Jada leaned in to Hope and pulled her knees up to her chin. They were both watching their feet.
“Spending the night there is going to be so awesome,” Drew said. “After all those months of imagining it.”
“The actual moving part isn’t any fun, but it’s a lot less work than building a house. Let’s start packing tonight.”
They didn’t only pack almost everything we owned into the impressive stack of boxes we’d been collecting for months, they also started disassembling furniture and piling it in the garage. They worked together, barely needing language to communicate. It was an impressive thing to watch.
The next afternoon we started carrying things over in a trailer I had picked up from craigslist. We had planned to rent a truck, but they kept insisting that we just take another load or two by trailer.
“We’ve moved almost all the furniture,” I said at around nine that night. I had just hung up the phone with my mom. She was planning to come help us unpack on the weekend but had started to feel bad again. She’d had pneumonia over the winter and had stayed with me for several weeks while she healed. I had worried about her, but she was tough and never complained. “Should we call it a night?” I suggested meekly to the kids.
“The only thing we have left are the beds,” Drew said. “Why don’t we just take the mattresses over now and sleep there tonight. We can get them all in one load if we leave the box springs.”
I was exhausted, but after months of dragging their feet over the move the kids were practically frantic to sleep at Inkwell. They pushed forward with no complaints. It was just like the build had been: Keep placing one foot in front of the other until the task is complete.
We had filled my library and the dining room with the bulk of the boxes, because they were closest to the front door and I couldn’t walk any farther than that. For the most part we had no idea what was in the boxes. At the beginning we had labeled them carefully, but then we had unpacked the boxes and reused them for so many more trips that every label was a jumbled mess.
“We’ll sort it out later,” Hope said when I pulled kitchen utensils, DVDs, and socks out of a box. “Let’s just get the mattresses in.”
Their euphoria was contagious. I was starting to feel that our long-delayed celebration was happening. A smile spread across my face and didn’t go away. Drew put on a dance mix, and we sang loud enough to be a disturbance. Even though it was way past his bedtime, Roman ran and leapt, and danced along with us. We were free and happy in a way we never would have been in another house. This was our personal space in every sense of the word.
“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.