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and gone underground. Even if he got caught, even if he went to jail for it and she got killed anyway, he could live with it better if he knew he had done
everything
to try to save her. Men think like that, Cindy knew. Some men anyway. Take upon themselves the burden of the world. Have to save everybody, help everybody, provide for everybody. And when they can't do it, they can't think of any other reason to live. Was that Don Lark? Probably. A man who had forgotten, not how to live, but why.
     

5
    Doors
    Back when Don was a housebuilder, the best part of the job was the beginning. Standing there on a wooded lot with insects droning and birds flitting and treerats scampering up the trunks, he saw the slope of the land, the way it would look in lawn and garden, and where the house would crown the lot. He imagined the plan of the house, where he might put a cellar that opened to ground level in the back yard, or how a deep porch might be especially nice on a hot afternoon. He saw the roof rising among the trees—he always saved the best of the trees, because that kept a house from looking naked and newborn. A brand-new house had to look established, had to look as though it had roots deep into the ground. People couldn't feel right about moving into a place that looked like it just came to rest there and might blow off again in a year or two, the next bad storm. Tall old trees gave that feeling of stability even on a house finished just the day before.
    Once building began, then the peace of the woods was broken, the dirt torn up and flung into the air as a fine dust that clogged everything. The naked frame showed its origin as cut trees—almost obscene to put them up among the living timbers, as if to cow them into submission by showing them what could happen to trees that didn't cooperate. Even when the house was nearly done and Don got his own hands deep in the finish carpentry, the pleasure of working with the wood and of watching it all take shape under his hands, that still wasn't as much of a joy as standing there on the building lot imagining the house inside his head.
    Kind of like getting married. Kind of like watching your child make your wife's belly swell. Imagining, wondering, building the finished family in your dreams.
    Don didn't build new houses anymore. At first he had no choice. The lawyers' fees ate up his business, his home, every asset he owned except the little bit of insurance that paid for his daughter's funeral. He found a wreck of a property that was worth less with the house on it than it was as bare land. A couple of friends lent him the closing costs and the token down payment and Don moved into the place, a ramshackle four-room farmstead out near Madison, and began to work on it. Three months later it was transformed into what the realtor called "a spic-and-span charmer of a cottage in the woods," and after repaying his friends and the bank and the unbelievably patient credit manager at Lowe's, Don walked away from the place with nine thousand dollars in capital. Three thousand a month. Except it wasn't income, it was another down payment and the expenses involved in fixing up the next place.
    Now he had enough that he could build new houses again. He could put Lark Homes back in business if he wanted to. There were people who still left messages for him, passed word along that they weren't going to build their dream house until Don Lark could build it for them, that's the kind of reputation he had. Once Don even went and stood on a building lot, a lovely hill in a development tucked away in an ell of a cemetery so it would always be surrounded by forest. But standing there, he saw nothing at all. Oh, he saw the flies, the birds, the squirrels. He even saw the slope of the land, the drainage. His eye picked out the peripheral trees that would be worth saving, and how the driveway would have to go.
    What he couldn't see was the house. He couldn't imagine the future anymore. That part of him had