Rise--How a House Built a Family

by Cara Brookins

  The far corner where Jimmy had directed his laughter was closest to the neighbor’s pond. It was still a good 250 feet from the water, but there was no question he was right. The neatly squared corner held at least six inches of water, and the water was pooling higher and building to a stream moving toward the front of the footing.

  “Hip waders? All my boots have heels.” I kicked a layer of mud off my old running shoes. They weren’t going to be the ideal footwear for the construction project after all.

  Look at your feet, I heard Matt say with a contemptuous snarl. And as badly as I wanted to feel superior and strong and a million years away from the effect of his shaming, I didn’t. I felt inadequate, like I was a failure with big feet and a small, small mind. What made me think I could build a house? I had just made a fool of myself, breaking ground with our self-rising Christmas flour. The loan officer would flash me a classic smirk for that one—and I deserved it.

  I pulled my muddy shoes off into a shopping bag and drove back to the house in cold stocking feet. The image of Caroline’s tornado house that had been perfectly clear in my mind that morning had faded into a blur that barely felt real. Balancing the kids, work, and building a house felt impossible. What had I been thinking? I had a big software project to roll out. My mystery novel, which I thought of as my future, had a weak protagonist and a weaker plot. I had freelance articles to get to the newspaper, and we needed the cash to keep paying the bills. It wasn’t going to be easy. What had Mr. Rothschild been thinking? The bank had been insane to loan me money; I was a terrible gamble.

  Hershey greeted me with a stripe of fur on her back raised into a Mohawk. The house was quiet and empty.

  I had less than an hour to work on an article before the kids came home. Hope would pick Roman up on her way, and he would be clingy and cranky after a long day in day care. I felt a little clingy and cranky myself, so that suited me just fine. Everything worthwhile had run out of my mind, leaving me raw and empty. My editing progress sucked even more than usual, and tomorrow’s deadline loomed closer and more impossible by the minute.

  The courage I hoped to find building a house wasn’t going to drop in my lap; I was going to have to hunt it down and trap it. Fifteen minutes before the afternoon chaos arrived, I stretched out on my bed with my eyes closed, my mind buzzing with to-do lists. Years ago, I had tried guided meditation but had never mastered it. There had never been a time when I needed to clear the space between my ears more than that moment.

  I talked myself through what I remembered of the old meditation CD. Squeeze and then relax your toes. Your calves. Your fingertips. Feel a warm breeze passing over your body. A bright light rose up and wrapped around me. Had that been part of the CD? It was peaceful, so I floated awhile, weightless and empty. The CD man had told me in a low, gravelly voice that people often met their true selves on deep meditation journeys. My true self was superb at hiding, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her anyhow. I shivered, losing my concentration. What if I found Caroline there, standing in the upstairs window, framed by the red curtains? Even though I admired that imaginary woman, I was afraid to meet her, afraid she would narrow her eyes at my weakness, my fear.

  Breathing deep, I fell weightless in the center of the warm light. I opened my eyes—not for real, but in the little dream world—and someone was sitting cross-legged near my right hip, chin pressed on his chest to look down at me. It wasn’t my true self unless my deepest soul was an elderly black man with a sun-weathered face and narrow, dark eyes.

  He sat perfectly still with his hands in his lap. His lips stretched flat, expressionless, and I had the sense there were few teeth behind them. His eyes felt wise and a little world-weary. He was trying to tell me something with those eyes, and I hoped it wasn’t another damn secret I was supposed to intuitively absorb. I was tired of life’s coded messages. I willed him to speak, to tell me the grand secret of life. He didn’t say a word, just continued looking down at me, rarely blinking but stretching it out long and slow when he did, like he was falling asleep and waking again. His name was Benjamin; I knew that without him saying.

  Tell me I’m going to be okay. Tell me we’ll make it. Tell me something I can believe in. But his dark eyes took in every minuscule detail of my soul without giving me anything back. The strange man simply existed, nothing more. Then Hershey barked and the front door swung in to bounce hard against the doorstop. The bright little world vanished.

  I felt calmer, more in charge, like I was able to take a full breath for the first time in years. But I was also a little afraid of the old man. Who was he? And what if I didn’t like what he was there to tell me? I bit my bottom lip. Life had tossed me some hard deals; whatever the old man had to say, I could take it. I promised myself I’d try it again, maybe every day, until I really did find my true self and understood the island man’s presence.

  The kids announced homework and school drama. A teacher had been put on leave for an investigation, a janitor had helped a special-needs kid after a bad fall, and one of Jada’s friends was going out with the boy Jada had liked for two years. Hope and I made pork chops, potatoes, and corn on the cob, with Roman serving up plastic cakes and cookies on mini dishes while we worked. He wasn’t clingy after all, but slow and quiet without his afternoon nap.

  After cleanup, Drew and I drove the seven miles to the job site while the girls did homework and took care of Roman. I had a concrete truck scheduled for the next morning to pour the footer, but the rebar had to be in place first. Instead of boots and hip waders, we had put our feet into tall bread bags and secured rubber bands around the ankles before putting on our running shoes. It kept the water a thin layer away from our skin, but not far enough to keep us warm.

  Even in the South, December was cold. When we leaned over the edge of the trench to lop off roots, it was twenty-eight degrees and falling by the second. My feet were dead numb by the time we climbed down into the trench. Drew handed down ten-foot pieces of rebar, which is a half-inch steel rod used to reinforce concrete. I spaced the bars out in the trenches, hands so cold that the only thing saving my grip was the ribbed surface designed for a better concrete bond. We made four parallel lines of rebar all the way around the rectangle of the house and the smaller rectangle of the porch. The mini spring Jimmy pointed out had become a gusher. Drew affectionately named it the Ink Spill.

  Our gloves did little more than hold a cold layer of ice water against our hands. Someone had probably invented a waterproof glove for this sort of work, but none of the videos we watched had mentioned it. I had never in my life imagined being so cold and miserable. Playing in four-foot snowbanks in a Wisconsin winter was warmer than being sopping wet in an Arkansas December. We used rocks to prop up the rebar, like Jimmy had suggested, but even they sunk in the mud slop faster than Gilligan in quicksand. Drew insisted the rebar chairs were exactly the thing we needed, so we ripped open the bag and propped a few in place. They looked like four-inch-tall traffic cones with a crescent support at the top to prop the rebar. In theory they were perfect, but their little heads vanished before we’d reached the end of the first trench.

  After sunset, I turned on the headlights and we kept working with no noticeable progress. Somewhere along the way, we caught a case of the giggles. One of us mentioned that the Ink Spill could turn into the Ink Tsunami, and we imagined waves of water barreling through the trenches—which unfortunately wasn’t much of a stretch. Drew literally rolled around on a grassy spot, breath gone with laughter, while I sat next to him and smeared laughter tears with clay.

  By then we had managed a system of placing flat rocks and then propping the rebar chairs on top of them. The rocks acted like miniature footers for the holders and the rebar was at least visible above the mud. “I’d say that’s a professional rebar job,” I said when I could speak again. My cheeks ached from smiling, and I loved the feel of happy tension. Our laughter needed to be pulled out and exercised more often.

  “Think it will hold up Inkwe
ll Manor?” he asked, then laughed even harder, gasping until I started to worry about him.

  “What? What is it? More Ink Tsunami?” I was laughing, too, but without a target.

  He shook his head. “It’s Sinkwell,” he managed between belly laughs. “Sinkwell Manor!”

  “And it’s a wrap,” I said, peeling off my gloves and dragging mud-encrusted tools to the car. I twisted the key so the interior could heat while we packed up and put our shoes in shopping bags. We had flip-flops for the ride home.

  We sat inside for a couple of minutes, the headlights shining on the trenches that had undergone another magical transformation, looking barely big enough for two rooms let alone a whole house. The heat sobered us while we worked through the painful sting of defrosting nerves and vessels. My nose tingled. I put the car in gear, and Drew turned on the dome light to search for his phone. I caught sight of my hands on the steering wheel and said, “Oh!”

  Drew jumped and held his own hands up to the light. Like mine, they were a dead purple-gray from fingertip to wrist. We laughed most of the way home, now and then managing a word or two. “The gloves! The ink. Inkwell!”

  We made it home before eleven, me hoping the ink would wash off and him hoping it wouldn’t. Hope gave us a thumbs-up when we lied and told her the work had gone perfectly. Jada and Roman were long asleep, both in my bed.

  It was almost two weeks before the footing was poured. First an ice storm set us back, then the holidays, then an overbooked concrete company giving priority to contractors they knew. The delay gave us time to draw plans for a 450-square-foot workshop to store tools and supplies. It was obvious that hauling tools and supplies back and forth between houses was going to get more and more difficult. So we made a basic two-by-four frame with stakes pounded in to hold it straight—or what passed for straight in our amateur construction world. This way, when the concrete truck finally backed up our long drive it could pour both at once. At least that’s what I imagined.

  In reality they made two separate pours a week apart. The foundation pour didn’t have to be smoothed much, just enough to prop concrete blocks on top. But the shop pour would actually end up being the permanent floor, so we rented long-handled floaters and did our best to make it perfect. Despite being a lifelong perfectionist, my definition of the word had relaxed dramatically over the past few months. “Good enough,” I declared when my biceps were burning and my feet were heavy enough with dried concrete to sink me in the neighbor’s pond for good.

  Our nine-month construction loan was well under way, but our house was not. I pretended we could make up the time during easier phases of the build. But a little voice told me there was no such thing, and it grew more and more difficult to hear my own determination over the voice of reality.

  –8–

  Fall

  Black, White, and Gray

  An alarm woke me and I tapped buttons across the clock, searching for that sweet snooze spot. No matter what combination I hit, the noise continued. I sat up, heart thumping when I realized it was my phone. There hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night call in years.

  I said something that resembled “Hello,” dimly noting that it came out a lot more like “Um-mah-oh.”

  “Cara? You okay, honey?”

  And then I was as fully awake as if the voice were inches from my face, one hand holding a knife and the other sketching an idea for a laser scanner to revolutionize the postal system. My next phrase sounded exactly like “Shit.” I sat up and turned on my reading lamp, expecting to see him on his side of the bed with a wild gleam in his brown eyes. He wasn’t there, of course, because he was on the other end of the phone. His papers and books were on the floor, but his side of the bed was empty and cold. He had been in his office when I went to sleep. We’d joked about the weather and he had laughed like a perfectly normal man. It worked that way too often, the normal days stretching into months until I doubted that anything was wrong at all, until I believed him when he said that it was me, that I just overreacted when he worked too hard. I clutched the phone tight enough for the plastic to groan. The light left me feeling exposed—spotlighted—so I switched it back off. “Adam? Where are you?”

  “It’s so good to hear your voice. God, I’ve missed you,” he said, sounding like the old Adam, the good one, the one before all the insanity. “How are the kids?”

  “They’re fine. Really good.” And I realized it wasn’t really true. I had never been a skilled actress, and hiding Adam’s vacationing mind was growing more difficult. But he had seen them earlier that night over supper and even managed part of a conversation. Why was he acting like he hadn’t seen them in years? My heart beat so fast I imagined it sounded more like a purring kitten than a human organ. The back of my head started to throb, and I could feel an artery pulsing in the side of my neck as though it were trained to gallop along quickly in preparation for Adam’s next rant.

  “I’m so glad. They’re good kids. Smart.”

  I rolled/fell out of the bed and made it to the door and then out into the den, doubled over like I’d been gut-punched. “Where are you, Adam? Are you in the house?” I pushed open his office door, forbidden territory. He wasn’t there, and his desk had been swept clean. The monitor and desktop computer were gone, keyboard and mouse cords trailing like long fingers pointing out the door. My head pounded. I could hear Adam breathing fast and nervous on the phone, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  Tiptoeing even though my heart felt louder than my footsteps could possibly be, I checked the rest of the house. Hope and Drew were sleeping the comatose sleep of preteens. Jada’s floor was scattered with dolls, so I couldn’t get close enough to check her bed without risking a broken limb or puncture wound. She rocked sideways and mumbled something when I flipped her light on and off. Even at three and a half she was prone to nightmares so terrifying that I didn’t like her to tell me about them. I convinced myself that the reason her waking hours were so carefree and happy was because these nighttime demons chased her worries and fears away. The alternative looked too much like hiding, or avoiding—too much like me.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Adam. Talk to me.”

  “They got too close. They’re putting things on my computer now. Messages. Words. Numbers. I can’t let them get everything. Not all of it. If they just take my thoughts, steal them right out of my head, then I can’t make the deal. I need the money for you and the kids. I’m going to take care of you. I can do that. I can take care of you.”

  Facing as many doors and windows as possible in the den, I curled into the corner of the sofa, phone pressed bruise-hard to my ear. I could hang up. I could just hang up. He was so far past understanding that nothing I said would matter anyhow. But I had spent too many years doing what I imagined to be the right things. The safe things. The things that would be right enough to level his mood. Don’t set him off, please don’t do anything to set him off had been my internal chant long enough to become a personal motto. I didn’t know another way to think. Placating and pleasing Adam was a mind-set I didn’t know how to escape even though we had been talking about separating, giving his mind a break from the chaos of the kids.

  “… is what she said. So, we’ll do that tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Sorry, I’m not really awake. What time is it?” I pulled the phone away, relaxed my fingers when I saw how contorted they were from my grip, and then checked the clock. A flash of anger made me flush. I could have checked other clocks in the house if they were reliable, if Adam didn’t change them. Even with the phone away from my ear I could hear his sigh. He had important things to say and I damn well better turn off the useless prattle in my own head to hear them. Wandering minds were disrespectful. Unacceptable. “Sorry, I didn’t catch all of that. It’s two in the morning.”

  “It’s two thirty-six, Cara. Two thirty-six A.M.” He enunciated the words carefully, anger creeping between the syllables.

  “Yes, Adam, so it is. What about tomorrow?”

 
“We have to go somewhere. Probably far away. Somewhere noisy so we can talk. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Things are getting out of hand and it can’t be like this. I can’t be separated from the things that matter—from my family. You will always be my family. We’ll grow old together, just like we always said.”

  The words were the right ones to say, but I could hear his fist thumping against a table or desk on every fifth word or so. Something metallic rattled after each thump, maybe a spoon. I yanked a fleece blanket off the ottoman and pulled it over me in a tent. Instantly, I felt better. Safe. Bulletproof.

  “We haven’t made any decisions yet. We can talk at home. I can’t just leave the kids. Why aren’t you here now? Where did you go?” I held my breath, waiting for the storm.

  “Remember when we decided the diving in Cancún didn’t measure up to Cozumel and took a day trip for a drift dive? Twenty-seven hours of taxi, bus, taxi, pedicab, ferry, taxi, dive boat.” He laughed, slow and real. “Rinse and repeat for the trip home. The dive was incredible, but you got so sick.”

  It had been a really spectacular trip. Just the two of us to stay connected, to keep our love alive. And things hadn’t been so bad at home then. He had just started to look in the rearview mirror a little too often and fill one too many yellow legal pads with pages of dots and dashes. It was the leading edge of insanity, when things could still be explained away. He had been eccentric and charming rather than slap-ass nuts. The good old days.

  “Is there any coast you haven’t puked off in a dive boat, a spot we’ve missed? Maybe you’d like to turn green down under?” He laughed again, his fist thumping faster and the spoon dancing in a jingle.

  He laughed so hard that the laughter faded to little throat clicks before billowing back out in a full belly chuckle. “Do you remember the old man with the ponytail who fed you grapes? They’ll make you feel better, he says. But you puked them starboard before he had time to reach for the next handful. He was a persistent old hippie.”