Starter House(92)

She hated the feeling of cold water worming down her back, and the water in her head was worse. Soap burned in her throat; her sinuses were full of sharp gravel, and the taste of bathwater rolled over itself, a hard slick thing. The hair dryer’s warmth spread in her ears, softening and opening the constricted tubes.

When she was little and had earaches, Grandpa Merritt held her on his lap with her mother’s hair dryer inches from her head. She tilted against his left shoulder while the warm air flowed into her right ear. He would tell her how when he himself was small, his own grandfather cured his earaches with hot smoke, lighting his pipe and softly blowing into the young Grandpa Merritt’s ear.

It had made the child Lacey laugh to think of her grandpa as a little boy with an earache. He laughed too, and his stiff beard bristles scraped along her cheek. His arm tightened and she felt safe, loved and comforted and warm all through.

And then he took those pictures, those and how many others? Lacey turned the hair dryer off. She had been so angry at Ella Dane all these years; if Ella Dane had told her, she would have accepted it. Lacey was suddenly positive that Ev Craddock hadn’t told his own children why he’d sent them away. There were no pictures in his office, no graduation caps or wedding gowns, no grandchildren. He saved them, but he lost them.

If they had known he loved them, Drew would have known it, too. Drew could travel, he could show up wherever he wanted. Ev kept his secret to set them free. He built a wall between Drew and his children. He himself was the wall. Ella Dane had kept her secret to preserve Lacey’s innocence.

She would have to do the same, if Eric would let her. All the qualities in Eric that had drawn her to him—his honesty, his constancy, the firm architecture of his mind—all these qualities set him against her now, for he would never abandon the child or the house, or believe he couldn’t have both. If she left the baby at the hospital, Eric would take him home, and in Drew’s house there was room for only one child. She had to get herself into the house, and Eric and the baby out of it.

She had put him through law school, giving her a claim against his future income. If she gave that up, traded it for the house, and let Eric take the baby . . . How many months would he fight to get himself and the baby back into the house? The parent who took the children got the house, mostly. And family law was his specialty.

Or she and Eric could leave the house, rent it out cheap, and make sure the right people took it, a young family with children. Soon, Drew would shift his attention to them. The right family, a mother with a baby girl and a couple of elementary-aged boys, and the Miszlaks could get clean away.

That was life and freedom. That was everything.

“No,” Lacey said. She put her hands over her ears, as if it were someone else’s idea and she could keep from hearing it. No. Ella Dane had left her father’s house, the security of life with Merritt Kendall, on the strength of a handful of Polaroids and a family rumor. She hadn’t traded another child’s future for Lacey’s.

Hadn’t she, though? She’d never reported Grandpa Merritt. In Lacey’s case there was so little to report, pictures that barely flirted with the line of innocence, but she had cousins who’d been abused and she hadn’t encouraged them to turn him in. He’d lived freely in a neighborhood with young families on every side, little girls in swimsuits wherever he looked. Ella Dane saved only her own child. That wasn’t enough.

Lacey pictured herself in an apartment, turning on the local news a year from now, settling in the red leather armchair to read Pat the Bunny to the baby, her own healthy living child, and the announcer would speak solemnly of the unexpected death of a toddler or a young mother in a Greeneburg neighborhood. The screen would flash to a reporter standing under a tree, and Eric would say, Isn’t that our house? Aren’t those our tenants? She couldn’t live with that.

The door opened, and Ella Dane came in, laptop under her arm. “Talking to yourself?” she asked. She scanned the room. “Are you talking to yourself, or is he here?”

“He left.”

“You saw him here?”

“He was mad about Eric being here. He touched me.”

“Oh, Lacey. I can’t handle this alone. We need help.”

Lacey nodded, not wanting to describe that lifetime underwater, twenty seconds at most. “He lost his temper for a minute. I’m fine.” Ella Dane looked doubtful, and Lacey patted the bed. “Sit with me, Mom.”

Ella Dane opened her laptop on the bed. “Look at this; I was online. Downloaded some old articles.” She opened a folder on her desktop, selected a newspaper article, and turned her computer so Lacey could read.