Rise: How a House Built a Family(5)

Roman was tiny, thin, and stressed in the honest way only an almost-two-year-old can be—he wanted to be endlessly held and cared for.

Those four green-eyed beauties were my everything. Too many times my determination to give them a perfect life had included giving them a father figure. But I had finally reached my own last straw. I had a good job as a senior computer programmer systems analyst, and I was working hard to grow my side income as a writer. Still, I couldn’t afford the big house we were living in on my own, and more than one man had left me with his debt. Our finances were a mess, and the stash at the bottom of my tampon box wasn’t going to take me far.

We would have to sell the house. I told myself that was for the best, even though the kids and I had sacrificed for years to have it built. It didn’t feel much like a home anymore, and the older kids were afraid there, too. Maybe they had always been, and I had only imagined my silence protecting them. What a weighty little bitch optimism is.

Just after sunset on a cold November night, Hope whisper-yelled down from the balcony, “I swear I see him out there sometimes. Out back in the shadows or in the kitchen window at midnight.”

“Who?” I asked, and Drew stomped up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door before I could apologize. After so many years of being a pretender, I had trouble remembering to be honest.

Hope rolled her eyes in that way all seventeen-year-old girls have perfected.

“Who’s outside?” Jada asked, running behind Hope with eyes aglow and turban-wrapped hair dripping on her nightshirt, a holey Gumby shirt that I’d worn in junior high and she loved like a blankie.

I leveled a glare at Hope, and she threw her hands up. She hadn’t realized Jada was out of the shower. “We were talking about the FedEx guy,” I said, slipping comfortably back into my pretender skin.

Jada, the flightiest child I’d ever known, had already forgotten. She giggled, untangling Roman’s right hand from Hershey’s ear only to find his left hand with a firm grip. The commotion barely disturbed the Lab’s nap. We let her sleep in the dining room now, all of us claiming it was to keep her safe from a prowling coyote we’d heard screaming in the forest.

We had been afraid of more than one man over the years. Matt had been the most violent, but he was sane enough to know I had found my courage and bought a gun. After all the late nights of terror with his hands around my throat, Matt had become a very small, pitiful man in my memory. The man Hope saw or imagined out the window was the man we’d left before Matt. His name was Adam. He haunted us because he wasn’t sane enough to be afraid. He had been once. He had even been a genius. But there is truly a fine line between genius and insanity, and he had crossed over for good.

He was the weight that held us back from recovery steps. He kept us so tight in our own shells we couldn’t reach out, not even to one another.

We lived in virtual silence that fall, waiting for the house to sell, waiting for a new life to start, waiting for our fear to dissipate.

Our nerves were so frazzled that none of us were sleeping. Roman had moved permanently into my bed after three straight nights of me lying on the floor beside the toddler bed, holding his hand. If we had a giant mattress that would hold us all, and we could lock it in a vault at night, maybe then we would sleep. In a cruel twist, having the dangerous men out of sight, where we couldn’t make believe we’d catch a sign of whatever set them off, we were stuck in a state of hypervigilance, waiting for one to appear. Waiting for the next strike, one we’d never see coming.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, I spent the day packing for a secret getaway. Not only had I kept the idea a secret from the kids, I’d been careful not to write down the address of the cabin I’d rented a couple of hours north of us in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. It would have been a prettier spot a few weeks ago, before the leaves dropped, but even stark landscapes would be an improvement over the view from my kitchen window.

“What happened?” Hope said when she walked through the door and saw the line of suitcases. Then she repeated it with a panicked squeal, “What happened?” The rattle in her voice made it sound raspy and old. “Did he do something? Did he come here?”

I ran down the stairs and nearly slid the last four when I saw how white she’d gone. “Nothing. It’s okay.” But I was flustered enough that she wasn’t convinced. I held both palms up. A surrender. A promise. “We just need to get out of here for a couple days or we’re going to lose our minds. No one came here. Nothing happened.”

She nodded.

Drew kicked his duffel bag. To him, this would feel like running away, and he wouldn’t like that. “Where?” he asked.

How long had it been since he’d put two words together? “I’ll tell you in the car.” I made a sweeping gesture with my hands. “You’ve got twenty minutes to grab entertainment for a quiet weekend. I packed your clothes and the basics.”

More like forty minutes later and after we’d gone down the driveway and back up again for Jada’s shoes—how a kid can get in the car and not notice they aren’t wearing any shoes, I will never know—we finally drove north, away from our house that wasn’t home. The kids sat straight in their seats, looking forward with their eyes and backward with their minds.

When had we forgotten how to take a road trip? When had we forgotten how to laugh?