"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."
"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.