I’m surrounded by crazy people and now crazy is beginning to seem normal. Houses don’t hold people, and I covered those screwholes with the deadbolt and just remembered it wrong.
When he got back with the bag of nuggets, having snitched only a few, he went through the house calling Sylvie’s name, but she didn’t answer. Not even in the attic. It was the first time he’d been in the house that she hadn’t also been there. So he sat down and ate the nuggets himself. He was hungry enough to polish them off without trouble, and the fries, and both lemonades. Then, because he hadn’t really done his day’s quota of work yet, he went room to room tearing up carpets and hauling them out to the curb. No reason not to bare the floors everywhere in the house, get the carpets all hauled away with the first load. When he tore up the carpet in the room that had Sylvie’s bed in it, he couldn’t help noticing that the bed was all she had. No other furniture. Not so much as a book to read or a nightstand.
It was dark when he finished. He was sweaty and dusty and worn out. So much for his shower. But he didn’t have the energy for another one tonight. Besides, his towel wouldn’t be dry yet.
When he came into the house from the junkpile out front, he heard water running in the house. So she had come back while he was outside. Must be using the back door. Or . . . the tunnel? Was there room enough to squeeze through over the top of the rubble, if somebody really wanted to?
Tired as he was, curiosity got the better of him and he went down the stairs into the cellar. He had left a worklamp hanging in the cellar, but even after he found the power strip and turned on the overhead, he still needed his flashlight to see behind the coal furnace. The rubble didn’t quite reach to the top of the gap in the foundation. Depending on how skinny Sylvie really was, maybe she could do it. But there was no sign of anybody climbing there—not that he knew what such a sign would be. A footprint? Not likely. Fallen rocks? It was a pile of rubble, for heaven’s sake. How could he tell which rocks were fallen because of somebody climbing over? So what did he know now? Maybe she used the tunnel, maybe she didn’t. And what did it matter?
He was tired. It was dark outside. Time for sleep, so he could be up at dawn. He stopped in the bathroom at the top of the cellar stairs in order to use the toilet and to wash his hands and face, then ducked his head down to splash water onto his hair to rinse out the worst of the dust, then toweled his head so he wouldn’t soak his pillow. He still felt filthy but at least his face didn’t feel cemented over with carpet dust. The water was still running upstairs. He wondered if he might have caused Sylvie’s shower to turn cold when he washed up or hot when he flushed the toilet. It had been thoughtless of him not to wait till she was done. But then, it was kind of a long shower she was taking and he needed to get to bed. He’d ask her in the morning whether the downstairs bathroom affected the upstairs shower.
He went into the parlor without switching on the light—he could see well enough by the streetlight to take off his shoes and socks and lie down on his cot. So he followed his ritual and pried each shoe off with the toe of the other foot, then sat down to take off his socks.
But when he leaned back, he cracked his head hard against something. It was so painful, so sharp a blow that he almost blacked out. He had to lie down until he could see again, and when he felt the back of his head it was wet. Which meant he had just got blood all over his pillow. Of course he knew at once what he had hit. Lying there on the cot, the workbench fairly loomed over him.
He tried to stand up but again almost fainted. So he crawled to the power strip and turned on the light. The workbench was almost malevolent in its placement, right up against the cot, at exactly the middle, where he sat every night to take off his shoes. Why did she move it? And why to that exact spot? It was impossible to imagine that she actually meant him to hurt himself, and yet it couldn’t have been more perfectly placed to achieve that end.
His head was clearing. When he looked at the pillow he could see that there really wasn’t much blood, just a dot of it. His fingers had felt the liquid, but of course his hair was still wet from the washing up he did. That’s what he had felt. Mostly. But there was a goose egg growing on the back of his head.
He pulled and then pushed the workbench away from his cot. The strain of moving it made his head throb. Damn her anyway for touching his stuff. Didn’t they have a deal? He wasn’t going to let this pass. He wasn’t going to be calm and reasonable about it, either. She had drawn blood, for pete’s sake.
He strode to the stairs and started to take them three at a time. The pain in his head immediately let him know that this was not a good idea. One step at a time he finished the ascent, then walked to the bathroom door.
It stood ajar by a couple of inches, and inside he could see fog swirling. He raised his hand to knock—or to push the door open? What was he thinking? She was taking a shower, which meant she was naked in there. Just because he had bumped his head didn’t give him the right to violate her modesty. Time enough for this discussion in the morning.
He made his way downstairs gingerly, because each jolting footstep rang through his head. This was going to slow him down tomorrow, he knew it. He rummaged through his suitcase and found some extra-strength Tylenol, then went to the bathroom and took four of them with a few handfuls of water. Had to get some paper cups.
Back in the parlor he switched off the light, then felt the back of his head to see if it was still bleeding. It felt like it had scabbed over. Not much of an injury, really, though the swelling was pretty high. If he was suffering from concussion, how would he know? He should go to the hospital. But what would they do? Tell him to take Tylenol and go to bed. He could do that without paying for a doctor and waiting for three hours in the emergency room.
Maybe he’d die in his sleep tonight. So what? Let Sylvie figure out what to do with his body. Let the Weird sisters cover him with garlic and bury him in the back yard. He was too sick and tired of everything to care what happened. You help somebody a little, and look what happens. Twenty thousand dollars because of Cindy. Now concussion and possible death because of Sylvie.
Don’t be such a baby, he told himself. You’re going to be fine.
He lay on his side, his head throbbing. Come on, Tylenol, don’t fail me now.
The water stopped running. How nice. Sylvie had apparently drained the hot water tank and would now go blissfully to bed, clean for the first time in years, no doubt, while he suffered alone downstairs because of her negligence.
A few moments later, he heard soft footsteps on the stairs. Was she coming down to inspect the damage? No, he shouldn’t leap to conclusions. No doubt she’d have some reason why she moved the workbench and then forgot to put it back. He should be fair and hear her out.
Like a good father.
The words in his own mind made his head throb even more. He wasn’t her father. He wasn’t her anything, not even her landlord, since she wasn’t paying rent. And yet he was thinking of her as a daughter, wasn’t he? Because when he knew that she was taking a shower, when he stood there at her door, it was her modesty that he cared about, that he wanted to protect. What he didn’t feel was desire. She was not in the category Cindy Claybourne had been in, when Don kissed her, when he felt himself swept away with desire for her. He and Cindy had met as equals. Sylvie was a waif; Don had her under his protection. The way Cindy was now. Off-limits.
Only he had still felt desire for Cindy today. It had taken willpower—not a lot, but some—to keep from trying to reopen that closed door.
It didn’t matter. Sylvie was coming down the stairs and he’d have to deal with her now whether she was in a daughter role in his unconscious mind or not. Painfully, slowly, he rose to a sitting position.
She emerged from the shadow of the entryway into the light slanting in from the streetlamp. Her hair hung straight and wet, with just a hint of curl in it where a few strands had dried. She had apparently decided against the bathrobe he bought for her—she was back in the same faded blue
dress. But in this light, cleaned up, the hair no longer stringing across her face, she was almost pretty in a forlorn, dreamy sort of way.
“You’re still awake?” she asked softly.
“Don’t you mean still alive?” he asked.
“What?” she said. “I just thought I heard you upstairs when I was showering. Did you want something?”
“You were gone when I got back with dinner,” he said. “Nuggets from Chick-Fil-A. I called through the house but you didn’t answer so what can I say. We don’t have a fridge or a microwave and they’re nasty when they’re cold. So I ate them.”
“That’s OK.”
No, it wasn’t OK. That wasn’t what he meant to say to her at all. He was going to chew her out about her carelessness. It was the headache. He couldn’t think straight.
He reached down and held out the pillow. Not that she could see it in the dark.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing much. Just my blood.”
“You hurt yourself?”
“No,” said Don. “You hurt me. By moving my workbench right up against my cot.”
“No,” she murmured.
“Smacked my head on it when I sat down to take off my socks. Almost knocked me out.”
“You should go to the hospital.”
“No, I’ve decided to die at home,” he said nastily.
“Concussions can be dangerous.”
“So why didn’t you think of that when you moved things around down here? I thought I asked you not to touch my tools.”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Who else, the tooth fairy?” he asked. “Come on, you can’t move the workbench halfway across the room and then forget you did it. It’s heavy.”
“I didn’t move your workbench,” she said. “I’m sorry you were hurt.”
She turned abruptly and left, pattering up the stairs.
He had no sympathy for her. Imagine denying it. How stupid did she think he was?
Couldn’t deal with it now. Thinking about her only made him angry, and that made his head hurt worse, and he didn’t need that. Had to sleep this off so he could get to work the next morning.
At the top of the stairs, Sylvie slapped the newel post. Without a sound she formed words and spoke them. “Stupid, nasty . . . what are you doing? What are you thinking of?”
She walked into the room Don Lark had stripped and opened up. “How many times do I have to tell you, he’s not hurting you?”
She strode to a bare timber, a thick vertical post, one of the ancient bones of the house, and pressed her head against it. “No more of this. No more hurting him. Ever.” The house seemed to her like a little child going to the doctor. Lashing out in terror of the needle. You couldn’t get angry, you just had to explain. “Don’t you see he’s going to make you whole again? It hurts now, but soon he’ll make you stronger. You have to trust me.”
13
Daughters
Tearing out walls, ripping up carpets, stripping lath and plaster off the old timbers, those were the dramatic changes, requiring hard labor and little skill. But those jobs were soon done, for the moment at least, for that first upstairs room. Don paid to have the junkpile hauled away; then he settled in to the routine of turning that upstairs room back into the graceful, comforting space it was meant to be.
He went back and forth over whether to add another bathroom upstairs. Now was the time to do it, or at least to rough it in between the back bedroom and the front one. On the one hand, plumbing it would be expensive and difficult, since no pipes ran to that region of the house. And it would cut into the nice proportions of one room or the other—or both, if he made it into a huge, two-window bathroom. So his inclination was to leave it out.
On the other hand, Americans seemed to be in the middle of an intense love affair with the bathroom. Not only were bathrooms getting larger in both size and number, people weren’t even frosting the glass anymore, and often didn’t even allow for window coverings. Heather and Chuckie next door could look out their window and watch whatever you were doing in the jakes. Don didn’t get it. Some of the bathrooms he’d seen looked like water shrines. One bathroom he saw, in a development just off the Algonkian Parkway in northern Virginia, was exactly as large as the master bedroom. All the normal accoutrements were scattered around the edges of the room, and in the middle was a huge jacuzzi that looked like an altar to some pagan god. He could imagine some priest in gold lamé sacrificing a virgin or a sheep.
For people who needed porcelain temples, would one small bathroom cut into the hall at the head of the stairs do the job for the entire second floor? He could hear the househunting couples already. “The children would fight constantly over the bathroom. And what about guests? It would be so awful trying to get the kids to keep their bathroom clean enough for company.”
Even money wasn’t a reliable guide. Putting in more bathrooms would make the house easier to sell, especially since the original bedrooms were so large that there was room to tuck a good-sized bathroom in every one of them. But not putting in more bathrooms would save him a lot of money, which he wouldn’t have to borrow from the bank, and that would allow him to charge maybe a little less for the house, which would make the house easier to sell. He couldn’t lose. Or couldn’t win, depending on how you looked at it.
In the end he followed his own preferences and opted to keep the simple purity of the original design. In other words, he saved himself a lot of bother and expense. He would still cut into the bedroom space to put in a beautiful closet that would look more like fine furniture than architecture. But it wouldn’t rise to within three feet of the eleven-foot ceiling, so the proportions of the room would still be visible and have their effect on the dweller. As for the cost, building an elegant closet was entirely a matter of carpentry, which he would do with his own hands.
The decision was made, and he set to work.
The rough framing always went fast, even working alone. Then wiring to bring the whole thing up to code—that took time, but the payoffs were immediate, as he was able to get rid of the extension cords running up the stairs and plug things directly into the new outlets. The wallboard got the fastest results of all, making things look so close to being done.
But that was just when the real work began. Any hardworking, careful guy could put up a stud wall and wallboard, then mud it and prime it. Any competent electrician could install a slew of outlets. But there weren’t many people left in America who still knew how to make elaborate wood trim out of fine hardwoods, which were stained, not painted, so the grain showed and no knots or other flaws could be tolerated. Crown moldings, a picture rail, wainscoting, and baseboards were all turned out by Don’s own hand.
With Sylvie watching.
There was no escaping her and he no longer tried. Partly because he was trying to be decent about it, but even more because she really wasn’t intrusive. Most people who watched others work were extraverts, insisting on constant engagement, asking questions, offering opinions, or, worst of all, trying to carry on involved conversations about things that had nothing to do with the task at hand. Sylvie just sat there, virtually unnoticeable. When she did speak, it was to ask questions that—to Don’s surprise—were worth answering. Like, How did carpenters make moldings before the invention of the router? Why wasn’t wallpaper put on first so the moldings and chair rail could cover the edges and keep them from peeling? Because the questions came rarely, they were a pleasure to answer.
And now and then Don would ask a question of his own. He began to build up a picture of Sylvie’s life. An only child, orphaned in her teens, she got a friendly foster home with the parents of a friend, but it was always more a room-and-board arrangement than a family relationship, and after high school graduation they quickly drifted apart. Sylvie had no money—either to inherit or from insurance. She earned a scholarship to UNCG and worked hard to pay her own living expenses. It was a solitary life; between work and school she had no
time for dating and no particular interest in it, either. “If I met a guy who seemed like he might be as good a man as my father, then I started comparing myself to my mother and realized I wasn’t worthy of a guy like that.” She laughed over it, but Don understood the pain under the laughter. Squatting here in the Bellamy house hadn’t been that big a change for her, except for matters of personal hygiene.
Felicity Yont changed all that. Lissy was the extravert Sylvie wasn’t. They were close enough to the same size that they could trade clothes, but mostly Lissy made Sylvie borrow her more stylish outfits so she wouldn’t look so mousy. Lissy changed Sylvie’s hair, drew her into some double dates, even got her to sleep in t-shirts instead of her dowdy flannel nightgowns. Never mind that Sylvie’s t-shirts were all shapeless oversized men’s shirts, while Lissy always managed to find shirts tight and short enough that she couldn’t have scotch-taped a rose petal to her skin without making a bump. It was still a lifestyle makeover for Sylvie.
Except it didn’t take. Sylvie was older, had a keener sense of responsibility. Maybe she had always been older. But she knew her grades had to be good enough to win her a solid job offer upon completing her master’s degree. So despite many changes in Sylvie’s look and habits, Lissy couldn’t change the big one: Sylvie’s need to work every possible moment. Sylvie thought it was a big deal to go out and frolic once a month. Lissy thought her life was over if she only went out on weekends. “Oil and water but our life was exciting,” said Sylvie. “Mine was certainly more interesting than the average librarian-to-be.”
So after that first year as friends, when Lissy proposed they share a large apartment on the ground floor of a decaying but gorgeous old house, Sylvie was game. What could go wrong?
“What did go wrong?”
“You’re going to laugh, but it was when she started watching every move I made. It used to be she was so free and I was the stay-at-home stick-in-the-mud. But then that last semester she stops seeing her boyfriend Lanny so much and there she is hanging around the apartment, looking over my shoulder, reading my textbooks. It’s as though she suddenly realized she was about to graduate with about a C average and nobody was going to want to give her a job worth having. While I had a couple of offers, including that Providence job. I think she wanted to learn how to study, only it was too late.”