I saw him dragged away—it took all four of them—and heard their radios make buzzes, beeps, and fuzzy voices, and I waited for a gunshot that never came.
When an officer knocked on the door, shouting his name and mine, time found its weight again and jolted my heart forward so hard it hurt. I looked around for Hope, but she was gone, and I wondered if she had ever really been there or if shock had painted her at my side. My face felt like it was only made of eyes when I opened the door, Karma loaded, finger on the trigger, barrel pointed at the floor. I couldn’t feel the gun in my hand. Couldn’t even tell I had a hand. How had my eyes grown so large?
A redheaded officer took the gun and unloaded it, lips moving but no words coming out. Or maybe they were, but I wasn’t ears, I was only eyes. The calm I had been so sure was with me to stay flew right out the door and chased the blue lights of the first cruiser down my driveway.
I felt paralyzed right up until the officer tried to put his arm around me. The touch burned against my raw nerves, and I jumped back from him, every cell alert and coursing with adrenaline. I ran up the stairs to Hope’s room with Hershey on my heels. Something between a knock and a claw brought Drew’s face into the crack of the door, up near the top because he was crouched on the dresser they had pushed in front of it.
“Kids upstairs,” Officer Red said into his radio, and then “Jesus!” when I swung around, eyes wild and teeth bared like I could rip his throat out with them. I hadn’t even noticed him following me.
Don’t sneak up on a mama bear. Stay back. Stay where I can see you.
That’s just what Officer Red did, slipping back toward the stairs while I told the kids it was safe to come out.
Drew was slow to believe me. A police officer’s uniform might have reassured most kids, but mine had seen too much. No badge or restraining order had stopped a man from coming after us in demon horns. Hope and Jada talked Drew into pushing back the dresser and opening the door. He came out first, knife in hand. I could see that he was ready to use it, and I knew firsthand how difficult it was to come to terms with what you were capable of doing to another person to keep your family safe. And I knew that hugs and words couldn’t erase that knowledge or give him back a measure of innocence.
“You’re sure he’s gone?” he asked. Looking out one window and then another with no idea that he was circling the house from the inside in the same way Adam had from the outside.
I grabbed his arm and held him still. “Stop it. Listen to me.”
He did.
“They took him away in a police car. Probably to the state hospital?” I looked at the officer for confirmation, and he nodded. He had a thin red beard to match his hair. I hadn’t noticed before. I searched out his name tag. I couldn’t call him Red out loud. Hamm. You’ve got to be kidding me. Officer Hamm. No doubt the victim of an endless stream of pig jokes.
Drew snickered. He had seen it, too.
Jada tugged on my hand, needing reassurance. I hugged her hard enough to nearly crush her. “Too close!” she whined.
Yes, I thought, that was too close. Much too close for comfort.
“I’ll need to get a statement from you,” Hamm said, staring at me a beat too long.
I still had the impression that my eyes filled most of my face. The better to see you with. My ears were foggy, like everyone was speaking into a tin can, and my voice had gone small, overshadowed by my eyes. My head had started to pound and my back ached from the adrenal-gland workout. I looked away from Hamm and back at the kids, whose eyes were stretched and hollow, too. I walked past Hamm to the stairs, waving the kids after me.
When you fall off a horse, you get back on.
When your house becomes the scene of a horror movie, you reclaim it.
I walked into my room, the bathroom, and then through every room downstairs and the garage with the kids and Hershey following like ducklings. No one spoke.
Hamm stood at the bottom of the stairs, which was nearly the dead center of the downstairs, and watched. From his raised eyebrows and the hands propped on his well-padded hips, I could tell he wanted to spin his index finger near his temple. Loco lady. Crazy as the man was. Slap-ass nuts.
His partner, a gray-haired man who hadn’t spoken a word that I noticed, stayed back by the door, giving us space as though he knew exactly what we were up to. It was the house equivalent of counting fingers and toes. When we had made the rounds, it was him I stopped in front of.
“Do you need the kids for anything?” I asked.
“Probably not.” He finished scribbling something on a long notepad before he looked up with a tight-lipped pseudosmile of pity.
I’m not sure if my building anger was healthy, but I was not going to stand for pity. I turned to the kids, determined not to minimize the effect this had had on them. “If you want to add anything to the police report, stay down here; otherwise, go upstairs into Jada’s room and play a game. You can take ice-cream sandwiches—and napkins—with you.” I turned and leaned over to make eye contact with Hamm. “Ice cream, Officer?”
“Um, no thanks. I’m good.” He wiped a hand over his beard.
Jada ran for the freezer. “Ice cream in my room!” she sang. Drew and Hope stayed put.
We all sat at the table while my oldest kids made lists of the things that had frightened them, pissed them off, or hurt their hearts. They were lists no parent wants their kid to imagine, let alone live. I was surprised by how many things I had failed to hide. They hadn’t talked to me about these things, which I’ll admit made me sad, but they had obviously talked to one another, which made up for some measure of it. And knowing the load of secrets I had harbored, I couldn’t point any fingers.
When they had both finished, they went upstairs without any ice cream. I was surprised at first that they didn’t want to stay and hear what I had to say, but if I could choose to walk away and unknow all the things I had seen in the past years, I would do the same … except I would definitely take the ice cream with me.
Hamm and his partner, Bacon—just kidding, the older partner was Hancock—took notes, and asked effective enough questions to prove they had done this sort of thing before. Even so, the large number of bizarre stories I had for them appeared to tip the scale toward worst-case scenario of their careers.
“We were pretty far away when we got the call. It took a long time for us to get to you,” Hancock said. “It happens that way sometimes. Keep your gun ready, but away from the kids. If this were to happen again, if he were to get in the house, you should be prepared to shoot him.”
For the space of a single inhale and exhale, I wondered if I should have done it, unlocked the door and let him in to end it. This wasn’t over. Not now, and not ever. He would keep coming back. He would come to any other place I moved. He wouldn’t stop until something terrible enough happened that they locked him away for good. Until then, with his mental illness as a bargaining chip, they would always let him go. A few days or a week to stabilize him on his meds, and he would be free again.
Free.
That was a thing we would never be.
Hamm rattled off a list of charges. I waved dismissively. It didn’t matter what they charged him with. Yes, I would press charges, but it would only create short delays, days where we could breathe easy, not years.
By ten thirty P.M., they were gone and the house was ours again. Jada was asleep. I put Karma back in my closet, this time showing Drew and Hope where to find her. “He’ll be back at the state hospital for a few days, maybe longer. You guys okay?”
They nodded and meant it.
“Get some sleep.” I hugged Hope hard, and then Drew. He held on longer than I expected but not as long as I would have liked. These experiences were changing them, damaging them in ways a lifetime of good fortune couldn’t undo. People have endured worse, I told myself. Concentration camps, wars, torture. But having to sink so low in the scale of human atrocities to find a life more frightening than our own was a small consolation.
–23–
Rise
Scramble to the Finish
The cut over my eye quickly became a thin, unimpressive red line, but the bruises were dramatic and ugly, extending from the middle of my forehead to just under my cheekbone. I worked hard to keep a poker face for the first few days, which the kids took as a personal challenge to send me into hysterical laughter at every turn. It was better than the alternative, so I played the game, half terrified I’d split everything open with each outburst.
My hand was slow to heal, but functional enough for me to keep pushing forward with the work. Once the doors were installed, the girls punched the nails and filled the nail holes. Hope started caulking the seams and then prepping to paint, trim first and then the walls and ceiling. Even though we had lots of decorating ideas that involved color, we opted for a single color called Vanilla Brandy for walls and ceiling throughout the house. The trim would all be Parchment Paper, a creamy white that I really loved, and not only because of the name. Rolling through the entire house with a single color saved hours of cleaning paint trays, brushes, and rollers. We could get creative later on—assuming we ever had the energy.
My optimism pulsed with a steady glow.
In mid-August, the cabinetmaker installed the unfinished cabinets in the bathrooms and kitchen. They weren’t everything I had dreamed, but they were functional. We began staining them, which took a lot more time and probably killed a lot more brain cells than I could spare. Hope was the fastest painter and stainer, but she emerged fully coated from nose to toe in whatever substance she was applying. The rest of us couldn’t figure out how she managed full-body application, but didn’t complain about her method, since it yielded speedy results.
Just when we thought we couldn’t handle the scent of stain for another second, Pete helped install the oak stair treads and railing, and the cabinet guy finished the rough build of my bookshelves in the library. Gallons of stain and polyurethane loomed in our future.
I abandoned the kids to the stain and paint while I started the tile work in the bathrooms. My bathroom had several diagonal walls and the counter was set diagonally, which made for a nightmare of trips up and down the stairs for wet-saw cuts. My five-by-five shower also had to be tiled from floor to ceiling. In our spare time we built the frames for concrete countertops, which proved to be a lot more difficult than it had looked on YouTube. My mom spent an entire weekend perfecting the frames so that they could be easily removed after the pour. She sealed every seam with caulk and bright red duct tape. Without her extreme attention to detail, half of my frames would have been permanently embedded in the countertops.
All the finish work was slow and took ten times longer than we expected, but nothing was worse than the wood floors upstairs. We had been working on them for over a month. Around two thousand square feet of hardwood flooring had to be laid through the bedrooms and closets, all in two-inch-wide strips. Some days, sixteen hours of spreading glue and hammering the tongue-and-groove pieces together with a rubber mallet moved us only a couple of feet across the expanse of the house. Roman was given the job of pushing the long, emptied flooring boxes out my bedroom window, which was open only eight inches so he couldn’t tumble out with them. “Look out below!” he yelled, sliding each box out and giggling when it sailed down to the growing heap.
By the end of August, it was looking like a real home. It was nowhere near finished, but we could definitely see a light at the end of our very long, dark tunnel.
The electricians had installed half a dozen lights and then vanished. They had had a falling-out and refused to come to the house at the same time, which reduced their sloth-like pace by half or more. We were anxious to have outlets and working lights so that we could ditch the long extension cords out to the temp pole for our tools and spotlights. I knew how to install them myself, but not only was that against code, it would take up valuable time already allocated for the impossibly long finish list. Besides, our contract affording them ten grand to complete the task made me hesitant to take on the responsibility, even though time was running short for our electrical inspections.
When Tweedledee and Tweedledum finally had enough fixtures and switches in place to run tests, we discovered that all our fears were on target. They really had been too high to get things right. They had lost the wires for my undercabinet lights behind the Sheetrock and never found them. The expensive speakers I bought to go over the den sofa suffered the same fate, useless with the wires somewhere in a twenty-foot wall packed with six inches of blown-cellulose insulation. Neither of the professionals had a clue where to start searching. The exterior outlets popped a fuse every time we tried to use them, and only a single phone line worked in the entire house, even though every room had at least one wired phone jack.
I called them continuously to come back and fix things, but their idea of fixing things was to smoke a little while they thought things over. They couldn’t get my cameras or the flat-screen monitor by the front door to work, but eventually sent a friend over to read the instruction manual.
Despite our frustration over the things outside our control, we kept reasonably upbeat about each new task. It still seemed impossible to finish for the bank inspection and the final city inspection to get our certificate of occupancy, especially after the kids had started back with school and homework, which stole away our working hours.
It was possible to get an extension from the bank, but it could result in extra fees and interest that I couldn’t afford. And, more important, we couldn’t handle another month or another week of building. Nine months of working nineteen-hour days had sapped every last ounce of our physical and emotional strength. The deadline was a countdown to the end of an impossibly difficult job as much as it was a ticking time bomb.
At five o’clock on the first Friday of September, with only a week left to go, I came back to the house we lived in too exhausted to speak. The kids had taken a couple of hours off after school to do homework, and I had come back to get them. But once I got there I didn’t think I could muster the energy to drive back to Inkwell, let alone accomplish anything.
I had been sleeping between eight and ten hours a week for three weeks, with an occasional twenty-minute catnap on a pallet in Hope’s closet at Inkwell. Even working those hours, it seemed impossible. We hadn’t poured our concrete countertops yet, let alone finished them. And until that was done, we couldn’t install sinks, faucets, or the stove top. Those tasks alone added up to more than a week of work, but we still had to make railings for the front and back steps in order to pass code, and we had to install toilets and the final electrical fixtures. The stairs needed a final coat of polyurethane, and the concrete floors downstairs had to be coated with xylene. The outdoor faucets had to be installed, and so did the garage doors and the concrete slab.
“I’m going to lay down, just give me twenty minutes, I’ll set an alarm.” I wasn’t sure if I had spoken the words aloud or merely thought them. The mattress swallowed me up, pulling me down to the deepest sleep I’d known in months. Benjamin wasn’t there. I rarely thought about him or Caroline anymore. In some ways, I felt I had outgrown them. He had been there to bring me peace and she had shared strength, two things I felt like I had finally found within myself. The kids and I were no longer the strangers we’d been on those first days of piling concrete block and mixing mortar. We worked as a team, a well-oiled machine. We laughed and practically read one another’s minds. The magic we had all found in the tornado-damaged house, the inspiration that started with Caroline, had been reborn in Inkwell Manor.
“Just one more week,” I whispered, smiling my way into the dreamless catnap.
“A ghost out the window!” Roman screamed. Jada laughed and Hershey barked, her nails clicking across the floor. Another game of chase.
“Twenty minutes,” I mumbled. “Can’t I just have twenty minutes?” Without opening my eyes, I felt for my phone. Even after I found it and held it in front of my face, it took me an
other full minute to get my eyes open. Another scream, this time with both Jada and Roman crying, which set Hershey off barking and whining, all while I tried to work out the numbers on my phone screen. It was seven. Two hours? Why didn’t the kids wake me? I had an e-mail from the newspaper with another article request for the freelance job, but that had been sent at six in the morning.
I checked my clock again. It was seven in the morning. I had slept for fourteen hours. Two weeks’ worth of sleep at once. It’s a wonder I survived it.
I pushed to my elbows. Drew stood in my doorway, his silhouette so much larger than it had been before the build. “Ready to get some work done?” he asked.
“Why didn’t you wake me? We have so much to do. I can’t afford that much time off!” I was angry, but more than that I was scared that the last hope of meeting our deadline had just been stolen by the sandman.
Drew laughed. “We tried to wake you after twenty minutes. Then after an hour. We took turns trying every thirty minutes until eleven. You were practically unconscious. You needed it.”
I stood, stretched, and smiled. Aches that I was half expecting to feel for the rest of my life were gone. “I’m starving.”
“Hope and Roman are cooking something. I made coffee.” He grinned. “Not that you’ll need it.”
We got three days’ worth of work done over the next ten hours. The mood was light, and our work was so synchronized that we appeared psychic. Hope had a paper to work on, and by six o’clock Roman was tired enough to cry over every bump and bug bite. “I’ll take you guys to the house, then I’m coming back to seal the concrete floors. It will be better if you guys are gone for that anyhow. Fumes are supposed to be toxic.”
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 28
