Rise: How a House Built a Family(39)

I tuned them out. If he really wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t a shirtsleeve or pant leg work every bit as well as dental floss? “I’m going to get going,” I said, standing and walking to the door. “I can see how bad he is. I knew that.” I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t known how bad he was. Even after I heard he had given a sales pitch to an empty room, I had never imagined he was this crazy. All the way gone. Schizophrenia. I expected Sophie and the doctor to protest, tell me how much more there was to see and learn, but they didn’t. Sophie looked like she’d been punched in the gut. I felt guilty for leaving her to deal with everything.

“It’s good that you came. Any time you have concerns you can contact me. I’m happy to help. Do you have questions before you go?”

I shook my head, but then realized I did have one. “How long will he be here?”

“We’ll get him stable and then treat him as an outpatient. Things will get better after he qualifies for some medical assistance. He’s uninsured at the moment.”

He could see I wanted more than that. I wanted the whole truth.

“Three to five days.”

Like most things over the past few months, it was worse than I thought. Three to five days of safety. I nodded and walked out the door alone.

I would have to tell the kids a little about what was going on before Adam was released. It might help them to know that his mind was messed up and he wasn’t doing things out of spite. Life was never what you thought it was going to be.

My mom always said a person isn’t given more than they can handle. But that was only the first step of a lovely thought. I had moved on to step two, and it was less lovely. A person has to let go of the things that are too big and dangerous to hold close.





–11–

Rise

Sounds Easy

The kids said they didn’t have homework and I didn’t push it even though I had a feeling they were bending the truth. We needed to get away, out of this house, out of this mind-set. We needed to feel the physical stretch of moving heavy objects and the mental stretch that reminded us we were eating the elephant bite by bite, doing the impossible, building someplace safe.

So we went to the job site, this time with a small battery-powered CD player from the garage. The speakers were tinny and weak, but Drew had made an upbeat CD with a mix we could mostly sing along to. Even Roman danced to the beat while he waded into puddles whispering to himself, “Don’t get muddy. Stay out of the mud.”

Hershey came with us, even though she would be a muddy mess on the way home. She’d been lonely at the house. And though I didn’t want to admit it aloud, I worried about the old girl. Tail wagging lazily, she followed Roman, nudging him now and then like a wayward pup.

Hope and I ran neon-pink strings from wooden frames I had pounded into the ground at each corner. We hung a line level from the taut string to get a level mark for the top of the first block row. The house was on a slight incline—or at least it had looked slight—so the foundation would be highest in the front corner under my library and lowest in the back corner under the kitchen. What had looked like a difference of only a few blocks when we had eyeballed it was actually about six feet. That would put my library floor nearly eight feet off the ground. This wasn’t what I had imagined, and I started to worry about the block-and-fill foundation plan. It wasn’t too late to build a different type of foundation, with a wooden floor that would leave the space under the house empty instead of filling it in.

I decided not to settle for that. With everything in our lives feeling hollow, I needed our house to be connected to the earth. We all needed solid ground under our feet.

We moved blocks until the sun faded and Roman’s teeth chattered behind mud-smeared lips. We slipped into our flip-flops for the ride home, singing the whole way because singing felt good and silence did not.

Roman zoned out in front of a cartoon after brushing his teeth. The other kids went to do the homework they had said they didn’t have, and I leaned back on the sofa at Roman’s feet with my laptop. For the first time in a long time, I made solid progress on my novel. A surprisingly gruesome murder took place that I hadn’t planned on, and I refused to analyze what that might mean. It wouldn’t take a professional headshrinker to track the subconscious correlations.

I knew it had been a successful writing night when I woke to three pages of “d”s on the screen. Almost always “d”s when I fell asleep, even though I wished just once it could be “z”s for a laugh. I carried Roman to my bed, having given up on sneaking him into his own bed. In a few months or a year he would go on his own, but maybe neither of us were ready yet.

I rolled intentionally on my side, curling into a ball to search for sleep rather than meditation time. Even though I always felt more grounded and at peace after seeing Benjamin, something about the experience still frightened me, and I didn’t have room for more fear that night. He and I would make peace, but courage doesn’t come like a lottery check, it is earned hard and slow, like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill.

Monday at the office I was glad to sit in a cushioned chair and rest my back. I was also happy to lose my mind in the analytical process of writing code. But after I picked the kids up from school, we rushed to the job site and discussed a plan to get water hooked up.

The city had let me pull the plumbing permit with no evidence that I could tell one end of a pipe from the other. And no, one end of a pipe is not always the same as the other. The permit office seemed to have as much confidence in my ability to learn from YouTube videos as the bank, so I gave it everything I had.