Rise--How a House Built a Family Read online

  “I’ll have to call the police. I won’t let him put the kids in danger, Sophie. This isn’t fair.” As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. Since when did fair have anything to do with life? This wasn’t fair to her either. She was in for a lifetime of unpleasant calls like this one.

  Jada was crying. Hope was sitting backward in her seat to get a better view out the rear window. Drew was practically backward in the passenger seat.

  “Everyone turn around and keep your seat belts fastened. I’m going to figure this out.”

  “Wait, Cara. Let’s find another answer. He can’t go through another hospital stay!”

  I jerked around another corner, happy to see a main road. The neighborhood had started to feel claustrophobic, and I didn’t know it well enough to be certain I was avoiding dead ends.

  The closer we got to town, the safer I felt. There’s safety in numbers, I kept thinking. But the first red light we came to nearly had me barreling through stopped cars like a bulldozer. Only one car separated him from us. If he jumped out and ran up to the car, we were trapped. The doors were locked, but windows are easy to break. I had a crowbar under my seat that would do the trick. Adam would have one, too. And crowbars were the least of our worries. A bullet would cut through glass like butter.

  The light turned green and I spotted a fire station just up the block. A big American flag flying overhead. Freedom, that flag said. Safety. So I pulled in and started opening my car door, thinking I would run out. But I knew from the time we’d come down to donate to the pancake-breakfast fund drive that fire-station doors were locked up tight. If I ran for the door, and he pulled in and got out of the car, the kids would be alone.

  I imagined ramming the big overhead doors. And then laughed. It was a single “Ha!” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. “Firefighters don’t even have guns!” I shouted.

  The kids laughed, too, even though it wasn’t funny.

  What the hell was I thinking a firefighter could do to save us? I had no idea why it had ever seemed like a good idea. He had pulled in behind us. I went around a handicapped parking sign and pulled around on the grass to get back on the road. I was headed for the police station, and wondering if arriving there would do me any more good than sitting in the small fire-station parking lot.

  About the only thing that was clear to me was that I wasn’t thinking clearly. I wasn’t sure how to get to the police station. I wasn’t sure I could get back home. And Hamot, Arkansas, wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. The whole police force was around twenty-five cars and I was probably being generous.

  I kept driving, and the fact that I was lost was most likely what saved us. Exactly what it saved us from was a mystery, but when I was making a three-point turn down a street I’d never seen before that was too far from town to be near a police or fire station, Hope said, “I’m pretty sure you lost him. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “Me either,” Drew said. “I was just about to say the same. You lost him.”

  “Who’s lost?” Jada asked.

  From the rearview mirror, I could see the wheels spinning, her eyes wide with memories.

  “Remember how Adam was having trouble thinking clearly?” I said. “I think today was a bad day for him. He got confused. We’ll all be okay though. Sophie is going to find him.” I had the urge to drive to Wisconsin, where my dad and grandparents lived. Home. We felt safe there. Nothing bad ever happened back home. Adam had never been there.

  My phone rang. It was Ivana. I connected without saying anything. I didn’t trust it to not be Adam.

  “Cara? Is that you? Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t called the police, have you?”

  “Not yet. I was on my way there. To the police station,” and as I said this I wondered why in the world I hadn’t called them. I should have. Of course I should have. I had even said I was going to. I had meant to after hanging up with Sophie. I really had. The worst part was that I hadn’t avoided the call to save him, I had simply been so wrapped up in my fear and the idea of getting to the station that I had lost the train of thought that would have made me call. I had panicked.

  “He’s home now. Adam’s here with me. I’m having a talk with him. We’ve got it all under control.”

  I nodded, but I had started crying and couldn’t stop. Couldn’t speak. I had failed again. Failed to do exactly the right thing to save my kids.

  “Are you still there? Don’t go to the police. He’s here and he knows he has to stay here. He isn’t going anywhere. I’ll sort this out with him. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, not even sure if the whole word got out before I had disconnected. I turned the ringer off and pulled into a parking lot, not even looking to see where we were.

  “Pizza!” Jada yelled.

  True enough. We were at a pizza joint. I handed my billfold to Hope. “Get two. Jada can go with you.” I was still crying and wasn’t sure I would ever stop.

  I waved at the radio and Drew turned it on, starting with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which only made me cry harder. But that turned out to be the last outburst. I found a tissue package of questionable age in the back pocket of my seat and cleaned myself up.

  Drew handed me a bottle of water, also of questionable age, that tasted like the hose water of my childhood. I smiled.

  The pizza made it out in record time. No one had mentioned that they were hungry, but stomachs rumbled all the way back to the house.

  I slowed at the end of the drive, planning to get the mail.

  “I’ll walk down and get it,” Drew said. “Let’s get this pizza in before Jada’s stomach chews its way out to the box. I’ve never heard so much grumbling in my life!”

  She kicked his seat. “We got the little packages of Parmesan cheese!”

  I smiled back at her just in time to see her licking her lips. Who cared what chaos was brewing around us? A mini package of smelly old Parmesan cheese was enough to bring us around. We were too used to this. Too pliable from too many traumatic events.

  We were also too deep to climb out. Too aware that sometimes the only safe place was behind a false smile.

  –17–

  Rise

  What Is Down Must Go Up

  Before we had boxed in the upstairs for good with plywood, we had enough sense to push the ceiling joists up through the studs. They were eighteen-foot two-by-tens and would have been difficult to get up the stairs and then turned to an open room where they could be fed up to the top of the walls. They sat in three stacks in my bedroom, and Roman had strict instructions to avoid them and the open windows, but otherwise he was finally free to run and play upstairs. I was relieved beyond words. The only thing we were missing to have the house in the dry was a roof.

  Jada and I spent a Wednesday evening lifting the ceiling joists up to Drew, who straddled the middle of the wall between my bedroom and Roman’s. Since it turned out to be the best place in the house to feed them up, we decided to put them all up there and then disperse them along the length of the house later when we nailed them in place. It was getting dark, so the goal was just to get them up there. My dad had gone back to the house to rest, and we were anxious to join him. We worked by the car headlights for the final stretch. By the time we had the last board up and our muscles were screaming, the thunder and lightning started. I hated the idea of leaving all those expensive boards up there in the rain after working for so many months to keep them dry, but the framed house had survived dozens of storms. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done over a handful of beef jerky and headed downstairs.

  Roman and Hope had swept up the downstairs, an endless chore with mud, leaves, and sawdust covering everything anew each day. Roman was bouncing a dozen quarter-size Super Balls in crazy patterns through the house. It was clearly driving Hope nuts, but he was giggling so hard that no one with a heart would ask him to stop.

  Hershey was flat on her side in the dining ro
om. A small patch of hair was permanently missing next to her spine, but no one ever mentioned it. A Super Ball bounced off her hindquarters and her eyes barely flickered. Good old dog, she was. No doubt about it.

  “Get all of them, Roman. There’s still a red one in the den,” Drew said, holding his hands out, already overflowing with balls. I had the ridiculous idea that they were cleaning up until Roman dropped a red ball in Drew’s hands and he yelled, “Watch out! Here they go!” He flung the balls as hard as he could across the room.

  Roman screamed in delight, running after them and then turning tail and running back when they leapt back at him, a delirious mix of terror and joy across his face. The balls ricocheted off studs, and each set out on its own wild path, thumping against us and Hershey, and then finally all rolling across the concrete, seeking out a low point. The shop lights hanging from studs with too-bright bulbs doubled and tripled the effect of the balls with wild shadows.

  “Again!” Roman screamed, handing a green and white marbled ball to Drew. “Do it again!”

  Hope rolled her eyes; the chaos was too much for her ordered mind. The rest of us were all in, gathering the balls and depositing them with Drew. I caught Hope’s eye and nodded up the stairs. She tiptoed up, and I knew she would go to her own room.

  Drew put in four more rounds of ball-tossing glee, which had us all running and screaming after them like Roman had and then running back the other way. We could have gone on longer even though we were tired and hungry, but Hope came down to announce that the rain had really started. Even without the roof, it would be a while before it made its way down through the tongue-and-groove flooring upstairs to cover the slab. But it would, and we would have yet another mess to clean up. Sounding like broken records, we drove home, talking all the way about how much we needed a roof.

  Jada was the first to throw up that night, but Roman wasn’t far behind her. Hope started closer to sunrise, and I was glad she at least had some sleep. Drew said he felt fine and went on to school. I couldn’t blame him; I would have run for the hills, too, if I had the chance. By noon, I was throwing up in between cleaning up the kids and handing out cans of ginger ale.

  The stomach flu lasted for just over twenty-four hours, leaving us weak and pitiful. Dad avoided us all and by some miracle never caught it. My stomach hurt almost bad enough for me to forget how bad my back hurt. Drew was the only one unaffected, and he hid out in his room to avoid our germs. It was nice to hear rapid-fire automatic weapons echoing in his room again. It had been too long since he had time to get lost in a video game.

  I thought about how I had been escaping with Benjamin and realized we each had our refuge. Jada had her dolls and toys, and Hope found peace in her craft or scrapbooking projects. I forgave Benjamin a little for leaving my kids out. Maybe they each had their own Benjamin after all.

  It had rained through both nights of our sickness and most of the day on Friday. We were up bright and early on Saturday morning, even if we weren’t bushy-tailed. We arrived at Inkwell ready to do some serious work on the ceiling so we could start the rafters, which I had a number of misgivings about building—but first things first.

  Drew carried the compressor and nail gun up and I followed with nails, various tools, and supplies. “Oh, crap,” he said, sounding a lot like Hope had downstairs when she saw how much water had pooled across the slab again.

  “This sucks,” he continued. “I mean, this really, really sucks.”

  I looked up and saw that it was worse than a few puddles. The ceiling joists we’d moved up on Wednesday had soaked up enough water to make them heavy and pliable. The weight had bent them down until they were shaped like mocking smiles rather than the rail-straight boards we needed. Maybe if we had balanced them up on end instead of laying them flat. Maybe … But there was no time for maybes. They had already dried in the morning sun. “Do you think if we flip them over?” I asked, knowing right away that it wouldn’t work.

  “We’ll have to order new boards,” Drew said. “Throw these away. They’re ruined.”

  We didn’t have the money to buy double supplies. And these were expensive pieces of lumber. One long board cost a lot more than two shorter boards that would add up to the same length, because they had to be cut from taller trees, which made them more difficult to make and to transport. “No way. We’ll make these work. Just give me a minute.”

  He climbed up, shaking his head and flipping the boards up to balance on the short ends the way they were supposed to be.

  “Let’s get the first one nailed in, then we’ll figure out the next. One at a time. We can make this work somehow. Maybe if I cut spacers to hold them the right distance apart?”

  Dad made two spacers, which Drew nailed in place to hold the next joist exactly sixteen inches from the center of the first. We nailed it in place and it stayed straight, counteracting the bend in the warped board, so we did it again. It added a lot of time to the job, and it took a little more wood than we would have otherwise used, but we put spacers between every ceiling joist down the back half of the house over the rest of that day and all of the next. A job made at least four times longer than it should have been by our own stupidity. Live and learn.

  The next week brought a line of thunderstorms that crippled the entire Midwest. Thankfully, our ceiling joists were safely in place and shouldn’t suffer much from the exposure. The subfloor upstairs was another story. We had already purchased cherry hardwood flooring and were worried that the plywood would be too damaged to make a stable surface for it.

  I finally reached out to Pete and admitted that I was too terrified to watch my kids crawl around on the upstairs ceiling joists—twenty feet off the ground in some places—to stick-build the rafters ourselves. He was sympathetic and suggested he could bring Re-Pete and another guy over on the weekend to get the roof on. I was so thrilled that I forgot I wasn’t supposed to believe everything Pete said.

  A tornado passed less than a mile from Inkwell Manor that week, peeling back roofs and tossing mobile homes around like Twinkies. “God hates trailer parks and Oklahoma,” my dad said. The familiarity of his much-repeated line made me smile.

  When we arrived on site Saturday morning, I was surprised that Pete hadn’t beat us there. Drew wasn’t, but he had been uncharacteristically sluggish and in a foul mood. I was even surprised at lunch when Pete still had not arrived. We stayed busy putting up Sheetrock nailers and sweeping away water puddles, but it was still irritating. I had a whole roof not being built.

  By the time Pete called at four in the afternoon, I wasn’t surprised anymore. Fool me once … okay so we were way past once.

  “We got a call about some tornado roofs that needed fixing so we’re working on that today,” Pete said. “These houses are going to be damaged if we don’t put the roofs back on.”

  So is mine! I wanted to scream. But it wasn’t Pete’s fault that I was a scaredy-cat. I should have ordered prebuilt rafters the way I had the ceiling joists between the two floors. Structurally either version would offer the same support, but it was much cheaper to stick-build them from scratch—at least, it would have been if I hadn’t lost my nerve. Since we had already built the rafters for the shop, it hadn’t seemed like it was a big deal. But stick-building on the ground level for a thirteen-foot-wide building is a lot different from stick-building in place for a thirty-three-foot-wide house from twenty feet in the air.

  “We’ll come by in the morning and get started on yours,” Pete said, but I was pretty sure he was just saying what I wanted to hear, not what he intended to do. And as much as I hated to be, I was right.

  The roof delay was more than just frustrating. It made me feel restless and powerless. We had worked for months to empower ourselves, and now the feeling was unraveling at my feet.

  A week later and no closer to having a roof, we were cleaning the job site. Chunks of concrete blocks and wood littered the area around the house, and it had really gotten out of control. I was out front, tossing s
tuff in a wheelbarrow, when I stopped to take a good look at the house. I looked at it all the time, but this time I looked at it square-on, imagining it with brick covering the front. Something looked very wrong. It was off balance.

  It was no secret that we had drawn the plans ourselves with little attention to aesthetics and no mock-ups of the exterior, but I had carefully measured the window placement to make sure that the six windows on the front of the house were evenly spaced—both on paper and when we laid out the walls. Still, there was a huge, unattractive blank spot between the garage window and the dining-room window. On the other side, the front door was dead center between the library and dining-room windows. That was exactly what threw everything off balance. The only way to fix it was to add another window.

  “Hope,” I yelled, “grab a tape measure and meet me in the dining room.”

  She didn’t ask questions while I measured and marked a rectangle halfway between the two windows. I released her back to clean up around the backyard while I drilled a hole at the top of my three-by-five rectangle in the garage. In the absence of a chain saw, I threaded the large-toothed blade of the reciprocating saw through the hole and cut straight down. The corner turned out sloppy, but I made it and cut through two studs along the bottom, pausing in the next corner, trying to decide if I could make the turn without drilling a hole and deciding I couldn’t.

  In the silence between the saw motor and the drill, I heard screaming. “Mommy! Stop! What are you doing! Mommy!”

  I turned to see all my kids gathered behind me. Even little Roman was red-faced from yelling, both palms out in the universal stop gesture.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Drew stared at me, dumbfounded. “What are you doing? You can’t just cut a hole in the wall! Have you lost your mind?”

  I looked back at what I had done, sidestepping to make sure it looked even. It did. I could already tell it was going to look perfect. “The house was off balance. Needed another window. We’ll just do the same thing upstairs, in Roman’s room.” I pointed over my head.