Free Starter House A Novel by Sonja Condit Page B

was right. He was angry, but he’d get over it. And he had brought her onion rings. She liked to nibble a hole in the crust, suck the onion out, and then eat the crust like a crunchy onion-flavored cookie. Delicious.
    A voice snorted under the door, “Huh. Huh. Huh.” Hard claws tapped back and forth, and the snuffling voice traveled from one side of the door to the other. “Huh.”
    Poor little Bibbits. Under all his fluffy apricot poodlosity, he was a sweet dog. Lacey pulled off the cheeseburger’s lower patty. She opened the door, and Bibbits stood on his rear legs and danced in a circle for her. She dropped the patty in front of him.
    He sniffed it, licked it, nudged it with his paw. Then he looked up and barked. “Seriously?” she said. She tore the patty into four pieces and fed them to him. When he was finished, he trotted back into the kitchen and knocked his bowl of rice upside down.
    Lacey brushed her teeth, took off the garnet strand, and went to bed, though it wasn’t yet ten. She let the garnet strand fall into the clay bowl beside her bed, along with all the other gemstone strands and amulets Ella Dane had given her over the last few weeks. Rose quartz for her uterus, amethyst for serenity, citrine for cleansing, moonstone for new life. Ella Dane was concerned for Lacey, but she had not sensed anything wrong with the house itself. The baby rolled inside her. What a busy boy he was, playing peekaboo in the dark.
    She fell asleep with the child dancing under her hand, and she woke gradually to a pain above her heart. Too many onion rings. She needed milk. The room was dark. She had a confused sense that it was later than it seemed, that midnight was long gone and yet morning had come no closer. The night had taken a turn into a different kind of time, bubbling out of itself into a circle of nameless hours between three and four.
    She needed milk. She pressed her hand against the mattress to lever herself upright, and her palms sank into a swampy warmth. She pressed deeper into the mattress. The slow liquid rose over her fingers, over the tops of her hands.
    Blood. So much blood, too much. While she was sleeping, the thing she most feared had happened, and it was already too late. Where was Dr. Vlk’s firm voice now? The window was a gray square in the wall, white with moonlit clouds casting no light into the room. She threw the upper sheet aside, and the bed was a black pool, a deeper black around her hips. She felt the warmth on her left thigh, the dark stain from her waist to her knee. Where the child had danced, stillness. She stood up, expecting pain, feeling only the old pain over her heart, the wetness cooling on her legs and hands. Eight steps to the light switch. Every step was a prayer. Please God no. Let it not be true. No no no.
    She touched the light switch, and the bed was blazing white. The lower sheet was translucent, water soaked. Warm water, with drifts of bubble-bath foam, planes of rainbow where the bubbles met in flat walls, a continental mass of bubbles mounding where she had slept. In the middle lay a green-and-blue plastic tugboat.
    Impossible, intolerable. She could not believe in the tugboat. She had never owned it, never had it in a classroom, never seen it in her life. It lay in the bubbles and the wet bed, so real and so specific, so exactly that particular tugboat, a real thing.
    She had to wake up now. She felt herself standing by the light switch with her hand on the wall. She also felt herself lying in the bed, on her left with her knee drawn up, breathing hard, trying to move a hand, to make a sound. Between the real self and the dream self, only the pain over her heart was the same. She breathed harder but could not engage her voice. She brought her whole mind into her left hand lying softly next to her breast. If she could tighten the fingers, if she could move at all. . . .
    The baby kicked. Lacey opened her eyes. She was in her clean dry bed, no blood, no water, no