers along the edge of the paper. “Look at that. His little nose. It’s perfect.”

“I’m sorry for saying those things,” Lacey said. “I just lost it.”

Ella Dane looked at the picture for a long time. Eventually, she said, “I went back to Columbia on Tuesday to pick up some things from my friend Patty’s garage.” She had boxes of possessions in garages and attics all over Columbia. “There’s some pictures you need to see. Jack says it’s time. He says the lies have blocked your chi.”

“What lies? I haven’t lied to you.”

“I’ve lied to you.” Ella Dane pulled a manila envelope from her duffel bag and handed six pictures to Lacey. They were Polaroids. Lacey recognized the thick paper, the broad white border at the bottom. And old, the colors fading to yellow. Still, the images were clear. A series of moments, a little girl changing out of shorts and T-shirt into a blue swimsuit. One piece, halter back. Lacey remembered the swimsuit, how the elastic had pressed against her neck.

That was the summer before first grade, the wonderful year with Grandpa Merritt. Six weeks into the school year, sometime around the end of September, her mother had picked her up from school and they had never gone home again.

Then what was this? Six-year-old Lacey, dressed, undressing, half dressed, naked; the bare white buttocks and the brown legs, the white ghost of the blue swimsuit on her skin, and then the blue swimsuit drawn up. Lacey laid the picture of her naked self above the others. “What does it mean?” she asked.

“One day,” Ella Dane said. “One day I was sorting Dad’s laundry, and I found a box of pictures. I tore up most of them, but I kept these.”