Homebody: A Novel (17 page)

"Or flirting with it."

"What you do is way beyond flirting."

"Way beyond praying sometimes, too," he said.

"See, Don, what I wanted to say was this. Even if you get mad at me. I've got to say it. Your little girl. She had from you the thing that matters more than money or 'quality time' or anything. She knew she was seen and known and admired and loved and...
respected
by you, she knew that, didn't she?"

"I don't know. She was so young."

"She knew. You think a kid has to be able to talk before they can know?"

And they got off on something else and then after a while fell silent and that moment was over. There weren't many of those times, but there were enough of them that by the time Don was pretty much through with that room, he didn't feel like he'd really finished it until he had Sylvie come in for a formal inspection and guided tour. "You're my surrogate parents," Don said. "I need to have you look at what I did so it will all turn real."

"Bibbity-bobbity-boo," said Sylvie. "You're now a real boy."

"You're thinking of
Pinocchio
but quoting
Cinderella
."

"I'm thinking of the sequel. Pinocchio tries to put the slipper on Cinderella and she gets splinters in her foot."

"I don't leave splinters," he said.

"So show me, and I'll make the room turn real," she said.

He led her to the room and opened the door, feeling silly as he did it. Hadn't she seen this room every day while he was working on it? But she came inside and turned around and around, like a child dancing, seeing it all as if for the first time. "Oh, Don, it's so beautiful."

"It was a well-designed space to begin with," he said. "All I had to do was keep from screwing it up."

"It makes the rest of the house look so drab."

"That's why I finish one room before doing anything else. I like to see the contrast."

Sylvie ran to the closet and opened the doors. Though on the outside it looked like an armoire, it was deep, a walk-in, with gentle lights that came on as soon as a door was opened. She turned around, reached out, and closed the doors. He stood in the middle of the room, waiting for her to reopen them. Waiting. "Sylvie?" he said. Then he began walking to the closet, wondering what could possibly be keeping her inside it so long. Couldn't she figure out that you opened the doors just by pushing them?

Just as he was about to reach out for the handles, the doors were flung open and Sylvie bounded out, right in front of him, and shouted, "Boo!"

Don made a great show of clutching his heart, but that was only to cover the fact that she really had frightened him. She almost collapsed with laughter, and he couldn't help laughing with her. Then she ran to the window and touched the natural-wood frame, the blinds, the fabric texture of the wallpaper.

"You can almost feel the house getting younger," she said.

Then, because she insisted on it, he gave her the guided tour, explaining what he had done—and what some builders might have done but he chose not to, so the space would be better proportioned or truer to the original concept or more functional. The inside story. And she listened to him. The way a daughter might have done, if she had lived long enough to grow up to be a homeless student of library science living in an abandoned mansion.

This idea stopped him cold, his thoughts spinning.

"What?" she asked, looking at him with some concern.

"What what?" he said. Then he realized that he must have been standing there in sudden silence. "Don't worry, when I have a heart attack I'll clutch my chest and grunt and fall down."

"I was thinking more of a stroke. Paralyzed on the spot. Turned to stone."

"A pillar of sawdust."

"What were you thinking?" she asked.

He hesitated a moment. His normal impulse would be to fend her off with a joke. But instead he found that he wanted to talk openly to her. No jokes. "I was thinking that this was like, you know... that showing you this room, I might have done that with my... daughter, if she had lived. Shown her my work like this."

She took a step back from him. "I'm not your daughter," said Sylvie.

So it had been a mistake to open up that far. It always was. "I just meant that I was imagining what it would be like if you were."

"I'm nobody's
daughter
." She said the last word with such vehemence that Don wondered if there might be something more to her relationship with her parents than their early death.

He almost apologized, but then stopped himself. What had he actually done to her? "What do you care if I think of you as a daughter?"

"I don't need a father," she said coldly.

"And I don't need a houseguest," said Don. "I've got no room in my life for what you actually are, but I do have this huge empty space for a daughter and if that's where I find a little room for you, what do you care?"

"My father left me, and my mother, and I did just fine."

"Oh, yeah, look at you, you've done so well."

His words visibly stung her and he regretted saying them. But he wasn't going to apologize.
She
was the one who decided to turn a contemplative moment into a quarrel.

"What happened to me in college has nothing to do with losing my parents," she said.

"Yeah, well, my letting you stay here has everything to do with losing my daughter, so learn to live with it, kid."

"What are you, the ancient of days or something? I'm twenty-four, not four years old. You can't be my father."

"Give me a break," said Don. "Twenty-four? How old were you when you got your doctorate?"

"I never got it," she said. "Remember?" But then she realized what he was asking. "I meant—I mean, I was twenty-four when I would have gotten my degree. But now I'm... even older."

"How much older? Don't you even know?"

"Look around, how many calendars do you see?"

"There are seasons, you know. You go outside, there's snow or ice, think winter. It gets like an oven in here with everything boarded up, you can figure you're having summer."

"I was going to get my degree in '87." She looked away from him, and he could see that she was afraid of what he was going to tell her.

"Ten years," said Don. "You've been squatting here for ten years."

"It's 1997?" she tried to look nonchalant. "My how time flies."

"You don't even know who's president, do you?"

"They never invite me to the White House anyway, so what do I care?"

"Doesn't this bother you?" But he could see that it did, that she was frightened by what had happened to her, the years lost in whatever funk had kept her in this place.

"I had no idea," she said. "All those years." She gave a little cry, maybe a sob, then gasped, trying to calm herself.

Don reached out his hand, rested it lightly on her shoulder. It dawned on him that it was the first time he had ever touched her. Have a woman living in your house, it wouldn't do to touch her; but Sylvie needed comfort, not the tongue-lashing Don had been giving her. He was thinking: What kind of father am I?

But she recoiled from his touch as if he were some sort of disgusting amphibian. "I told you!" she screamed at him. "I'm not your daughter!"

"Damn right you're not!" he snapped. "There's not a chance in hell I would have let a daughter of mine end up like this, trapped in an abandoned house so you don't even keep track of how many
years
you've been wasting your life!"

"How old are
you
, Mister Wisdom, Mister I-Would-Have-Made-Everything-All-Right-No-Matter-How-You-Screwed-Up?"

"Younger than you," said Don. "And a hell of a lot older."

"Well,
Daddy
, don't swear at me." She made
daddy
sound like an epithet.

"Don't call me that," he said.

"I thought you wanted me to be your daughter, what happened to that?"

"When she called me Daddy it didn't sound like that." And then he heard her voice in his mind, the voice of his little girl when she was barely a year old, just walking, just able to say
Mama
and
Daddy
, before she was taken away from him. Daddy. And the floodgates opened. Sobs took over his body like a convulsion and he sank to the floor, trying to twist his body away from her so she wouldn't see how the tears leapt from his eyes and splashed on the light lustrous finish of the delicately whitewashed wooden floor.

But she saw, of course. He heard her step toward him. Felt her hand on his head, patting him. A light touch, like a child's. It burned through him, lightning through his body. "Don't touch me like that!" he cried.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"You're not my daughter, all right?" He tried to get control of his voice. He couldn't look at her, couldn't show his face contorted, tear-soaked like this. "She's dead and I'll never see her again and you're not her so get out! Get out!"

She left the room. If she went right on and left the house, that would be fine with him too. He should never have let her stay. He should never have let anybody get this close to him. He lay down on the floor, curled up like a child, crying, saying her name over and over. He hadn't let himself think of her name in years but he had lost control anyway, and so he might as well say it, over and over like a prayer, like the refrain of a sad half-forgotten song, "Nellie, Nellie, Nell."

It didn't last long, really, considering how many months, years, his feelings had been pent up. He lay there for a while, then rolled onto his back and stared up through sore, wept-out eyes at the ceiling he had finished only a few days before. The warm natural-wood molding. The closet that looked more like an armoire than a built-in. He turned his head to the windows. The wooden Venetian blinds sliced the afternoon sunlight into thick buttery bands. A room for playing, for dreaming, for resting, for life.

After all the rooms he had created out of nothing, out of junk, with this room he finally understood what it was he was making. Safe spaces. Comforting refuges. He was making rooms for Nellie.

Only Nellie would never set foot in any of them. Never in this room. So what was it for?

He got to his feet, a little sore from lying on the floor. He walked out into the hall, down the stairs, out the front door without ever seeing Sylvie. Maybe she was gone. Good.

No, not good. Not good that he could build a place like that and then drive her out of it. Surely that wasn't what he had intended. Surely it was for her that he had built it. When he was through showing her the room, he had meant to tell her that it was hers until the house was sold. Her bright safe place, after all these years in a dark, dirty, hot-or-freezing house. Not that he had admitted this plan even to himself. But that was where today was heading before it turned into that stupid, meaningless fight, into this emotional disaster.

The leaves were all turned to autumn colors now, and they still festooned the trees, except for a copious sprinkle across the lawns. But there was a wind picking up and the sky was lowering. The leaves would go tonight, the bulk of them, blown off the trees and then matted down to the ground by cold, pounding autumn rain. He walked in the chilling air, breathing in the smell of impending weather, letting the color wash over him. He had spent too long indoors. And even indoors he had not looked out the window half enough. Running errands, he hadn't seen the world he was moving through.

It was Sylvie's room. That's who he had made it for. He knew that Nellie was dead and would never live there. He knew that Sylvie wasn't his daughter. But she was someone who needed his protection. He hadn't wanted to take her into that place, but she was there, and the room was for her, had always been for her. For herself, not for some imagined surrogate of his daughter.

When she moved into that room it would no longer be his. He would knock at the door if he wanted to speak to her. If she invited him in then he would go, but as a visitor. That was the way of it, for a builder like Don. You made beautiful spaces, you built with your whole heart, and then you invited someone else into the space you had made and gave them the keys and locked yourself out of it forever. But you were still there, that was the secret. Don was still there in all the houses, watching out for the people, enclosing them, sheltering them. He was still there, soothing their eyes, stilling the sounds of the outside world, framing their lives so that all their dreams could be contained in a place where they had only to reach out and touch them and they would come to life again.

He headed back to the house. Jogged back, the tape measure and wallet and keys bouncing in his pockets. He had left the front door unlocked; he burst through it, calling out to her. "Sylvie!" His voice echoed through the house. It sounded so empty. "Sylvie, are you here?"

He ran up the stairs, tried all the doors on the second floor. Up into the attic. "Don't hide from me in here, Sylvie," he said. No answer, she wasn't there, or if she was he couldn't find her.

She'd come back. She'd hidden before, stayed out of sight for a while. But she came back. Ten years she'd been trapped in this place, it's not likely that one quarrel would drive her out, was it? He tried to fill himself with confidence as he went back down the attic stairs, then down the wide staircase to the main floor. Maybe she was in the cellar.

No. She was in the parlor. Lying on his cot. Asleep on his cot. Hadn't she heard him calling? He'd been so loud. Nellie had been like that. When she slept, she slept.

He thought of waking her, apologizing to her, telling her what he had realized, that the room was for her all along, that she was welcome here as long as the house belonged to him. But he couldn't bring himself to disturb her.

He went upstairs to the bedroom she had been sleeping in, to the one shabby bed remaining in the house. He took the mattress off the bed, blankets and all, and dragged it into the new room; the sagging box springs came next. Then he knocked apart the bedframe and carried in the four parts and reassembled them, put on the springs and mattress, and neatly made the bed. It looked so small in that large space, like a child's bed, though it was a regular twin. And so tatty compared to the glowing perfect finish of the room. He thought of buying her a new bed, a queen-size perhaps; a canopy bed, or a brass one, or a four-poster. But no, that would feel too permanent. A waste of money in a house he was going to sell in a year. This shabby old bed would have to do. It was the space around the bed that mattered. What she would see in the morning when she opened her eyes. The bands of light through the windows. The closet where she had already played like a child. She owned nothing with which to fill this space. So instead she would own the space itself.