Starter House A Novel Read Online Free Page B

turn the blue grout black. She squeezed her hand around a clump of paper towels. Numb cold rayed through her wrist.
    Inside, the dining room and hallway were unexpectedly dim with a darkness gathering like water in a cup, and pressing into Lacey’s eyes and filling her throat. Her teacher voice, the careful adult Lacey, warned her to stop, go out and wait for Harry, but she ignored it because the house was hers . Nothing could keep her out. She clenched her injured hand between her breasts and reached out with the other hand to feel her way.
    She could not understand this darkness, here where the lowest step turned in a full circle and she had seen her someday children and their maybe dog in the bright afternoon. Evening light came in through the two windows in the living room and reflected off the newly polished and sealed floors, a sheet of brilliant amber. In the kitchen, red sunlight glittered in the granite’s mica flecks. Yet no light reached here, where the stairs began, though it should have poured in a shower of gold down the porthole window. She looked up to see what was wrong—had the painters blocked the window with cardboard and forgotten to remove it? Was the glass broken and boarded up?—and she saw nothing, not even darkness. A mist pressed against her eyes, and her mouth tasted of cold gray water, the taste of fear.
    There was a step on the front porch, too light for Harry, and a hand tapped the door. Lacey held her breath and pressed her hand over her breastbone to muffle her rushing heart. She felt like a child put to bed in a strange room, knowing silence was safety, head under the blankets no matter how hot, suffocating on terror and her own used breath. But the teacher voice said, It’s time to act like a grown-up, and the hand tapped again. Nothing to be afraid of, it said, just a neighbor at the door .
    “Coming,” Lacey called. Something caught her ankle. Something that gripped and squeezed. Her feet flew out behind her and she tumbled forward, twisting as she fell.
    She landed hard on her right side and curled around the belly bump. “No,” she said. “No, no.” This could not happen. She held her breath, keeping the child in through will alone; she clenched her fists, regardless of the pain in the slashed palm.
    The back door opened, and with Harry’s entrance, light flowed into the hall, rising from the polished floor. The porthole window burned. “Lacey? Where are you?”
    “I fell.” The middle of her body tightened, relaxed, and tightened again around a feeling too dense and slow to call pain.
    “Are you hurt?”
    Something touched her thigh. “I’m bleeding.”
    He took her right hand and pulled her fingers away from the red clot of paper. “You’ll need stitches.”
    “No. I’m bleeding .” Lacey reached under the pink dress to touch the thing on her thigh, soft and insinuating, a wet feather, a tickling tongue, the faintest sticky stroke of warmth sliding on her skin. “Ambulance,” she said, her voice perfectly steady. Her heart hummed in her ears, and she kept her face stony. If she let go, let her mouth shake even once, she would fall apart and the baby would die. She tightened her thighs to hold everything in, blood and baby and all. She would not allow this to happen.
    “This is too soon,” Harry said. He reached down to take her elbows, as if to pull her to her feet. She shook her head. His hands jumped away from her.
    “Ambulance,” she said again. She showed him her left hand, the blood on her fingertips. “Please.”

 

    Chapter Four
    AFTER TEN MINUTES in the emergency room, Lacey was wheeled into a semiprivate room in Labor and Delivery. Pink and blue balloons floated above the doorknobs in the hall, each announcing someone else’s baby. She waited for a long time and no one came to tell her if her baby was alive or dead. If only she had her phone so she could call Eric—even if she had the phone, the battery was probably drained; she was forever