“I want cookies,” Roman said, scooting backward down the stairs and stopping every other step to push Peek-a-boo, his ratty, one-eyed, stuffed cat, down ahead of him.
“We’re having pancake cookies,” I said, holding my arms out. He climbed into my lap and melted against me in the way only sleepy two-year-olds have mastered.
The blueberry pancakes woke the teenagers—or maybe that was the bacon—and they made adjustments and repairs to the stick house while they crammed maple-syrup lumps in their mouths so fast they had to be swallowing them whole.
For the next two days, we ate, built, walked, and then started the cycle over on repeat. We scrapped our plans to go hiking along the Buffalo River. Everyone was content to stay in with the project and go on occasional forest excursions for more twigs, nuts, and forest scraps. It was the most thankful Thanksgiving I could remember.
Saturday night, our last at the cabin, we packed most of our things, pretending all the while that it didn’t really mean we were going back to our house. I climbed into bed feeling completely safe for the first time in years. The curtains and shades were all tucked down tight, the door was triple-locked, and the newspaper was still taped over the kitchen window. But hey, whatever it takes.
I sank into the too-soft mattress with a smile while the idea of being all the way safe wrapped around me. In the morning I wouldn’t have to tiptoe around any man, or test his mood. I no longer had to weigh each word or send warning looks to the kids: Careful, it’s one of those days. Stay clear. Don’t rock the boat. I could sleep straight through until morning. No one would wake me with telltale breathing, wild yelling, or frantic whispers about the corporations pursuing his patents. No hands around my neck.
I rolled onto my side, covering my ear with the blanket like my mom had when I was little. She had tucked her dad’s wool army blanket between two thinner, softer ones, telling me that wool was not only the warmest sort of blanket but the only sort that made people dream brighter dreams. I still slept under a wool comforter in the winter, and now more than ever, I believed in dreams.
Only a few experiences in my life felt so profound while they were happening that I consciously tucked them away as a permanent memory. This was one of those moments, feeling safe in my bed for the first time in … Geez, how long was it? Eleven years? More? For the rest of my life, I would pull out this moment every single night when I climbed into bed. I would smile and remember that I was safe, that I could sleep straight until sunrise without fear, and I would also remember the thousands of women and children who hadn’t made it that far yet.
I would remember that I was a very fortunate girl.
Sunday morning started with the last of the peppered ham and pancakes—or pancake cookies if you were two and a picky eater. We had learned to call all meat chicken and tack the word cookie on to just about every other food. As every ad exec and mom knows, it’s all in the packaging. But no amount of catchy packaging was going to smooth the scowls away from the older kids. The three of them looked like they were eating sand cakes, and calling them sand cookies wasn’t going to do the trick.
I pretended that a couple of happy nights knowing I was safe would hold me for a long time, but in reality it was just enough to tease me into wanting that sort of thing full-time. Don’t be greedy, I told myself. Be patient. But I wanted to dropkick that patronizing voice into next week. I was sick and damn tired of being patient. If wanting to sleep without fear was greedy then I was damn well ready to accept the label. I smiled and squeezed the nail in my pocket. Already I felt more like the woman who had hung the red curtains, my imagined Caroline, than I had a few days ago.
Drew practically growled when he caught me smiling. He had been wrapping our stick house with pages torn from the yellow pages. I hadn’t yelled at him for destroying the phone book. Not many people bothered with yellow pages anymore, and our house—our dream—had to be protected.
“We’ll get it home safe,” I told him, “even if we have to leave one of your siblings behind.”
“Not me!” Jada yelled, poking a broom under the sofa to scoop out her socks.
“Me!” Roman yelled. “Pick me!”
I scooped him up and buried my face in his tummy, blowing raspberries. “I’ll pick you for the tickle-monster attack. That’s what I’ll do!” When he’d giggled himself into the hiccups, I put him down and he ran down the path three steps ahead of me. The first load to the car was the heaviest. The kids followed, slow and quiet.
Despite the fact that we’d eaten most of the food we’d brought, and the food the girls picked up for our feast, it looked like we were taking back more than we had brought.
The stick house fit in the trunk as long as three shopping bags of laundry rode on the floorboards around the kids’ feet. With a final walk-through to collect all the things Jada had left behind, we said a sad good-bye to Hickory Haven.
Per usual, the kids conked out quickly, or at least I thought they did. When we were about a mile from my tornado house, I got a better look at Drew in the passenger seat and realized he had probably been faking it for the whole hour. “I’d like to show you a house,” I whispered.
He sat up, eyes open behind his sunglasses, not even bothering to fake a yawn or stretch. His left earbud dropped to his shoulder.
Come out, come out, wherever you are! I wanted to sing. It had worked when he was Roman’s age and hiding from something he was afraid to look in the eye.
When I pulled into the drive, I could see it was like coming home for him, too. He wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was a teenager who had seen more of the harsh realities of life than a lot of grown men. Before I had the car at a complete stop, he opened his door and his right foot skimmed over the leaf-cluttered driveway.
I stayed in my seat, twirling the nail between my fingers. The house had already given me what I needed, even though I couldn’t put that thing into words. Courage, that was part of it, but also vision. Hope?
Drew rounded the side of the house opposite the master bedroom. I had no idea what he would find, but I was sure it would be exactly what he needed. The girls needed things, too, but I didn’t think they were going to find them here at the edge of the storm damage. Their healing would take more time. They would need to travel a lot closer to the eye of the storm. I was afraid for them. But we had lived under a dark cloud for so long that I wasn’t as frightened as I should have been. I was desensitized in the same way as a child who grows up next to an artillery range and doesn’t go inside when he hears thunder, dismissing every warning boom as just another background explosion.
A shadow moved past the dining-room window and I jumped, almost dropped my nail. Not only because I worried for a second that Drew had gone inside, but because there was no way I could know that window was the dining room. I knew it, though, as definitely as I knew that Drew hadn’t gone in, that whatever shadow I’d seen had come from inside of me. I’d spent weeks, even years, trying to piece together Matt’s and Adam’s truths, and now I was the one left fractured and wandering empty houses like a lost spirit. I clung to Caroline’s nail, needing her strength until I could believe in my own and stitch my shadow back in place. The red curtains snapped in the wind and I shivered.
Inch by inch, I compared the layout of the house to the one Drew and I had drawn and then made out of sticks. We had worked it out together, one room at a time, vetoing one another’s ideas along the way, the whole thing accomplished without a word. Yet I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that our stick house would match this one, probably to exact scale, room for room, inch for inch. My library was where the master bedroom was here, though, because I was planning to sleep upstairs, closer to the clouds than the earth.
A tiny bird landed near the chocolate-colored front door. I looked back at the girls and Roman, confirming that they were asleep for real. I could see the blue milk-lid coffee table in our stick house and had the idea that even the girls’ furniture and decorations would match those in the house in fron
t of us. I hadn’t noticed a swing in the backyard, but I knew that Roman’s swing was there, too, exactly where he told Drew to put it.
The next handful of breaths came so fast and loud that I worried I’d wake them all. Had I lost my mind? Had I been possessed? Had we all?
The nail kept spinning between my fingers, warm and almost alive. I blew out a breath. Calm the hell down before you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it made me think of my grandmother, and her memory calmed me. I stared at the house, trying to see it through someone else’s eyes. It wasn’t the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, just a big, plain box. But it was something … something to me. I didn’t want to know the rest of the house’s story. That was the past, and I was never looking to the past again. From now on, the kids and I were all about the future. A good future filled with good fortune.
Drew came back around the same side of the house where he had disappeared, right hand in his pocket. I wouldn’t ask him what he had found, or more likely what had found him. Like the nail, warm and promising in my palm, it would be just the thing he needed.
He was smiling when he sat down. It wasn’t a full-out foolish grin or anything; in fact, it looked more like the frown he’d maintained the past couple of years had relaxed into a neutral expression, but that was closer to a smile than we’d had in a long time. The earbuds hung loose from his back pocket and he left them there. If I’d learned that they hadn’t worked for six months, it wouldn’t have surprised me. They were a mask he no longer needed.
When I looped my arm around his seat and turned to back the car out, a little “Oouu” escaped. The girls and Roman were wide awake and staring at the house, riveted. I smiled a little and waited, just in case I’d been wrong and one of them did need to get out and look around. But where this house was concerned, I was dead right every time. I eased the car sideways off the driveway, slower than I needed to, and paused there, angled so they could get a good look out the side windows.
They didn’t say anything; none of us did. None of us needed to. In fact, we never spoke out loud about that home, not once.
We were thirty minutes from our house when Roman groaned in the frustrated way that meant his back was tired of the car seat and he was arching, straining against the chest guard I called his car armor. “Almost home!” I sang, feeling like a liar. The place we were going wasn’t our home, and we were all afraid of what we might find there. “Do you want your juice?”
“I want cookies,” Roman said, his mood lifting with the request. “Cookies with baby kisses.”
“We’ll make some tonight,” Hope said, “for our lunch snack.” She liked planning their bag lunches for school, and even though I hadn’t told them how limited our income was, she saved by making home-baked treats.
“Cookies for lunch!” Roman sang.
“You want to make a tent tonight, Roman?” Drew asked. “We can camp out in the den.”
“In the cabin?” he asked, eyebrows high, nodding rapidly.
“Not the cabin. I’ll show you. We’re almost there. See the car crash?” Drew pointed to Roman’s favorite billboard, a local attorney’s personal-injury ad with the back half of a real compact car crashed through the sign. “We’re almost … there.”
Roman idolized his big brother, but they rarely played together. It was the first of many new things. If only all of them could be good.
The house, the non-home, was still standing. Despite a few dark moments and wicked thoughts, I knew that that was a good thing. I rolled my window down and opened the crammed-full mailbox. A good citizen would have remembered to have the mail held for the extra days away.
I pulled into the garage a bit too fast and had to stop hard to keep from hitting the shelf lined with oil, nails, butterfly nets, and basketballs. “Wait, I meant to back in. Easier to unload.” I managed to get the car out and back in again in reverse, but I was shaky, and the kids didn’t get out of the car even after I got out and opened the trunk. Roman’s window-muffled voice called out for cookies, but no one moved.
Arms loaded with luggage and supplies, I thumped my elbow on the window until Jada opened her door. “Take Roman over to Mrs. Lenz’s to get Hershey.”
“Hershey!” Roman yelled, his cookies temporarily forgotten.
Drew got out and grabbed bags and stray shoes while I pushed into the dining room. He somehow managed to get beside me, his anger redirected into a fierce desire to protect. I dropped the bags in the kitchen. Hope was right behind us. She went to the microwave and reset the clock, then started working on the oven clock, which was a pain to change using the temperature up and down arrows. They hadn’t been intentionally changed, only flashing zeros because of an electrical flicker, but it was an ugly reminder of uglier days.
“Grilled cheese and hot dogs for lunch,” Hope said, unloading the cooler.
“And carrots,” I added. Flickering clocks wasn’t going to scare me out of feeding the kids their veggies. I wasn’t that far gone.
“Raw,” she said, which applied equally to the carrots and our emotional state.
Holding my nail in my right fist like Dumbo’s feather, I did a quick walk-through of the downstairs and could hear Drew doing the same upstairs.
The kids and the dog ran in through the garage door. Hershey’s nails clicked on the tile floor, reminding me of a speed-typist at a keyboard. The happy Lab nearly bowled me over, let me rub her ears and pat her ribs, then set off smelling a trail through the house to see if Roman had left fresh crumbs while she was away.
“Mommy?” Drew called from upstairs. I smiled even though I knew that whatever he was calling me for wouldn’t be anything to smile about. I loved that all the kids still called me Mommy. It made me feel like I should win a parenting prize.
“Roman, help Jada get Hershey’s food and water bowls filled. And can you find his ball?”
“Fetch, Hershey!” he yelled, dropping to his belly to peer under the sofa for a tennis ball. No doubt he’d find a dozen under there and toss them all out. It was a wonder no one had broken a hip tripping over them yet.
I took the stairs two at a time and pretended that was why my heart was so loud in my ears when I got to the top. Drew was in Roman’s room.
“This how it looked when we left?” he asked.
Heaps of clothes surrounded the dresser, and toys were scattered everywhere. “I was packing away the summer clothes and sorting for winter while Roman looked for toys he’d outgrown. Neither of us finished.” I shrugged. I could definitely see why he might think the room had been ransacked.
Drew’s hand went into his right pocket and stayed there. He had his own feather. If he could deal with this, so could I. “Anything else?” I asked, proud that my voice cracked only a little.
Roman’s hands were slapping the stairs, followed by his knees. “Sissy’s makin’ cookies!” he said, arms up in the air like he was measuring an enormous cookie pile.
“First she’s making cheese and bread. Then cookies,” Drew said, giving me time to absorb that everything was okay, and that we shouldn’t have to worry so much that it might not be.
We didn’t find anything wrong in the house, though we would wonder through the day if small things had been moved. Nothing had been damaged or taken, unless a sense of security counted, but that had been so thoroughly destroyed years ago it would be hard to argue that a new invasion could mar whatever remained.
“Food’s on!” Hope called. We raced to the table. She didn’t like cold food and expected subsecond response time. If she was willing to do most of the cooking, none of us dared object to her rules.
Roman and Jada ate their grilled cheese with hot dogs sliced in half the long way inside the sandwich. Then they dipped the salty, gooey, grilled mess in ketchup. Roman dipped his carrots in the ketchup, too. Whatever it took to get them down. My rule making had definitely gone lax. Pick your battle, my mom always said, and the silent battle in my head was sapping my energy.
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Unlike the final meals at the cabin, where we laughed and talked over each other with three conversations at once, this meal was silent except for carrots crunching, ketchup splatting, and juice cups clicking.
“We’re building it for real, right?” Jada blew the question out like it had been bottled and corked for years.
We all stared at her, chewing paused, eyes wide. Then we blinked in unison and unfroze. I was relieved for a half second until they all turned their eyes to me, waiting for the answer. Needing it to be yes.
When my mouth opened, I meant to ask, What? Build what? Cookies? But we were truth tellers now. No more liar, liar, pants on fire for our family.
“Yes,” I said. “We are building it.”
And that was that. The older kids had already cast their vote. And since Roman was at a stage when he preferred dirt, sticks, and rocks to anything Fisher-Price had to offer, we assumed that he gave the project a couple of mud-stained thumbs up.
We ate. We unpacked and did laundry. And for the first time in what, months? Years? A decade? I had a crazy goal, an impossible dream that made me smile and gave me hope. The kids were transformed, unrecognizable from the nervous beings who had left for a mystery vacation only days ago.
Thanksgiving.
Yes, it was a time for that.
–6–
Fall
Coffee with Cream
The oldest three kids were in elementary and middle school and Roman wasn’t even thought of yet. My second husband, Adam, stood in front of our French doors, staring across our backyard and into the neighbor’s. His Yugoslavian features were distinct and handsome. His dark hair, long on top and parted straight down the middle, hung just under his eyes. If his hands were free just then, he would have pushed it back in a way that had once made my knees weak and my tummy flutter. His left eye was always closed a bit more than the right, just on the edge of a wink.
I was cleaning my fifty-gallon fish tank, more because it was a good place to keep an eye on him than because it needed cleaning. Something important was happening; he never stood in front of windows without a good reason. Every thirty seconds—timed so precisely that I knew he was counting it out—he lifted his index finger to the window and drew a letter. Someone was out there watching. He had me as sure of it as he was.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 5
