Rise: How a House Built a Family(6)
Jada livened things up when she paired her phone with the radio and tortured us with a playlist of pop songs remixed by the Chipmunks. Nothing screams road trip like kids complaining about the tunes. It was a start, anyhow. I decided not to save my emergency mom-trick for later; it looked like we were one big catastrophe right from the start. “Cheese Doritos?” I asked, pulling the crinkly bag from the floorboard on the front passenger side, where Hope was tucked in with three bags that wouldn’t fit in my Accord’s trunk.
It was the closest to happy I’d seen them in a while. Doritos were a rare treat. Years ago, Adam had forbade them in the house because he couldn’t stand the smell. Even after he had gone, I let the smell remind me of him. No more. We were letting go of stupid, imaginary boundaries. The car filled with cheesy corn-chip breath. I smiled.
When the kids were full of Doritos and empty of complaints, they started dozing off in the standard pattern of youngest to oldest. Drew was kind enough to kill Jada’s music before he slipped into dreamland. It wasn’t until Hope’s head went slack against a pillow she’d jammed between her seat belt and her cheek that I realized I’d forgotten to tell them where we were going. It was beyond bizarre that none of them had remembered to ask. It made me smile for a second to feel their absolute trust, but then I realized something deeper and sadder was behind their silence. They hadn’t asked because it didn’t matter. We were going away from the life where bad things had happened, and as far as they were concerned the coordinates of the place we landed were irrelevant.
The road turned hilly and shadowed as we headed toward the mountains. The early sunset in fall and winter used to make me sad, eating away my productive daylight hours inch by inch. But I had become a creature of the night, a shadow who felt safest when no one could see. I crept around the house with the lights off, memorizing how many steps would take me to the staircase and dragging my hand along walls to stay oriented. I’d taken to reading under the covers, sometimes even pulling my laptop under with me to write in a warm bubble that smelled of melting ozone. It was a silly habit for a grown woman, but like it had when I was six, the blanket bubble felt like an impenetrable shield.
The sun was only peeking through on high spots by the time we reached Dover, Arkansas. I started seeing evidence of the tornado that had skipped through the hills in the spring. Oaks that had seen the Civil War were taking their final bow in groves of thinner, more pliable species that had weathered just fine. Small houses with mismatched roof patches and freshly installed storm shelters lined the beast’s path. A fireplace that once warmed a family now towered alone at one end of a long concrete pad, swept clean enough for dancing.
Just around a sharp curve, at the top of a small hill, I spotted my dream home. It was two stories with warm brown bricks and dark chocolate shutters. Tall columns on the front porch made it look regal and very Southern. Large flower beds lined the sidewalk, with varying shades of green perennials that looked alive in every season.
I pulled into the drive, and let my mouth hang open. Odds were pretty good no one was home, since the tornado had peeled much of the roof away and the windows had only small, jagged bits of glass hanging stubbornly in the frames. I wondered if the pressure had blown them out or if the local teens and a case of Budweiser had done the job on a Saturday night.
In one of the upstairs windows, a red curtain hung outside, about a foot under the bottom sill, motionless despite the breeze. It was like something out of a postapocalyptic movie, or a stark black-and-white photo shoot where a single focal point had been colored in. The sun lit the edges of everything, blurring the details in the center and making the whole scene muted and surreal.
Nothing could have convinced me not to get out for a closer look. I felt suddenly very strong, bulletproof—even strawproof. The kids would carry on with their naps as long as I left the car running.
Around the west side, a wall had tumbled in an almost perfectly diagonal line from roof to foundation. The upstairs room with the red curtains was still covered enough that I couldn’t see in. It didn’t bother me, though. I already knew that room as well as I needed to. Behind it, upstairs on the back of the house, was a room fully decorated in pink—not the bright modern pink of plastic toys, but the old-fashioned, pale pink of yesterday. The bed had a lace canopy, and I imagined dolls piled on it. I imagined, too, that it contained a dollhouse made to look exactly like the big house. A tiny replica of a dream. It made me smile.
The last rays of sunset made the master bedroom on the lower floor look alive enough that I looked away, feeling like a Peeping Tom staring into such an intimate space. I couldn’t help myself, though: I moved back in for a closer look. Bricks littered the floor and bed like favorite shoes ready to be packed for a trip to Aruba. A dusty red robe hung behind the door, and that more than anything made it feel like a home, like a place where people had not only been alive, but lived. I wished I could meet the woman who had hung red curtains and worn the red robe.
No, that wasn’t it at all. I wished I could be that woman. She was strong and courageous. She never would have let things get so bad or settled for living so small, so far away from her dreams. She would have stood up and taken charge. Her house belonged to her all the way through. It was a home. Even with the holes, it felt safer than my own.
Broken two-by-fours hung from the upper floor like teeth, but I had the idea they were yawning lazily rather than flexing to clamp down like a guillotine. A long nail hung off the end of a splintery board, as shiny as a freshly minted coin. It fell into my hand almost before I touched it, sun-warmed and filled with potential. I put it in my pocket and pushed my index finger into a cookie-dough-soft piece of Sheetrock, taking note of how insubstantial it was. A wall, even one that hadn’t been pulverized by tornado and rains, was barely stronger than my blanket tent.