Rise: How a House Built a Family(14)
I would remember that I was a very fortunate girl.
Sunday morning started with the last of the peppered ham and pancakes—or pancake cookies if you were two and a picky eater. We had learned to call all meat chicken and tack the word cookie on to just about every other food. As every ad exec and mom knows, it’s all in the packaging. But no amount of catchy packaging was going to smooth the scowls away from the older kids. The three of them looked like they were eating sand cakes, and calling them sand cookies wasn’t going to do the trick.
I pretended that a couple of happy nights knowing I was safe would hold me for a long time, but in reality it was just enough to tease me into wanting that sort of thing full-time. Don’t be greedy, I told myself. Be patient. But I wanted to dropkick that patronizing voice into next week. I was sick and damn tired of being patient. If wanting to sleep without fear was greedy then I was damn well ready to accept the label. I smiled and squeezed the nail in my pocket. Already I felt more like the woman who had hung the red curtains, my imagined Caroline, than I had a few days ago.
Drew practically growled when he caught me smiling. He had been wrapping our stick house with pages torn from the yellow pages. I hadn’t yelled at him for destroying the phone book. Not many people bothered with yellow pages anymore, and our house—our dream—had to be protected.
“We’ll get it home safe,” I told him, “even if we have to leave one of your siblings behind.”
“Not me!” Jada yelled, poking a broom under the sofa to scoop out her socks.
“Me!” Roman yelled. “Pick me!”
I scooped him up and buried my face in his tummy, blowing raspberries. “I’ll pick you for the tickle-monster attack. That’s what I’ll do!” When he’d giggled himself into the hiccups, I put him down and he ran down the path three steps ahead of me. The first load to the car was the heaviest. The kids followed, slow and quiet.
Despite the fact that we’d eaten most of the food we’d brought, and the food the girls picked up for our feast, it looked like we were taking back more than we had brought.
The stick house fit in the trunk as long as three shopping bags of laundry rode on the floorboards around the kids’ feet. With a final walk-through to collect all the things Jada had left behind, we said a sad good-bye to Hickory Haven.
Per usual, the kids conked out quickly, or at least I thought they did. When we were about a mile from my tornado house, I got a better look at Drew in the passenger seat and realized he had probably been faking it for the whole hour. “I’d like to show you a house,” I whispered.
He sat up, eyes open behind his sunglasses, not even bothering to fake a yawn or stretch. His left earbud dropped to his shoulder.
Come out, come out, wherever you are! I wanted to sing. It had worked when he was Roman’s age and hiding from something he was afraid to look in the eye.
When I pulled into the drive, I could see it was like coming home for him, too. He wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was a teenager who had seen more of the harsh realities of life than a lot of grown men. Before I had the car at a complete stop, he opened his door and his right foot skimmed over the leaf-cluttered driveway.
I stayed in my seat, twirling the nail between my fingers. The house had already given me what I needed, even though I couldn’t put that thing into words. Courage, that was part of it, but also vision. Hope?
Drew rounded the side of the house opposite the master bedroom. I had no idea what he would find, but I was sure it would be exactly what he needed. The girls needed things, too, but I didn’t think they were going to find them here at the edge of the storm damage. Their healing would take more time. They would need to travel a lot closer to the eye of the storm. I was afraid for them. But we had lived under a dark cloud for so long that I wasn’t as frightened as I should have been. I was desensitized in the same way as a child who grows up next to an artillery range and doesn’t go inside when he hears thunder, dismissing every warning boom as just another background explosion.
A shadow moved past the dining-room window and I jumped, almost dropped my nail. Not only because I worried for a second that Drew had gone inside, but because there was no way I could know that window was the dining room. I knew it, though, as definitely as I knew that Drew hadn’t gone in, that whatever shadow I’d seen had come from inside of me. I’d spent weeks, even years, trying to piece together Matt’s and Adam’s truths, and now I was the one left fractured and wandering empty houses like a lost spirit. I clung to Caroline’s nail, needing her strength until I could believe in my own and stitch my shadow back in place. The red curtains snapped in the wind and I shivered.
Inch by inch, I compared the layout of the house to the one Drew and I had drawn and then made out of sticks. We had worked it out together, one room at a time, vetoing one another’s ideas along the way, the whole thing accomplished without a word. Yet I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that our stick house would match this one, probably to exact scale, room for room, inch for inch. My library was where the master bedroom was here, though, because I was planning to sleep upstairs, closer to the clouds than the earth.
A tiny bird landed near the chocolate-colored front door. I looked back at the girls and Roman, confirming that they were asleep for real. I could see the blue milk-lid coffee table in our stick house and had the idea that even the girls’ furniture and decorations would match those in the house in front of us. I hadn’t noticed a swing in the backyard, but I knew that Roman’s swing was there, too, exactly where he told Drew to put it.