Starter House(90)

I love you, please come home. No, he’d said that. She was coming home, but nothing was settled, nothing was finished. He had no idea what to do next.





Chapter Forty

LACEY LOOPED AN ELASTIC around her hair. She squeezed a pouch of motel shampoo into the bath, and the water battered it into foam. She hadn’t had a real bath since July, when Eric made a list of things pregnant women shouldn’t do. No soft cheese, deli meats, sushi—not a big sacrifice there—no horseback riding, skiing, skydiving, or trampolines—really—but she missed the hot baths.

She turned the water toward cool. She liked a bath tingling hot, but for the baby’s sake, her someday child with sun in his hair, her future teenage ingrate who would tell her he hated her, she cooled the water until it was like a swimming pool in August, not hot enough to melt the grease off her skin, the way she liked it. She rubbed the hotel soap into lather and scrubbed her skin red, and still the smell of Bibbits crawled on her.

Eric had smelled it, too. She’d seen the disgust in his face. He said he loved her, please come home, and it must have cost him something to speak so plainly, to open himself. She loved him too, abstractly, as a fact she would think about later, when she had time. He could live without her. The baby couldn’t.

Ev Craddock saved his children by sending them away. She could save the baby by giving him up, but she’d have to leave the baby with Eric and take Drew with her. If Drew would come with her. If he could. He could leave the house; how long would he stay away? If he went back and found another parent, another child, Eric taking care of the baby alone, how long before Drew demanded Eric’s attention? He followed the Craddocks to Nevada, until a family moved in with children. That must have been CarolAnna’s people, and after that, the Honeywicks.

If she divorced Eric and forced him to sell the house, if she gave up custody so he would take the baby and move, she could keep Drew attached to her long enough for Eric to get the baby away. Would Eric give up the house and go, stubborn as he was? Even though he called it their starter house, he might dig in his heels and insist on keeping it.

She could always try explaining it to Eric. Like that would work.

Just now, there was Drew, a shadow on the pebbled glass of the shower door. She’d known he was coming, and here he was. Tears rushed up. She splashed hot foaming water on her face and cleared her throat. Happy voice. “Hey. I know you’re there,” she said.

He slid the door back in its tracks. It moved and she saw his fingers come around its edge, she saw the silhouette behind the glass reveal itself as a naked child with a towel around his waist. She saw her own hands floating in the water, and yet, whose hand was on that door—her own hand, moving by his will in a gesture she could neither feel nor see? She swirled the water. The bubbles parted and closed, leaving a seam of finer bubbles where her hand passed. Even as she felt the water’s resistance, the shower door slid open. Drew used her mouth to eat cookies, her hand to move the game piece and to attack Ella Dane with the broken plate, but he’d wrecked Ella Dane’s room on his own, while she was downstairs, with Ella Dane her witness. Even if she could keep him out of her body and mind, she wouldn’t be safe from broken furniture and flying glass.

“I heard what you said to him,” Drew said.

“I know you did. I saw you. Don’t you want to go home?”

“About the baby. You said you don’t want him.”

Lacey shrugged. She pulled the shampoo foam around herself, building islands of modesty. Her belly mounded up, a crayon color, Strawberry Cream. “I’m not going to be able to take care of him, am I? Not if I’m with you.”

Drew smiled, bright and happy, the look of the little boy in the Burgoyne Elementary yearbook. “You won’t leave me?”

“Never.”

“You’ll stay with me?”

Lacey took a breath as if it were her last, the sweet bubble-scented air. Drew was in the water already; he was inside her, cold on the underside of her skin. If she made this promise, she had to mean it. He would sense a lie.

“Always,” she said. “As long as you want.”

There was a flicker, a leap, and now the shower door was closed at her head and opened at her feet, next to the taps, although neither door visibly moved. Lacey shuddered in the cooling bathwater. Another soaping, and then she’d wash her hair, and maybe the smell would be gone.

“If you don’t want the baby,” Drew said, and she felt his warm hand on her belly, though he appeared to be standing in the bath, beside the taps, “he can go away.”

The small invisible hand pressed, and the baby kicked. “Too late,” Lacey said lightly. “He’s too big. I’d bleed and die, and then you’d be alone.” The hand lifted. “It’s only a couple of months. Eric can take the baby, and I’ll stay with you.”