Rise: How a House Built a Family(94)



“We need your help, Mommy!” Hope yelled from the dining room. They had my king-size mattress wedged on the stairs. The diagonal wall over the stairs may have met code, but it could have used a couple more inches for moving a pillow-top king mattress. We had to bend it and push with all our might to get it through.

I e-mailed my boss that I was taking the next day off to finish moving. I needed the time to enjoy settling everything into the place we’d made for it.

So on our first night at Inkwell Manor, we slept on crooked mattresses that blocked doorways and were half-made with mismatched sheets. My head was facing south instead of north like it had at the other house. The 180-degree life shift was welcome, but disorienting, too.

I had trouble falling asleep, and blamed it on a short to-do list. The mile-long-list review had worked like sheep counting for the past year. What would I do without it? Other than some cleanup at the other house, the long-awaited result was complete.

When I finally slept, it was more like work than a restful thing. Caroline appeared over and over, always angry, always yelling, always at me. She had never directed any of her fierce temper at me before; it had always felt more like it wicked up through me with someone else as the target. When I checked my phone clock at three A.M., I realized I was afraid of her.

We had built the home inspired by her tornado house. We had rebuilt our family. Most important, we had survived mountains of craziness. All at once I was glad that her nail was out in the shop and not in our house. I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that she wanted something more from us.

I slept again, but she was there waiting for me, almost nose-to-nose with me in anger, and I had nowhere to go to escape. She was wrapped in orange and yellow instead of her signature red, cheeks glowing, lips moving in an ancient tongue I couldn’t interpret.

Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, Benjamin appeared in front of her like a shield. He sat as calmly as ever, but stared intently at me. I felt small and weak, like they were ganging up on me after being my inspiration for a year and a half. What? What do you want me to do? I wanted to scream at them. We’re done! We built it! It’s wrapped around us, protecting us. What more do you want from me?

All at once, Caroline leapt over Benjamin and hovered over me, orange dress and wild hair fanning out in waves, her body parallel to mine and about six feet above me. She looked more like a demon than the matriarch and supporter I had imagined her to be.

I looked back at Benjamin, needing his calm protection. But his eyes had gone wide and angry, too. He opened his mouth and I flinched, expecting a plague of locusts to stream out and suffocate me.

“Rise!” he shouted.

It was the only word I’d ever heard him speak, so I did. Faster than I could blink my eyes open, I stood, stumbling beside my mattress, feet tangled in my sheets. Even after I worked my eyes open, the world was cloudy. It was six o’clock. A foggy spring day that would be my late grandpa’s eighty-ninth birthday.

The house was quiet, so I started pancakes for the kids. They weren’t big breakfast eaters, but a quick bowl of cereal or a breakfast bar wasn’t an option when they were probably buried in a box of garden trowels. I had moved around a lot in my life, but I had never been so disorganized and frantic with it. It didn’t worry me, though, because of all the moves I had ever made, this one felt the most right.

The only thing still bothering me was the nightmare about Caroline and Benjamin. They had been a strange gathering of forces that helped me through when I needed them. But now I worried that my restless mind had turned them into something different. I knew how easily a person could slip into insanity. The kids and I had created a peaceful place to live, and now it was time to settle in and find peace in my own mind.

I was ready to take on the task. I was sure of it.





–24–

Fall and Rise

You Built Your Own Damn House

You’d think that by then I would have known better than to be sure of anything.

But I’m an optimist.

Drew and Jada went off to school after begging unsuccessfully to stay home and help unpack. “We’ll have plenty of time to get things settled. Go learn something,” I told them.

Hope had left her senior year a semester early to work as an intern to the executive director at the Clinton Foundation, and by a stroke of luck, she had a few days off.

Roman and I were lounging on a twin-size mattress on his bedroom floor. We needed a few lazy minutes of play before we attacked the boxes in earnest.

Finally, reluctantly, I got up to check the e-mail on my phone in case anything had come in from the office. I had missed dozens of calls from my mom.

I dialed, heart racing, wondering if something had happened to her sister in Wisconsin who had been waiting for a kidney transplant. Mom was planning to start the testing to see if she could be a donor.

But instead of Mom, my brother John answered. He had lived with her off and on most of his life, never able to hold a steady job with his disabilities.

“Why don’t you ever answer your damn phone?” he said before I got a word out. “Mom’s sick. Really bad. I’m pretty sure she’s dying. But she won’t go to the hospital. I called a friend to take her but she said she can’t—”

“Call 911. Now!” I told him. I was already crying, already wondering why I had ignored the bad dreams.

“She won’t go. She says not to.” His voice was shaking. He was scared.

Cara Brookins's Books