To be fair, most of the time Petra got along considerably better with Don Collins than Rae had with William Newborn. She seemed to accept that Don was not to be relied on for much except an amiable and distracted good cheer—except when he was openly thwarted, cornered into a position of having either to give in or to attack. Then he could be vicious—not physically violent, not that Rae had seen, but capable of a clever and devastating revenge. One walked quietly around Don on the rare occasions when he was truly angry.
But Petra seemed to know this, for up to now the child’s need to push back had only been directed against her mother. Rae had raged against her father’s spinelessness in the face of William’s authority; Petra, on the other hand, patted her father on his well-groomed head and went her own way.
Petra was a different person from her grandmother, Rae reminded herself firmly. For which promise Rae rejoiced. She and Tamara both watched the child fearfully for any signs of inherited instability, and the mere fact that neither had glimpsed any reassured neither of them. Adolescence would be the test.
Rae had never asked Tamara why she had named her daughter Petra. She did not really have to: Conscious or not, the choice of Petra’s name was a bid for rocklike stability in the next generation, a plea that the house of Collins be built of sterner stuff than that of Newborn.
When the girls returned, glistening and smelling of soap, Rae put food on the table (the scrubbed-pine kitchen table, not the ghastly over-polished mahogany in the formal dining room). She served up and they began eating, with Petra’s excitement about the day and the ribbons she had won carrying them on, until the back door opened. Tamara walked in, and ice settled down on the gathering.
One glance, and Rae’s stomach clenched. What on earth had she done now, to provoke that expression on Tamara’s face? She had no doubt she was the cause; even Don’s transgressions did not earn quite that same look.
Tamara passed through the kitchen wordlessly. When she came back, washed and changed, Petra shot her one sharp sideways glance and immediately asked if she and Bella could be excused, please, so she could finish the story she’d been telling Bella. Tamara nodded, and the girls cleared their plates and slipped away upstairs. Rae wished she could be allowed to go with them, but instead she moved the salad around to Tamara’s side and, because there was no point in avoiding it, she asked her daughter, “What’s wrong?”
The tightening of lips was so like Grandfather it was eerie, the old man’s ghost in that thirty-year-old woman. Utter disapproval, in a mere twitch.
“Bella tells me she was up on the shed roof with you today,” Tamara said finally, not looking up from the precise transferal of pasta to plate. Rae felt Alan’s eyes on her.
“Yes,” she said steadily. “She wanted to help. Why?”
“Is that the safest thing in the world?”
“Alan was behind her the whole time. She couldn’t have fallen, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Alan was with her.” Tamara was now concentrating on the sliced bread, choosing a piece with complete attention.
“We were both with her, Tamara. If there’d been a seven-point earthquake while we were up there, she still wouldn’t have fallen.”
“I question your judgment.”
So what else is new? Rae thought, and if it had been simply a matter of Bella’s safety, she would have said it aloud and let Tamara explode in anger. But this was not really about Tamara’s half-sister.
“You’re talking about Petra, aren’t you? Her visit next month?”
“If she comes to visit you” (it was “if” now, Rae heard, although Petra’s stay had been settled for weeks) “I don’t want to be worrying the whole time.”
“Tamara, you’ll worry no matter what, but I promise you I won’t let Petra climb out on my roof.” It was an effort to push the reasonable phrases past the tightening throat muscles, but essential. Insane mothers were not allowed to lose their tempers like other women. Madness was a Pandora’s box: Its lid had to stay locked tight. Rae felt Alan stir, but he said nothing. Instead, it was Don who spoke up, dropping a small bombshell into their midst.
“Actually, Tam, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to afford your thing after all.” Typical of Don, to use the offhand term “thing” to refer to a much-sought-after, weeklong Colorado workshop in an arcane variety of horse breaking, a workshop that Tamara’s own income-generating summer classes were to be based upon. Tamara turned to gape at him, her fork suspended in mid-air. “I know you’ve sent in your deposit and all,” he went on, “but it looks like money’s going to be a little tight just now.”
Tamara’s “thing” was the very reason she had agreed to turn Petra over to her grandmother’s care, since it could not be expected that Don might cope with full-time parenting for seven whole days. Both women began to speak, but their first words were swallowed by the loud scrape of Alan’s chair and his industrious and noisy gathering of plates. His face remained expressionless.
Rae glanced at Tamara, saw the rage that she was trying to hide, and started again, trying not to sound desperate. “Tamara, I’ve been racking my brain for what to give you for Christmas. Let me give you the workshop, please. I know how you’ve been looking forward to it.”
Now it was Don’s turn to rise suddenly—not to help Alan, but to go back to the freezer and fill his glass, as if demonstrating how little interest he held in any decision. Tamara wavered. She was hungry to go, and had in fact arranged her spring and summer around the completion of the course; however, she was not only furious at Don, and unable to show it in front of her mother, but furthermore, accepting Rae’s money had always been Don’s business, not hers; never hers. Still, she badly wanted to go …
Rae tried to nudge her gently toward acceptance, without appearing too eager. “Call it a birthday present, too. I haven’t given you anything fun in a long time.”
It was the word “fun” that did it, Rae decided later. Fun was a commodity the hardworking Tamara found little time for. Tamara gave in, and thanked her with as much grace as she could muster. Don smiled into his glass, Alan slammed the dishes into the dishwasher, and Rae went out to the car for her checkbook.
Alan intercepted her outside the front door on her way back inside. Petra’s voice in monologue drifted down from her upstairs bedroom, where by the sound of it she was either telling Bella about the day’s events or, more likely, making up a story for her young auntie’s entertainment.
“You do know he manipulated you into doing that?” Alan demanded.
“Of course I do, sweetheart. It’s what Don always does. And if it makes him feel clever, who am I to argue?” To Don, the cleverness was as important as the money. They all knew that if they had flat out asked Rae for money, she would have given it. But doing so would have left a bad taste in both Tamara’s mouth and Don’s, for slightly different reasons. “Let it be,” Rae said. She kissed him on the cheek, and went back to take her seat at the kitchen table.
“How much is it?” she asked Tamara.
“Nine thousand.”
“Nine—”
“And the thousand deposit,” Don contributed helpfully, studying the overhead lamp. Tamara opened her mouth to speak. “And airfare,” he added. Tamara’s mouth hung open for a moment longer, then closed.
At Don’s casual words Alan, back at the sink, made a noise that might have been a cough but which Rae knew for a snort. Good; he was able to see the humor in it.
She looked over at Don. “Fifteen thousand ought to do it, then?” she asked sweetly.
Again Tamara started to protest, but Don moved to squelch it. “That’d give her a little to buy books and some of their specialized equipment. Very nice of you, Rae.”
Rae had no doubt, from her daughter’s reaction, that the original sum Tamara had stated was all-inclusive, and she knew she should be outraged at Don’s blatant sticky fingers. Another time, she might be, but today she was merely amused at the transparency of his greed.
The man had no shame. Of course, if Don were stingy with Petra and Tamara, she might have put her foot down, but she knew that his self-respect included keeping his wife and daughter in all the comfort anyone’s money could buy. There was nothing Rae could say that might make things better, so that was what she said: nothing. She merely wrote out a check for fifteen thousand dollars and slid it across the table to Tamara, taking care not to meet her daughter’s eyes lest contact bring forth a confession.
They left shortly after that, since Alan had a class the next morning. When Bella’s snores came from the back, Alan, at the wheel, said to Rae, “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
Tears had been trickling down her cheeks for the last couple of miles, and he knew that, although he had not looked away from the road ahead and she had neither sniffled nor wiped her eyes. He always knew.
“It’s just so sad, Tamara’s situation. Such a lot of games she puts herself through. It takes all her strength to stay convinced that she’s not her mother: I don’t need counseling; my marriage isn’t in trouble; I don’t have any problems with my daughter. She learned more than horsemanship from David’s mother—denial was that woman’s middle name. And I worry about Petra in a few years, when she starts to demand her independence. It won’t be long—she’s already getting that look on her face when her mother talks to her.”
“Petra seems a remarkably well-balanced child,” Alan protested mildly.
“So did I at that age,” Rae retorted.
After a moment, he intoned, “Said she, ominously.”
Rae had to laugh at that. She blew her nose and laid her hand on his thigh, where he covered it for a moment with his own before putting his back on the wheel. They traveled in amity through the night. Ten miles later, Alan spoke again.
“You have to wonder if this mighty effort of the white-coats in mapping the human genome will ever lead to any real understanding of the human being, beyond the mere mechanics. Where do characteristics come from, things like stubbornness and a disdain for convention?”
“Are you talking about Tamara and Don, or Rory?” Alan’s son, an enigma to his father: witty, intelligent, enormously energetic when it came to avoiding work, his charmer’s sparkle masking his utterly amoral nature. A born con-man, Alan had called Rory once in half-admiring sorrow, just after he’d told his only son that he was no longer welcome in their house. Bella was two, and Rae had caught Rory pocketing an antique silver rattle that had belonged to Rae’s grandmother Lacy, an object valuable both in money and in memories. Alan still saw him from time to time, but Rae hadn’t laid eyes on Rory since that afternoon.
“Both, I suppose. I mean, say the scientists do isolate the scrap of protein that makes a man a rogue. What happens if you eliminate it? No more rogues, but do we also find we’ve eliminated ruthlessness in mathematicians and inventors and artists as well?”
It was Alan’s kind of conversation, the academic’s search for meaning in any field. Rae replied, “I was thinking this evening about how like Tamara is to my grandfather William. Physically she resembles my grandmother, but in personality—talk about ruthlessness.”
“And yet Petra shows no sign of it.”
“She doesn’t, does she? Petra the Rock. Maybe it’s like a double negative—when it comes from both sides the two doses cancel each other out.”
“And she does have the honest love of both parents, no matter their other problems. Who knows what your grandfather’s childhood was like, to shape him that way.”
Rae knew full well what Tamara’s childhood had been like, and it would support Alan’s thesis of nurture’s preeminence. “William’s mother was indeed a tyrant, by all accounts.”
Neither of them made mention of the true subject of their thoughts, serenely dozing in the back.
They drove on through the night toward their hilltop home, deep in the woods. The next morning, with Alan running late (as usual) for his first lecture, she would gather her tool belt up in a hasty armload of damp swimsuits and leftover roofing material and sling it on its hook just inside her shop door. There the belt would hang, gathering dust, three galvanized roofing nails overlooked in its pouch, for seventeen months while Rae’s world ended and slowly remade itself.
Three overlooked nails: last remnants of a family’s happiness.
Rae looked from the nails resting in the palm of her hand to the laminated photograph of a man with a door latch in his, then up at the tree trunk on which she intended to mount the picture. Instead, she laid the photo down on the workbench and knelt on the ground to drive the three nails in a straight line along the edge of the bench, in the center of what had originally been the upper edge of the door. Their dusty gray finish was oddly similar to that of the driftwood below, three metallic circles surrounded by rich dark wood. They looked like a Braille message, put there for those in the know to decipher, like the dots on an elevator’s control panel. She ran her thumb over them to confirm that they were uniformly flush against the wood, feeling the rough surface against the freshly planed wood. Then she went off to find another nail to use in mounting the picture of Uncle Desmond and his house.
Twelve
Desmond Newborn’s
Journal
October 22, 1923
To my amusement, I have discovered that I am greatly more suited to the life of a hired man than I am to the role of overseer, my once-soft hands more fitted to the pickaxe than the pen. A university man am I, younger son of a tycoon, who should be growing a belly behind a desk and conversing with Cabots and Lodges, yet here I stand with a masons trowel in my hand, speaking only to God.
“Stand” is hardly accurate at this very moment, and if I have spoken to the Almighty today, it was in terms so unflattering, He would have to be All-forgiving indeed to have answered me with anything less than a bolt of lightning.
I broke my foot this morning. Not too badly, thank the much-maligned Divinity, but when the swelling goes down I fear one of the bones along the top will creak and groan, and I shall be reduced to a hobble for some time.
My first act, after I had removed the rock from my extremity, cursed God and all his lithic creations, and pried the boot from my wounded member, was to cut a sturdy branch with a convenient crook from the madrone tree and trim it to fit beneath my arm.
Despite this setback, when I took up this journal to write the first entry in months, I discovered that I am quite ridiculously pleased with life.
Some of my happy delirium, I admit, may have more to do with the liquid pain relief of which I have partaken than with my contentment with my current life. Some may even be the spectacular sunset which the Almighty has laid out at my wounded feet, where I sit out on my finger of rock in the sea, and the intoxication of those colors that no painter has captured. But beneath those passing joys lies the deeper one of a man who has discovered his true purpose on this sorry globe.
I am a builder.
Not a builder of grand houses and factories like my brother William, but the builder of a house, this house, as yet little more than wax pen outlines on naked rock. The shape of it was imprinted on me, as if from birth, so clearly has it grown up before my eyes: towers that reach for the sky, a deep foundation that settles firmly into the earth, and a dwelling between, strong yet light, like the trees from which it will be made, like the native peoples who trod softly but firmly on this land before me, leaving behind a few subtle artifacts and images.
And sitting beneath this sky tonight, with the strip of black island to the west to separate the deepening oranges and blues of the sky above from the sparkling oranges and blues mirrored on the water below, I begin to see that my towers will do more than reach for the sky.
Had I not been forced to flee Boston by my sins, had I not gone to soldier, I would never have found this skill in my hands. I would have become my brother, grumbling behind his desk, dying there.
So now I speak to God, not to rail and curse, but to thank.
This is a blessed place, broken foot
and all.
Thirteen
With the vegetation decimated and the jungle inside the stones reduced to a trampled expanse of mud, Rae could now begin to dig out the foundation, hauling away seven decades’ worth of fallen rock, composted leaves, and the decayed remains of floor and furniture, siding and shingles. It made for a rich soil but brutal work, shoveling the wet debris into her heavy, high-sided builder’s barrow and wrestling it out of the foundation and off to the future vegetable patch. It took just a couple of trips for her to realize that she would only be able to manage three or four hours of it before her back started to scream at her and the bone and muscles of her left arm grew too painful. The afternoons she would have to dedicate to other labor.
This morning, once Desmond’s photograph was on the tree, she rattled her barrow over to what would be the crawl space beneath the floorboards, then ran it up the bouncing ramp she had fashioned the day before out of 2×10s. Once up and over the foundation stones, she pulled on her work gloves and reached for the shovel, sinking its head deep into an undisturbed heap of fallen rock and the softer stuff below.
One of the questions whose solution Rae had most anticipated was the discovery of just how much Desmond had left behind him in the house, whether he had abandoned a bare shell (the front door, after all, seemed to have no lock) or if she would uncover some remnants of his life there. She could not hope for photographs or papers, and it was doubtful that she would encounter even scraps of his furniture, but the odd coin or cracked Mason jar, or some of those peculiar rusted lumps uncovered in garden beds and displayed in small museums—that sort of thing was surely not out of the question.
With that in mind, Rae had included in her endless lists (compulsive, Dr. Hunt had called them reprovingly—but then The Hunter had never built a house) a quantity of heavy-gauge wire mesh in order to sieve the soil before it went into the future garden—which would also save the future gardener’s fingers, since there was bound to be glass and nails aplenty. She positioned the sieve frame over the deep barrow and set to shoveling.
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