Rise: How a House Built a Family(85)

She was too numb to cry on the way home. “I’m going to cancel my trip to Denver. He was supposed to be part of our group. He was a superdelegate. It will just be so depressing to do that now. We were supposed to leave in a couple days.”

I didn’t argue with her. I was afraid to offer any advice. “Go with your gut,” I said, confident that her gut was luckier than my own.

On Monday we drove to the funeral. It was a huge affair, with the Clintons, General Wesley Clark, Governor Beebe, and dozens of local politicians from both parties attending. Two blocks from the church, people lined the sidewalk holding signs. It wasn’t until we stopped at a traffic light that I realized exactly what we had run into: the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrators. The signs had photos of Bill with flames around his head that read “Burn in Hell Gwatney,” and dozens of other hate-filled messages, and scriptures suggesting that God killed Bill as a punishment for our country tolerating homosexuality. Hope started yelling and unbuckled her seat belt. She had every intention of going after them. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the past week and had no filters or patience left for cruelty.

I locked her door and put my arm across her, trying to hold her in the car. I looked ahead, willing the light to change so we could get away from the hateful chants, and then I saw something unexpected on the opposite side of the street. It was a long line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Long-haired, bearded bikers in leathers were also holding signs—peace signs. “Look across the street!” I yelled. “Just focus on the bikers. Look at their signs!”

Hope relaxed, the light turned green, and I rolled down my window so that we could both wave at the Patriot Guard motorcycle group who frequently counter the Westboro demonstrators. “This isn’t what I expect you to do every time you see a group of guys on Harleys,” I said.

By the next day, everything had changed again. “I’m going to Denver,” Hope told me, chin up and tears dry. “I just heard that Rebecca, Bill’s wife, is going along with the Clintons. If she can go then I can do it, too.”

So I piled her in a van with a group of law students, all quite a bit older than her, and they headed off to Denver. It was exactly the healing trip she needed.

She called me from Denver while I was on my hands and knees in her closet, gluing and pounding narrow strips of hardwood in place at eleven P.M., still fighting to make our deadline. She had just heard Hillary Clinton’s speech and she was bawling while she quoted her. “‘My mother was born before women could vote. My daughter got to vote for her mother for president. This is the story of America, of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.’”

I was crying, too. This was our story. Women like Caroline. Women like us.

My oldest daughter had seen a lot of life’s bad things, but she had seen good things, too. She returned stronger and braver, more determined to make changes in the world. She brought us each one of the small flags they waved as Obama spoke, and she brought a special gift for Roman. It was a twelve-inch plush doll of Obama. She had taken Roman with her to hold signs and hand out stickers near polling offices, so the names of politics were familiar to him, but his love for his doll surprised us all.

“It’s Obama!” he squealed, hugging his doll close. “I have Obama!”

The doll became his security toy, and for months when he woke in the middle of the night, instead of hearing a cry for water or a blankie over the monitor, I heard him whimper, “Obama! Where’s Obama? I want Obama!”

Life is stranger than we could possibly predict. And while we all leapt back in to work twenty-hour days to finish Inkwell Manor, we found new strengths, new weaknesses, and thousands more reasons to call ourselves fortunate.





–22–

Fall

Aiming True

Adam’s red Honda was no more than half a car length behind me, matching my speed. If I had seen him seconds earlier, I could have kept going, driven to town like we had last time, bought some time while I called the police. But I had missed all the warning signs, because I was preoccupied with being happy, with moving on, and finally dating this guy named Matt who made me feel safe and felt like he might be a true forever-after.

Drew saw him, too, and I wondered what made him look over his shoulder. Hope spotted him only a second or two after us.

“Is he wearing…” Hope tried to turn all the way around in the passenger seat and I pushed her back down. “Horns. He’s wearing red horns,” she said, settling back in her seat and not wanting to see more.

“Hell.”

“You’re not supposed to say that. It’s a bad word,” Jada said. “Hell.”

I sped up, turning sharply at the top of the driveway to angle across the front lawn instead of into the garage. He followed, and I pushed the garage-door button. I had to choose between getting into the house or running, and just then the house seemed like the better bet. He followed me, but the turn caught him off guard and I had the advantage. I whipped around in a circle, slipped neatly between the post for the basketball goal and the lawn-mower shed, and stopped in the garage with my finger mashing the door button and the nose of the car denting the shelf unit against the far wall. The door moved down, slow and careful. It was only halfway down when his car stopped in front of it.

“In the house!” I yelled at the kids. “Get upstairs now!” I should have followed them, locked us all tight in a room with the door barricaded. It wouldn’t be the first time we hid from him like that. But Adam had jumped out of his car and I caught a flash of his legs—red tights, or leggings. Red like a demon.