Jada sang the alphabet backward for half the ride home. I was proud of Hope for not strangling her. We were happy. For the first time in a very long time we were just plain happy. The idea sent a chill down my spine. Happy people get lazy. They forget to be on guard.
I took a deep breath. We didn’t have to be on guard so much anymore. Matt had chilled out a lot, and while Adam might show up at the back door one day, we weren’t the same people we had been the last time he came around. We were strong in ways that had nothing to do with the biceps we showed off to one another when we had the energy to flex our new muscles for fun. We could relax. We were all going to be okay. And we were so close to the end of this project that we could taste it. The kids could get regular teenage jobs and go on dates. They could have friends over to hang out instead of hanging plywood and hoisting bathtubs. I could spend time with my mom again.
The kids dragged through their bedtime routines and I hugged them all. Roman was asleep before I was out the door. I cried on the drive to Inkwell—not full-out weeping, but a handful of tears for the burden I could see lifting from my children. Pulling up in the sandy, washed-out driveway of Inkwell Manor made me smile, though, just like it always did. I stopped at the end of the drive, car idling. The house was something of a marvel, even by moonlight, as surreal and impossible as a colossal pyramid. We had actually built it ourselves. That wasn’t all, though; it had built us, too, individually and as a family, until we had become a vital part of one another.
I pulled up to the garage, which still didn’t have doors. And because the slab hadn’t been poured outside it yet, there was no way to drive inside over the high concrete edge. Still, it felt more welcoming than the other house, safer.
The xylene finish for the downstairs concrete flooring was in a five-gallon metal pail in the garage. I had mopped and swept the floor before we left earlier that day, so it was fully prepped. Just to be sure, I swept again. The stain I had sprayed on with a garden weed sprayer, the green kind that you pump up to create air pressure, was called Cola Brown. The end result wasn’t what I had hoped, but only because of my amateur technique and inferior equipment. I had high—optimistic and unrealistic—hopes that the finish would hide rather than magnify my mistakes.
I opened all the windows and doors, upstairs and down, because ventilation was essential with the toxic chemical. The instructions strongly recommended protective breathing gear, which I did not have. There was no wind to blow dust inside, so I bargained that the ventilation would be adequate.
Staying true to my commitment to center the house’s purpose around my writing, I started in the library. The shiny finish brought out the natural variations in the concrete. I lost myself in the work, admiring the floor as I rolled a thick paint roller with a long handle forward and back, reloaded in a square pail, and went again, closing windows and doors as I passed them so they wouldn’t be open all night. By the time I reached the dining room, only the front door was open, and it was the one I would back out of when I finished.
But in the corner of the room farthest from the door, I realized I was in trouble. I touched my lips and couldn’t feel them. In fact, I could feel none of my face below my eyes. How long had that been going on? It seemed to have happened all at once. I took a step toward the door and realized I couldn’t feel much below my waist either, not enough to walk, anyhow. I dropped the roller in the bucket and fell to my hands and knees, crawling toward the door. By the time I reached it, I was on my belly doing the same combat crawl Hope had done until she learned to walk. Slithering like a snake, I made it to the front porch and as far away from the door as I could get without rolling down the porch steps.
For a few minutes, I wondered if the paralysis could be permanent, or if the fumes had caused brain damage. Wouldn’t it be ironic to build a house called Inkwell Manor with an enormous library and never be able to write again? The bullfrogs around the pond next door didn’t seem overly concerned with the pins and needles in my face and scalp, so I closed my eyes and listened.
At least two hours had passed when I woke up. Whether I had been napping or unconscious I didn’t know, but I felt normal except for extreme thirst and a headache. With my shirt pulled up over my mouth and nose, I ventured back into the house, and I rolled on finish in the dining room and foyer at record speed until I was standing back out on the porch to do the last few feet.
Thank goodness the kids hadn’t been around to inhale any of that crap.
I left the roller and bucket to be thrown out, my head aching too badly to clean them with more caustic chemicals. When I was back at the house with the kids and rubbing Hershey’s head before I climbed into bed, I realized I had no memory of the drive there.
Chalk xylene application up as a huge mistake. I would never come near the stuff again.
My dreams were of Caroline, or of me as her. Maybe we had become the same creature. It was a thought I didn’t like very much. Some part of her was more than just strong, it was vengeful, and that frightened me.
But did it really? Did it frighten me more than he did?
Not anymore.
The next week passed in a fog of work followed by more work and far too little sleep. We were all in a cloud of exhaustion on the night before the final inspection. It was a cool September night, which we welcomed after working so long in the heat. Our major task was installing all the plumbing fixtures and toilets. We had plenty of smaller tasks to finish and a lot of cleanup. Every day a fresh layer of sawdust, concrete dust, and Donna Fill coated everything.
Faucet installation would normally be simple, but we were installing our faucets in four-inch-thick concrete countertops. I had made inset circles out of larger pipes so that the thickness immediately around the faucet handles and spigot would be closer to that of a granite countertop, but they should have been slightly larger in diameter. I ended up flat on my back under the bathroom sinks with a hammer and large flathead screwdriver, chiseling away concrete in tiny chips, terrified that I would hit too hard and shatter the counter. There was no way to patch it: A break would mean starting over. A break would mean we didn’t pass inspection.
Safety glasses kept my eyes clear, but I had dust and chunks of concrete in my hair, mouth, nose, and ears. By the time we finally got the faucets in, it was ten P.M. and we still had the drain lines and toilets to install. The stove top had gone in the night before, so we broke it in making a giant pot of ramen noodles, nobody’s favorite but they were quick and easy. The only other food we had in the house was hot cocoa, so I warmed a pot for dessert and we drank it from plastic cups.
Roman went to sleep on a pallet upstairs, and the rest of us went back to work. At two thirty A.M., Drew carried in the last toilet. “This is it!” he said, an enormous grin shining under exhausted eyes. Then he pulled the box off the toilet and said, “Crap! This totally sucks!”
“What?” I asked, my face draining as pale as his before I even knew what was wrong. We were too close to run across a problem now. One more step. Only one.
“The entire base of this toilet is cracked. We have to return it.” He balled up a wad of bubble wrap and threw it at the wall.
I held in a laugh. As violent acts of temper went, bubble wrap was pretty lame. Or maybe the laugh trying to steal out was actually hysteria. It seemed impossible that the very last task for the night had gone wrong. “The hardware stores won’t open until seven,” I said, wiping a hand over my face. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Can you have them come later tomorrow? Instead of seven A.M.?” Hope asked, a paintbrush in her fist and a fresh coat of paint covering the entire front of her shirt, her left arm, and both thighs. “If you call them?”
I shook my head. “We’re first on the schedule.”
“Surely they’ll understand. The other toilets work. They can see we know how to install them, and that we’ll get this one right, too,” she argued.
Both Drew and I shook our heads. “That isn’t how inspections work,” Dr
ew said. “They have to check off every item.”
We had to pass. We were not going to delay it by a week or a day. We couldn’t. Emotionally, we couldn’t handle another minute under a ticking clock. “We have to make sure he doesn’t flush this one,” I said, opening the box with the wax ring and handing Drew the flex pipe. “Let’s install it as though everything is fine. Just leave the water off so the bowl doesn’t fill and leak. I have an idea.”
Drew installed the toilet while I went out to the shop for the tissue holder and the towel rod. They didn’t have to be installed for the house to pass inspection, so they had been knocked off the essentials list, to be finished at a later date. He was hand-tightening the bolts for the tank when I walked back in.
“We’re going to close the lid and cover it and the back of the tank with screws and parts from these,” I said. “No one would want to move all that stuff to check it. We’ll make sure he does upstairs first, so he’s flushed a couple toilets. Then we’ll keep talking to him, distracting him, so he can’t even remember if he has flushed this one.”
“What about the baseboard in Drew’s room?” Hope asked. “We don’t have any more finishing nails and the last two pieces aren’t up.”
“I don’t even know if they have to be.” I looked at the ceiling, hands on my hips. I was dizzy and nauseous from exhaustion, and we had to be back for the inspection in only a few hours. “We’ll station Jada in that room. I’ll take you all to school late, after the inspection. She can stand in the corner and hold the trim up with her feet.”
We had more secrets, like that the sinks weren’t attached to the countertops and would slide around if anyone bumped them. But nothing major was wrong with the house that we knew of. If we could slip these minor issues past the bank and city inspectors, we would be set with a certificate of occupancy for our own home. Not just any home, but one we built with our own hands. If the cells in my cheeks weren’t too depleted to respond, I would have smiled. “Let’s go back to the house and get a couple hours of sleep.”
The little tricks and big distractions worked. The inspectors were both surprised and overjoyed to hand over my final paperwork. “This has been a fascinating project right from the start,” the bank guy said, and the city guy nodded in agreement.
I pretended that they didn’t mean the same fascination that kept bystanders staring at a train wreck. But we’d surprised them with success instead, and that made me pretty damn proud.
We did the impossible. We can do anything. Live? Does this mean we are strong and resourceful enough to stay alive?
After school, no one asked if we were going to Inkwell Manor; they just settled in with homework and television. Drew played a video game. In fact, we didn’t set foot on Inkwell property for the next seven days. We still loved it, we still felt more at home there than in our big house filled with bad memories, but we needed to catch our breath before we packed and moved. For the last month of the build, we had loaded up the cars with assortments of household goods and filled the shop and the center of the dining room with boxes and bags. But the bulk of our things would take a truck and a lot of work to get over there.
On the seventh night, after a fajita supper, everyone disappeared into corners of the house to work on projects or hobbies. I missed them now that our joint project was finished, but I also knew that it was healthy for us to have our own interests. We would never lose the bond that the build had created. I felt selfish calling them all to a sofa meeting, but it was time.
“I know we’re waiting for the house to sell before we do a full move to Inkwell, but we eventually have to go over there and finish things up.”
They let out a collective groan.
“It won’t be like before. We don’t have a time schedule. But the things we didn’t have to have finished for our inspection still need to be finished before we can live there. We need shelves in the pantry and all the closets and clothes rods. The last toilet needs to go in, too. It’s all small stuff, but it will make moving in a lot easier.”
They agreed, and we made a schedule. It was slower than I would have liked, but we were truly out of energy and enthusiasm. And we were all a little depressed that the house hadn’t sold yet and we couldn’t move in and celebrate. It felt a little like we had done all that work for no reward. It was a financial hardship to maintain both households, too. But the realtor insisted that an empty house would be even more difficult to sell.
It was several months of full nights of sleep and regular meals before our bruises healed and our muscles stopped aching. We finished most of the extra projects at Inkwell and moved more things over there. It wasn’t until the end of March that we sold the house.
We gathered again for a sofa meeting.
“Are you guys ready to move for real?” I had no idea what I would do if they said no.
Jada leaned in to Hope and pulled her knees up to her chin. They were both watching their feet.
“Spending the night there is going to be so awesome,” Drew said. “After all those months of imagining it.”
“The actual moving part isn’t any fun, but it’s a lot less work than building a house. Let’s start packing tonight.”
They didn’t only pack almost everything we owned into the impressive stack of boxes we’d been collecting for months, they also started disassembling furniture and piling it in the garage. They worked together, barely needing language to communicate. It was an impressive thing to watch.
The next afternoon we started carrying things over in a trailer I had picked up from craigslist. We had planned to rent a truck, but they kept insisting that we just take another load or two by trailer.
“We’ve moved almost all the furniture,” I said at around nine that night. I had just hung up the phone with my mom. She was planning to come help us unpack on the weekend but had started to feel bad again. She’d had pneumonia over the winter and had stayed with me for several weeks while she healed. I had worried about her, but she was tough and never complained. “Should we call it a night?” I suggested meekly to the kids.
“The only thing we have left are the beds,” Drew said. “Why don’t we just take the mattresses over now and sleep there tonight. We can get them all in one load if we leave the box springs.”
I was exhausted, but after months of dragging their feet over the move the kids were practically frantic to sleep at Inkwell. They pushed forward with no complaints. It was just like the build had been: Keep placing one foot in front of the other until the task is complete.
We had filled my library and the dining room with the bulk of the boxes, because they were closest to the front door and I couldn’t walk any farther than that. For the most part we had no idea what was in the boxes. At the beginning we had labeled them carefully, but then we had unpacked the boxes and reused them for so many more trips that every label was a jumbled mess.
“We’ll sort it out later,” Hope said when I pulled kitchen utensils, DVDs, and socks out of a box. “Let’s just get the mattresses in.”
Their euphoria was contagious. I was starting to feel that our long-delayed celebration was happening. A smile spread across my face and didn’t go away. Drew put on a dance mix, and we sang loud enough to be a disturbance. Even though it was way past his bedtime, Roman ran and leapt, and danced along with us. We were free and happy in a way we never would have been in another house. This was our personal space in every sense of the word.
“We need your help, Mommy!” Hope yelled from the dining room. They had my king-size mattress wedged on the stairs. The diagonal wall over the stairs may have met code, but it could have used a couple more inches for moving a pillow-top king mattress. We had to bend it and push with all our might to get it through.
I e-mailed my boss that I was taking the next day off to finish moving. I needed the time to enjoy settling everything into the place we’d made for it.
So on our first night at Inkwell Manor, we slept on crooked mattresses that blocked doorways and were
half-made with mismatched sheets. My head was facing south instead of north like it had at the other house. The 180-degree life shift was welcome, but disorienting, too.
I had trouble falling asleep, and blamed it on a short to-do list. The mile-long-list review had worked like sheep counting for the past year. What would I do without it? Other than some cleanup at the other house, the long-awaited result was complete.
When I finally slept, it was more like work than a restful thing. Caroline appeared over and over, always angry, always yelling, always at me. She had never directed any of her fierce temper at me before; it had always felt more like it wicked up through me with someone else as the target. When I checked my phone clock at three A.M., I realized I was afraid of her.
We had built the home inspired by her tornado house. We had rebuilt our family. Most important, we had survived mountains of craziness. All at once I was glad that her nail was out in the shop and not in our house. I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that she wanted something more from us.
I slept again, but she was there waiting for me, almost nose-to-nose with me in anger, and I had nowhere to go to escape. She was wrapped in orange and yellow instead of her signature red, cheeks glowing, lips moving in an ancient tongue I couldn’t interpret.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, Benjamin appeared in front of her like a shield. He sat as calmly as ever, but stared intently at me. I felt small and weak, like they were ganging up on me after being my inspiration for a year and a half. What? What do you want me to do? I wanted to scream at them. We’re done! We built it! It’s wrapped around us, protecting us. What more do you want from me?
All at once, Caroline leapt over Benjamin and hovered over me, orange dress and wild hair fanning out in waves, her body parallel to mine and about six feet above me. She looked more like a demon than the matriarch and supporter I had imagined her to be.
I looked back at Benjamin, needing his calm protection. But his eyes had gone wide and angry, too. He opened his mouth and I flinched, expecting a plague of locusts to stream out and suffocate me.
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 29
