Starter House(89)

“If you say so,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

He remembered the eighth and ninth points of his argument. “I love you,” he said. He took her hand. “Please come home.”

“Okay,” she said, in the boiled-egg voice. She looked at his hand, and he let go.

“What?” he said.

“I said okay. I’ll come home. I’m getting ready, I’m packed. I just need a bath.”

He had to agree: she really did need a bath. That strange smell in the room hung about her hair and her skin. He caught a wave of it whenever she moved. “I can ask Ella Dane to leave if you don’t want her around,” he offered, as if she had refused and he needed to bargain with her.

“No, I want her.”

Feeling that something was required of him, he took her hand again. It lay in his as cold and wet as a pork chop, and he shivered, rubbing her palm to bring some life into her touch. “I’m glad you’re coming home,” he said. “I love you.”

She snatched her fist out of his palm and clutched one hand over the other between her breasts. “Yes,” she said, but she wasn’t speaking to Eric; she was looking over his shoulder, at the corner of the room. “Yes, I love you, I’m sorry I tried to run away, I shouldn’t have done it, I’m coming home.” Her voice was dead, flat, like a hostage reading a prepared statement in a language she didn’t understand.

“You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic about it.” He remembered another of his points. “A baby needs a father,” he told her.

“Oh.” She shrugged and looked away from him. “That baby. I don’t want him.”

“You’re six months pregnant; you can’t say you don’t want him now!”

“You can have him. I don’t want him. I don’t love him.” She was speaking to the corner of the room again. “Are you listening?” she said, and now he heard a thick urgency in her voice. “Can you hear me? I don’t want him, I don’t love him. Go home.” She went into the bathroom. “I mean it,” she called. Water gushed behind the door. “I don’t want him. Go home.”

That was the noisy tumble of bathwater, not a shower. “The doctor said you’re not supposed to take hot baths,” Eric said.

“It’s not hot. I need a bath. Could you go? I’ll follow you.”

He remembered another thing he’d meant to tell her. “The new debit cards came yesterday,” he said. “I got a cash advance from Discover to pay off the overdraft. I’m leaving your card by the sink.”

“Fine.”

Eric collected his handfuls of logic. Since she had agreed to come home, there was no further need to convince her, yet he felt she was unpersuaded, unwilling; she was coming home as a captive, resigned to imprisonment for a while, until the chance for escape came again. What had he ever done to her, that she should see him like this? “I love you,” he said to the bathroom door. “Please come home.”

No answer except the water. He thought she was crying and had turned the water up so he wouldn’t hear. He tried the bathroom door: locked. He should break it in, pull her out of the bath or get in there with her, and take her face in her hands and make her look at him; he should ask her and ask her and ask her, until she told him the truth.

But he recognized this feeling. Lex Hall when he threw the camera through Jeanne’s window must have felt exactly this. This was the feeling of the moment before going too far. His clients said, I had to make her understand. I had to make her listen to me. I had to make her tell me the truth. Nothing good ever began with I had to make her.

He had to make Lacey tell him the truth. Not to break through a locked door, no, that was going too far. “I’ll see you at home,” he said. He hated the weakness in his voice, but this was all he could do for her now, so he did it. He didn’t wait for her answer. He closed the door loudly and revved his engine a few times outside room 117, so she would hear his car and know he was leaving.

All the way back to Greeneburg, he thought about what he should have said. If she didn’t want the baby, why get pregnant in the first place? If she thought he would live with a wife who wouldn’t sleep in his bed, and who gave him her hand like a piece of dead meat, she could think again. If she was just going to turn around and come back home, why had she left? If she wanted a week at the beach, she only had to say so.

Yet he was the one who had left the marriage bed. When she had to move downstairs, he bought her a twin mattress and stayed up in the bedroom, alone.