Rise: How a House Built a Family(15)

The next handful of breaths came so fast and loud that I worried I’d wake them all. Had I lost my mind? Had I been possessed? Had we all?

The nail kept spinning between my fingers, warm and almost alive. I blew out a breath. Calm the hell down before you throw the baby out with the bathwater. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it made me think of my grandmother, and her memory calmed me. I stared at the house, trying to see it through someone else’s eyes. It wasn’t the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, just a big, plain box. But it was something … something to me. I didn’t want to know the rest of the house’s story. That was the past, and I was never looking to the past again. From now on, the kids and I were all about the future. A good future filled with good fortune.

Drew came back around the same side of the house where he had disappeared, right hand in his pocket. I wouldn’t ask him what he had found, or more likely what had found him. Like the nail, warm and promising in my palm, it would be just the thing he needed.

He was smiling when he sat down. It wasn’t a full-out foolish grin or anything; in fact, it looked more like the frown he’d maintained the past couple of years had relaxed into a neutral expression, but that was closer to a smile than we’d had in a long time. The earbuds hung loose from his back pocket and he left them there. If I’d learned that they hadn’t worked for six months, it wouldn’t have surprised me. They were a mask he no longer needed.

When I looped my arm around his seat and turned to back the car out, a little “Oouu” escaped. The girls and Roman were wide awake and staring at the house, riveted. I smiled a little and waited, just in case I’d been wrong and one of them did need to get out and look around. But where this house was concerned, I was dead right every time. I eased the car sideways off the driveway, slower than I needed to, and paused there, angled so they could get a good look out the side windows.

They didn’t say anything; none of us did. None of us needed to. In fact, we never spoke out loud about that home, not once.

We were thirty minutes from our house when Roman groaned in the frustrated way that meant his back was tired of the car seat and he was arching, straining against the chest guard I called his car armor. “Almost home!” I sang, feeling like a liar. The place we were going wasn’t our home, and we were all afraid of what we might find there. “Do you want your juice?”

“I want cookies,” Roman said, his mood lifting with the request. “Cookies with baby kisses.”

“We’ll make some tonight,” Hope said, “for our lunch snack.” She liked planning their bag lunches for school, and even though I hadn’t told them how limited our income was, she saved by making home-baked treats.

“Cookies for lunch!” Roman sang.

“You want to make a tent tonight, Roman?” Drew asked. “We can camp out in the den.”

“In the cabin?” he asked, eyebrows high, nodding rapidly.

“Not the cabin. I’ll show you. We’re almost there. See the car crash?” Drew pointed to Roman’s favorite billboard, a local attorney’s personal-injury ad with the back half of a real compact car crashed through the sign. “We’re almost … there.”

Roman idolized his big brother, but they rarely played together. It was the first of many new things. If only all of them could be good.

The house, the non-home, was still standing. Despite a few dark moments and wicked thoughts, I knew that that was a good thing. I rolled my window down and opened the crammed-full mailbox. A good citizen would have remembered to have the mail held for the extra days away.

I pulled into the garage a bit too fast and had to stop hard to keep from hitting the shelf lined with oil, nails, butterfly nets, and basketballs. “Wait, I meant to back in. Easier to unload.” I managed to get the car out and back in again in reverse, but I was shaky, and the kids didn’t get out of the car even after I got out and opened the trunk. Roman’s window-muffled voice called out for cookies, but no one moved.

Arms loaded with luggage and supplies, I thumped my elbow on the window until Jada opened her door. “Take Roman over to Mrs. Lenz’s to get Hershey.”

“Hershey!” Roman yelled, his cookies temporarily forgotten.

Drew got out and grabbed bags and stray shoes while I pushed into the dining room. He somehow managed to get beside me, his anger redirected into a fierce desire to protect. I dropped the bags in the kitchen. Hope was right behind us. She went to the microwave and reset the clock, then started working on the oven clock, which was a pain to change using the temperature up and down arrows. They hadn’t been intentionally changed, only flashing zeros because of an electrical flicker, but it was an ugly reminder of uglier days.

“Grilled cheese and hot dogs for lunch,” Hope said, unloading the cooler.

“And carrots,” I added. Flickering clocks wasn’t going to scare me out of feeding the kids their veggies. I wasn’t that far gone.

“Raw,” she said, which applied equally to the carrots and our emotional state.

Holding my nail in my right fist like Dumbo’s feather, I did a quick walk-through of the downstairs and could hear Drew doing the same upstairs.

The kids and the dog ran in through the garage door. Hershey’s nails clicked on the tile floor, reminding me of a speed-typist at a keyboard. The happy Lab nearly bowled me over, let me rub her ears and pat her ribs, then set off smelling a trail through the house to see if Roman had left fresh crumbs while she was away.