How to Build a House Page 13

  I stopped, pivoted and stared at him.

  Finally. He’d defined us.

  A list of responses shuffled around in my head. There were so many to choose from, but I knew, somehow, that I’d never be able to say the right thing. So instead I shook my head, and turned back around, and walked slowly up the steps to the school entrance, and Gabriel let me go.

  Tess and I went the entire week without running into each other. She very carefully and successfully avoided me. A few times I saw her disappear around a corner or duck into a classroom.

  When she got out of the car and slammed my door the night of the party she, like she always did, got the last word. She was the one who got to make the angry, dramatic exit. She made it seem like I’d done something wrong, when I deserved the last word. I deserved to be the one who slammed doors and didn’t shatter glass.

  Tess cheated. She cheated at cards and now she cheated me out of the position of angry, hurt and wounded sister.

  I decided I’d stop speaking to her. I’d pretend we didn’t go to school together with lockers down the hall from each other. I’d pretend we didn’t once share a room and clothes and secrets. I’d pretend we didn’t still share a history and a younger brother who spoke to insects.

  Tess would be nothing more to me than a girl I sometimes saw as she was walking away or turning corners or ducking into rooms.

  I took stock of my life.

  I had other friends. Friends I talked to at parties or sat with at lunch. There were the people in the Environmental Club. My lab partner, Kiki Thomas. Ben from U.S. History. Natalie Banks with the stiletto-heeled boots.

  Without Tess, there was nobody to talk to about Gabriel. Without Gabriel, there was nobody to talk to about Tess. Maybe that was all right after all.

  And anyway, I had Dad.

  Dad was always loyal—maybe not to Jane, but he was always loyal to me.

  HERE

  On the first two nights Teddy goes home around ten, but on Saturday night he invents an excuse. Something about sleeping over at a friend’s, and his parents buy it even though Mikey, Teddy’s only real friend, is gone for the summer.

  We have a whole night together.

  If I complained earlier that there needs to be another word for heat down here, that the heat I’ve known all my life bears no resemblance to the heat I’ve felt since arriving in Tennessee, then the same can be said about sex.

  It should have another name.

  What happens with Teddy during these three nights with a room to ourselves is nothing like what happened over those months at home with Gabriel, where every time I found myself pressed against him it felt random, and every time it was over and he rolled his body away from mine, I felt the chill of insignificance envelop me.

  There’s nothing random about what happens with Teddy. We are here, naked together in this dingy room, exploring each other because we choose to be together, here, now.

  For three days all my worries fall away. There were the worries about sex and how things would be after. And there were others too, the ones that come with sharing a small motel room with the one person in the world whom you want to see only the very best of you.

  But my worries vanish into this polyester-curtained, traced-with-old-cigarette-smoke, hazy light. The days fly by in a contented blur, but at the same time, paradoxically, they go by in slow motion.

  And then, when Sunday morning comes, and Teddy is lying next to me, it’s like waking up from a dream. A heaviness has arrived. An intruder into this realm of new possibility. Its weight is everywhere: in the air, my hair, my T-shirt. In the comforter I kick to the floor.

  Marisol returns tonight. Teddy goes back to sleeping in his trailer. In a few weeks I go back home. Everything is ending.

  So maybe I’m being melodramatic. But there’s something unbearably sad to me in the beautiful way Teddy sleeps with his arm up over his head and his mouth slightly open. He smells sweaty and earthy, like pencil shavings.

  I trace a line from his chin down his neck, over his Adam’s apple to his skinny chest, and I stop at his heart.

  I stand up and walk to the window. It’s late morning. The clouds are small, scattered over the deep-blue sky like someone kicked over a box of cotton balls.

  “Hey,” I hear Teddy say, softly and sleepily, but I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want him to see the tears that are starting to come against my will.

  “Hey, come back here.”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “I know. Come back to bed.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  He stands up and comes over and wraps his arms around me. He strokes my hair. He turns me to face him and he wipes a tear from my cheek.

  “Ssshhh,” he says. “Please don’t cry. I can’t stand it.”

  I laugh and wipe my face on my T-shirt. “Don’t take it personally. It’s me. I only manage to cry when someone treats me well.”

  “So if I want you to stop, I need to do my baby wrong?”

  “I guess so.”

  We go back and sit on my bed, I lean against the headboard and he leans against the wall. I drape my legs over his lap.

  He runs his hand up and down my thigh.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I blurt out.

  “I’m not sure Marisol would appreciate it if I stayed. Look at this place. I’m a total slob. I leave my clothes on the floor and toothpaste stains in the sink.”

  If only he’d seen the room before I’d tidied it.

  “You are a slob. But I still wish you didn’t have to go.”

  What I really mean to say is that I’m afraid that when he opens the door to this room and walks back to his life, some kind of spell will be broken, everything will start to fall apart, the summer will begin to end. But of course, I don’t say any of that.

  He kisses the top of my head. “We’ll find another way to be alone,” he says, completely misreading me. “There’ll be other opportunities.”

  “Okay.”

  He untangles himself from me and stands up. He’s all legs and arms, a stick figure in red-and-white-striped boxers. He reaches for his jeans and pulls them on. He’s leaving.

  He tugs his shirt over his head and leans down for a kiss, which I deliver quickly.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he says.

  “Of course you do.” I try to sound cool.

  “You understand, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, you don’t.” He looks down at me and then climbs back onto the bed, pins me under him, and kisses me long and hard before he’s back on his feet.

  “You said it yourself. It’s Sunday,” he says.

  “So?”

  He turns back with one more smile as he reaches for the doorknob. “Jesus radio might be enough for you, but it isn’t for me. I have to go to church.”

  He pulls open the door and light pours in.

  There’s nobody in the breakfast room but Linus, his face obscured by a copy of the Memphis Daily News. I grab a banana and a muffin and I fill my travel mug with coffee.

  I think about sneaking back to my room, where it still smells of Teddy, but instead I pull up a folding chair and Linus puts down his paper.

  “News flash,” he says. “It’s going to be hot.”

  “I’m sick of heat. Heat totally sucks.”

  “Well said.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I suggest you get used to it. It’s the wave of the future, pardon the pun.”

  “I know it.” I peel my banana but it’s bruised and stringy. I put it down on the table. “Do you think we caused the tornado?” I ask him.

  “You and me?”

  “No, I mean humanity. Are we to blame, or do you think it was just a run-of-the-mill natural disaster?”

  Linus scratches his beard. “Actually, the definition of a natural disaster is when a hazard meets human vulnerability, which pretty much accounts for all tragedies.”

  I think about that for a minute. A hazard
meets human vulnerability. It does describe a lot.

  What I’m really after is whether we’re responsible for this hazard, but I know Linus doesn’t have the answer. He’s not a scientist, and even if he were, it wouldn’t matter. Not even scientists know.

  Everything is speculation.

  “I haven’t seen much of you this weekend,” he says as he takes a final swig of his coffee before standing up and starting to clear his place. I blush. I hate breaking rules and I hate lying to Linus.

  “Catching up on sleep,” I offer.

  I follow him to the trash bin, where I deposit my uneaten banana and the greasy paper wrapper from my muffin.

  “How’s Teddy?”

  I look at him. Is he testing me? Does he know something?

  I think of Teddy leaving, of his back as the door closed behind him and the light chased him out of the room.

  I shrug. “He’s fine, things are fine, I guess.”

  I can see Linus doesn’t believe me.

  What I really want to say is that nothing lasts forever, no matter how solid it seems. I know this. I’ve always known this. This knowledge is with me like a smooth stone in my pocket. There are days I worry my fingers over the stone’s surface at every waking moment and some days I forget that the stone is there at all.

  Today, the stone weighs forty pounds.

  We step outside to the same cotton-ball-littered sky I saw through my window this morning while Teddy was still sleeping.

  Linus closes his eyes and puts his arms out at his sides. “‘Look to this day. For it is life. The very life of life.’”

  I stand beside him. Quiet.

  He continues. “‘In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The splendor of beauty, the bliss of growth, the glory of action. Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.’”

  He opens his eyes and looks at me. “It’s an ancient Sufi text.” He smiles. “My mantra.”

  He folds his paper, bats me over the head with it and walks away.

  I do another round of tidying for Marisol’s return.

  We’re living opposite lives. Photonegatives of each other’s. Her bed is crisp and untouched, mine is a tangle. Her clothes are folded neatly in the closet, mine are all over the floor.

  She’s spending a summer away from her boyfriend, but she’ll go back to him soon. My boyfriend is here, just down the dusty road, but when this summer ends I’ll have to say goodbye to him.

  I think of Linus’s mantra. In the same Eastern philosophy class where I learned about yin and yang, we read part of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now.

  Be here now.

  I found the idea simplistic and annoying, which might have had something to do with the fact that Baba Ram Dass is really a Jew from Massachusetts named Richard Alpert. Or maybe it was simply that the idea that nothing else matters but the moment you’re in, while an attractive idea, just didn’t make any practical sense in the world I inhabited.

  But Linus offers something different. More complex. An idea I can get behind. What his mantra seems to say is that if you enjoy your life in the moment, if you’re happy and you live well, then that painful past begins to recede and you’ll be more open to possibilities in the future.

  I’m done cleaning up, and I go out into the hallway to make my weekly call to Dad.

  He asks me how I am. How’ve I been? What’s new?

  What am I supposed to say? That everything has changed? That Teddy chose me? That I feel happier and more at home here than I do home alone with him?

  “Nothing’s new. I’m fine.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “Actually, I’m the opposite of angry.”

  “I’m not sure there is an opposite of angry, other than not angry.”

  I make a mental note to myself: Precision about language can be really, really annoying. It can make you miss the point of what the other person is saying altogether.

  “Okay. Fine. I’m not angry, I’m happy. I’m pretty sure happiness can be an opposite of anger. And I’m happy. Things are great here.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “Yes, it is. Life is good down here. My friends are fantastic. They’re nice and kind and loyal. And this family we’re building the house for? The Wrights? They’re amazing. Teddy. And the girls. And Diane and Coach Wes. I mean, after everything they’ve been through, and not just the tornado, but everything, coming from different backgrounds with family who didn’t approve, settling in a town that wasn’t welcoming to mixed-race couples, after all that, they’re still together. They’ve made everything work.”

  “That’s great for them, Harper. I’m glad they’re still together. I hear what you’re saying. And again, I’m sorry to have failed you. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the family you so desperately wanted.”

  “You did give it to me, Dad. And then you took it away.”

  There’s a long silence full of clicks and scratches on the phone line.

  He clears his throat and asks me about my conversation with Jane, and whether I’m planning on calling Tess, and I tell him it’s time for a meeting, which is a lie.

  Baba Ram Dass was right. Linus was wrong. All I want is to be here now. I don’t want to think about the past. I don’t want to imagine what will happen when I return. I just want to protect my life here from the intrusions of that other life that is thousands of miles and clicks and scratches away.

  HOME

  The story of Tess and me pretty much ends with the slamming of my car door. I wish there were more to say.

  I stopped talking to her. She stopped talking to me.

  There were times when this was impossible, like when I would ring the doorbell to her new house on the days Dad and I picked up Cole. Sometimes she’d say, “Hey. Hang on a sec.” And then she’d walk away shouting, “Coley!”

  I’d say, “Thanks.”

  Five words from Tess. One from me.

  There was the time our U.S. History classes were joined for a one-day project. There was the time we were assigned to the same Saturday college-essay-writing workshop.

  I stopped seeing Jane. I rebuffed her invitations to lunch, or the movies, or shoe shopping.

  Too much homework. I’m watching Cole. I have other plans.

  Any excuse other than I can’t face you because you remind me of too many betrayals.

  Dad tried talking to me. I never told him anything other than I just wanted him to leave me alone, that things with Tess were hard, that he couldn’t possibly understand.

  But no matter what happens, the earth keeps turning.

  Monday always comes and eventually, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, that Monday is followed by a Friday. You take tests and hand in papers you wrote at two in the morning the day they were due, and your shoes get worn out, and the pollen in the air increases so that you go through an entire package of tissues during the SATs, and you wander through the crowds at parties looking for Natalie Banks because you came with her, and you watch her take off for the backyard with a senior who seems to be in the backyard with a different girl at every party, and you learn to play chess with your dad, and you eat too much ice cream, and your favorite television drama has its two-hour season finale, and then suddenly the school year ends and you pack your bags for Tennessee.

  And that’s the end of the story.

  STEP SIX:

  THE ROOF

  The summer after sixth grade I spent a month in New York City with my grandparents that flew by in a haze of melting sidewalks, Popsicles in Central Park and museum after museum. I loved sitting in the Egyptian wing of the Met. I loved cruising the design exhibit at MOMA. I loved the dizzying spiral walkway in the Guggenheim and how I could never know which floor we were on. But my favorite museum turned out to be the Frick on Fifth Avenue.

  Half the reason to go to the Frick is to wander around the mansion. Now that I know a thing or two about building houses, I really appreciate
the quality of the materials and the grand space. Henry Clay Frick made a fortune in steel, and after he built himself this mansion and decorated it with worldclass art, he died and left it all to the public. I’m guessing that really pissed off his heirs.

  My grandmother and I went once a week and we’d check out the dining room and the library, sit in the garden, and before we’d leave, I’d visit my favorite painting: Mistress and Maid.

  One young woman in a regal yellow gown, one in a brown sack dress. One beautiful, one plain. They stand at a small writing table, pen and paper ready. There’s an entire novel right there on the canvas in who these women are to each other, and how they got there.

  I still remember part of the curator’s description:

  There is an exceptional sense of dramatic tension in this painting of two women arrested in some moment of mysterious crisis.

  When I returned from New York, Tess had switched our beds around. Mine was now by the window. For years I’d complained about not getting enough fresh air or light in my corner of the room, but Tess wouldn’t budge. Now she’d gone and surprised me, and made my bed with perfect hospital corners and moved around our bedside tables and didn’t even try to pass off her lamp with the small burn mark on the shade as mine, and I knew that all of this was her way of telling me she’d missed me.

  HERE

  The roof is getting shingled today. It’s going to be brutal up there in this heat, and I’m hoping Linus has me inside working on the cabinets or maybe even painting.

  Painting is one of the jobs nobody wants. You could go mad painting. Every wall and ceiling and inside every closet and all those corners and all that white primer and white paint, it just goes on forever, and you start to feel like you’re rolling away the contents of your brain with every stroke, but it’s got to be better than spending the day on the roof in hundred-degree heat.

  Teddy picks me up for breakfast at his place and when we get back to his trailer, it’s empty.

  “Surprise,” he says. He starts kissing me and we fall onto the couch. “The twins have doctor’s appointments in the city.” He throws some pillows to the floor. “Mom took them in for breakfast so they could beat rush-hour traffic.” He pulls off my T-shirt. “Dad had an early meeting with the school principal.”