Rise--How a House Built a Family

by Cara Brookins

  By the next Friday we were completely finished with the water lines, and I called the city inspector to sign off on them so I could hook up a faucet. When he showed up, Pete and Re-Pete were working on the roof. I had to keep pinching myself to believe it was true.

  The inspector congratulated me on the plumbing and signed off. No leaks. Then he ruined it all by saying, “You really have some damage started on that subfloor from all the rain. It’s past time to get a roof on this.”

  I waited until he was at the end of the drive to say, “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” and then set out to hook up the exterior faucets. I felt defeated when Pete had to come and finish them for me, but was slightly redeemed when I hooked up the faucet in the garage the next day all by myself. We kept an oversize bowl in the sink for weeks, though, because I hadn’t figured out how to hook up the drain lines. Baby steps.

  By the end of May, we had a roof on the house. We were still so far behind schedule on the build that I wasn’t sure it was possible to finish by the September deadline. I held out hope that future projects would be easier than I had imagined despite the fact that all the projects to date had been somewhere between ten and a thousand times harder than I imagined.

  Optimists. We are the slowest of slow learners.

  The next hurdle came on a Thursday night while I was trying to run iron pipe past the laundry room and onto the back porch for a barbecue grill. It was turning out to be par for the course, harder to install than I had ever imagined.

  Over our late supper that night, everyone was in a good mood, so I left deadlines, finances, and worry out of the discussion. Drew didn’t come down for supper, just sent a text that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to sleep. He didn’t want me to bring anything up to him and told me to stop asking.

  I didn’t think a lot about it that night. The girls and I watched a movie while Jada helped Roman build block towers that he knocked down with exceptional fanfare and explosive noises that included a lot of flying spit.

  The next morning Drew sent a text that he wasn’t going to school. He still didn’t feel well. No, he didn’t want any medicine, and no he wasn’t hungry.

  I was late for work and told him to text me if he needed me to pick up ginger ale or crackers at the store. He didn’t text me all day.

  That night, when he still refused to come out of his room, I knew something was up. After his childhood ear infections had been cleared up by tubes at age two, he had only been sick maybe twice, ever. The entire family would come down with colds or flu and none of it touched him. I mentioned it to Hope, and she got a particularly mischievous gleam in her eye. “If something is going on at school, I can find out in two minutes.”

  She was wrong. The bad news was so easy to find that she had it in thirty seconds. Drew was eighteen months younger than her, and two years behind in school. Still, if the juniors hadn’t ended classes two weeks before the freshmen, she would have already heard gossip of this magnitude. She handed me her phone with a news article from a local station (All the News All the Time!) pulled up.

  I recognized the name in the headline right away. One of Drew’s friends—not his best friend, because he didn’t really have one of those, but a boy he knew well enough to invite over for video games—had been killed in a violent car crash. The images of the car were chilling. And all the questions that ran through my mind in the first few seconds didn’t really matter in the long run. Was he texting? Did he buckle his seat belt? Was he drinking, or high?

  He was someone’s little boy. Someone’s brother. Someone’s grandson. Someone’s friend—Drew’s friend. And he was dead.

  It hurt that Drew was trying to handle it all by himself. Locking himself away from the people who loved him enough to help in any way they could. But I understood it, too. He was the man of the house, and he had this image that being a man meant being strong, in control, and not leaning on anyone else. As the adult head of our household, I’d finally learned that being grown-up and a true leader meant just the opposite. It meant asking for help even if that made someone else feel stronger, even if someone laughed, or mocked your plumbing terminology. The most important part of being in charge was recognizing when you weren’t in control.

  The older kids’ dad had been so absent that I sometimes had to remind myself that his life still must affect them. He had left the air force soon after we divorced, spent years without a job while he went to college, married two more times, and then joined the army as an officer. While we were building Inkwell Manor, he was in Iraq, occasionally e-mailing the kids about bombs and the general horrors and fears from a war zone. Drew’s understanding of the ordinary dangers of everyday life had to be a jumbled, tangled mess.

  I knocked on his door, and when he told me he was too tired I went in anyhow. “I read about Derek,” I said, sitting on the side of his bed.

  He was on his stomach, head turned away from me. His shoulders started heaving with big racking sobs. I put my hand on his back, and he let me. We both bawled until our noses were too swollen to sniff anymore.

  “Do you want to go to the funeral? Sometimes it helps to be around other people who feel like you do. To say good-bye.”

  He shook his head.

  “Think about it some more. You don’t have to go. People have different ways of finding their way through things like this. If the funeral isn’t your way, then that’s fine, but find what is your way, and do that. Okay? You have to keep moving. Keep living.”

  He nodded.

  I had more to say but hadn’t worked out how to say it. My feelings were hurt that he hadn’t told me about this. Really that wasn’t it exactly. It wasn’t my feelings. “You know how you felt when I glossed things over and pretended they were okay, lied even to make it look like they were when it was obvious they were all going to hell in a handbasket? Well, I feel the same about this. I imagine Hope does, too. We don’t hide things anymore. Understand? We deal with them together. It’s the only way we’ll get through this … and any number of things to come.”

  He nodded again.

  “And you need to eat something. Keep moving forward. You want me to bring something up or you want to come down?” It was an old parenting trick, giving him two choices that both ended in the same result—him eating. And phrasing it in a way that he had to do more than nod or shake his head was a trick I had been honing since they became teenagers.

  “I’d rather eat up here.”

  I smiled. His voice sounded distorted by his swollen nose and throat, but he was using it. “I’ll be right back.” I stopped after two steps. “I love you. And I’m sorry this happened.”

  He was crying again when I went out the door. I was, too. But this time they were slow tears, the sort that meant you were saying good-bye to both the lost person and the overwhelming early stage of grief.

  He ate that night, but never came out of his room. On Saturday morning I asked what he wanted to do, and he asked if he could stay home. I had expected that, knowing that if he did it would be part grief and part getting out of a hard day of work.

  “Tell you what. Hang out here until noon, and then I’ll come back and get you. I need your help with the exterior doors. We’re one hard day’s work away from being able to lock Inkwell up tight.” We were really more like three days away unless doors suddenly got a lot easier to install, but it was the principle that mattered.

  He nodded, immediately perking up. Everyone wants to feel like there are tasks that just can’t be done without them. I wanted to give him that, and in this case it was absolutely true. I couldn’t build the house without him. We each had a role in the build, and his was a big one.

  The electricians had started drilling holes and pulling wire, but I suspected they were pulling drags off funny cigarettes with more than half their time. They weren’t particularly worried about how far behind we were, but then again they didn’t appear to be particularly worried about anything. Even the fact that the house wasn’t totally waterproof didn’t s
hake them. We had a roof covered in tar paper, but there were no shingles. They were supposed to arrive that Friday, and I had hired some guys to put them on—friends of our Chico’s Restaurante neighbors.

  I was a little worried the shingles wouldn’t show up, and a lot worried the roofers wouldn’t. Pete had taught me a lot of things since we began, and the most important was the fluidity of a construction worker’s calendar and promise.

  Hope, Jada, and I carried boxes of hardwood flooring upstairs and piled them in the middle of the back bedroom. Two thousand square feet of flooring takes up a lot of space and takes a lot of back muscle to move. As soon as the electricians were finished, we would have insulation and Sheetrock moving in and needed to keep the area as open as possible. But with the shop full of appliances, lights, and plumbing fixtures in addition to tools, the hardwood and tile had to be stored in the house.

  Roman sat next to the growing flooring mountain and colored an entire two-by-six with a fat hunk of pink sidewalk chalk. He was focused, humming a single monotone note that drilled into our skulls until the girls and I wanted to scream.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh,” he continued, pausing only to pull in another breath, then letting it out with the same, steady “Ahhhhhhhhh.”

  I gave Drew his silence until one P.M. before I picked him up. If we had any cash to spare, I would have picked up some hamburgers, too. But things were so tight we were lucky to have bread, meat, and cheese for lunch. We actually would have been thrilled with another of Dad’s turkeys, which was something we never thought we’d say in a million years.

  My little pep talk and the light I had sworn I saw in Drew’s eyes had both faded. He was sluggish and irritable, even after he saw how much work we’d done without him, and after he had helped finish it off. It was Roman’s singing that finally pulled him out of it—well, in a roundabout way. Roman’s incessant note was driving me insane, so I thought to turn on Drew’s music mix. He moved a beat or two faster. And by the third song his lips were forming the words; he wasn’t exactly singing along, but it was a step in the right direction. Baby steps, again. I was learning to appreciate them as much as Neil Armstrong–size leaps.

  Somewhere in recent history, humans—at least those in America—had become all about feeling rather than doing. Instead of tackling our problems and sweating them out, we started sitting around and talking about them, or trying to drown them in alcohol and pills. The new methods didn’t seem to be working well, from what I had seen. Ancient rites of passage always centered on action. A child had to do something physical, like face a demon in a dark forest, before becoming a man or a woman.

  Drew smacked a crooked cripple into place with a framing hammer so we could try the French doors in the den again. He was taking action, battling demons, and I had no doubt that he would emerge from this trial as a man. It was every bit as useful as weeks alone in the wilderness in search of a spirit guide. Each of us was passing through into a more evolved phase with a timeless tradition of breaking down in order to build stronger.

  A thin red line ran from the side of Drew’s palm, down his wrist, and to his elbow. It probably wasn’t much of a cut, but mixed with his sweat, the blood dripped onto the concrete slab. I had plenty of scrapes and bruises, too. We all did. Angry rainbow bruises the size and shapes of fists, as though the beatings we’d taken all these years on the inside were only now erupting to the surface, spilling out and then draining away for good.

  The house felt like a live being that day, marking us, branding us like possessions, and we were marking her right back with star-shaped drops of blood and DNA swabbed on the tips of misfired nails or wood slivers. I had the idea that maybe Caroline wasn’t a woman at all, but a house. I wondered what I would find if I went back to the tornado house now, and had the eerie feeling that it would be gone, completely swallowed by the earth and spit right back up as Inkwell Manor’s pieces and parts. Drew swung the hammer again, beating the resistance out of an innocent piece of knotty pine. His shoulders slumped, his own resistance on the way out the door, too.

  Yeah, we were building things. Every swing of the hammer made him stronger, purged his grief. At the end of the day we’d have a new door or two, and the thought made me smile. For the first time in too many years we were fearless about stepping through newly opened doors.

  The shingles were not only delivered that Saturday afternoon, they were delivered directly onto the roof. Roman watched the conveyor belt like it was transporting alien beings back to their home planet. As a bonus, the roofers actually showed up the next day. The only thing that made me happier than the progress we were making was the fact that my own feet were firmly on the ground.

  Pete was supposed to come by and help me work on the drain lines, but he didn’t show. Drew and I managed to get the last exterior door installed. Just when I worried I was teaching him a few new words, he taught me a few. Installing windows and doors did not make our list of favorite pastimes. And with five bedrooms, closets, three bathrooms, laundry room, pantry, library, Harry Potter cupboard, garage, and four exterior doors, we had a substantial future with doors. To make matters worse, the library and back doors were complicated French doors, so they actually counted as two each—on the off chance that anyone was counting.

  “As soon as the Sheetrock’s in place, we can actually lock this place up!” I said, holding my hand up to feel for a breeze around the edge of the window.

  “You mean if we ever figure out how to install the locks,” he said, and I realized I was getting used to the exasperated tone he had fired at me for the last few days.

  “Don’t forget, we’re also assuming no one knows how to throw a brick through a window,” I added, matching his irritation and raising it three exhaustion levels. “While we’re at it, let’s assume no one can use a reciprocating saw to cut straight through a wall any time they damn-well please.”

  That took him off guard, and I regretted the small truth. We were building Inkwell Manor to feel safe, to forget that a crazed man with power tools might hack his way through our carefully measured walls and back into our life.

  “I know it’s slow, but we’re making progress. You want to work upstairs or down?” I asked. Now that we were back to slow-moving projects, it was all work and no fun.

  He wiped his face, and I pretended not to notice that he had drawn another Egyptian slave symbol on the back of his hand. He’d been doing it for at least a week. We moved through the day like we were marching in pudding.

  Off like a herd of turtles, my grandma would have said.

  By the next weekend, most of the sewer lines were complete. We finished running black iron pipe for the natural gas, and I had a hard time shaking the feeling that I might blow us all to the moon. A water leak would be unfortunate, but a gas leak was scarier than an ex with a thing for knives and coded messages.

  On Friday, the realtor showed our old house to a young couple with three small girls. I was equally terrified that it would sell and that it wouldn’t. If they bought it, we’d go from being buried under a mortgage we could no longer afford to living free and clear at Inkwell. The trouble was, we would have no place to live until the build was finished. While strangers tiptoed through our bedrooms, we drove to a nearby park and watched Roman swing—“Too high!”—until the realtor gave us the all clear. Living in a house that was up for sale made us feel displaced. We had two houses but no home. The kids retreated to their rooms after a late supper, with Roman following Jada to her room.

  I welcomed the quiet sunset, hoping that Caroline would ride down on the final rays to cheer me and pass on some strength. I cleaned the kitchen under the haze of orange sun, disappointed that my imaginary friend hadn’t stopped in for an imaginary pep talk. The last yellow-green of daylight streaked the horizon while I tied the trash bag closed, feeling fortunate to live in a time where trash bags were infused with mountain-fresh Febreze. “Come on, Hershey. Let’s get this bag out, girl.” I whacked my palm against my leg and she beat me to the
door, tail thumping the wall.

  It was a beautiful night, clear and so filled with starlight that I believed Caroline was with me after all. I walked around to the side of the garage to drop the trash in the can, but no one had brought it up from the road. We had a system for whose turn it was, just like the system for the dishes. A block of wood sat in the kitchen window with the older kids’ names stamped on different surfaces. After they unloaded the dishwasher, they flipped the block to the next name;—forget to flip it and you were up twice. A cruder chunk of wood in the garage served the same purpose for trash. I didn’t have the energy to drag one of them out and didn’t really mind the walk anyhow.

  Hershey trotted beside me, sniffing after a chipmunk or rabbit trail every ninth step, gravel shooting back from her paws when she launched on each new path. Freshly mowed grass and wild onions reminded me of my mom’s potato soup, and the chorus of night insects boldly shouting things they never said in daylight made me smile. I was practically skipping by the time I reached the can. A fire-ant hill had started beside it, and I made a mental note to poison it before it spread. The bites annoyed the kids and left large welts on me, an allergic reaction never quite bad enough for Benadryl but driving me half mad with itching for a week or more.

  I tossed the bag in and left the can at the street. Dragging it back up the gravel would interrupt night sounds, and I was in the mood to listen. I threw my hands in the air, eyes on the stars, and felt a yell bubbling in my throat. I held it in, wondering what it would say if I let it out, wondering if it would be in an ancient tongue. The things in my mind and heart had started to feel more and more foreign, but in the thrilling way of new discovery; I no longer felt like a lost, frightened soul. I had found a home inside my own skin for the first time. Things were a long way from perfect, but they were trending in a direction I knew I could live with. My mom was right. We really were going to be all right.