Rise: How a House Built a Family(10)

He took the pencil and added a shop. I added a tree house, so he put in a zip line and a rock wall. “Diamond Mine,” I wrote in a circle in the back lawn near the tree house. He added a portal to an alternate reality, but then flipped back to the interior drawing of the upstairs and penciled in toilets and showers while I rolled a ball to Roman.

What was I thinking? Giving these kids false hope, letting them plan for a future house that was as impossibly beyond our reach as the portal to another dimension. I pulled the nail out, twirling it between my fingers while Roman played basketball in a laundry basket. Then he climbed in and said, “I’m a boat. Whee!”

He jumped, knocking his boat over when the door flew open. He caught himself on his hands but whimpered anyhow. The blood rushed in my ears like a storm. Jada and Hope looked like pack mules, loaded down with shopping bags and pink-cheeked from the walk in the cold. But something was very wrong. Hope’s face was drawn and pale, and I could hear her breath rattling in and out from across the room. Drew stood up so fast his chair spilled over like Roman’s basket boat.

“Thump,” Roman said, whacking his palms against the worn wood floor. “Thump. Thump. Thump.”

Drew was behind Hope, locking the dead bolt and stringing the chain in place before I had made it to my feet.

“What?” I asked in a breathy whisper. “What happened?”

Hope cut her eyes at Jada. But I waved my hand. “We aren’t pretending anymore. We aren’t covering things up for anyone. We can say things that are true.” I wanted to mean it, to really, fully mean it, but I was still as afraid to speak some things aloud as I was to hear them.

“I think a car followed us out of the parking lot and all the way until I turned on the gravel drive.” She swallowed hard, hugging the shopping bags hard enough that bread or eggs would have to be salvaged as French toast. “I should have gone another way. I should have tried to lose him.”

Drew leaned forward, arms waving. “Don’t you ever drive around like a maniac trying to lose someone. You did the right thing. Stay inside. We’re calling the police.”

Jada let go of her bags and ran upstairs. It was time for me to talk to her. Tell her some hard truths. Not everything. The big kids didn’t know everything, or even half of everything, but enough that she would stay alert. She had been a toddler when I’d married Adam and his mind was attacked by schizophrenia months later. He had turned into someone so terrifying that years after the divorce we still viewed the world through peepholes and rearview mirrors.

I hooked my arms through Hope’s shopping bags. “We’re fine. No one can possibly know where we are.”

“You can’t know that!” she yelled.

“I made the reservation from a coffee shop and paid by check with a new account. We didn’t pack a thing until the day we left, and I didn’t even tell you guys where we were going. You didn’t know until we pulled up and unloaded the car. I stopped several times along the way in remote locations where I would have seen anyone following.” Instantly, I regretted telling them so much. “We’re safe.” They were wide-eyed and still, processing what it all meant. Calculating our level of danger. Code red. Severe.

Roman tugged at my pant leg and I hoisted him onto my hip. As much as I wanted to believe he was immune, he could sense the fear and anger flowing thick enough around our ankles to float his little boat.

By trying to reassure them, I had let them know that we really could be in danger and, more important, had made hiding feel necessary. Was there such a thing as too much truth? I believed there was, and I had just crossed a dangerous line. Then again, if they didn’t know about the danger, they wouldn’t be on guard. Life had gotten too complicated, too gray. I missed the good old days when I was young, I knew everything, and the world was drawn in stark lines of black and white.

Drew and I carried the groceries to the kitchen and loaded the fridge.

“I bought ice cream,” Hope said, “and a brownie mix. Let’s pig out tonight and drown the fat in holiday food tomorrow.”

“I’m dying for ice cream,” Roman said with a dramatic hand to his forehead. The surface tension broke with our laughter even if the wires underneath were still tight with fear.

I went up to talk with Jada while they finished stowing the groceries and started baking the brownies. When we came down, with Jada more quiet and subdued than any free-minded hippie child should ever be, I noticed that all the shades and curtains were closed. The kitchen window was covered with a sheet of newspaper.

I wanted to scream and rip it all down. My kids shouldn’t have to be afraid. They shouldn’t have to hide like criminals. They deserved to feel safe in a Thanksgiving cabin in the woods. They deserved to feel safe at home. I squeezed the nail in my pocket until it dug a hole in my palm. Next I’d be fashioning a crown of thorny sticks. I didn’t want the nail to turn me into a sacrifice, a victim; I wanted its magic to save us. But what if there wasn’t enough magic in the world to keep us safe?

Four bottles of white school glue lined the edge of the table by our model house. Jada sat down and piled tiny twigs into a stick figure. I ripped a napkin into the shape of a dress. She took it without meeting my eyes. If her tiny people had faces, they would be weeping.

Drew sat next to her, his eyes alight, anxious to try out the glue. Instead, he flipped to the upstairs page of our mutely drawn house plans, pointing out Jada’s initials on a bedroom. He sketched a tiny bed in one corner, then sketched a huge circle next to it and wrote, “Hot Tub.” She nodded, and stretched her lips sideways in what she may have thought approximated a smile, and then went back to her stick figures.