this time tomorrow. It was also a good house and he was going to make it better. If there was something wrong with the house, he'd heal it. When it came to houses, he was the physician. By the time he was done, the old ladies would come over for a tour of the place just like everybody else and they'd ooh and aah about how gorgeous he'd made it.
Or else they'd sit there in their house and stick pins in a doll with "Don Lark" scrawled on it in crayon. He didn't really care which.
He rolled over on his side and did what he always did to go to sleep. He imagined rooms and estimated the dimensions and calculated the floor area and the wall area in order to figure out the cost of carpet and wallpaper and how much wainscoting he'd need and...
It never took long. He slept.
Chapter 7 Squatter
Don didn't like dreams because they were even worse than his real life. Either they were meaningless, uncontrollable fantasies, or they were memories, which in his case were just as uncontrollable and fraught with unbearable meaning. And they came night after night. He woke up with them, sometimes as often as an old man with prostate trouble, and it had gotten to the point where during some dreams he knew the whole time that he was dreaming, that he'd soon wake up, that it was either unreal or too far in the past to change. Even knowing that, he couldn't stop the dream, couldn't even stop it from frightening him or enraging him or grieving him all over again.
Maybe it was anticipation of the closing next morning that made lawyers come to mind as he lay asleep. In his dream he sat across the desk from Dick Friend, who had a reputation in Greensboro as the lawyer nobody wanted to mess with. The lawyer you wanted on your side, if only out of fear that if you didn't hire him your opponent would. Don came to him as a man with some money and respect in the community. He heard himself explaining his whole story, ending as it always did: I want my daughter back. She's not safe with my ex-wife.
And then Friend, beetle-browed and dominating, explained to him that as long as the mother hadn't been charged with any crime, the courts would have little sympathy with him. "Hire a private investigator, get evidence on her." As if he hadn't tried it. The pictures he got didn't prove anything, the police said, and unless he could let them know when she was going to do a buy and they could get the seller, they weren't interested. He spent almost ten thousand dollars finding that out. "Just to mount a serious case will mean bringing in experts. And when you lose, the appeals cost more and more. This can break you, Don."
"It's worth it."
"Not if the expenses of the suit cost you so much that you can no longer prove that you can provide for the child, or even keep up your child support payments."
"Which she uses to buy drugs."
"Which you can't prove. The weight of presumption in favor of the mother is enormous."
"But there's a chance."
"There's a chance the moon will fall into the sea with a gentle splash," said Friend. "But is it worth betting on?"
"My daughter is worth betting on," said Don. "Get her away from that woman, Dick."
Suddenly a loud creaking sound made Don and the lawyer both turn around and look toward the door. It swung open, but there was nobody there. A thrill of fear ran through Don. From being a memory, this was turning into a weird fear dream. Come on, Don, why do you put up with these dreams? Wake up now, before you end up imagining the car smashing into the concrete and the babyseat rocketing forward through the windshield and headfirst into the cement.
Don opened his eyes. He lay on his cot in the parlor of the Bellamy house. The wind had died down outside. The house was still.
And then he heard it again, the creaking step. It wasn't a normal house noise. It was someone walking on stairs.
Don sat up and reached for his shoes in the dark. If he had to run - toward someone or away from them - it'd be easier with his shoes on. Another stealthy step, another, and then another. In the dim slanted light he found his flashlight and his favorite