Rise--How a House Built a Family Read online

  Jada leapt through the obstacle course of walls with Roman climbing cautiously behind her. “Can I help? Is it my turn?”

  We had avoided the scary part as long as we could. “We’re going to have to raise some walls and brace them. We’re running out of room to build, and our measurements aren’t going to be right for the next walls if we don’t get these in place.”

  “One more,” Drew said. “Let’s build the inside wall between the den and library so we have something to brace these to.”

  He was right. But even after we built it, the idea of the bracing process made me nervous. A long, skeleton of a wall won’t stand up on its own. We had to nail long boards on each end to use for support. If we had a wooden floor, we would have nailed the braces to the floor. With the concrete slab, we had to brace the walls against one another and nothing would feel stable until we had more walls up to increase support options. Houses were a lot flimsier than I ever imagined. I took a deep breath. “Library wall first. The one we rebuilt. We’re going to need all hands on deck, and yes that means you, Jada.”

  I settled Roman in his mini lawn chair with a blueberry Pop-Tart, and we stood at the top of the wall, with Drew and me on each end and Hope and Jada spaced in the middle. Hope had rolled a thin layer of blue foam along the edge of the concrete floor slab, pushing holes in it with the threaded ties sticking out from the edge of the slab. The foam insulation wasn’t used in every build, but I’d read about it and liked the idea of the extra insulation and moisture barrier. The ties were essentially extra-large bolts and would push through the bottom plate of the wall and help hold it in place during tornadoes or other potential disasters—like the crash of a poorly braced wall built by amateurs. They didn’t actually hold the wall together, but they did snug it up tight to the floor. Slowly, and with grins wider than our fears, we walked our hands from the top down to the middle as we stepped forward. The holes we’d drilled in the bottom plate matched perfectly to the threaded bolts, and the foam insulation stayed in place. It was a minor miracle.

  “Now what?” Jada asked.

  I pretended I wasn’t wondering the same thing. “Hope and Jada, hold the brace things. They’ll work like handles while Drew and I get the other wall.” We had nailed ten-foot two-by-fours at each end to brace against other walls, and they made decent handgrips to support the wall. I glanced over my shoulder at Roman. His feet were propped on a wall with our front door framed at one end, his attention split equally between the wall raising and his treat. Drew and I pushed the next wall up and met the corners together. The top-heavy window frame made it almost as wobbly as my nerves. “If it starts to fall, just let it go!” I told him, hysteria creeping into my voice. I had a nightmare image of the kids trying to stop the walls and plummeting over the edge of the slab with them. It was an eight-foot fall off this corner, which made me regret insisting that we start with the library.

  Drew shot at least a dozen nails into the corner and was only halfway up from the slab.

  “Let’s not make Swiss cheese. Get it tacked and move to the braces.” Our eyes met. He was just as uncertain about the stability as I was. “The corner’s good, Jada. Let go of your brace and come here.” I pulled a handful of large washers from the back pocket of my jeans and thumped my toe on the bolt end sticking up through the bottom plate of the wall. “Put one of these on each one. Then come back and get the nuts.”

  She ran back for the nuts, and finger-tightened them with so much enthusiasm that I worried she would strip the skin off her fingers.

  Drew had done all he could with the braces until we had another wall. “Another interior wall next,” he said. “I want to run a cross brace.”

  I nodded, but found I couldn’t let go of my end of the wall. It might fall. We might have done it wrong. The whole thing could crash right over the edge. What if … I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to stop the million what-ifs. But instead, I answered the question. If it falls over the edge, we’ll pick it up, salvage what we can, and try again. That’s what. Is that so bad? Can I live with that? Yeah. That’s actually no big deal. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyhow. I can live with that. I let go.

  “We built a house!” Roman said, spinning in a circle next to his chair.

  “Sit down, Roman,” Hope said. “You can come see the house after we do one more wall, okay? Sit for just a little longer.”

  He sat with his fingers laced on his knees, watching like he might shout out a few pointers concerning our technique.

  The next wall went up quickly but came with its own unique challenges. It didn’t have insulation under it or the threaded ties to hold it to the slab. To keep it from shifting around, we had to bring out the big guns—and real bullets. A nail had to be driven through the bottom plate—the bottom horizontal board that vertical wall boards are nailed to—and into the concrete. This terrifying job was all mine. The nail gun hooked to the compressor wasn’t powerful enough. I would have to drive the nails in with a device that looked a lot like a telescope but actually fired .22 blanks, blasting the nail through both wood and concrete.

  I crouched at the far end of the wall, dropping the shell twice before fitting it into the middle of the tool. The three-inch masonry nail went into the business end of the power hammer. This was the closest I had come to crying since we started. I lifted the tool upright and took a breath so deep that my right ear popped. “Earplugs. I forgot.” The delay made me so happy that I tried in vain to think up a reason for another one.

  The kids watched with sympathetic grimaces. They could see that I was scared but weren’t about to take my place. I lifted the gun, carefully choosing the right spot to rest the nail end, and tried the same trick I had relied on throughout this enormous, impossible project: imagining the worst possible outcome and reminding myself that we could get through it. What was the worst-case scenario? Oh, Jesus. I didn’t even want to think about it. I lifted the hammer and after a practice aim realized I was just as terrified of smashing my hand with the hammer as I was of the crazy tool malfunctioning.

  “Pretend it’s Thor’s hammer. Forget about the gun thing.” Drew’s voice was muted through the earplugs, but it still made me smile.

  I lifted the hammer and brought it down hard. The .22 shell fired, and I swore I could feel the air around me expand and contract with the blast. The echo sounded for miles. Sulfur and burnt-paper scent drifted up. The tool wobbled in my grip and I let it go, more interested now in the results than in the weapon. I’d driven the nail clean in, crushing the little orange plastic cap around the nail head. The kids’ eyes were wide, fingers still up by their ears, when I turned around and grinned.

  “Nailed it!” I said, feeling damn proud of myself. But when I pulled the earplugs out, I could hear Roman whimpering. I hugged him and admired his latest frog-in-a-pail, Bufford. “Hope is going to play with you for a few minutes while we get this wall finished. Then we’ll take a break, okay?”

  “And a fire?” he asked.

  “Maybe a fire. It’s warm today though. We might not need one.”

  “I need one.”

  “Gather some wood and gum balls then. We’ll have a fire.”

  He wove his way around and over walls to the low end of the slab in the garage and headed for the closest sweetgum tree to gather gum balls. Hope joined him, and I put three more nails in the wall with the nail shooter, shouting “Ears!” before each hit. The power behind the echoing blast made me feel strong and capable. Caroline would find excuses to use a tool like this. She would build things just for the joy of hammering them into concrete with a bullet. I had the urge to shout and roar a marine hoo-rah.

  We had a late lunch, and then framed walls until more than half of the downstairs was complete. The structure gained stability once we had enough walls to brace and cross-brace each one into one or more of the others. It resembled a spiderweb in ways it probably shouldn’t have, but at least it felt safe. Better overbraced than underbraced, I always say.


  It was dark when we started packing up tools. Roman was worn-out. He and I had played for a while in the afternoon and let the older kids lay out a wall and raise it on their own. I couldn’t stop smiling while I watched them push our kitchen up into a three-dimensional space. Their faces were almost unrecognizable. They were not the same kids who had slept with me on bedroom floors with a dresser in front of the door. These kids were self-assured. They were capable of anything. These kids were brave. Invincible.

  Roman and I carried snacks, muddy clothes, and the cooler to the trunk. I thought the kids would get the hint that it was time to wrap it up, but they looked determined to see the entire first floor framed, even if it meant working by moonlight. “Get the tools locked up,” I said. “We’ll come back in the morning.”

  They let out a united groan, and I could hear their minds whirling for excuses. “We should spend the night out here. Camp out on the slab,” Drew said.

  That was exactly the right comment to swing Hope over to my side. “Mommy’s right. Roman looks exhausted.” She pulled the plug on the compressor and flipped the air-release valve.

  Jada and Drew sighed wistfully but wound up cords and hoses without complaint. I took two steps toward them, and my vision faded around the edges. A lake of coffee couldn’t compete against the effects of the sleep deprivation I’d been facing for weeks. Add some dehydration and inadequate calorie intake and it was no wonder I was at the edge of collapse.

  Roman climbed into his car seat willingly, a sure sign of exhaustion. “It was a best day,” he said. “A best froggy day. A twenty-eighty-five-three-hundred-froggies day.”

  “It was definitely a best day.” I drank half a bottle of warm Gatorade, and the spots had stopped dancing through my vision by the time the kids closed the shop door and walked toward us, dragging their feet like zombies. The adrenaline rush of progress had pushed us way further than we should have gone. Every cell was depleted.

  The drive home was so silent I thought everyone was asleep, but when I pulled into the garage they were all staring straight ahead, in a sort of shock.

  I herded everyone in the door and made them sit at the table. Hershey collapsed two steps inside the door. None of us had the energy to cook. If I had any discretionary cash I would have ordered a half dozen pizzas. Instead, I carried two loaves of seven-grain bread to the table with the family-size jar of peanut butter, strawberry jam, grape jelly, and—my favorite—raspberry preserves. I added a pitcher of Kool-Aid and two pitchers of ice water. Before the peanut butter had made the rounds I had to refill both water pitchers.

  We ate in total silence, all adjusting slowly to a new picture of ourselves and our family. The air was heavy with more than just the smell of sweat, mud, and peanut butter. It was charged with an energy from someplace deep, something primitive that had empowered the ancients with the stubborn determination to construct mud hovels with fingernail-scraped earth patted into bricks with calloused hands.

  The peanut butter went around the table once, twice, and I stopped counting. Roman fell asleep after eating a full sandwich. When the bread was gone, we carried the jelly to the refrigerator and went wordlessly to showers and baths. Roman woke up enough to sit upright in the tub while I scrubbed him down but fell asleep again while I toweled him off. I carried him upstairs to his own bed, knowing there was no way he would wake up in the night.

  We had worked as hard and as long setting the foundation blocks in place, but that work hadn’t been as emotionally draining. The day of framing made the house real. It made our future real. For the first time in years, it made us real. We were relevant. We were alive. And we were going to keep on living.

  I stood in the hot shower only long enough to rinse away the grime; I couldn’t stay upright longer than that.

  Other people, those whose spirits hadn’t been pulverized, would have celebrated and laughed when the house was enclosed by real walls. There would have been high-fives and pats on the back. Our joy was just as real, but it was the kind you feel when you crawl the last mile on your belly and cross the finish line all the way empty. We would get to that place where we were full of happiness, but first we had to be emptied of sadness.

  I fell into bed. Emptied from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

  As soon as I closed my eyes, Benjamin was there. I was asleep in seconds, but I saw the right side of his mouth lift in something that resembled a serene smile before he faded behind my dreams.

  Sunday began in a series of slow-motion scenes followed by hours in hyperspeed. Breakfast was slow, the bacon salt lingering on my tongue even after I had finished my orange juice and the brilliant-yellow yolk glowing like sunshine on my toast. Drew and Hope were silent, a carryover of physical and emotional exhaustion. Jada crunched the crust of her toast. Crumbs coated her braces, and raspberry jelly dripped into the crease between her thumb and finger. She laughed easily from one topic to the next, even though I was the only one who appeared to be listening and I was mostly pretending. She was sweet perfection.

  While the kids packed the car with a cooler and a clingy dog, I slipped out to the front porch for a minute alone to inhale and exhale.

  It was ten thirty when we pulled up to Inkwell Manor. The kids hooked up cords and hoses without waiting for my instructions. “Do you want to put up another wall or play with Roman?” I asked Jada, knowing that she felt left out of the fun stuff a lot.

  “We’re hunting crawdads,” she said, digging through a collection of shovels, rakes, and hoes in search of small nets on three-foot handles. Over the years, the kids had trapped countless swimming, crawling, and flying creatures in those stained old nets.

  “I want green,” Roman said, pointing at the blue one.

  “Just stay by the ditch, not the pond. Don’t let Roman anywhere near the pond.” It was a mom thing to say. An ordinary warning exactly like countless others I’d issued over the past seventeen years. But this time my throat squeezed closed and a knife of pain rocketed through my stomach. Things were good, which made me terrified that they would swing back to bad in order to set the universe at ease. Long ago, Adam had given me a scare about drowning kids that still hit my gut hard when I least expected it.

  I leaned against the tool bench, head low like I was looking at something important and very, very small next to the vise grip.

  “We need to start planning the staircase,” Drew said. “The downstairs is almost finished!”

  I forced myself upright. This was no way to live. It was time to focus, push forward, grow up. We were alive, and we might as well live. Growing old isn’t for sissies, my grandpa used to say.

  “I’m still researching the stairs,” I said. “My math keeps going all wrong when I try to plan them. Every try ends with new numbers.” I had left two messages asking Pete for help but hadn’t heard back. “This skeleton frame may look complete, but it’s just the first step. We have to add the top plate and ceiling joists next. And add the Sheetrock nailers and support nailers for curtain rods, towel holders, and shelves. There are holes to drill for plumbing and electric. The plywood has to go up on the exterior before we do the joists. Remember how unstable the shop was when we put the rafters up before the plywood? We don’t want to try that here. Oh, and we have to mark every light switch and outlet since we don’t have a formal electric plan. Trust me—we aren’t going to run out of work before the stairs are built.”

  He had zoned out on me after the first few items on the to-do list, but I had needed dozens of work images to fill my head so there was no room for anything else. Seconds later, he flipped over a milk crate for the old radio and put on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Jack Johnson followed with some banana pancakes, and that yielded to techno, which demanded robotic dubstep moves from Drew. Bit by bit, we were filling our souls with good things. Replacing the bad memories with good ones.

  I danced a few graceless steps and spun the heavy header for the pantry door in a circle, grasping it like a partner. The kids rolled
their eyes. I liked it when they treated me like an ordinary, embarrassing mom instead of a fellow prisoner of war.

  Hope held the cripples in place while Drew nailed them. She didn’t even flinch with the pop and hiss of the gun. He was becoming a real expert, and we were all gaining confidence.

  “Let’s lift the kitchen wall. Clear more room to move.” I loaded a .22 shell into the Ramset nailer, feeling reckless and excited about blowing a nail through concrete. We hadn’t put nails in the exterior walls, because the bolts were there, but one of the bolts had stripped and wouldn’t take a nut, so the nails would have to do. “Ears!” My voice was a stranger’s through my earplugs. I smacked the top of the ram gun with a framing hammer and felt the numbing jolt in my fingers. A chunk of concrete flew off the side of the slab.

  “Umm. Mommy? That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Drew dispensed his fifteen-year-old wisdom freely, especially when I’d done something stupid.

  “Too close to the edge. Angled it wrong,” I said, slipping in another nail.

  “Go too far the other way and it’ll go through your knee.” He shrugged.

  A dry hickory leaf drifted down and skimmed my cheek. I reloaded, wondering how effective a Ramset would be as a weapon while I sunk the next nail. Grins all the way around. The nail was tucked firmly through the treated bottom plate of the wall and into the concrete floor slab. The chip from my first attempt wasn’t too bad. Since we were using all two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours in order to get a higher insulation value, the wall would be plenty stable. A wave of shrugs passed from youngest to oldest. Nothing to worry about—it was unanimous.

  “Meet the construction gurus of Inkwell Manor,” Drew said. “Fear our superior skills!”

  Within the hour we had a pantry and a laundry room. The entire downstairs—minus the three-car garage—was framed, at least in the most basic sense of the word. We could finally get a full sense of what it felt like to be in the space we would call home. Even though we could walk right through the stud walls, it felt more solid than the house we lived in. It also felt one hundred percent ours. But it wasn’t only ours. It was flooded with an energy from deep in the earth, and the combined energy of a million women that I had grown accustomed to calling Caroline. We were not alone.