Rise--How a House Built a Family Read online

  “I understand how hard it is for you.” I looked behind the sadness to the wildness deep in his dark eyes. I could practically see the anxious neurons zipping around and could almost understand why he drowned them with vodka every couple of months.

  I stuck to the script. “Maybe you should change jobs. Get your mind on something new.” I waved like he had, out at the nothingness of the field and the forest beyond, where the only things giving us a sideways look were the mosquitoes brave enough to look away from the diving bats.

  “Dammit!” He threw his head back. “Dammmmm-it!” He stretched out the word, loud and long like a song to the stars. “A regular day job is not for me. Never was. Jobs like that were for my father.”

  He struck his index finger against my chest three times, and focused on it for several heartbeats, eyes narrowed. “You should try those pills again. Maybe the nausea was from something else. Have you seen Shane’s wife? Her tits grew at least a cup.” He held his hands inches in front of me, air-massaging imaginary breasts as though the proper fertilizer would make them sprout like healthy eggplants.

  “I’ll try again,” I said, pretending I hadn’t flushed the pink pills he’d ordered from Chest Success to save me from my chest fail. The package included a complimentary bottle of pheromone spray, boasting a woman who didn’t need the breast pills or more than a quarter yard of fabric for any outfit in her closet. She was probably born with no body hair, and her feet were no doubt size six. “Why don’t we get some sleep? I’m leading a software meeting in the morning. I have to be on top of my game.” I stood, smiling even though he wasn’t, then walked around him to the door with my hand out behind me, hoping, wishing, praying that he would take it and follow me inside.

  He took the hand and used it as a pivot point, a handle, a lever, to swing me into the wall. It was siding here, just under the porch, and that was better than the brick on the rest of the house, I told myself, twisting so my hip would hit with the next swing. It was a habit I’d developed when I was pregnant. Whenever you’re slammed into a wall, protect your belly, protect the baby. There was no baby now, and my belly would have bruised less than my hip would, but those habits, the old ones, they die hard.

  –3–

  Rise

  Sticks and Stones

  Mom called me determined, or a Taurus, but Grandma said straight up, “You mean as stubborn as a jackass.” Even when I was three and pretending not to understand them, I knew exactly what they meant, and I knew they were right.

  That stubborn streak remained strong with each bad relationship. I believed that I could fix it, that I could wait out the bad times and talk some sense into everyone. Of course, I also made secret plans to get away, saving money in my tampon box under the instructions for use, but the fact that my cash would fit unnoticed in my tampon box showed my level of dedication.

  I stuck with most of these relationships a lot longer than I should have for a million small reasons that all felt big at the time. I’m stubborn enough to want to see something all the way through, and I believe hard work can fix things when they’re broken. My mom’s strong religious beliefs were another powerful reason I stayed even when it seemed unlikely I would come out alive. Stay and pray, she would say. Because divorce under the wrong circumstances was a sure path to damnation. Larger and more important than all of those reasons, I stayed because of a little old liar called fear.

  My kids and I had spent years walking on our tiptoes, which was great for calf development but not so great for posture because of the way we had to duck our heads to avoid sharp, flying words. The bad moments had outweighed the good, but optimism had been pressing her heavy thumb hard on the scale. I would always be an optimist, but I had finally learned to recognize her in the mirror—the twelve-step process had begun. When I found myself alone and in a flattened, hopeless position that must be what addicts call the bottom, I finally believed that there was a top.

  Matt and I divorced, and I believed that was a big enough step for the kids and me to rebuild our damaged family. But months later, Hope, the oldest at seventeen, still slept on the floor next to her door, listening. She had seen the most, and she felt the most protective of me and the younger kids. If anyone could prove the stereotype of an oldest child, it was Hope. Her long, dark hair and tiny nose made her a stunning beauty, model-perfect if she could add ten or twelve inches to her five-foot-two frame, but on the inside she had those extra inches and then some. Hope was an organized, calculating, determined force of nature. And somewhere along the line she had become a very angry force, too. Was that one of the twelve steps? Or maybe I was thinking of grief, not recovery. Then again, we were probably navigating the steps of a dozen different traumas at once, in which case, all emotions were justified. Even though Hope’s anger threw out stinging words at times, I preferred them to silence.

  Fifteen-year-old Drew carried a shotgun shell in his pocket and a chip on his shoulder, but lacked the confidence to use either one effectively. He was the silent one, so much like me it hurt. I could see the things boiling under his surface, though I knew that no one else could. He was almost six feet tall, thin, with loose brown curls that he had kept short until recently. He was devilishly handsome, but lacked the self-assurance to use that superpower. I thought of him as my Mini-Me, but the optimism was weaker in his blood. It was a worrisome combination, the silence without the little voice to cheer him up. I needed a way past his well-structured walls, and I didn’t have much time to find it.

  Jada and Roman were young enough to pretend they were unaffected, even though Jada’s sixth-grade poetry notebook was too full of sunshine and rainbows, too optimistic, when the truth was muddy and shadowed. My elf girl might be the most difficult to heal. I’d passed optimism to her full force, like a congenital disease.

  Roman was tiny, thin, and stressed in the honest way only an almost-two-year-old can be—he wanted to be endlessly held and cared for.

  Those four green-eyed beauties were my everything. Too many times my determination to give them a perfect life had included giving them a father figure. But I had finally reached my own last straw. I had a good job as a senior computer programmer systems analyst, and I was working hard to grow my side income as a writer. Still, I couldn’t afford the big house we were living in on my own, and more than one man had left me with his debt. Our finances were a mess, and the stash at the bottom of my tampon box wasn’t going to take me far.

  We would have to sell the house. I told myself that was for the best, even though the kids and I had sacrificed for years to have it built. It didn’t feel much like a home anymore, and the older kids were afraid there, too. Maybe they had always been, and I had only imagined my silence protecting them. What a weighty little bitch optimism is.

  Just after sunset on a cold November night, Hope whisper-yelled down from the balcony, “I swear I see him out there sometimes. Out back in the shadows or in the kitchen window at midnight.”

  “Who?” I asked, and Drew stomped up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door before I could apologize. After so many years of being a pretender, I had trouble remembering to be honest.

  Hope rolled her eyes in that way all seventeen-year-old girls have perfected.

  “Who’s outside?” Jada asked, running behind Hope with eyes aglow and turban-wrapped hair dripping on her nightshirt, a holey Gumby shirt that I’d worn in junior high and she loved like a blankie.

  I leveled a glare at Hope, and she threw her hands up. She hadn’t realized Jada was out of the shower. “We were talking about the FedEx guy,” I said, slipping comfortably back into my pretender skin.

  Jada, the flightiest child I’d ever known, had already forgotten. She giggled, untangling Roman’s right hand from Hershey’s ear only to find his left hand with a firm grip. The commotion barely disturbed the Lab’s nap. We let her sleep in the dining room now, all of us claiming it was to keep her safe from a prowling coyote we’d heard screaming in the forest.

  We had been afrai
d of more than one man over the years. Matt had been the most violent, but he was sane enough to know I had found my courage and bought a gun. After all the late nights of terror with his hands around my throat, Matt had become a very small, pitiful man in my memory. The man Hope saw or imagined out the window was the man we’d left before Matt. His name was Adam. He haunted us because he wasn’t sane enough to be afraid. He had been once. He had even been a genius. But there is truly a fine line between genius and insanity, and he had crossed over for good.

  He was the weight that held us back from recovery steps. He kept us so tight in our own shells we couldn’t reach out, not even to one another.

  We lived in virtual silence that fall, waiting for the house to sell, waiting for a new life to start, waiting for our fear to dissipate.

  Our nerves were so frazzled that none of us were sleeping. Roman had moved permanently into my bed after three straight nights of me lying on the floor beside the toddler bed, holding his hand. If we had a giant mattress that would hold us all, and we could lock it in a vault at night, maybe then we would sleep. In a cruel twist, having the dangerous men out of sight, where we couldn’t make believe we’d catch a sign of whatever set them off, we were stuck in a state of hypervigilance, waiting for one to appear. Waiting for the next strike, one we’d never see coming.

  On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, I spent the day packing for a secret getaway. Not only had I kept the idea a secret from the kids, I’d been careful not to write down the address of the cabin I’d rented a couple of hours north of us in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. It would have been a prettier spot a few weeks ago, before the leaves dropped, but even stark landscapes would be an improvement over the view from my kitchen window.

  “What happened?” Hope said when she walked through the door and saw the line of suitcases. Then she repeated it with a panicked squeal, “What happened?” The rattle in her voice made it sound raspy and old. “Did he do something? Did he come here?”

  I ran down the stairs and nearly slid the last four when I saw how white she’d gone. “Nothing. It’s okay.” But I was flustered enough that she wasn’t convinced. I held both palms up. A surrender. A promise. “We just need to get out of here for a couple days or we’re going to lose our minds. No one came here. Nothing happened.”

  She nodded.

  Drew kicked his duffel bag. To him, this would feel like running away, and he wouldn’t like that. “Where?” he asked.

  How long had it been since he’d put two words together? “I’ll tell you in the car.” I made a sweeping gesture with my hands. “You’ve got twenty minutes to grab entertainment for a quiet weekend. I packed your clothes and the basics.”

  More like forty minutes later and after we’d gone down the driveway and back up again for Jada’s shoes—how a kid can get in the car and not notice they aren’t wearing any shoes, I will never know—we finally drove north, away from our house that wasn’t home. The kids sat straight in their seats, looking forward with their eyes and backward with their minds.

  When had we forgotten how to take a road trip? When had we forgotten how to laugh?

  Jada livened things up when she paired her phone with the radio and tortured us with a playlist of pop songs remixed by the Chipmunks. Nothing screams road trip like kids complaining about the tunes. It was a start, anyhow. I decided not to save my emergency mom-trick for later; it looked like we were one big catastrophe right from the start. “Cheese Doritos?” I asked, pulling the crinkly bag from the floorboard on the front passenger side, where Hope was tucked in with three bags that wouldn’t fit in my Accord’s trunk.

  It was the closest to happy I’d seen them in a while. Doritos were a rare treat. Years ago, Adam had forbade them in the house because he couldn’t stand the smell. Even after he had gone, I let the smell remind me of him. No more. We were letting go of stupid, imaginary boundaries. The car filled with cheesy corn-chip breath. I smiled.

  When the kids were full of Doritos and empty of complaints, they started dozing off in the standard pattern of youngest to oldest. Drew was kind enough to kill Jada’s music before he slipped into dreamland. It wasn’t until Hope’s head went slack against a pillow she’d jammed between her seat belt and her cheek that I realized I’d forgotten to tell them where we were going. It was beyond bizarre that none of them had remembered to ask. It made me smile for a second to feel their absolute trust, but then I realized something deeper and sadder was behind their silence. They hadn’t asked because it didn’t matter. We were going away from the life where bad things had happened, and as far as they were concerned the coordinates of the place we landed were irrelevant.

  The road turned hilly and shadowed as we headed toward the mountains. The early sunset in fall and winter used to make me sad, eating away my productive daylight hours inch by inch. But I had become a creature of the night, a shadow who felt safest when no one could see. I crept around the house with the lights off, memorizing how many steps would take me to the staircase and dragging my hand along walls to stay oriented. I’d taken to reading under the covers, sometimes even pulling my laptop under with me to write in a warm bubble that smelled of melting ozone. It was a silly habit for a grown woman, but like it had when I was six, the blanket bubble felt like an impenetrable shield.

  The sun was only peeking through on high spots by the time we reached Dover, Arkansas. I started seeing evidence of the tornado that had skipped through the hills in the spring. Oaks that had seen the Civil War were taking their final bow in groves of thinner, more pliable species that had weathered just fine. Small houses with mismatched roof patches and freshly installed storm shelters lined the beast’s path. A fireplace that once warmed a family now towered alone at one end of a long concrete pad, swept clean enough for dancing.

  Just around a sharp curve, at the top of a small hill, I spotted my dream home. It was two stories with warm brown bricks and dark chocolate shutters. Tall columns on the front porch made it look regal and very Southern. Large flower beds lined the sidewalk, with varying shades of green perennials that looked alive in every season.

  I pulled into the drive, and let my mouth hang open. Odds were pretty good no one was home, since the tornado had peeled much of the roof away and the windows had only small, jagged bits of glass hanging stubbornly in the frames. I wondered if the pressure had blown them out or if the local teens and a case of Budweiser had done the job on a Saturday night.

  In one of the upstairs windows, a red curtain hung outside, about a foot under the bottom sill, motionless despite the breeze. It was like something out of a postapocalyptic movie, or a stark black-and-white photo shoot where a single focal point had been colored in. The sun lit the edges of everything, blurring the details in the center and making the whole scene muted and surreal.

  Nothing could have convinced me not to get out for a closer look. I felt suddenly very strong, bulletproof—even strawproof. The kids would carry on with their naps as long as I left the car running.

  Around the west side, a wall had tumbled in an almost perfectly diagonal line from roof to foundation. The upstairs room with the red curtains was still covered enough that I couldn’t see in. It didn’t bother me, though. I already knew that room as well as I needed to. Behind it, upstairs on the back of the house, was a room fully decorated in pink—not the bright modern pink of plastic toys, but the old-fashioned, pale pink of yesterday. The bed had a lace canopy, and I imagined dolls piled on it. I imagined, too, that it contained a dollhouse made to look exactly like the big house. A tiny replica of a dream. It made me smile.

  The last rays of sunset made the master bedroom on the lower floor look alive enough that I looked away, feeling like a Peeping Tom staring into such an intimate space. I couldn’t help myself, though: I moved back in for a closer look. Bricks littered the floor and bed like favorite shoes ready to be packed for a trip to Aruba. A dusty red robe hung behind the door, and that more than anything made it feel like a home, like a place
where people had not only been alive, but lived. I wished I could meet the woman who had hung red curtains and worn the red robe.

  No, that wasn’t it at all. I wished I could be that woman. She was strong and courageous. She never would have let things get so bad or settled for living so small, so far away from her dreams. She would have stood up and taken charge. Her house belonged to her all the way through. It was a home. Even with the holes, it felt safer than my own.

  Broken two-by-fours hung from the upper floor like teeth, but I had the idea they were yawning lazily rather than flexing to clamp down like a guillotine. A long nail hung off the end of a splintery board, as shiny as a freshly minted coin. It fell into my hand almost before I touched it, sun-warmed and filled with potential. I put it in my pocket and pushed my index finger into a cookie-dough-soft piece of Sheetrock, taking note of how insubstantial it was. A wall, even one that hadn’t been pulverized by tornado and rains, was barely stronger than my blanket tent.

  I leaned in to see a family photo hanging firm and straight even while the wall disintegrated around it. Dirt clung so heavy on the glass that the people were only silhouettes, but I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye. Man, woman, two kids, and a dog. And the woman wore a deep-cut, V-neck shirt. No turtlenecks for her. Caroline, that was her name, or that was what I called her, anyhow. It was a strong name with a lot of history. Someone named Caroline would cross in a wagon train to the west. She would continue with the kids and oxen even after her husband died of pneumonia during a winter storm. She would build her own damn cabin and plant a garden to feed her kids. Someone named Caroline would live.

  This someone named Cara had every intention of living, too, even if she was slower to find her strength than Caroline would have been.

  A glimmer in the leaves and rubble near the toppled nightstand caught my eye. Jewelry, I thought, maybe something meaningful. Maybe something of Caroline’s. Using a long piece of mint-colored crown molding, I swatted away a chunk of plaster. It was a watch.