Rise: How a House Built a Family(72)

By the end of May, we had a roof on the house. We were still so far behind schedule on the build that I wasn’t sure it was possible to finish by the September deadline. I held out hope that future projects would be easier than I had imagined despite the fact that all the projects to date had been somewhere between ten and a thousand times harder than I imagined.

Optimists. We are the slowest of slow learners.

The next hurdle came on a Thursday night while I was trying to run iron pipe past the laundry room and onto the back porch for a barbecue grill. It was turning out to be par for the course, harder to install than I had ever imagined.

Over our late supper that night, everyone was in a good mood, so I left deadlines, finances, and worry out of the discussion. Drew didn’t come down for supper, just sent a text that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to sleep. He didn’t want me to bring anything up to him and told me to stop asking.

I didn’t think a lot about it that night. The girls and I watched a movie while Jada helped Roman build block towers that he knocked down with exceptional fanfare and explosive noises that included a lot of flying spit.

The next morning Drew sent a text that he wasn’t going to school. He still didn’t feel well. No, he didn’t want any medicine, and no he wasn’t hungry.

I was late for work and told him to text me if he needed me to pick up ginger ale or crackers at the store. He didn’t text me all day.

That night, when he still refused to come out of his room, I knew something was up. After his childhood ear infections had been cleared up by tubes at age two, he had only been sick maybe twice, ever. The entire family would come down with colds or flu and none of it touched him. I mentioned it to Hope, and she got a particularly mischievous gleam in her eye. “If something is going on at school, I can find out in two minutes.”

She was wrong. The bad news was so easy to find that she had it in thirty seconds. Drew was eighteen months younger than her, and two years behind in school. Still, if the juniors hadn’t ended classes two weeks before the freshmen, she would have already heard gossip of this magnitude. She handed me her phone with a news article from a local station (All the News All the Time!) pulled up.

I recognized the name in the headline right away. One of Drew’s friends—not his best friend, because he didn’t really have one of those, but a boy he knew well enough to invite over for video games—had been killed in a violent car crash. The images of the car were chilling. And all the questions that ran through my mind in the first few seconds didn’t really matter in the long run. Was he texting? Did he buckle his seat belt? Was he drinking, or high?

He was someone’s little boy. Someone’s brother. Someone’s grandson. Someone’s friend—Drew’s friend. And he was dead.

It hurt that Drew was trying to handle it all by himself. Locking himself away from the people who loved him enough to help in any way they could. But I understood it, too. He was the man of the house, and he had this image that being a man meant being strong, in control, and not leaning on anyone else. As the adult head of our household, I’d finally learned that being grown-up and a true leader meant just the opposite. It meant asking for help even if that made someone else feel stronger, even if someone laughed, or mocked your plumbing terminology. The most important part of being in charge was recognizing when you weren’t in control.

The older kids’ dad had been so absent that I sometimes had to remind myself that his life still must affect them. He had left the air force soon after we divorced, spent years without a job while he went to college, married two more times, and then joined the army as an officer. While we were building Inkwell Manor, he was in Iraq, occasionally e-mailing the kids about bombs and the general horrors and fears from a war zone. Drew’s understanding of the ordinary dangers of everyday life had to be a jumbled, tangled mess.

I knocked on his door, and when he told me he was too tired I went in anyhow. “I read about Derek,” I said, sitting on the side of his bed.

He was on his stomach, head turned away from me. His shoulders started heaving with big racking sobs. I put my hand on his back, and he let me. We both bawled until our noses were too swollen to sniff anymore.

“Do you want to go to the funeral? Sometimes it helps to be around other people who feel like you do. To say good-bye.”

He shook his head.

“Think about it some more. You don’t have to go. People have different ways of finding their way through things like this. If the funeral isn’t your way, then that’s fine, but find what is your way, and do that. Okay? You have to keep moving. Keep living.”

He nodded.

I had more to say but hadn’t worked out how to say it. My feelings were hurt that he hadn’t told me about this. Really that wasn’t it exactly. It wasn’t my feelings. “You know how you felt when I glossed things over and pretended they were okay, lied even to make it look like they were when it was obvious they were all going to hell in a handbasket? Well, I feel the same about this. I imagine Hope does, too. We don’t hide things anymore. Understand? We deal with them together. It’s the only way we’ll get through this … and any number of things to come.”

He nodded again.

“And you need to eat something. Keep moving forward. You want me to bring something up or you want to come down?” It was an old parenting trick, giving him two choices that both ended in the same result—him eating. And phrasing it in a way that he had to do more than nod or shake his head was a trick I had been honing since they became teenagers.