The phone was in my hand. Still connected. If they were talking I couldn’t hear them, but they would hear the phone thumping against the stairs. Up. Up. Up. My vision tunneled, cleared, and tunneled again.
I had been afraid for my own life so many times, but I’d never even imagined he could slip my kids right out of the house and drive them to the bottom of the Arkansas River, float them out of my life for good. It was a brand-new terror born into a mind that thought it was full up with them.
At the landing, I stood, even though I wasn’t steady on my feet. My mind spun in a frantic whirlwind, urging me to run as fast as I could to find my children. At the same time the too-logical side of my brain held me back, froze my body in place. There were only two possible outcomes. The kids were either there or they weren’t. And that urgent side of my brain didn’t understand that speed couldn’t change the outcome.
Officer Stracener wasn’t in a hurry to find out if my kids were in the trunk so he could rescue them; he was checking to see if they had bodies to recover. My children’s bodies.
One, two, three.
I held on to the half wall at the top of the stairs, hyperaware of the rough Sheetrock texture under every fingertip. I curled my toes into the carpet and swore I felt each individual fiber. Hershey had stayed at the bottom. As badly as I wanted her with me, I didn’t have the courage to open my mouth and call her.
For one last minute, a precious one, I stood there as a mom. In only seconds I could walk into one room after another and find empty beds. Cold sheets. It could be the very last minute that I was someone’s mommy, and I needed to hold it.
Jada’s room was closest, but I couldn’t go there first. At four, she would be the easiest one to get out of the house in total silence. I started to think of ways he could have pulled the other kids out and stopped myself. They were ugly thoughts.
Drew’s door was closed, and when I tried the handle it was locked. The little pseudokey over the bathroom door fit in all the doors, and I slipped it in until it clicked the lock open. My son stretched diagonally across his bed in a pair of checkered boxers, feet tangled in his sheets. The room smelled of body spray and dirty sneakers.
A sob cracked out of my chest so rapidly it hurt like it had been jerked out by a fist. I pulled the door closed and ran to Hope’s room, my hair flying and arms out, so I must have resembled a ghost running across the long playroom. Hope’s dark hair fanned onto her pillow like it had been arranged. The quilt was pulled neatly to her chin. I could hear her slow breathing but couldn’t come anywhere near to matching the pace.
Tears had drenched my face. I could no longer breathe through my nose. The phone had gone missing at some point and I’d have to find it eventually. But not yet. One. Two. I had two children.
My head and kidneys ached from fear and adrenaline. My vision tunneled out more than in. I was cold. At some point I realized I must be going into shock. I gagged. The only way I could make it to Jada’s room was by holding the doorframe and hugging the wall like Spider-Man, like a woman who had lost gravity.
What if she’s gone? How will we go on? The kids—we just can’t—
I couldn’t hear anything from the doorway. Shouldn’t I hear her?
Jada’s door caught on a pile of clothes when I pushed it open. Even from the doorway I could see that her pillow was empty.
From the middle of the room I could see a lump in the middle of her bed. A dark, hopeful shape. I stood there for at least a minute, imagining it was her and everything was okay. Then I imagined Adam, and a terrible part of me wanted him to be in his car at the bottom of the river—out of my life forever. In a watery grave. I could see him there clearly, curled up in his own trunk. Gone.
I walked across the rug, dragging my feet to keep from stepping on a project or stray earring. I ran my hands over the pillow, palms flat, then down the bed, tangling my fingers in blankets. Nothing but blankets. I moved slowly at first and then faster, frantic, looking for a piece of my little girl. I jumped when my hand ran up against a stuffed toy, flipping it over with a mechanical mew. I echoed the cry and resumed my search, friction heating my palms and making a whistling noise against the sheets. When my hand found her back, I almost shook her, angry that she was pressed long and flat against the footboard, using a beach towel for a blanket.
Three. I had three.
The walk back to the stairs was dark. My tears hadn’t stopped. I wasn’t sure they ever would. I found my phone on the carpet at the top of the stairs. It was still connected.
Going backward with one hand and my knees, I moved down the stairs. “Officer? Sophie?” But even I could tell my throat was squeezing my voice to a squeak. Like a little white mouse. I sat on the floor at the bottom, holding Hershey and crying against her side. “Sophie?” I said again, and this time someone heard me.
“This is Officer Bradley. Am I speaking with Cara?”
“They’re all okay. My kids. They’re all here.”
“We got ’em! All good!” he shouted. “Kids accounted for. Get him out of here. We got the kids.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stracener said from a distance, and then he must have taken the phone from Bradley. “We have a Hamot officer pulling into your driveway now. He can come in and sit with you for a while. Call someone for you.”
“No,” I said. They hadn’t sent the officer to sit with me, they had sent him to check my kids’ beds because they thought I was too weak, too small to do it myself. “I don’t want him to come in.” I was still crying, and there was no way to pretend otherwise when my nose was completely blocked.
“Are you sure? Can I call someone to come over? You might not want to be alone.”
I steadied my breath. “I’m not alone. My kids are here.” Lights were drawing and redrawing a blue line across the dining-room wall. “We’re just fine.”
“Call if you need anything. We’ll do whatever we can,” he said.
I hung up, wondering if I had thanked him or only thought the words. My head was still scattered and my thoughts couldn’t find a straight line to anything. The clock on the oven said it was 4:31, and I was having trouble finding oxygen. Someone had sucked it all out of the house.
The police lights switched off before the car backed out and hung a right toward town. A deep breath took the very last molecule of oxygen and used it up. I lurched for the door and pulled it open, sucking in gulps of fresh oxygen and starting to cry again.
My forehead throbbed with sharp pains on either side like someone had accidentally left a couple of steak knives in my skull. When I leaned down to rub the worst spots near my temples, I saw something on the welcome mat. Hershey sniffed at it and pulled away with a little sneeze.
One of the kids had left a glass there. But why would they do that?
I picked it up with my left hand, because I was afraid if I moved the right one from my temple my brains would shoot out. Water sloshed over the lip.
Water.
A dark figure floated in the glass. A little dead mouse. My hand shook badly enough to drop it, but somehow I held on long enough to lower it back to the welcome mat.
“Better you than me,” I said, but I meant Better you than my kids. I couldn’t just stand there thinking about all the might-have-beens. All the what-ifs. Adam had been at the house and walked right up to the front door while we slept and I’d never known it. I had the feeling he was trying to tell me I was lucky this time. He could have hurt me if he wanted, he could have made us all take a dive. But I had been lucky. We were all so lucky.
I flapped my left arm against my leg like a wounded bird. Hershey abandoned the trail she was sniffing through the yard and leapt over the glass to get inside. She leaned against my thigh and put her nose under my hand. A subtle hint that she was open to some attention.
“Good girl. Keep an eye out, and don’t let him in. He has no right to be in this house. No matter what.” I rubbed her head, gave her three solid pats on the ribs, and laughed when the hollow echo made m
e jump.
She went with me to check all the downstairs doors and windows, and then to push the dining-room chairs in front of the doors. I hadn’t worked out yet what I would tell the kids. If I was going to start barricading the doors, I would have to tell them something. When I was in the kitchen sorting through the knife drawer for just the right one to keep on my nightstand, I realized how ridiculous I was being. The chairs and the knife weren’t a bad idea, but they would be useless tonight. After driving his car into the river and claiming that a body or bodies were in the trunk, Adam wasn’t going to be sneaking around my house for a while. He’d earned himself a trip back to the state hospital, where slipping pills into the potted plants wasn’t going to be as easy as it was at Ivana’s or Sophie’s.
I closed the knife drawer and put the dining-room chairs back under the table. Being realistic and cautious was smart. Being paranoid and irrational was not only stupid, it was dangerous. Adam might have suggested that I was slow and stupid all these years, but I was starting to believe he was wrong.
The thudding in my temples had slowed, but it had worked like a bilge pump, draining every last bit of energy from my limbs. I wanted to go upstairs to get Jada, to carry her back to my bed and sleep with one hand on her tummy. But my fear wasn’t the sort of energy she needed to feel. Besides, I could barely lift my feet to move across the den toward my room. When I reached the bed I rolled into it, my arms and legs leaden weights.
I never would have imagined I could sleep after the terror of thinking I had lost the only things that mattered. But my body separated into two parts, half drifting into the early-morning sky and half sinking deep into the earth. My dreams started out fractured and chaotic but settled into a rhythm that woke me shortly after sunrise as though it were music.
I had lost some of my urgency and gained an appreciation for tiny moments. The way my breath moved slow and calm in and out of my lungs felt good. The sheets felt luxuriously smooth. Even my pillowcase’s fake mountain-fresh scent that came from a softener bottle made me smile.
–21–
Rise
Glue Me Back Together
I slept that night with my punctured leg propped and iced after I’d soaked it in peroxide, then alcohol, then applied antibiotic cream, then taped a split-open aloe vera leaf to it. My whole body tingled from the fiberglass insulation, but the worst of it had washed away in the shower. If I hadn’t been too dehydrated to make tears, I would have cried myself to sleep.
Benjamin was there as soon as I made the conscious effort to relax my shoulders and imagine a disk of light passing through me. He was leaning over me, his face clear. I studied him, wanting his pity to validate how pitiful I felt. Per usual, his expression was more happy than sad, more peace than pity. His eyes smiled and his lips curved barely past a neutral expression. It wasn’t mocking, like I had thought for the first few seconds. He was encouraging in a way that told me I could do everything I set out to do and then some.
I wished he’d say the words, speak out loud that he was proud of me. How long had it been since I had heard words like that from anyone but my parents? Years. He didn’t speak, and I realized he probably never would. The look in his eyes would have to be enough. I exhaled, at peace, and slept right through my morning alarm.
The kids would be in the way at the job site, with the Sheetrock guys spraying the finish texture inside and hanging the sheets in the garage ceiling over our insulation. I left them at the house with a list of simple chores and went to my doctor for a tetanus shot. Dr. Sam—short for Samantha—gave me a list of things to watch for with the puncture wound. It had a high risk of infection, but she thought it looked clean considering the conditions it had happened under. I was thankful I didn’t need stitches.
I wished I could go home for a nap, but had to go in to the office instead. My commute was about twenty-five minutes, and that was the only time I ever found myself alone. I realized on that drive that I was feeling restless and a little vengeful, so I started thinking about Caroline again. She had been lying low lately, and I missed her. There were still things I needed to learn from her strength.
When I got home, the Sheetrock foreman called to say the job was done and ready for me to check out, which was code for “Come over and write me a check.”
The kids were as anxious to see the finished walls as I was, so we loaded into the car with Hershey and drove over.
“I can’t believe how many rooms there are!” Jada said, dancing through the upstairs. “Just a few days ago, I could walk through that wall!” She bumped up against the wall separating her room from one of the upstairs bathrooms.
The first thing I noticed was how much quieter it was. Work in one room didn’t echo through the entire house and ricochet through my skull like it had for months. We all went to our own rooms, except Roman, who bounced among all of them like a pinball. I lay down in the spot where my bed would be and stared at the ceiling. Even though we were a long way from finished, even though my calf ached, I couldn’t stop smiling. We were actually doing it. We were building our own house, and it looked every bit as good as what a real construction crew could have built.
Red. I would put red curtains in my room and a fuzzy rug beside my bed to curl my toes in. “We’re a kick-ass family,” I whispered to Caroline, and I felt her smile along with me. She’d been hanging out in the shadows all along.
It was the first of August, which made the countdown to our September 13 deadline impossibly close. The rest of our to-do list was on us, and it was more like three months long if everything went perfectly. Impossible. But we’d done impossible before, albeit not when we were quite so exhausted. The stolen minutes to look at the ceiling were a guilty pleasure we couldn’t afford. I sat up. “Drew? You ready to put in a couple doors?”
He didn’t answer, so I stalled for him, reviewing the list on my phone. Doors, trim, caulk, paint, hardwood flooring, concrete flooring, tile, showers, bathtubs, toilets, cabinets installed, stain and finish cabinets, make concrete countertops, install sinks and plumbing fixtures, lights, switches, outlets, stairs, rails, exterior porch rails, back steps and rail, garage doors, concrete slab, library shelves. I rearranged the items in what I guessed was the right order.
It really wasn’t possible. Not even for an experienced construction crew working overtime. Our budget was too tight to hire workers, because I had no intention of using all the money the bank had approved. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to afford the final mortgage of Inkwell. This was a low-budget build. I had to make it work.
I found Drew downstairs. He had carried in three doors by himself and propped them against the wall in the dining room. While it would have been nice to believe he realized how overwhelming our list was, I knew his enthusiasm was because he thought we were almost finished. As hard as we’d been pushing for almost eight months, the final six weeks were going to be even more difficult, and we were going in feeling fully spent. I didn’t say any of this to the kids. Whatever well they could find to pull enthusiasm from, I wouldn’t dampen it. Not yet.
The girls were cleaning the upstairs, getting the floor ready for the hardwood, which was in two-inch tongue-and-groove strips that would be glued to the subfloor. Roman was in his room, zooming Matchbox cars—real ones rather than painted rocks—around and around the stack of hardwood flooring. Drew and I installed the laundry-room and pantry doors faster than we had any of the exterior doors, but the downstairs bathroom went wrong and then more wrong before we got it to close evenly. It was dark by the time we finished, and we were working with a shop light that put off a lot of heat. “Enough doors for tonight,” I said, expecting Drew to want to head back to the house.
“Those last sheets of plywood are blocking the upstairs doors. What are we doing with those?” he asked.
It was good to think of our building supplies as the last ones. The last two-by-sixes, the last plywood, the last nails, screws, or Liquid Nails. “I thought we’d use them in the attic for storage platfo
rms.”
“Let’s carry them up before we leave, so the doors are ready to go when we come back.”
My calf was throbbing, but I didn’t want to stand in the way of his momentum. We needed every extra push we could get. All the months of building had made for some impressive muscles. Drew had turned from a pasty-white, thin, geeky boy into a tan, muscled young man. Before the Sheetrock went up, he could jump up and grab the ceiling joists and pull himself up through them effortlessly. My muscles hadn’t built quite as much as his, but I definitely had muscles I hadn’t believed I owned. Carrying the four-by-eight sheets of plywood upstairs took little effort.
The attic door hadn’t been installed, so there was just a hole in the ceiling in Roman’s room. We carried ladders up and positioned them as well as we could. Hope helped us stabilize everything while we hoisted the sheets up one at a time with Drew all the way in the attic and me perching at the top of the ladder to push the end of the sheet up.
Everything went smoothly until the final sheet, which wedged against a crossbeam on a rafter and wouldn’t budge. We would have just left it for another day, but it had Drew blocked in the attic space unless he slithered around the side on his hands and knees. The blown-cellulose insulation was easier on skin than the fiberglass kind, but we both decided we might as well just finish the job for good. “Hold on,” I told him, “I’ll climb up and help from up there. I can get more leverage.”
We tried a half dozen maneuvers to loosen the stuck piece, but failed. “Brute force,” Drew said. “We’re just going to have to push it out the way it came in. You push down on your side to pivot it, and I’ll push up and try to bend it a little at the same time. It’ll pop right out.”
The reasoning was sound. I pushed down with everything I had. He pushed up. I felt the wood bend under his pressure, but I never felt the instant it gave way. We hadn’t planned that far ahead. The top spun around and slammed into my head, just above my left eye. Following the basic rules of physics, my head slammed into the rafter behind me. The pain was impressive, and so was the blood. I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from at first, because my entire head throbbed from the hit.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 25
