“This is Gus, our contractor extraordinaire,” Martin said, introducing Joan and their sons. Then he nodded at Gus, and Gus laughed, and said, “Your dad wanted to give you guys a treat,” and he handed each boy a sledgehammer, and pointed to the wall that divided their rooms.
Daniel and Eric both turned to their father, and Martin said, “Go for it,” and they yelled, “Cool!” and struck the first blows at their old house, smashing holes where their heads used to rest on pillows on their beds.
Gus’s men trooped in then, and the family went back into the house. Daniel picked up his backpacks, then the four of them were down the walk, to the cars parked at the curb.
The boys looked at each other, grasped hands in a familiar way, as if walking through the red school door for so many years had taught them a code for brotherly love, no matter their differences, a secret way to say goodbye.
Daniel grabbed Eric into a rough hug, said, “Take care, buddy. Don’t be too weird at camp and try to come back as the brother I love.” Eric nodded until Daniel let him go.
“Mom,” Daniel said, pulling Joan close. He whispered into her ear, “I’ll be fine. I’ll be great. After all you’ve made me who I am. A kid who can take care of himself, who can figure shit out.” He kissed her cheek and stepped back.
He shook Martin’s hand gravely, the kind of parting Daniel thought this deserved. It would be his first time away from home for such a long period, practice before the real thing.
Eric threw himself into his father’s arms, said, “I love you, Dad,” then did the same thing to Joan.
“Honey, I’m the one taking you. Plenty of time to tell me how I’m a superlative mother, how we’re superlative parents letting you go to this camp.”
*
The summer was hot and dry and the grass, unchecked, grew high, covering their land in a dazzle of green light. Gus had promised that, absent any bad weather, the house would be finished by early August, an abbreviated construction schedule costing them a premium. Each night, when Martin came home from the hospital, he said, “Did you listen to the weather report, see any clouds?” and Joan would say, “I did. The weather is complying,” and, indeed, Martin’s prayers that it remain rainless were answered.
They were nomads, Joan thought, she and Martin moving ever forward in their house while the rooms in which she had raised her unexpected, unwanted family collapsed behind them. Later, they would wonder why they had not moved into Rhome’s only hotel at the far end of Strada di Felicità, lived dust-free at night.
Two weeks into the renovation, she and Martin were living in the kitchen, their bed was in there, and the television on top of the fridge, and out in the front hallway, their clothes hung on rolling racks, and in the front closet was the box securing Joan’s typewriter, pads and pens, and the thick draft of Words still hidden beneath those old coats. She would need somewhere to hide everything once the kitchen and front hallway came down, and, for a while, that box that contained her lifeblood was tucked in the trunk of her car.
She worked wherever and whenever she could in the house, if the noise was not too loud, and when it was, she edited chapters in a carrel at the Rhome library. But her presence was needed at home, on-site, in the zones of construction. She could not be absent for long, could steal only a few hours each day. She came to know Gus and his team very well, and then Tony, the swimming-pool builder, and his team.
Slowly, their new house began rising phoenixlike from the ashes. It was fascinating walking through the new cool and bare rooms, family life absent from the air. Family drained away the mystery of life, slowed, then stilled, its otherwise intrinsic thump-thump, and the cave—the cage—in which they dwelled, might change form as children grew, wriggling first fingers and toes, then gaining inches, saplings that might bear weight or give in to a hard wind. But in this new house, these new rooms, everything seemed possible once again, as possible as what Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton were creating in their arcadia, in the pages of Words of New Beginnings.
Only much later when the house was furnished, when other things had happened, would Joan realize what had always been absent from those lovely and detailed architectural plans. There were the boys’ new bedrooms, large and light, and bathrooms they could roam around in; and the new master bedroom that was breathtaking with its windowed walls where she could lie in bed in the early morning and feel the weather, its enormous bathroom where she could take her nightly bath; the new den with comfortable, deep couches, and a flat-screen for watching old movies, and Martin’s cherished turntable at last having a place, the shelves of his vinyl records, the speakers in the walls; the new study with its long marble desk and new ergonomic chair, its sleek new computer not to be commandeered by Eric, and with the artifacts and relics of Martin’s profession that he had found in dusty and disquieting antique stores on all his trips operating abroad that she hoped he would not put back on display, but did; the new library with its walls filled up with all of the books she had read from childhood on—books Daniel read growing up—and Martin’s medical reference guides, textbooks, and journals, comfortable armchairs to rest in, to read in, to dream in; the new living room with its skylights that brought down the stars on their heads, with its long white womanly soft sofas, redolent of pleasure; the new dining room with its long gleaming table; and the neat square arch that led into the enormous kitchen with the massive limestone center island that was quarried in Croatia and required six burly men and a small hydraulic crane to install. The rooms were all gorgeous and inviting, but not a single room, Joan would discover, belonged only to her.
She would realize this when the gale of Eric emptied her head, turned her book into something remote, years of work hard to recall. An illogic to it all, about what was happening. It was then, too, that she considered Eric’s name, its Norse meaning—eternal ruler—that ick at the end.
And Joan would wonder if it was true, that the good child rarely came out on top, and the child problematic since birth, slightly troubled in a way hard to identify, whose undeniable genius swelled in his teens, would win, taking up all the air in whatever room he happened to be in, in the house as a whole, in her every thought, setting she and Martin at odds, another triangle, this time a scalene, all its sides and angles different.