Rise: How a House Built a Family(89)
When they had both finished, they went upstairs without any ice cream. I was surprised at first that they didn’t want to stay and hear what I had to say, but if I could choose to walk away and unknow all the things I had seen in the past years, I would do the same … except I would definitely take the ice cream with me.
Hamm and his partner, Bacon—just kidding, the older partner was Hancock—took notes, and asked effective enough questions to prove they had done this sort of thing before. Even so, the large number of bizarre stories I had for them appeared to tip the scale toward worst-case scenario of their careers.
“We were pretty far away when we got the call. It took a long time for us to get to you,” Hancock said. “It happens that way sometimes. Keep your gun ready, but away from the kids. If this were to happen again, if he were to get in the house, you should be prepared to shoot him.”
For the space of a single inhale and exhale, I wondered if I should have done it, unlocked the door and let him in to end it. This wasn’t over. Not now, and not ever. He would keep coming back. He would come to any other place I moved. He wouldn’t stop until something terrible enough happened that they locked him away for good. Until then, with his mental illness as a bargaining chip, they would always let him go. A few days or a week to stabilize him on his meds, and he would be free again.
Free.
That was a thing we would never be.
Hamm rattled off a list of charges. I waved dismissively. It didn’t matter what they charged him with. Yes, I would press charges, but it would only create short delays, days where we could breathe easy, not years.
By ten thirty P.M., they were gone and the house was ours again. Jada was asleep. I put Karma back in my closet, this time showing Drew and Hope where to find her. “He’ll be back at the state hospital for a few days, maybe longer. You guys okay?”
They nodded and meant it.
“Get some sleep.” I hugged Hope hard, and then Drew. He held on longer than I expected but not as long as I would have liked. These experiences were changing them, damaging them in ways a lifetime of good fortune couldn’t undo. People have endured worse, I told myself. Concentration camps, wars, torture. But having to sink so low in the scale of human atrocities to find a life more frightening than our own was a small consolation.
–23–
Rise
Scramble to the Finish
The cut over my eye quickly became a thin, unimpressive red line, but the bruises were dramatic and ugly, extending from the middle of my forehead to just under my cheekbone. I worked hard to keep a poker face for the first few days, which the kids took as a personal challenge to send me into hysterical laughter at every turn. It was better than the alternative, so I played the game, half terrified I’d split everything open with each outburst.
My hand was slow to heal, but functional enough for me to keep pushing forward with the work. Once the doors were installed, the girls punched the nails and filled the nail holes. Hope started caulking the seams and then prepping to paint, trim first and then the walls and ceiling. Even though we had lots of decorating ideas that involved color, we opted for a single color called Vanilla Brandy for walls and ceiling throughout the house. The trim would all be Parchment Paper, a creamy white that I really loved, and not only because of the name. Rolling through the entire house with a single color saved hours of cleaning paint trays, brushes, and rollers. We could get creative later on—assuming we ever had the energy.
My optimism pulsed with a steady glow.
In mid-August, the cabinetmaker installed the unfinished cabinets in the bathrooms and kitchen. They weren’t everything I had dreamed, but they were functional. We began staining them, which took a lot more time and probably killed a lot more brain cells than I could spare. Hope was the fastest painter and stainer, but she emerged fully coated from nose to toe in whatever substance she was applying. The rest of us couldn’t figure out how she managed full-body application, but didn’t complain about her method, since it yielded speedy results.
Just when we thought we couldn’t handle the scent of stain for another second, Pete helped install the oak stair treads and railing, and the cabinet guy finished the rough build of my bookshelves in the library. Gallons of stain and polyurethane loomed in our future.
I abandoned the kids to the stain and paint while I started the tile work in the bathrooms. My bathroom had several diagonal walls and the counter was set diagonally, which made for a nightmare of trips up and down the stairs for wet-saw cuts. My five-by-five shower also had to be tiled from floor to ceiling. In our spare time we built the frames for concrete countertops, which proved to be a lot more difficult than it had looked on YouTube. My mom spent an entire weekend perfecting the frames so that they could be easily removed after the pour. She sealed every seam with caulk and bright red duct tape. Without her extreme attention to detail, half of my frames would have been permanently embedded in the countertops.
All the finish work was slow and took ten times longer than we expected, but nothing was worse than the wood floors upstairs. We had been working on them for over a month. Around two thousand square feet of hardwood flooring had to be laid through the bedrooms and closets, all in two-inch-wide strips. Some days, sixteen hours of spreading glue and hammering the tongue-and-groove pieces together with a rubber mallet moved us only a couple of feet across the expanse of the house. Roman was given the job of pushing the long, emptied flooring boxes out my bedroom window, which was open only eight inches so he couldn’t tumble out with them. “Look out below!” he yelled, sliding each box out and giggling when it sailed down to the growing heap.