And now she had pushed Drew. Allan Montego broke the Smartboard. Drew could kill her. She said, “Are you Andrew Halliday?”
Drew opened his mouth. Starless night cracked open the creases of his lips, darted up the smile lines into his eyes, blackened and spread in the blue veins of his forehead. The blackness split and swallowed him, reached up and over Lacey like a raised fist, a tall wave on the point of breaking, the vertigo of nightmare balanced on the point of swallowing her forever. It shattered on her, sank into her body, pulled itself upward and out of her, and was gone. She spun in its wake, turned to follow the direction it had taken.
It was the thing that had fallen past her, the bloody screaming thing, now racing up the stairs, where Ella Dane was waiting with Jack McMure, ready to banish it from the house with—what? Burning herbs, mostly sage? What were they thinking?
She ran up the first five steps, and every muscle tightened, squeezing inward on the baby. She fell forward on her knees, grabbing for the banister to keep from falling downstairs on her belly. The pain tightened until she thought her spine would crack. Then, when she could bear no more, it sank down, water into sand. The baby kicked against this outrageous assault.
Thirty weeks. Too soon, too young, too small. “Please don’t,” Lacey said to not-Merritt inside her, not-Merritt not ready to be born. “We haven’t bought a crib.”
He wouldn’t need a crib. He’d sleep in a bright womb of Plexiglas and white plastic. Too soon. Lacey waited for another contraction. The baby rolled. She slipped a hand under her dress to touch the wet spot on her underpants. Blood? No, it was colorless. Amniotic fluid? She sniffed her fingers and laughed. Imagine, that there could be time in her life when wetting herself was good news! She went upstairs on her knees, pausing on each step for balance before moving her right hand to the next banister post.
It took five minutes to get up the stairs. She knew, because she had marked the time of the first contraction on her watch, ready to time the second one when it came. She reached the top of the stairs at 7:21. Tightness rippled across her belly, but it wasn’t really a contraction, so she didn’t count it.
Just in case she had to tell a doctor, later, she noted the time. Six minutes.
Voices from the bathroom. A man’s voice, loud and deep, and a lighter voice in a hurried response. Was Jack making peace with Drew? Could that actually work?
If the child Andrew had survived, then the spirit Drew might be Andrew Senior, a man who had worn a crew cut to teach American history in 1972. What was Jack McMure doing in 1972? Lacey would bet he wasn’t wearing a crew cut, or if so, then not by choice. Maybe he and Andrew Senior could talk about it man to man, instead of the way she had tried to talk with Drew, teacher to child. She had to get to them. But the stairs were so steep, and if she stood, she would fall.
Lacey crawled to the first bedroom door and used the doorknob to pull herself up. It felt good to be on her feet, but there was something wobbly about her hips, the joint unlocked. She kept one hand on the wall as she went toward the bathroom.
It was a long walk from bedroom to bathroom, each step a deliberate act. Too quiet—she’d only lain down for a minute. Why hadn’t the baby woken her up? The light on the stairs was the golden blond of late afternoon. She’d slept through lunch, slept through the afternoon feeding, slept until it was almost time to start cooking supper, how had she slept so long?
Lacey stopped, pressing her hand against the wall, feeling the texture of the paint against her palm. She looked at her watch, which said 7:23, so she’d only been in the hallway for two minutes, yet she could not shake off this heart-squeezing sense that it was too long, too much time had passed, she was too late. And the porthole window framed a starless night, clouded and moonless darkness, not the flood of late spring sunshine she had seen. Imagined. Not seen. Imagined. Remembered.
“Mom?” she said. So many children had stood outside this bathroom door calling for their mothers. “Ella Dane? What’s going on in there?”
The door opened. Smoke twisted out, and Jack McMure roared out of the smoke, shouting in another man’s voice, “You did this, you, you, you did this!”
Lacey’s hand slid down the wall and she knelt with her hands over her face. “I’m sorry,” she wept. “I didn’t mean to, I just lay down for a minute, I was so tired!”
“After all I do, six hours a day with those freaks and hooligans, and I come home to this.” He carried something in his left arm, pressed against his shoulder and his heart, something small as a cat. A clear stain spread from it, turning his white shirt to glass. She could not stop looking. Soon the stain would sink into him. His skin would fade away, his muscles turn pink, then white, then clear, his ribs would turn to glass and his lungs to water, until only the wild red heart was left, hammering unbearable pain. He grabbed her shoulder and dragged her to the top of the stairs. “Call them,” he said.