Anger flared within her and she yanked aside the curtains, pulling open the sliding glass door and storming outside. “I want you out of here!” she screamed at the foreman. She gestured around to all of the workers, many of whom were now looking at her. “Get off our property! Now!”
The policeman stepped forward. “Calm down, ma’am—”
“Calm down? Calm down?”
“These men are only doing the job they were hired to do.” He spoke clearly, as though to a particularly thick seven-year-old. “There’s nothing I can do about that. Everything they’re doing is perfectly legal. No laws were broken here.”
“We did not authorize this!” she shouted. “That company is trespassing on our property, destroying our landscaping, wrecking our house, and you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do about it?”
“All of the permits and authorizations seem to be in order. You could file a civil suit against the company, but there’s no criminal—”
“I want to talk to another policeman,” she demanded, folding her arms over her chest. “Send someone else out here.”
“Ma’am . . .”
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, you sorry excuse for a human. Just call your station and get someone out here who knows how to do his job.”
The policeman’s expression hardened. “We’re done here. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing the police can do to help you.” The implication was that a mental health professional could help her.
The yuppie smiled. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Whiting. We’ll be out of your hair by the end of the week. My men really want that bonus.”
***
Jim called that night.
“Hi, hon. How’s it going?”
Cindy felt like crying. “It’s been a nightmare! There were construction workers in our backyard all day, building an addition to the house, and I couldn’t get them to stop.”
“Calm down, calm down. Tell me what happened.”
“I just did! After you left this morning, I heard noises outside, and I looked out and saw construction workers in our backyard. They were bringing in lumber and tools and materials and they had a cement mixer going, and there were beams crushing my roses, and . . . and they wouldn’t leave! I told them to leave and they wouldn’t! They just kept building!”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”
“Are you sure they’re—”
“Am I sure they’re what?” she shouted. “Am I sure they’re adding a room to our house? Our yard is filled with building materials! They’ve started tearing out the back wall of the living room!”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Have you heard a fucking word I’ve said?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Look, I’ll take care of this when I get home,” Jim said.
“They’ll be done by the time you get home!”
“Calm down. You know how you get.”
She took a deep breath, willing herself not to scream in his ear. He obviously didn’t understand what was going on here. He seemed to think this was some minor inconvenience like a leaky faucet rather than a major construction project that was eating up their yard and permanently altering their home. “Someone prepaid a construction company thousands of dollars to add an extra room to our house,” she said, speaking slowly. “I told the foreman that there had been some mistake, that they had the wrong address, but our address was on his work order and he knew my name. He refused to leave, and I called the police, but the policeman who came out said there was nothing they could do, the construction company wasn’t doing anything illegal.”
“I see,” he said.
“Do you? Do you understand what’s been going on here today, what I’ve gone through?”
“Yes. And, like I said, I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry. I’ll call the construction company and get this all straightened out.”
Thank God.
“I was scared,” Cindy admitted, and tears welled in her eyes. “No one would listen to me. There was nothing I could do.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said reassuringly. “Don’t worry.”
They talked for another ten minutes, staying away from her nightmarish experience, sticking to the normal subjects of their long-distance conversations—his day and how his trip was going—and then they said goodbye. But the second she hung up the phone, Cindy was overcome with doubt. I’ll take care of it, he’d said. But how was he going to take care of it? He hadn’t even asked for the construction company’s name. Or the name of the project foreman.
Maybe he already knew.
Maybe he had hired them.
A host of scenarios flashed through her mind: he had a mistress and that’s who he was really visiting when he went on his so-called “business trips.” He was going to bring her back and set her up in the new room. Or the mistress had been knocked up, and he was going to use the new room for the baby. He’d divorce Cindy and marry the new woman. Or—
The phone rang.
She jumped, startled out of her reverie.
It was Jim.
“I forgot to ask you the name of the construction company.”
He hadn’t hired them! The relief she felt was nearly overwhelming, and she gratefully gave him the name and phone number of the company. Although she didn’t know the foreman’s name, she did not the name of John P. Wilton, the company’s president, and she told him that, too.
“I’ll call first thing in the morning,” he promised.
Once again, they said their I-love-yous and goodbyes, and once again Cindy felt trepidation after she hung up the phone. She was glad Jim was going to call the construction company, but he still didn’t seem as concerned as he should be. He was doing the right thing but out of obligation not outrage. He should be as upset as she was. After all, someone was knocking out an entire wall of their house in order to add on a new room that they did not want.
Maybe she hadn’t explained it well enough. Or maybe he just thought it was an overreaction on her part, like the time she had made him come home from a trip to New York because she thought someone had broken into their house, only to find out that an improperly balanced book had fallen from a shelf and knocked over a flower vase. But how could she misconstrue a team of construction workers adding an extra room to their house? And how could Jim think that this situation could be anything other than what it was? She’d described what had happened very clearly.
She wanted to call him back, but she realized that he had forgotten to give her the name of the hotel at which he was staying—and she had forgotten to ask.
She waited by the phone for the next two hours, hoping that he would call again, but the phone did not ring and finally, exhausted, she went to bed, not even bothering to take a shower or undress, merely kicking off the slippers and flopping down on the mattress.
She was awakened by the sound of pounding hammers.
By the time she was out of bed, the entire house was shaking as heavy equipment attacked the last vestiges of the living room’s back wall. She had taken all of the framed prints and photographs off the walls yesterday, had moved the couch and coffee table to the center of the room, had even accepted the clear plastic tarp Wilton Construction provided her—although she refused to let any of the workers enter her house and had insisted on covering the floor and furniture herself. But she was still shocked by the massive hole in the house that greeted her after she’d put on clothes and emerged from the bedroom.
“Hello!” the foreman called out to her from the backyard. “Nice day!”
Two other construction workers nodded to her, waved.
Cindy looked frantically around. Now there was nowhere for her to hide. Her home was open to the outdoors, her life exposed, and there was no place she could go inside the house that they could not see. The workers had a full view of the living room and kitchen, with only a partially obstructed v
iew of the family room, and they could see straight down the hallway, which meant that while they couldn’t see what precisely she was doing, they would know which room she was in: bedroom, guest room, bathroom.
She felt horribly vulnerable, and she knew that she could not live like this for the next week or however long it took them to finish the addition.
However long it took them?
She realized that she had already accepted the idea that the addition would be built, had already bought into Wilton Construction’s assumptions, that though she still intended to fight tooth and nail, to not give up without a struggle, in her mind she had already acquiesced.
She ignored the open space where her wall had been, went into the kitchen and walked outside through the side door. She met the foreman by the patio. His jacket was off, but he was still wearing a white dress shirt and tie, and when she approached he was going over blueprints with a muscle-shirted blond man at the picnic table.
Cindy stood at the head of the table, arms folded angrily across her chest. When neither man looked up, she pretended to clear her throat—loudly—in order to get their attention.
“Yes?” the foreman said.
“What are you doing here? Didn’t my husband call your office?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Could you check?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Whiting. But we’re a little busy right now. We have a deadline to meet—”
“Check!” she yelled. “Because he was going to call your boss and tell him to get his men and equipment off our property, and he was going to rip that jackass a new asshole! Check!”
Sighing, the young man took out his cell phone and pressed a preset number. He spoke briefly to John Wilton, but Cindy didn’t even have to wait for the end of the conversation to know that Jim had not called the construction company, that he had not ripped anyone a new asshole.
She stormed back into the house, but that gaping hole was there and all of the construction workers were watching her, and she hurried down the hallway, ducking into the bedroom for some privacy. She could not live like this. She picked up the phone, intending to call one of her friends, but the line was dead.
She wanted to attribute it to accidental causes, but she could not help thinking that it was intentional, that they’d cut the line to keep her from communicating with the outside world.
Was it legal, though?
Excited by the prospect of having caught Wilton Construction doing something they shouldn’t, she grabbed her purse and phonebook, drove down to a pay phone at the strip mall over on Lincoln, called city hall and asked to talk to a building inspector. She gave her name and address and spoke to the inspector assigned to the construction project at her house. But when she described the situation with the phone, the inspector said such a cutoff was legal as long as it was temporary and phone service was resumed each evening at the completion of the day’s work.
Disappointed, she thanked him for his help, then drove to her friend Julia’s apartment. Julia was at work, but Cindy had an extra key and she let herself in. She locked the door behind her, sat down on the couch and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She leaned back against the soft pillowy cushions, luxuriating in the privacy of a living room that was closed to the outside world, free from the prying eyes of manual laborers and not under construction.
***
Julia let her stay the week, as Cindy knew she would.
She went back to the house only once, to get her clothes, toothbrush and toiletries, but though she was tempted to return each day to check on the progress of the addition, she did not. She was curious, and more than once she started driving down her street for a quick peek, only to turn a few blocks away and speed in the opposite direction.
The truth was that she was afraid.
Of what she was not quite sure. Not the smug yuppie foreman exactly. Not John P. Wilton or those four workers tearing apart her yard and house. Not the mysterious person or persons who had paid for the project. No, it was . . . everything put together.
And the addition itself.
Yes, the addition scared her, though she did not know why. She had no idea what the room was going to look like, had no preconceived notions about it, but its very existence frightened her, the idea that it was growing each day like some sort of cancer, the fact that it was an intrusion on her house and property that would permanently alter her home in a way she did not want and had not requested.
She had no idea at what hotel Jim was staying, and she kept hoping that he would call Julia to find out where she was, that after he discovered the phone line was dead he would start contacting their friends just to make sure she was all right and nothing had happened to her. But the days passed, and no call came, and she began to get angry at him, resenting the fact that he didn’t care enough to make even such a simple attempt to reach her.
“Doesn’t he care?” Julia asked more than once, and for that Cindy had no answer.
Even worse, to her mind, was the fact that he didn’t care about what was happening to their house. Was he in on it? She didn’t think so, but there seemed to be no other explanation for his behavior and his unforgiveable silence.
The addition was being built, yes, construction was continuing, but at least she had made an effort to stop it, at least she had tried. Jim? Jim had been absent. Not just absent but willfully, purposefully not involved, as thought he expected her to shoulder all of the responsibility and eventually all of the blame.
The phone finally rang on Friday night.
“It’s for you,” Julia said.
Cindy practically leapt off the couch. “Is it Jim?”
“I don’t know.”
She took the phone from her friend. “Hello?”
“It’s done, Mrs. Whiting. You can go home.”
Chills ran down her arms. She didn’t recognize the voice, but she knew it was someone from Wilton Construction. How had they known she was staying here, though? She hadn’t told them. Had the company had her followed?
There was a click as the man hung up, and then the monotonous sonority of a dial tone.
Numbly, Cindy replaced the handset in its cradle. She tried to imagine what the new addition looked like, the dimensions of the room and how it would fit into the overall design of the house. She wanted to see it, but there was no way in hell she was going out there at night, not even with Julia along for support—although she could not have said why. She didn’t think it was haunted or anything, didn’t think any of the construction workers would be lurking around waiting to mug her. It was just . . .
She didn’t know.
She just didn’t want to see it at night.
In the morning, she packed her suitcase, thanked Julia for the hospitality and went home. Her friend offered to accompany her, but Cindy said she wanted to do this alone, she’d call later. Jim was supposed to be coming home today, but she had no idea when and at this point she didn’t really care. He had become an abstraction to her, and she realized that if she never saw him again, she would eventually forget his face.
A week ago, she would not have thought that possible.
She did not procrastinate or prolong the suspense but parked in the driveway, got out of the car, unlocked the front door of the house and walked inside. There was an entryway to the new addition in the center of the rebuilt living room wall at the approximate spot where the sliding glass doors had opened onto the patio, and she headed straight for it.
The new room was huge, easily as big as the living room, almost twice the size of the guest room, and the lack of carpeting or furniture made it appear that much larger. There were no windows, only twin sets of fluorescent bars recessed into the ceiling.
Cindy walked around the perimeter of the empty room, feeling agitated. What were they going to do with all this space? What use could they possibly have for an addition like this? A spare bedroom? They already had one—plus the sofa bed in the living room. It could be a sewing room, except she
didn’t sew. Jim didn’t have any hobbies either, and his job was not one that required him to bring work home from the office.
What then? A library? A storage room? An art gallery? A weight room? A bar? There were too many possibilities, and she sat down in the middle of the floor, on the hard cement and stared at the white walls, feeling small and scared. She waited for Jim to come home.
He arrived early that evening, and the look on his face told her all she needed to know: he was stunned. Dropping his briefcase, Jim walked dazedly around the empty room, touching the fresh plaster, looking up at the fluorescent lights.
“I thought it was another one of your . . . I thought it was . . .” He shook his head.
“You thought it was what?”
“Never mind.”
She stood. “Don’t tell me ‘never mind.’ What did you think? What exactly did you think? That I was lying, that I was making it up, that I was crazy? What?”
“No,” he said, backing off. “Not that . . . exactly . . . ”
“What then?” She suddenly realized how vague he was despite his insistence on specificity in others, how he never really took a stand on anything or held concrete beliefs on any subject of importance. Like a dutiful wife, she’d always acceded to his wishes, always complied with whatever he suggested, but now, for the life of her, she could not figure out why.
He ignored her, not responding, pretending she had not spoken. He walked slowly about the room, staring at the windowless walls as though searching for something that was not there. He seemed frightened, a feeling she recognized and shared. “What is it?” he asked. “Why is it here?”
“I don’t know,” she told him, and for the first time she felt that she was on the stronger of the two, that she was better equipped to handle what would come next. She glanced around at the blank walls, the bare floor. It was a heavy responsibility, finding a purpose for all of this empty space, a daunting prospect that filled her with dread. It would change their lives forever, and the decisions they made now would have repercussions far into the future, a ripple effect that would influence everything that was to come.
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