“Roman, help Jada get Hershey’s food and water bowls filled. And can you find his ball?”
“Fetch, Hershey!” he yelled, dropping to his belly to peer under the sofa for a tennis ball. No doubt he’d find a dozen under there and toss them all out. It was a wonder no one had broken a hip tripping over them yet.
I took the stairs two at a time and pretended that was why my heart was so loud in my ears when I got to the top. Drew was in Roman’s room.
“This how it looked when we left?” he asked.
Heaps of clothes surrounded the dresser, and toys were scattered everywhere. “I was packing away the summer clothes and sorting for winter while Roman looked for toys he’d outgrown. Neither of us finished.” I shrugged. I could definitely see why he might think the room had been ransacked.
Drew’s hand went into his right pocket and stayed there. He had his own feather. If he could deal with this, so could I. “Anything else?” I asked, proud that my voice cracked only a little.
Roman’s hands were slapping the stairs, followed by his knees. “Sissy’s makin’ cookies!” he said, arms up in the air like he was measuring an enormous cookie pile.
“First she’s making cheese and bread. Then cookies,” Drew said, giving me time to absorb that everything was okay, and that we shouldn’t have to worry so much that it might not be.
We didn’t find anything wrong in the house, though we would wonder through the day if small things had been moved. Nothing had been damaged or taken, unless a sense of security counted, but that had been so thoroughly destroyed years ago it would be hard to argue that a new invasion could mar whatever remained.
“Food’s on!” Hope called. We raced to the table. She didn’t like cold food and expected subsecond response time. If she was willing to do most of the cooking, none of us dared object to her rules.
Roman and Jada ate their grilled cheese with hot dogs sliced in half the long way inside the sandwich. Then they dipped the salty, gooey, grilled mess in ketchup. Roman dipped his carrots in the ketchup, too. Whatever it took to get them down. My rule making had definitely gone lax. Pick your battle, my mom always said, and the silent battle in my head was sapping my energy.
Unlike the final meals at the cabin, where we laughed and talked over each other with three conversations at once, this meal was silent except for carrots crunching, ketchup splatting, and juice cups clicking.
“We’re building it for real, right?” Jada blew the question out like it had been bottled and corked for years.
We all stared at her, chewing paused, eyes wide. Then we blinked in unison and unfroze. I was relieved for a half second until they all turned their eyes to me, waiting for the answer. Needing it to be yes.
When my mouth opened, I meant to ask, What? Build what? Cookies? But we were truth tellers now. No more liar, liar, pants on fire for our family.
“Yes,” I said. “We are building it.”
And that was that. The older kids had already cast their vote. And since Roman was at a stage when he preferred dirt, sticks, and rocks to anything Fisher-Price had to offer, we assumed that he gave the project a couple of mud-stained thumbs up.
We ate. We unpacked and did laundry. And for the first time in what, months? Years? A decade? I had a crazy goal, an impossible dream that made me smile and gave me hope. The kids were transformed, unrecognizable from the nervous beings who had left for a mystery vacation only days ago.
Thanksgiving.
Yes, it was a time for that.
–6–
Fall
Coffee with Cream
The oldest three kids were in elementary and middle school and Roman wasn’t even thought of yet. My second husband, Adam, stood in front of our French doors, staring across our backyard and into the neighbor’s. His Yugoslavian features were distinct and handsome. His dark hair, long on top and parted straight down the middle, hung just under his eyes. If his hands were free just then, he would have pushed it back in a way that had once made my knees weak and my tummy flutter. His left eye was always closed a bit more than the right, just on the edge of a wink.
I was cleaning my fifty-gallon fish tank, more because it was a good place to keep an eye on him than because it needed cleaning. Something important was happening; he never stood in front of windows without a good reason. Every thirty seconds—timed so precisely that I knew he was counting it out—he lifted his index finger to the window and drew a letter. Someone was out there watching. He had me as sure of it as he was.
He really was smart, genius-level smart. My own Da Vinci–minded inventor. He held patents on a handful of creative devices that could actually make the world a better place. Always thinking. Always a step ahead of the average guy.
I had seen a few letters from companies interested in his ideas. They were real. And he told me he was negotiating with major people who wanted a piece of his latest patent. It was big, he said, a revolution for the construction industry, bigger than the cut iron nail. And a dark car had been following him, putting on the pressure to sell for pennies on the dollar.
Technical drawings and disassembled devices covered every inch of his cluttered office. Dozens of clocks and watches, a telegraph printer that had worked when he bought it, bizarre medical tools, tubes, mechanisms from the Victorian era, and boxes of modern electronics all gave the space a surreal, science-fiction look. He never built anything new or put the ancient things back together, just placed the screws, gears, diodes, and microchips in neat lines on his worktable, each screw and component meticulously labeled.
The kids had to be kept away from these important experiments, and I wasn’t allowed to touch them either. Jada was just a toddler, grabbing with damp fists at the metal pieces whenever she tottered close. But she was easier to keep clear of the parts than Drew, who was early in his elementary-school years and already building perpetual-motion machines and robots. They were learning, though, that touching the forbidden projects was not worth Adam’s belt.
Someone always wanted the ideas blossoming in his head, the things he put on paper only after they had bent and tortured him—and me—for months. In a single hour he might sketch ideas for bubble-bath containers, children’s socks, and complex laser scanners. But he had never actually sold a patent. Not one. And while I’d seen them come in the mail with a gold seal and a red ribbon to prove their status with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, I had no idea where he hid them after holding them up in victory and promising big things.
I had never seen the cars following him, or noticed anyone sitting in the red truck in the neighbor’s backyard. That’s what he was staring at, writing a secret message on the window to someone hidden in that truck.