not the crying kind of guy."
She touched his cheek. "I can still feel your tears," she said.
"I feel like this is just one sadness too many, Sylvie. I don't know. I don't know."
"You'll be fine."
"I don't know."
"You've got to sleep now," she said.
"Sleep? You think I'm going to waste any of the time we have together?"
"She's coming, Don. And you're so tired right now you can hardly stand up. Look at you, stooped over like an old man. What good will you be to me or yourself if you're falling down from exhaustion?"
"What if you're gone when I wake up?"
"I won't be gone, Don. Even if I've faded, I'll still be here. In the house. I'll still be here."
"She has to see you, Sylvie. She has to face you."
"I'll hold on. I'm stronger than you think. I've got the strength of the house to hold me here, don't I? And your strength to keep me real. But for now you've got to sleep."
She was right and he knew it. He nodded, unhappy about it, and started for the stairs.
"No, not down there," she said. "You can't sleep down there. What if she sneaks up in the dark before either of us knows she's there, and shoots you through the window?"
"Didn't think of that."
"This isn't TV," she said. "Bad guys don't really stand there and confess everything so there's time for the good guys to get there and rescue you. They just shoot and down you go and they're out of there."
"I don't know, even bad guys like to have somebody hear their story."
"We'll find out tonight, won't we. Here, sleep on my bed. In this beautiful room you made for me."
"I didn't know it was for you till it was done."
"I didn't know you loved me until you gave it to me."
Her bedding had gone unwashed for ten years, but it felt clean enough as he lay down atop the bedspread. Whatever was hers was clean enough for him. Or maybe it really was clean. Like her faded dress. Maybe the house had the power to do that, too. All that was missing was flower petals to mark her passage through the house.
With all his aches and pains, with the evening light still coming in through the windows, he thought it would take him forever to get to sleep, or that perhaps he might not sleep at all. But within a few minutes he felt himself fading. For a moment he thought: Is this how it feels to her? To fade like this? But he knew it was the opposite. His body was heavy and real; it was his consciousness that was fading. Her consciousness would stay, locked up in this house until he tore it down and set her free. And that's what he'd do. He'd have ten, twenty thousand left, maybe a little more, after paying the demolition crew. That was enough for a down payment. He'd work his way up to cash purchases again. He'd done it before. His life wasn't over. It only felt that way.
She was still there, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall. "Sylvie," he whispered.
"Aren't you asleep yet?"
"Almost," he said. "Promise me you'll wake me when she comes. Don't try to face her alone."
"I promise," she said. "I've been alone long enough. The house kept trying to draw me in, make me part of the walls, the timbers. I never did. I knew I had to stay separate. Myself. I was waiting."
"For Lissy to come back?"
"No. For you."
She crawled the yard or so to the bed and leaned on it with her face just inches from his. "When Lissy was around, men always ignored me and fell for her."
"I'm smarter than those guys," he said.
And then he slept.
Sylvie watched him for a while, but then she began to wander through the house. As she was fading, she felt the pull of the house on her growing stronger. She could already feel her footsteps as strongly from underneath as from above; she felt through the floor as much as through her own feet.
For ten years she hadn't let herself want anything. Not sunlight, not food, not love, not life. Nothing. She hadn't known she was dead, but at the same time she knew she felt that way. Only when she stopped being dead, only these few weeks with Don Lark in the house did she understand how dead she had been. Lost in her guilt, her shame, her pain, her losses.