Rise: How a House Built a Family(81)



“Those last sheets of plywood are blocking the upstairs doors. What are we doing with those?” he asked.

It was good to think of our building supplies as the last ones. The last two-by-sixes, the last plywood, the last nails, screws, or Liquid Nails. “I thought we’d use them in the attic for storage platforms.”

“Let’s carry them up before we leave, so the doors are ready to go when we come back.”

My calf was throbbing, but I didn’t want to stand in the way of his momentum. We needed every extra push we could get. All the months of building had made for some impressive muscles. Drew had turned from a pasty-white, thin, geeky boy into a tan, muscled young man. Before the Sheetrock went up, he could jump up and grab the ceiling joists and pull himself up through them effortlessly. My muscles hadn’t built quite as much as his, but I definitely had muscles I hadn’t believed I owned. Carrying the four-by-eight sheets of plywood upstairs took little effort.

The attic door hadn’t been installed, so there was just a hole in the ceiling in Roman’s room. We carried ladders up and positioned them as well as we could. Hope helped us stabilize everything while we hoisted the sheets up one at a time with Drew all the way in the attic and me perching at the top of the ladder to push the end of the sheet up.

Everything went smoothly until the final sheet, which wedged against a crossbeam on a rafter and wouldn’t budge. We would have just left it for another day, but it had Drew blocked in the attic space unless he slithered around the side on his hands and knees. The blown-cellulose insulation was easier on skin than the fiberglass kind, but we both decided we might as well just finish the job for good. “Hold on,” I told him, “I’ll climb up and help from up there. I can get more leverage.”

We tried a half dozen maneuvers to loosen the stuck piece, but failed. “Brute force,” Drew said. “We’re just going to have to push it out the way it came in. You push down on your side to pivot it, and I’ll push up and try to bend it a little at the same time. It’ll pop right out.”

The reasoning was sound. I pushed down with everything I had. He pushed up. I felt the wood bend under his pressure, but I never felt the instant it gave way. We hadn’t planned that far ahead. The top spun around and slammed into my head, just above my left eye. Following the basic rules of physics, my head slammed into the rafter behind me. The pain was impressive, and so was the blood. I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from at first, because my entire head throbbed from the hit.

Drew wiggled the plywood down into place, yelling while he did it. “Hope! Mommy’s hurt! I need your help!”

Hope came up the ladder while I turned to walk toward it. Rafters were spinning, but I was pretty sure it was just an immediate response to the hit, not a symptom of a serious head injury. Blood dripped onto the plywood and the tops of the ceiling joists we’d worked so hard to straighten after leaving them out in the rain. It soaked into the insulation, dropping like bread crumbs to mark my path to the ladder, down it, and to my bedroom, where I sat on the floor.

“Get me some ice and a washcloth,” I said, as though those were things we would actually have. Jada started taking her sock off but I waved for her to stop. Hope brought a roll of paper towels, and I shook the Sheetrock dust off them before pressing a handful to my left eyebrow, which had become the focal point of the head pain.

“You need to go to the doctor,” she said.

Drew swung down from the attic opening without using the ladder. “Definitely. That’s a lot of blood,” he said. “How bad is it?”

“Head wounds bleed a lot. It might not be that bad. I need a mirror.” I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I was too tired to sit in an ER. Not only that, I hated the idea of stitches. Yuck.

Drew disappeared and we sat quietly, mopping up blood. When he came back, he was carrying a four-foot-long wall mirror for my bathroom. I laughed. “I’m not getting ready for a cocktail party!”

“All I could find.” He laughed, too, and propped the mirror in front of where I sat cross-legged in a little cloud of crumpled red paper towels.

It took me a minute to work up the courage to lift the pressure off and look. A long cut under my left eyebrow gaped open and started bleeding again. But it wasn’t the cut that caught my attention, it was my hand. The entire back of my left hand and my middle and ring fingers were purple and bruised. The fingers were obviously swollen. How I hadn’t noticed that injury, I’d never know. I flexed the hand and winced. The fingers wouldn’t bend all the way. Typing was my livelihood. Whether the eyebrow cut needed stitching or not, my hand needed an X-ray. Damn it. I didn’t have time for injuries.

“Ewww,” Drew said, looking away. “It’s going to need stitches for sure.” He hadn’t noticed my hand and I kept quiet.

“I probably should have it looked at. Let’s get everyone home and Hope can drive me to the hospital. No hurry. It’s just a precaution.” I stood up, marveling at how little my calf hurt compared with my head and hand.

Roman and Jada didn’t even know I’d been hurt until we called them to leave. Jada had lost her shoes somewhere in the house, and we finally gave up and left them there. When we got back to the house, Roman cried, wanting to go with me, but Drew finally lured him away with popcorn and a bad ninja movie. “Cookies, too?” Roman asked, milking the bribe for all he could.

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