Homebody: A Novel (16 page)

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."

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 lame 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."

"You miss her."

Sylvie looked away. "She wasn't a nice person. But no worse than me."

From then on it was impossible for Don to see Sylvie as a homeless waif. She was a person with a past, with friends found and lost, with emotions that could be stung into life by a memory.

Conversations like that were pretty rare, though, during the couple of weeks Don worked on that one room. Mostly Don just worked as Sylvie watched from across the room. Mostly he forgot she was there.

In fact, they evolved a kind of signal. Don plugged in his cheap boom box during the jobs that didn't involve power tools. Music gave a kind of rhythm to the work, made it feel like he was flowing a little faster through the minutes and hours of the day. He tuned to 98.7, which used to be a hard rock station but now played the new-country format. First time it drove Sylvie out of the room, which annoyed Don a little. Couldn't help but take it as an insult to his taste. But then she gradually sidled back in, listening to the music. While the music was playing, she never talked. But when Don was tired of the station and turned the boombox off, she usually had a question or comment stored up. Often enough it was country music she wanted to talk about. "Once you get used to the twang," she said.

"Some of us don't hear it as a twang," said Don.

"Don't tell me John Anderson sounds natural to you."

"I give you John Anderson."

"'Swangin,'" she sang.

He laughed.

Gradually he got a feel for the kind of music she liked, and one evening after work he went to Borders and came back with a fistful of CDs. Garth Brooks was too plastic for her; Lyle Lovett was too weird. But she liked Martina McBride and Lorrie Morgan, Trisha Yearwood and Ronna Reeves, liked them a lot. Don tried to figure out what it was that she liked so much about their music. Heaven knows they were twangy enough, and pretty plastic too, sometimes. She couldn't put it into words. "It's like their lives are full of tragedy and yet they can sing about it with so much energy. Instead of being depressed, they turn it into music."

"Is that what you are?" asked Don. "Depressed?"

"No. I'm just plain old-fashioned sad." And then she got up and wandered off. He couldn't figure out why she left when she left. There didn't seem to be a pattern to it. Sometimes she'd answer the most personal questions—not that he asked her anything
that
private. Other times the most innocent, general comment would make her wander away. Now and then Don would feel a little stab of annoyance at her moods, but then he remembered how he let his own moods control her, too, what with turning the radio on when he didn't want to talk and taking off to run errands when he needed to be alone.

The longer he worked on refurbishing that upstairs room, the more she warmed up. She finally started taking a little food now and then. Never more than a bite or two when Don was looking. She'd chew it like it was the best thing ever cooked. But she'd leave the rest. "You're going to waste away, you keep eating like an anorexic."

"You can't eat like an anorexic," she said. "You can only
not
eat like one."

"Well pardon me while I go puke like a bulimic."

"That's the room that's missing from this house. A vomitorium." Then, because he had no idea about Roman culture, she explained to him how the Romans would feast and feast, then duck into a vomitorium to puke it up.

"How does the chef tell the difference between a compliment and a criticism?"

"If you go back for seconds."

Times like that, there was a lot of silly joking, easy laughter. The kind of chatter that could go on while Don was working, without him missing a stroke or a cut.

One time after they heard Ronna Reeves sing "Man from Wichita," Sylvie started talking about her parents. "I don't know why that song reminds me of them. The song's got nothing to do with parents."

"It's got to do with missing someone so bad you want to die," said Don. "My folks didn't die on me when I was young, but it still hurts."

"I know," said Sylvie. "You fight with them because they're always trying to control your life, you want to break free. And then... I was free. And I thought: Why isn't this more fun? Isn't this what I always wanted?"

"Of course it wasn't."

"I don't mean them being dead, I mean the freedom. I wanted freedom. But it was... what. Empty."

"Me too," said Don. "It's like, anything you do when your parents aren't there to watch, it didn't really happen."

"People aren't supposed to lose their parents so young."

"In the old days most people lost one or the other. Childbirth. Sickness. Industrial accidents. Every time I cut myself on something, I think, there but for antiseptics and modern hygiene would be my last injury. Gangrene."

"Half the people I knew in school had lost a parent."

"Yeah but that was divorce, right?"

"My parents fought sometimes," said Sylvie. "But I don't think they would have gotten divorced, even if they hadn't died."

"Mine were solid, too."

"I had to keep imagining my mother was checking on me," said Sylvie. "The whole time I was working on my schooling and all, I'd keep imagining her just out of sight, watching." She laughed derisively. "Turned out it was only Lissy."

"But why shouldn't your mom be watching you from... wherever she is."

"Heaven is the word you're looking for," she said.

"I didn't know if you, you know, believed."

"In what?"

"The afterlife."

"Maybe the word 'belief' is too strong," she said. "I hope."

"Me too."

"It ain't your parents you're missing, Don Lark."

"Careful, Sylvie. You're starting to talk like a hick. 'Ain't,' indeed. Too much country music. It's getting to you."

She ignored his attempt to change the subject. "I try to imagine what it would be like to have a child, and then lose it."

"I didn't
lose
her," said Don. "She was stolen away from me."

"I try but I can't do it," said Sylvie. "Either one. Can't imagine either one."

"Having one is the best thing in the world. Losing her is the worst. After that, you've seen the best, you've seen the worst."

"So you're scared of nothing?"

"I look like a damn fool to you?"

"Only when you're holding up a slab of wall-board with that toe-lever thing and pressing your whole body against it to get it set in place. Then it looks like you're praying to the wall."