Rise: How a House Built a Family
Cara Brookins
Acknowledgments
This is the story of me and my children building our house. I have changed the names of most others in the account and I have chosen to omit some of those who were present for privacy or narrative reasons. I’ve also reordered some events.
Building a book is every bit as tough as building a house. Thanks to those below and the rest of you who tied on tool belts, laptops, or just tied one on in the name of helping me reach the end—which turned out to be the beginning.
Thank you:
My late brother, John Puttkammer, who wanted to but couldn’t. Darlene, whose e-mail encouraged beyond the call of duty. Kei and Dorian, for whom I’ll always have mom hugs. Scott and Aidan, who are part of Inkwell’s spirit. My grandparents, who would have said I was nuts and the aunts, uncles, and cousins who went ahead and said it.
My agent, Jessica, who made me dig deeper and my editor, Rose, who indulged me when I needed to laugh, even when I wasn’t funny. And St. Martin’s Press, for believing.
Early readers: Sean, Don, Darryl, Jim, and Phil. Jason, who listened when I failed and when I succeeded. Daniel, who lit a match and David, who encouraged, shared, supported, and was generally his amazing writer self.
Hershey, Peek-a-boo, and Inkwell Manor, my best buds when humans were too much or too little.
And to Hope, Drew, Jada, and Roman. If knowing you really can do absolutely anything brings you future grief, I’m sorry, but it was worth it.
–1–
Rise
A House
The house stands sturdy and straight. To us—my four children and me—it is a marvel, as surreal and unlikely as an ancient colossus. It is our home, in the truest sense. We built it. Every nail, every two-by-four, every three-inch slice of hardwood flooring has passed through our hands. Most pieces slid across our fingers multiple times as we moved material from one spot to another, installed it, ripped it out, and then tried again. Often the concrete and wood scraped flesh or hair, snagging physical evidence and vaulting it into the walls. Sometimes bits of wood or slivers of metal poked under our skin. I have shavings of house DNA permanently embedded inside my palm and dimpled forever in my left shin. The house wove us all together in this painful and intimate union, until we were a vital part of one another.
The idea of building our own home was not born out of boredom, but rose as the only possible way to rebuild my shattered family while we worked through the shock waves of domestic violence and mental illness. The dangers of our past were more difficult to leave behind than we ever imagined.
I groped for something that would weave us together with a sense of purpose, something large and profound. We needed a place to live, and one fall evening I imagined us working together, building our place, taking small pieces and fastening them together until they had grown into something much bigger than ourselves. The next day I discussed the idea with my three older children, and by that afternoon we had decided to do it.
I didn’t know yet how to frame a window or a door, how to snake pipes and wires through a wall, or how to draw up blueprints and obtain permits. But I knew my kids, and I knew we needed this.
We thought the beautiful metaphor of rebuilding our family while we were building a house would make both tasks easier. We believed we were starting at the bottom and could only rise up from that humble spot. We imagined we’d feel powerful and big because we were doing something profound.
We were wrong on all accounts.
Nothing makes a person feel smaller, weaker, or more insubstantial than taking on one thousand times more than you can handle. Building a house was the most difficult challenge we’d ever face, and so was rebuilding our family amid the trauma of abuse. We were nowhere near the bottom, but we would find it before we found the top.
One board at a time, we built a house.
And in the end, we discovered a home.
–2–
Fall
Bad Habits
I had been married for a year and a half and was nineteen when my first child, Hope, was born. From the first time I held her, I knew I would do anything to give her a family with both a mom and a dad. My own parents were long divorced, so I knew how torn in two a kid could feel. Years later, and with three kids in tow, it wasn’t especially surprising that I married again after the failed marriage to my high-school sweetheart turned military world traveler, but after I had narrowly escaped Adam’s schizophrenia, it surprised everyone when I married Matt.
For some people, the third time’s a charm. But for other, hardheaded people, that’s just how many times it takes to learn a lesson.
Matt was younger than me but said he was eager to be a dad to my kids—I had three by then—and to have a child with me. He was controlling, manipulative, and violent within a few months of our marriage. He always had a good reason, a solution, and it always pointed to something that he found wrong with me. Even after he started drinking heavily and experimenting with a variety of drugs, I believed that things would get better, that we might be happy, that the mother hen of the universe wouldn’t send me another bad egg.
I went to sleep every night expecting to wake up to his apologies, to a happy family, to an alternate reality.
But what woke me was the sound of his breath, ragged, uneven, and no more than six inches from my face in our dark bedroom. He sucked in each lungful through his teeth and then pushed it out the same way. “Fi,” it said on the way in, and “Fah” on the way out. How many times had I heard that rhythm? Too many. But not enough. Because here I was again, Matt’s hands around my throat, his vodka breath drying my eyes, and that heartbeat-steady sound that woke me even before I felt his right hand scoop under my neck and the left hand close over my throat.
No snooze button on this alarm. “Fi-fah. Fi-fah. Fi-fah.”
My heart thumped a dozen times with each fierce breath. And my own breathing went so shallow I wondered if it would just stop altogether, wondered if I wanted it to. He wasn’t cutting off my air supply. No, not that. He wasn’t trying to kill me, for God’s sake. It wasn’t until the third—no, maybe it was the fourth—time that I figured that out. Mustn’t kill Cara. He just wanted to let me know that he could. Any time he wanted to, he could kill me.