“Hope and Roman are cooking something. I made coffee.” He grinned. “Not that you’ll need it.”
We got three days’ worth of work done over the next ten hours. The mood was light, and our work was so synchronized that we appeared psychic. Hope had a paper to work on, and by six o’clock Roman was tired enough to cry over every bump and bug bite. “I’ll take you guys to the house, then I’m coming back to seal the concrete floors. It will be better if you guys are gone for that anyhow. Fumes are supposed to be toxic.”
Jada sang the alphabet backward for half the ride home. I was proud of Hope for not strangling her. We were happy. For the first time in a very long time we were just plain happy. The idea sent a chill down my spine. Happy people get lazy. They forget to be on guard.
I took a deep breath. We didn’t have to be on guard so much anymore. Matt had chilled out a lot, and while Adam might show up at the back door one day, we weren’t the same people we had been the last time he came around. We were strong in ways that had nothing to do with the biceps we showed off to one another when we had the energy to flex our new muscles for fun. We could relax. We were all going to be okay. And we were so close to the end of this project that we could taste it. The kids could get regular teenage jobs and go on dates. They could have friends over to hang out instead of hanging plywood and hoisting bathtubs. I could spend time with my mom again.
The kids dragged through their bedtime routines and I hugged them all. Roman was asleep before I was out the door. I cried on the drive to Inkwell—not full-out weeping, but a handful of tears for the burden I could see lifting from my children. Pulling up in the sandy, washed-out driveway of Inkwell Manor made me smile, though, just like it always did. I stopped at the end of the drive, car idling. The house was something of a marvel, even by moonlight, as surreal and impossible as a colossal pyramid. We had actually built it ourselves. That wasn’t all, though; it had built us, too, individually and as a family, until we had become a vital part of one another.
I pulled up to the garage, which still didn’t have doors. And because the slab hadn’t been poured outside it yet, there was no way to drive inside over the high concrete edge. Still, it felt more welcoming than the other house, safer.
The xylene finish for the downstairs concrete flooring was in a five-gallon metal pail in the garage. I had mopped and swept the floor before we left earlier that day, so it was fully prepped. Just to be sure, I swept again. The stain I had sprayed on with a garden weed sprayer, the green kind that you pump up to create air pressure, was called Cola Brown. The end result wasn’t what I had hoped, but only because of my amateur technique and inferior equipment. I had high—optimistic and unrealistic—hopes that the finish would hide rather than magnify my mistakes.
I opened all the windows and doors, upstairs and down, because ventilation was essential with the toxic chemical. The instructions strongly recommended protective breathing gear, which I did not have. There was no wind to blow dust inside, so I bargained that the ventilation would be adequate.
Staying true to my commitment to center the house’s purpose around my writing, I started in the library. The shiny finish brought out the natural variations in the concrete. I lost myself in the work, admiring the floor as I rolled a thick paint roller with a long handle forward and back, reloaded in a square pail, and went again, closing windows and doors as I passed them so they wouldn’t be open all night. By the time I reached the dining room, only the front door was open, and it was the one I would back out of when I finished.
But in the corner of the room farthest from the door, I realized I was in trouble. I touched my lips and couldn’t feel them. In fact, I could feel none of my face below my eyes. How long had that been going on? It seemed to have happened all at once. I took a step toward the door and realized I couldn’t feel much below my waist either, not enough to walk, anyhow. I dropped the roller in the bucket and fell to my hands and knees, crawling toward the door. By the time I reached it, I was on my belly doing the same combat crawl Hope had done until she learned to walk. Slithering like a snake, I made it to the front porch and as far away from the door as I could get without rolling down the porch steps.
For a few minutes, I wondered if the paralysis could be permanent, or if the fumes had caused brain damage. Wouldn’t it be ironic to build a house called Inkwell Manor with an enormous library and never be able to write again? The bullfrogs around the pond next door didn’t seem overly concerned with the pins and needles in my face and scalp, so I closed my eyes and listened.
At least two hours had passed when I woke up. Whether I had been napping or unconscious I didn’t know, but I felt normal except for extreme thirst and a headache. With my shirt pulled up over my mouth and nose, I ventured back into the house, and I rolled on finish in the dining room and foyer at record speed until I was standing back out on the porch to do the last few feet.
Thank goodness the kids hadn’t been around to inhale any of that crap.
I left the roller and bucket to be thrown out, my head aching too badly to clean them with more caustic chemicals. When I was back at the house with the kids and rubbing Hershey’s head before I climbed into bed, I realized I had no memory of the drive there.
Chalk xylene application up as a huge mistake. I would never come near the stuff again.
My dreams were of Caroline, or of me as her. Maybe we had become the same creature. It was a thought I didn’t like very much. Some part of her was more than just strong, it was vengeful, and that frightened me.
But did it really? Did it frighten me more than he did?
Not anymore.
The next week passed in a fog of work followed by more work and far too little sleep. We were all in a cloud of exhaustion on the night before the final inspection. It was a cool September night, which we welcomed after working so long in the heat. Our major task was installing all the plumbing fixtures and toilets. We had plenty of smaller tasks to finish and a lot of cleanup. Every day a fresh layer of sawdust, concrete dust, and Donna Fill coated everything.