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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 hammer, the one his ex-wife called "The Singing Sword" back when they still liked each other. Massive, long, it would make a formidable weapon. Against anything but a gun.

Armed now, Don decided to give the intruder a chance to get away. Who needed confrontation? As long as his tools were undisturbed, there was no harm done, except for whatever they did to a window or his new deadbolts in order to get into the house. He turned on the flashlight and walked over to the foot of the stairs. As he suspected, it wasn't this main front stairway creaking. Whoever it was must be on the stairs up to the attic.

As Don started up the stairs, he called out loudly, "Whoever's in here, I'm unarmed and I'm not going to hurt you." Surely it was all right to lie to intruders in the night. And a hammer wasn't a real weapon, was it? "I just want you out of my house."

In the upstairs hall, he opened each of the doors and shone his light into every room. There were places to hide. He stepped in and looked into closets, behind beds and dressers. Nobody. Room after room.

"If you leave quietly, no harm done. I won't call the cops or anything."

The sounds had stopped. Wherever the intruder was, he wasn't moving now. Lying in wait? Or just lying low? Who should be more scared?

The sound of metal scraping on metal. It took a moment for Don to realize what it was. A shower curtain with metal hangers being drawn across a rod.

He headed straight for the bathroom at the end of the hall. The door was almost closed. If the intruder had a gun, Don didn't want to make an easy target. He stood up against the wall on the hinge side of the door and reached around to push the door open. No sound, no reaction from inside.

"Look, don't be scared, nobody's going to get hurt." He wasn't sure if he was talking to the intruder or to himself. He stepped away from the wall and, from a few paces off, shone the flashlight into the bathroom. Nobody was standing there, but the shower curtain was drawn, and when Don and Cindy were in there that evening, when they kissed in there, Don was quite sure the shower curtain had been open, bunched up against the wall. The curtain wasn't even hanging inside the old clawfoot tub. If water had been running it would have made a mess on the floor. He thought of the movie Psycho and wondered which part he was playing.

As he stood there, his feelings changed. The fear faded. Anger took its place. How dare somebody break into his house while he was sleeping there? And then hide in an obvious, stupid place like this? It was outrageous. He didn't have to put up with it.

This is how guys get themselves killed, he thought. Losing their fear and getting mad enough to act.

But he couldn't stand there all night waiting for the shower curtain to open by itself. So he finally took action. In four quick strides he was at the tub, reaching up, flinging aside the curtain, all the time holding the hammer at the ready in case he needed it to defend himself.

The intruder was there, all right, a woman in a scruffy dress, huddled in the far corner of the tub, staring up at him with wide, terrified eyes as she screamed, thus answering the question of who was more frightened. She screamed again, and Don stepped back, letting the hammer drop to his side.

"For Pete's sake, shut up. Nobody's going to hurt you," he said.

Her eyes followed the hammer as he lowered it. Her screaming subsided to a whimper, then to heavy breathing. But she still stared at him in wide-eyed fear. Immediately, male guilt settled in: I made a woman scream in fear of me, I've done something wrong. He tried to stifle the feeling—after all, she was the intruder here. Or was she? From the look of her she was a street person, homeless. Maybe she'd found some way in through a window somewhere, and had been using this house as a safe place to hide out. She wouldn't know that someone was finally buying the place. His voice must have come as more of a shock to her than her creaking footsteps on the attic stairs had been to him. And then he appears, throwing back the curtain, standing there with a hammer upraised in his hand.

"How did you get in here?" Don asked.

She looked at him in puzzlement. "I live here," she finally said.

So he was right. She was a squatter. "Maybe you did, but you don't now," he said. "How did you get past my locks?"

"I was already inside, of course," she said. She looked at him as if he were stupid.

"Then you had to have heard me working down there. Why didn't you just leave out the front while I was working in back? Or while I was cutting down the weeds in the yard? You could have gotten out any time."

She thought about this. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

"Come on, there are homeless shelters, lady. But this isn't one of them."

"I can't go there," she said.

He and his wife had gone with a church group to help serve dinner at a homeless shelter in Greensboro, back when his wife was still pretending to lead a normal life. Everybody at the shelter was on their best behavior—his wife included—but it still looked like a rough crowd to him, so he couldn't argue with this woman, couldn't assure her that she'd fit right in. The more he thought about it, he couldn't remember seeing any women at the shelter. Maybe it was just a shelter for men and there was another place for women. It should be easy to find out.

"I'll help you get there," said Don. "I'll give you a ride."

"No," she said, shaking her head adamantly.

Her stubbornness annoyed him. "What do you think, I'm going to let you stay here or something? How long would that last? I can see it now, I've got the house all finished, I'm showing it to people, I tell them, 'And here you have your own homeless woman who sleeps in the bathtub on the second floor.'"

The young woman laughed, but there was a hysterical edge to it. Don didn't want to be harsh with her, but he couldn't just leave her in the tub, either. "Come on, don't make me call the cops."

"Don't make me go," she said. "Not tonight."

That was the most terrible thing a woman could do to a decent man: look vulnerable and ask him for mercy. If he refused her he'd be denying all his instincts as a provider and protector. Fortunately, Don understood this—he'd better, after all the books about women and men that he read back when he was trying to salvage his marriage. So he wasn't going to act on his natural impulses, he was going to do the sensible, rational thing. Though she really didn't look dangerous; it wasn't as if he had anything to fear from her. "Do you realize what you're asking?"

"Don't make me go tonight, that's what I'm asking."

That was disingenuous of her, and the way she looked away from him showed that she knew it. She wasn't asking for just one night. How would anything be different in the morning?

"I don't need a roommate," he said.

"You won't even notice I'm here."

"I already did. That's why we're having this conversation."

She stood up warily, still hanging back, virtually sliding up the wall till she was standing. "I used to room here," she said. "Paid rent, the regular thing. In college. But nothing's gone right since then. The place was standing empty, I had nowhere else to go. This is my home. Please."

Her neediness almost hurt, it was so deep and real. But she was asking him to give up his privacy. For a total stranger, for the kind of person who hides out in abandoned houses. Though, come to think of it, wasn't he that kind of person, too? The difference was that he paid for the houses he hid out in. "Look, I'm sorry your life's been hard, but so's mine, and this is my house and I'm going to..."

Going to what? What could he tell her? I'm going to hang out here alone and wallow in self-pity while you go out and live on the street again without a roof over your head because I can't find room in a mansion this size to...

"What is this, anyway? Is every woman in the world determined to stop me from..." And then he realized that he wasn't arguing with her, or even with his ex-wife. He was arguing with himself. And he'd already lost. He couldn't bear the idea of letting someone share a space with him like this, but at the same time he couldn't bear the idea of throwing her out on the street. Certainly not tonight. What was it, two, three A.M.? He was tired, he just wanted to go back to bed.

"Listen, you can stay tonight. OK? One night. Got that? Say it after me. One—"

She took two steps toward him—all the bathtub would allow—and spoke angrily right in his face. "Don't talk to me like that!"

"Like what?"

"Like I was your daughter!"

The words stung him. His daughter, his little girl. She would never have grown up to be someone like this, homeless, derelict, squatting in someone's filthy bathtub. He would have raised her to be strong and free and able to stand on her own two feet.

But maybe she got taken away from her father. Maybe she got taken away and raised by an incompetent, negligent...

No. He would not let her become his daughter in some dark place in his psyche. "If you don't like the way I talk to you, you're free to leave."

"Talk however you like then." The implication, from her words and from her defiant manner, was that she wasn't going, no matter what. And at whatever ungodly hour of the morning this was, Don wasn't going to ruin his own night by trying to throw her out. Either he'd have to use force, which he hated and which could lead to complications, or he'd have to leave the house to go get help from the police, and that would be even more galling, for her to stay and him to leave, however briefly.

"You can stay the rest of the night," Don said. "In the morning, get out. And make sure you don't touch any of my tools. If anything's missing, I'll call the cops and you'll have a new home in jail. Got it?"

His tough talking didn't impress her any more than it did him.

"You want me to say it after you?" she asked.

"This is where I live and work now," he said. "And I live and work alone."

That was the simple truth, and she seemed to realize that this wasn't bluster or anger or fear or waking up in the middle of the night. This was how he felt in his heart. There was no room for anyone in his life, and his house was his life, and that was that. She seemed to realize he meant it, because she said nothing.

But she didn't agree, either. He'd have this quarrel all over again in the morning, if she didn't kill him with a two-by-four while he slept. And if he never woke up, well, then the house would be big enough for the two of them.

Yet as he left the bathroom, her continued sullen silence infuriated him until he had to call out to her as he stalked down the hall, "You want to live in a rundown old house, you do like I did, start with a small one! Find yourself a rundown abandoned mobile home somewhere!"

That got a rise out of her. He was halfway down the stairs but he could hear her piercing angry voice just fine, despite the echoey quality from the bathroom. Was she still standing in the tub? "Would you be happy if I found an abandoned rundown cardboard box?"

He thought of answering, How about an old truck tire? but then he thought better of it. He was arguing with her like a schoolyard kid. Like siblings, waiting for Mom or Dad to come in and stop them. It put them on the same level, and they were not on the same level. He was a property owner, for heaven's sake, and not by inheritance or dumb luck, either, he had earned this house by the sweat of his body.

Back in the parlor, he sat down on his cot and started taking off his shoes again, cursing himself for a fool. That stupid girl didn't have to argue with him, he was going to flagellate himself into giving her a place to stay.

She called down the stairwell to him. "Didn't a friend ever give you a hand sometime in your life?"

This stung him. He knew how much he owed to the friends who staked him to start his life over. "You're not my friend!"

"Well how do you know who your friends are, till you see who helps?"

He didn't have an answer for that. Instead, he flung a shoe against the wall.

"What was that!" Her voice was fainter. Where was she now? What room did she sleep in? They had all looked equally dusty and unkempt to him. Well, wherever she slept, she should go and do it and leave him alone. He had a closing in the morning. Thinking of that made him wonder: What would Cindy think if she knew there was a woman sleeping in this house with him tonight? That was a complication he didn't need.

He flung the other shoe against the wall.

"What are you doing down there!" she called.

"Whatever I want!" he shouted back. "It's my house! Now shut up and go to sleep!"

He lay back on the cot and closed his eyes. This was so unfair, to throw the burden of her poverty on him. That was what taxes were for, wasn't it? So that the poor would go deal with an institution instead of asking so personally for help. And not even out on the street, like the other beggars. No, she accosted him here in his own house. What should have been a sanctuary.

Of course, she had thought of it as her house, her sanctuary, and from that perspective he was the intruder here.

Madness, all of this. Kissing Cindy in the upstairs bathroom, that was insanity enough for one day, wasn't it? Then dinner with those crazy old ladies next door and their warnings about the house. And now this homeless urchin—well, maybe she was too old to be an urchin—this homeless woman, anyway, daring to ask him, Can I stay? As if it were as easy as asking for a glass of water. Can I set up residence in your house and look over your shoulder and get underfoot all the time? Can I destroy your solitude and take away your privacy and force you to deal with another person all the time when all you really ask of life now is to be left alone? How could he be so churlish as to resent the request?

He muttered it again, like a prayer. "I live and work alone." But like all his prayers in recent years, it went unheard.