“Rise!” he shouted.
It was the only word I’d ever heard him speak, so I did. Faster than I could blink my eyes open, I stood, stumbling beside my mattress, feet tangled in my sheets. Even after I worked my eyes open, the world was cloudy. It was six o’clock. A foggy spring day that would be my late grandpa’s eighty-ninth birthday.
The house was quiet, so I started pancakes for the kids. They weren’t big breakfast eaters, but a quick bowl of cereal or a breakfast bar wasn’t an option when they were probably buried in a box of garden trowels. I had moved around a lot in my life, but I had never been so disorganized and frantic with it. It didn’t worry me, though, because of all the moves I had ever made, this one felt the most right.
The only thing still bothering me was the nightmare about Caroline and Benjamin. They had been a strange gathering of forces that helped me through when I needed them. But now I worried that my restless mind had turned them into something different. I knew how easily a person could slip into insanity. The kids and I had created a peaceful place to live, and now it was time to settle in and find peace in my own mind.
I was ready to take on the task. I was sure of it.
–24–
Fall and Rise
You Built Your Own Damn House
You’d think that by then I would have known better than to be sure of anything.
But I’m an optimist.
Drew and Jada went off to school after begging unsuccessfully to stay home and help unpack. “We’ll have plenty of time to get things settled. Go learn something,” I told them.
Hope had left her senior year a semester early to work as an intern to the executive director at the Clinton Foundation, and by a stroke of luck, she had a few days off.
Roman and I were lounging on a twin-size mattress on his bedroom floor. We needed a few lazy minutes of play before we attacked the boxes in earnest.
Finally, reluctantly, I got up to check the e-mail on my phone in case anything had come in from the office. I had missed dozens of calls from my mom.
I dialed, heart racing, wondering if something had happened to her sister in Wisconsin who had been waiting for a kidney transplant. Mom was planning to start the testing to see if she could be a donor.
But instead of Mom, my brother John answered. He had lived with her off and on most of his life, never able to hold a steady job with his disabilities.
“Why don’t you ever answer your damn phone?” he said before I got a word out. “Mom’s sick. Really bad. I’m pretty sure she’s dying. But she won’t go to the hospital. I called a friend to take her but she said she can’t—”
“Call 911. Now!” I told him. I was already crying, already wondering why I had ignored the bad dreams.
“She won’t go. She says not to.” His voice was shaking. He was scared.
“Call them right now or I’m going to. Tell her she doesn’t have a choice.”
He hung up to call 911 and then called me back, saying she was getting worse.
I got dressed, threw a bag with extra clothes in the car, and started driving. She lived seventy-five miles north of me. I called one of her sisters and told her what had happened. She called me back for an update twenty minutes later, but I hadn’t heard anything more from my brother.
I was still thirty minutes away when my phone rang with a blocked number.
“Is this Cara?” a man asked me. A stranger.
I nodded. I didn’t want to speak to him. I made foreign noises with no idea if they were real words.
“This is the doctor at the ER who attended to your mom when she arrived. I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve done everything we can, but she didn’t make it.”
“No,” I squeaked through the tears. “You have to keep trying. Can’t you do something? There has to be something.”
“Where are you? Is anyone with you?”
“I’m driving. I’m trying to get there. I’m almost there. Please.”
Mom was fifty-nine. She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. She was physically strong, and emotionally strong. But what had been diagnosed as pneumonia was a blood clot in her lung. It shouldn’t have happened. She should have watched my children grow and held her great-grandchildren. She should have stayed with us in the house that she helped us build. She should have retired early and driven across the country on the adventures she’d always dreamed of.
I held her still body and kissed her good-bye. I whispered, or maybe I shouted, “I don’t know how to do this.”
And then I drove to her house feeling weaker than I had ever felt in my life.
Nothing could save me from the biggest threat I had ever faced, not a big house, not our new muscles or mind-set, not even my beat-up old gun, Karma.
When I woke up this morning I had a mom, and now I don’t.
We finished moving and unpacking. Everything found its place. I got my brother John situated about ten miles from me where I could take care of him. My dad and John had stopped talking years ago, so I knew I was on my own with him. He couldn’t drive or hold a job. He couldn’t save and plan for the future—not even next week—but he could take care of his own day-to-day needs. And he was family. Family takes care of family.
It was months of work to get everything sorted and moved. To sell my mom’s house, we did home repairs and remodeling on it, as well as to the one we moved John into. There were endless weekends and evenings on our hands and knees installing flooring, painting walls, and repairing siding.
There was no celebration for the completion of Inkwell Manor.
Not yet.
Not until we settled into our new roles over the holidays and I found days where I could remember without weeping. Not until we came to terms with the way life doesn’t deal things out just the way you expect or want them. She doesn’t even deal them fair all the time.
But the celebration did come.
It didn’t happen as a dance party or a lot of patting ourselves on the back. It happened slowly, as we all stretched into our new sense of self and found that we had become a little fearless.
When summer came and Mom’s plants were beautiful and full in my gardens, I thought about Caroline for the first time since the day Mom died. I still tried to meditate when I remembered to, and Benjamin was usually there, still and calm. I believed he always would be.
I walked to our shop, set up a ladder, and pulled the nail—Caroline’s nail—from above the door. The curved scrap of metal clanged onto the concrete floor.
Then I walked toward my house—my home—with the nail, still warm, clutched tight.
I opened the back door and could hear the kids upstairs, listening to music, talking, living.
On top of a chest that belonged to my great-grandmother was a carefully wrapped antique photo my dad had brought to me that spring. The round frame had a bubble of glass over the front, and under it was my grandmother at about six years old. Her own grandmother was beside her, smiling as peacefully as Benjamin.
Oh, but her eyes! I knew them well. They were Caroline’s eyes.
I pounded the warm nail into the wall in my den and hung the photo, then stood back three steps to be sure it was straight.
“I was never alone,” I said to those women, and to all the others who had survived before me.
The kids thundered down the stairs and I smiled over my shoulder at them. We had ugly days ahead, everyone does, but we had more good days than bad, more smiles than tears.
And we would never be alone.
About six months after Mom died, I started feeling sorry for myself, wondering if the months of exhausting work had been worth it. If the kids and I could reclaim the lost dates, friends, movies, and countless hours of sleep we had given to Inkwell Manor, if we could take it all back and buy a small cottage with double sets of bunk beds, would we be in a better—or at least an equivalent—place?
What if I could go back and spend those hours with my mom instead?
One Thursday after school,
Jada and Drew were raiding the pantry together and I was in the library, listening. Jada was having trouble with middle-school mean girls, and Drew was half listening and halfheartedly giving out mediocre advice.
Then Jada said something that caught her brother’s full attention. She said, “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Drew said, angrier than I’d heard him in months. “Jada, you built your own damn house. You can do anything.”
If they said anything else, I didn’t hear, because I had just gotten an answer to the question that had plagued me.
Yes, it was worth it.
Yes, they were better for it.
Yes, they got it.
They had learned that little bit of fearless that changed everything. And anytime one of them forgot, or let the shadow of the old life creep back over their mind, they would remind each other.
You built your own damn house. You can do anything.
* * *
While I was writing the first draft of this book, I remembered how to be afraid again. Adam had not found us at Inkwell Manor, and I worried what would happen to me and the kids if his memory was refreshed by the book. In fact, I had started and stopped writing the book repeatedly for five years because of this fear. While I worked on the latest draft, and tried to figure out how I would handle renewed contact from him, Adam parked his car at a coffee shop and committed suicide with a knife. We hadn’t heard from him directly in several years. It was a horrific end to a tragic, tortured life. And I realized only then how often during an ordinary week I had been afraid and watching over my shoulder for him.
Sometimes people do learn from their mistakes. They do change. Matt came to understand some measure of the trauma he had caused in our lives. He learned. He grew. He became a better person and we are no longer afraid of him.
My dad continues to gather unusual items and find new purposes for them. He visits every year to add a new level of Rube Goldberg–like complexity to the act of starting my lawn mower with his improvements and adjustments. He still brings turkey and cheese but has also added unfathomable quantities of rhubarb to the mix.
Hope graduated number one in her high-school class and was awarded a spectacular scholarship package. By the time she was nineteen she had interned for a former president of the United States and fourteen United States congressmen. She now owns her own consulting agency, which specializes in events, marketing, and online business.
Drew spread his wings all the way to Alaska, where he pursued a degree between snowboarding and climbing mountains. He continued the adventure in Denver while managing an electronic-repair shop. He is now working in the technology industry and will undoubtedly continue planning adventures near and far.
Jada spent time on an off-grid farm, working as the volunteer manager for their sustainable-living organization and gathering knowledge to someday build her own off-grid home. She now creates personalized physical training plans with a focus on people with disabilities, encouraging a healthy lifestyle for those who are often left out while their peers are active on sports teams and neighborhood activities.
Roman is rocking elementary school, with enough confidence to display his own style. He runs his own YouTube channel and has a line of T-shirts and a business plan to become a YouTube gamer star. He is a big part of our family business, and we all suspect we’ll be working for him one day.
I write in my library. The window overlooks some of my gardens that are loaded with plants my mother loved, even some that belonged to her parents. I fight with my lawn mower but ultimately enjoy mowing our acre and taking care of everyday household problems. I’ll never stop marveling over what we continue to accomplish.
Our dinnertimes and movie times are often interrupted with business chatter and heated discussions. But mostly, we laugh a lot.
It isn’t that we aren’t afraid of anything, but rather that we are no longer afraid of failure.
What’s the worst-case scenario? Yeah, we can handle that.
People often comment on how much Inkwell Manor must mean to us, that we could never possibly sell it. But in the end, the most important thing we learned is that this story—our story—was never about a house.
About the Author
CARA BROOKINS is a computer analyst and social-media marketing expert based in Little Rock. She is the author of seven middle-grade and young adult novels. Rise is her debut memoir. Visit her online at carabrookins.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Acknowledgments
1. Rise A House
2. Fall Bad Habits
3. Rise Sticks and Stones
4. Fall What I Learned in First Grade
5. Rise Truth Tellers
6. Fall Coffee with Cream
7. Rise Plan B Is for Sissies
8. Fall Black, White, and Gray
9. Rise Shop Not Shopping
10. Fall Karma Points
11. Rise Sounds Easy
12. Fall The Art of War
13. Rise A Little to the Left
14. Fall Loyalty Won’t Save You
15. Rise One Cookie at a Time
16. Fall Firefighters Have Hoses
17. Rise What Is Down Must Go Up
18. Fall Hear the Words I Mean
19. Rise I Am My Plumber
20. Fall Down by the River
21. Rise Glue Me Back Together
22. Fall Aiming True
23. Rise Scramble to the Finish
24. Fall and Rise You Built Your Own Damn House
About the Author
Copyright
RISE. Copyright © 2017 by Cara Brookins. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Designed by Meghan Day Healey
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-09566-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-09567-1 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250095671
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: January 2017
Rise--How a House Built a Family Page 30
