Rise: How a House Built a Family(73)
“I’d rather eat up here.”
I smiled. His voice sounded distorted by his swollen nose and throat, but he was using it. “I’ll be right back.” I stopped after two steps. “I love you. And I’m sorry this happened.”
He was crying again when I went out the door. I was, too. But this time they were slow tears, the sort that meant you were saying good-bye to both the lost person and the overwhelming early stage of grief.
He ate that night, but never came out of his room. On Saturday morning I asked what he wanted to do, and he asked if he could stay home. I had expected that, knowing that if he did it would be part grief and part getting out of a hard day of work.
“Tell you what. Hang out here until noon, and then I’ll come back and get you. I need your help with the exterior doors. We’re one hard day’s work away from being able to lock Inkwell up tight.” We were really more like three days away unless doors suddenly got a lot easier to install, but it was the principle that mattered.
He nodded, immediately perking up. Everyone wants to feel like there are tasks that just can’t be done without them. I wanted to give him that, and in this case it was absolutely true. I couldn’t build the house without him. We each had a role in the build, and his was a big one.
The electricians had started drilling holes and pulling wire, but I suspected they were pulling drags off funny cigarettes with more than half their time. They weren’t particularly worried about how far behind we were, but then again they didn’t appear to be particularly worried about anything. Even the fact that the house wasn’t totally waterproof didn’t shake them. We had a roof covered in tar paper, but there were no shingles. They were supposed to arrive that Friday, and I had hired some guys to put them on—friends of our Chico’s Restaurante neighbors.
I was a little worried the shingles wouldn’t show up, and a lot worried the roofers wouldn’t. Pete had taught me a lot of things since we began, and the most important was the fluidity of a construction worker’s calendar and promise.
Hope, Jada, and I carried boxes of hardwood flooring upstairs and piled them in the middle of the back bedroom. Two thousand square feet of flooring takes up a lot of space and takes a lot of back muscle to move. As soon as the electricians were finished, we would have insulation and Sheetrock moving in and needed to keep the area as open as possible. But with the shop full of appliances, lights, and plumbing fixtures in addition to tools, the hardwood and tile had to be stored in the house.
Roman sat next to the growing flooring mountain and colored an entire two-by-six with a fat hunk of pink sidewalk chalk. He was focused, humming a single monotone note that drilled into our skulls until the girls and I wanted to scream.
“Ahhhhhhhhh,” he continued, pausing only to pull in another breath, then letting it out with the same, steady “Ahhhhhhhhh.”
I gave Drew his silence until one P.M. before I picked him up. If we had any cash to spare, I would have picked up some hamburgers, too. But things were so tight we were lucky to have bread, meat, and cheese for lunch. We actually would have been thrilled with another of Dad’s turkeys, which was something we never thought we’d say in a million years.
My little pep talk and the light I had sworn I saw in Drew’s eyes had both faded. He was sluggish and irritable, even after he saw how much work we’d done without him, and after he had helped finish it off. It was Roman’s singing that finally pulled him out of it—well, in a roundabout way. Roman’s incessant note was driving me insane, so I thought to turn on Drew’s music mix. He moved a beat or two faster. And by the third song his lips were forming the words; he wasn’t exactly singing along, but it was a step in the right direction. Baby steps, again. I was learning to appreciate them as much as Neil Armstrong–size leaps.
Somewhere in recent history, humans—at least those in America—had become all about feeling rather than doing. Instead of tackling our problems and sweating them out, we started sitting around and talking about them, or trying to drown them in alcohol and pills. The new methods didn’t seem to be working well, from what I had seen. Ancient rites of passage always centered on action. A child had to do something physical, like face a demon in a dark forest, before becoming a man or a woman.
Drew smacked a crooked cripple into place with a framing hammer so we could try the French doors in the den again. He was taking action, battling demons, and I had no doubt that he would emerge from this trial as a man. It was every bit as useful as weeks alone in the wilderness in search of a spirit guide. Each of us was passing through into a more evolved phase with a timeless tradition of breaking down in order to build stronger.
A thin red line ran from the side of Drew’s palm, down his wrist, and to his elbow. It probably wasn’t much of a cut, but mixed with his sweat, the blood dripped onto the concrete slab. I had plenty of scrapes and bruises, too. We all did. Angry rainbow bruises the size and shapes of fists, as though the beatings we’d taken all these years on the inside were only now erupting to the surface, spilling out and then draining away for good.
The house felt like a live being that day, marking us, branding us like possessions, and we were marking her right back with star-shaped drops of blood and DNA swabbed on the tips of misfired nails or wood slivers. I had the idea that maybe Caroline wasn’t a woman at all, but a house. I wondered what I would find if I went back to the tornado house now, and had the eerie feeling that it would be gone, completely swallowed by the earth and spit right back up as Inkwell Manor’s pieces and parts. Drew swung the hammer again, beating the resistance out of an innocent piece of knotty pine. His shoulders slumped, his own resistance on the way out the door, too.