The next morning, Hershey wanted out the front door instead of the back, which was more likely to signal bad news than good. Labradors rarely break their obsessive patrol paths without reason. The kids had started summer vacation—well, if you could call anything about our life a vacation—so I made a to-do list for them before I opened the front door a crack. The welcome mat was a clean series of black quatrefoil blocks on a cream background. No scary messages. No signs. No real reason for me to still be looking for these things. I pulled the door open and stepped out, one foot on the mat and one on the threshold.
The long, narrow porch had a small bamboo table and two matching chairs on the far end. It had been my birthday present three years ago, a little spot to read with a lemonade. A tall, iced lemonade with a red-and-white-striped straw. I closed the door, not only the cheery front door of the house, but the door that led to scary thoughts about things left on doorsteps and last straws. I was sick and tired of spending brain cells on the past.
I stumbled my way through an interview on my lunch hour at work. To bring in extra grocery money, I was freelancing for the state paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writing front-page features for their inserts. Local human-interest stories were a nice diversion from the chaos of our own story, but I had a hard time being objective with story arcs just then, not to mention how hard it was to stay awake and meet my deadlines after working past dark on the job site and rising before the sun for my programming job. I cheated by listening to the most important part of the subject’s answers and then writing half the article during the interview when they carried on about less pertinent details.
We went to the job site in the afternoon and wished we could have gone in the morning instead. Late June in the South wasn’t any cooler than July would be; in fact, it often felt steamier, because the summer rain clouds hadn’t evaporated. My hair curled into tight spirals in the humidity. As much as I would have liked to use the heat as an excuse to work inside, we had too much to finish outdoors.
“Get the scaffolding set up. I’ll be out in a minute,” I said to Drew. He knew the drill when it came to putting up siding. Jada ran after him, eager to help. The only siding left was high up, but unlike me, she was fearless in high places.
Hope and I looked over an estimate one of the cabinetmakers had taped to the kitchen window. I had selected simple, unfinished cabinets and drawn the basic plan myself. The extra-tall cabinet doors would go all the way to the ceiling and have more drawers than doors on the lower half. Pan drawers, towel drawers, utensil drawers, and bread drawers. I didn’t like digging in back cabinets on my knees. To offset the plain style, a decorative wooden hood over the stove would act as a centerpiece. I had ordered a custom marble-tile image of a Da Vinci sketch, a study of five characters in a comic scene, to set in the backsplash above the stove top. We needed a comedy set in stone.
It was a big kitchen, and since Hope did a lot of the cooking, she was excited. “This is the lowest estimate so far,” she said, measuring her excitement against my skepticism. “Is everything the same?”
“He moved the wall oven. We’d lose the floor-to-ceiling cabinet, but placing the oven away from the refrigerator makes a lot of sense.” I flipped to the computer image of the appliances. “I like it. What do you think?”
She nodded, future baking days dancing in her eyes.
“I’ll call him before I start on siding.” I wasn’t thrilled with the kitchen, but it was good enough. Ain’t no church, my dad would have said with a mock Southern twang. Honestly, I was just tired of making decisions by the armload and didn’t have the energy to linger over this one.
The electricians showed up around suppertime, smiling and barely lifting their feet off the ground. They drilled holes and pulled wire with surprising efficiency. I was actually impressed with them for once, until Hope came out with Roman on one hip. “I think there’s a problem with one of the pipes.”
I thought right away that she must mean a water line, because there wasn’t much that could go wrong with the drain lines when nothing was draining into them yet. But I’d forgotten that Tweedledum and Tweedledee were back on the job. They had drilled a hole in the four-inch sewer line running down from the kids’ upstairs bathroom through a wall in my library.
“Just get one of them couplers, cut it in half, and glue it on over the hole,” Tweedledee said. “Put the seams against the studs and the inspector will never notice.”
The proper way to fix the hole would be to cut out the section of pipe, and replace it with smaller sections of pipe and couplers to hold it all together. It was going to be a real pain, since the bottom was set in concrete and the top was wedged against the ceiling. We had no wiggle room. And the asinine suggestion that I try to slip a spliced-together fix past the inspector wasn’t going to fly with me.
“We’re talking about sewage running down a wall in my library!” I said. Okay, I may have shouted it, actually. I took a deep breath. “We’ll have to cut this section out. Splice in a repair, and retest for leaks.” Damn it was left off but implied by my tone. They didn’t offer to help do the work or pay for the parts, and I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. I would subtract the replacement parts from their final payment and attach the receipts.
We had electricity in the house, at least in theory, but wouldn’t be able to flip the switch and use it until after the Sheetrock was up and the electrical fixtures and outlets were installed. My confidence well was shallow when it came to the likelihood that the electricians had done things right, and making repairs after they were covered up would be next to impossible.
The times when we were overwhelmed with things to do were tough, but it was always more difficult when we were waiting for other people to complete tasks. So the next few weeks had us all on edge while the cellulose insulation was blown in the walls, the final bricks were laid, and the Sheetrock was hung and finished. We did a lot of cleanup and planning inside and out, and on a hot July afternoon, we put fiberglass insulation in the ceiling of the garage so my room above would be more energy-efficient.
“It’s literally a hundred and ten degrees,” Hope said, checking her phone. “This is a deep layer of hell.”
I didn’t want to tell her that carrying the insulation rolls into the garage and setting up the ladders was the easy part. We’d bought six-inch rolls that we’d double in the twelve-inch-deep ceiling space. But the fluffy fiberglass had a paper backing on it that would create a moisture barrier between the layers if we left it there. Not good. I started ripping the paper backing off half of the rolls, marveling at first over how easy it was compared with how difficult it had seemed in my mind. Drew took my prepared rolls and started shoving them in place, layering the paper-backed layer underneath with Hope just behind him stapling the paper to the ceiling joists to hold everything up.
When I finished peeling away paper, Jada and I started our own assembly line, with her handing insulation up to me while I shoved and stapled with an electric staple gun. She also kept the cord and long pieces of insulation from tangling. Thankfully, Roman napped in the back of the shop through the worst of it.
The job would have been miserable in the dead of winter with us wearing full protective clothing. But covering every inch of skin with thick clothing in the heat would have killed us, so we bargained between heatstroke and discomfort with thinner gear than we probably should have. We were overheated and sweaty, with tiny shards of fiberglass coating us; it was the worst I had felt in my life, truly a task I wouldn’t wish on an enemy. A layer of hell, indeed.
“Worse than being tarred and feathered,” Drew said.
“I feel like fire ants are all over me!” Jada whined.
“I want to die,” Hope added, and I silently agreed with all of them.
We traded jokes for a while, then complaints a while longer. But before we were halfway done, we were too miserable to speak. Drew’s CD stopped—someone must have forgotten to hit the repeat button when they started it—and no one
bothered to turn it back on. We gestured when we needed something, grunted when we smashed a finger, and rehydrated when we started blacking out from heat exhaustion. As horrible as I felt, seeing my kids so far past fatigue and discomfort that they couldn’t even bicker and complain made the whole thing worse.
Roman woke up and toddled out of the shop clenching his grungy cat, Peek-a-boo, in one fist. He stood in the doorway watching us, and no one had to tell him to stay out. He could see that whatever was happening in the garage, it was not fun. I handed him a juice box from the cooler, and he sat under a tree in his Tweety Bird lawn chair, perfectly silent in honor of our obvious suffering. Hershey sat with him, whining now and then over the unhappy tension.
We stapled the last row up when the sun was a glowing ball of unrelenting heat on the horizon. There were no celebratory dances. No victory. No words. The insulation had inflicted enough pain to be the battle victor.
We rinsed our faces, arms, and legs with the hose, but it did little more than cool us. Our clothes and hair were still filled with bits of fiberglass that rained down when we moved and stuck to our damp skin. A shower and generous handfuls of soap followed by equally generous handfuls of lotion was the only thing that would offer relief. Still silent, we packed tools away and loaded up the car.
“Crap,” Drew said, pointing to a stack of concrete-reinforcement wire in the driveway. We were trapped. Blocked in. The six-by-twelve-foot grids of rusty wire had been delivered that morning and we’d forgotten all about it. Eventually, the wire would reinforce the slab outside our garage and a driveway up to the shop. The rest of our long drive would be paved after we’d moved in and I saved up the money. But the only thing that mattered just then was that the wire was blocking our way out. I took a few steps toward it, measuring the idea of driving around without hitting a tree or a muddy sinkhole. I might have taken the risk if I hadn’t remembered that the Sheetrock truck would need to get up the driveway bright and early.
I went to the shop for a pair of gloves, and the kids followed, silently sorting through the milk crate of gloves for a right-and-left pair, no matter the size or mismatched colors.
Drew and Hope stood on one of the short ends and I took the other. The wire sheets tangled in each other when we lifted them two at a time, and then tangled in the long grass and shrubs when we dragged them across to the edge of our property. On the final trip, we struggled with three sheets, determined not to walk all the way back for a single piece. We hadn’t eaten much all day and were at the edge of heatstroke. If the pinpricks of fiberglass hadn’t been torturing us, we might have slowed down and been more careful. I might have watched the four-inch spikes of wire sticking out from my end of the sheet as carefully as I watched the grass for the copperhead snakes that we knew lived nearby. But we were tired. We were desperate. And we were less careful than we should have been.
When the spike of rusty metal stuck into my left calf, I thought for one instant that it was just a scratch and my exhaustion had focused the pain, made me overreact. But when I bent over to look, the spike was shorter than it should have been by nearly two inches.
I exhaled quickly and pulled it out, like ripping off a Band-Aid; there was no reason to wait and think it through. More than anything, I was pissed off that I had yet another thing to deal with on a day that had already had enough of me. Rich blood pumped out, matching the rhythm of my heart rather than just dripping in a steady stream. My vision tunneled. I had passed out when the older kids’ dad had his wisdom teeth pulled and again when Jada’s bottom teeth poked through her lip after a fall. Passing out there in the field would have been a welcome reprieve from the day.
“Mommy?” Hope’s voice went wobbly, sounding a lot like Jada’s.
“I need,” I said, looking around for something to put over the pulsing wound and not seeing anything. “Tape. I need the roll of duct tape.” I pulled off my left shoe and sock, wadded the already bloody sock over the hole in my leg, and fell backward onto my butt.
“You okay?” Hope asked, her face ashen and her hands shaking.
“It’s just a little hole. Where’s the—”
Drew handed me a roll of gray tape. I wrapped tape around my leg to hold the sock in place. Definitely not the most sanitary wrap, but it couldn’t be helped. Jada was holding Roman and leaning against the car. All four of them looked terrified.
I took a deep breath, preparing myself to shrug it all off and reassure them. Maybe I could have pulled that off if I hadn’t looked down at my leg. The sock was drenched in blood. On my exhale, I leaned over and puked in the grass, narrowly missing Drew’s foot. It wasn’t that the injury was all that terrible, but combined with our hellacious day, the heat, and my squeamishness, it was more than I was prepared to handle. I put a hand up, palm out, to the kids and waved like it was no big deal, but in reality it was in surrender as much as reassurance.
“Just need to keep pressure on it and get a tetanus in the morning. Good as new.”
Hope drove us home and no one spoke.
Some of our words had been stolen away by exhaustion, that was true, but my mom had taught me to live by the old “if you can’t say something nice” rule, and I had nothing nice to say.
We were so far beyond tired of the project that there wasn’t a word to describe what we felt. And with so many things left to do, the deadline looked more impossible every day. I wanted my kids to go on dates and eat spaghetti and meatballs instead of jerky and crackers for supper. I wanted the house we were living in to sell and I wanted the new house to be a home instead of the hardest damn thing I’d ever done in my life. I wanted to go on vacation with my mom again and invite my dad down to relax.
I wanted to take my own turn at feeling broken and let someone else take a turn at cheering everyone up. But that isn’t how being a mom works. So I swallowed all those thoughts, got everyone showered and fed, and carried on with the pushing-forward, the cheering-up, and the determination to work hard enough to make everything better.
Have I mentioned I’m an optimist?
–20–
Fall
Down by the River
Even though Adam and I had been divorced for well over a year, my erratic sleep reflected how often I still worried about him coming back. I stayed up late, woke frequently, and found deep, solid sleep only in the early-morning hours before my alarm rang. It wasn’t a sustainable pattern, and I told myself that every evening before I climbed into bed and did it again.
My phone was ringing, and I had the sense that it had been for a while. But it was so far away that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to get to it. I tried to climb up out of the foggy sleep determined to hold me down, and I slowly became aware that I was in my bed.
A woman had been yelling at me in my dream. She was red-faced and angry. When she opened her mouth, the ring tone of my phone sounded from deep inside her.
Yes, I’ll get it. Leave me alone.
I often felt like it had been years since I’d slept a whole night without worry or fear. But that never seemed like a terrible thing, as long as there was hope that it would end sometime soon. A person can get through just about anything if they believe it isn’t forever. I reached over to my nightstand and fumbled for the phone, knocking it to the ground. It stopped ringing. Fine with me. I rolled over so my back was to it, but I had only pulled in two slow breaths when it started again. The ringer was turned too low to wake the kids, but I couldn’t ignore it no matter how much I wanted to.
I leaned over, grabbed it, and tucked back under the blanket like there were monsters under the bed.
It was a Little Rock number. “Hello?” I cleared my throat.
“Is this Cara? Cara Brookins?”
“Yes. Who—”
“Shit. It’s her. I have her,” the man said aside to someone else. “Cara, this is Officer Stracener with the Little Rock Police Department. I need you to confirm that your children are with you.”
Cold rushed from the sides of my nec
k down my torso. “They’re here. In bed. Asleep.” My voice was tiny. Insignificant. The voice of a liar.
“No. I need you to confirm that each one of them is there. I need you to go check your kids. Now.” He was firm. Commanding. Nerves—or fear—stretched his tone a notch too high, made it flutter at the edges.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. My heart galloped so fast that I half expected Officer Stracener to witness my heart attack over the phone. The last of me. I had nothing left.
“Cara? Are you checking your kids?”
“Let me talk to her. Cara?”
My mind went around in a circle before I whispered, “Sophie.”
“Cara, Adam drove his car into the Arkansas River. The car’s gone, but he got out and swam around, naked and yelling crazy stuff.”
“River?” my lips said but my voice did not.
“We need her to check the goddamned kids!” Officer Stracener was losing his cool, but I had enough for both of us. I was sinking deep into a cool, dark place and I wasn’t sure I would ever find my way out again.
Sophie said something I didn’t hear. Maybe I didn’t want to. Then she was loud, talking fast. “He told them you were in the trunk. He told them that, and he believed it. But you’re not, so—”
So my kids might be.
A noise exactly like Hershey had made, bloody and taped like a rodeo calf on my back porch, came out of my throat. Then another, and I sucked it all back in and bit my lips to silence. I was in my doorway without any memory of standing.
Why had I put four-year-old Jada in her bed last night? Why? She had fallen asleep reading with me in my bed. Why? What was I thinking? Just because we hadn’t heard from him in a while, had I really believed we were safe?
I made it to the stairs, gaining confidence when Hershey appeared next to me, sleepy-eyed. She would have alerted me if anyone had entered the house. Wouldn’t she have? Or would she have cowered, too afraid of Adam to move or even growl? I crawled up the stairs like a toddler. Knee. Palm. Knee.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 24
