How to Build a House Page 16

  “They’re initials. GL and AD. Two people who used to mean everything to me.”

  I wish I hadn’t asked. Despite the fact that it’s written on his body, this is his private world, his history, and I’ve stepped into it uninvited. Are they dead? Divorced from him? Have they let a distance too big to cross grow between them?

  We’ve exited the highway and we’re pulling into the parking lot of the lumberyard.

  “Some things you can never put back together again,” he says, and he puts the van in park. He pulls off the big ring of keys and clips them to his belt loop.

  It becomes a ritual.

  I do it maybe three times a day. I dial everything but the 8.

  Tonight I do it just before bed. I’m standing in the hallway in my pajamas.

  I look at my graffiti in the phone booth. HE+TW 4EVER. I could easily have been writing about Tess Waxman. The lie would have been just as big.

  I start to dial the numbers. I figure maybe I’ll catch her working at the diner. I picture her in her uniform, balancing a tray piled high with dishes, struggling to dig her cell phone out of her apron pocket. I picture this, and it makes me smile, even though I know her phone won’t ring.

  When I get back to my room Teddy is there.

  “Surprise,” he says, and he kisses me.

  I look over at Marisol.

  She rolls her eyes. “He begged me to let him in, and when I said no, he offered me a dollar.”

  Teddy shrugs. “She’s cheap. I was willing to go up to five.”

  I haven’t seen Teddy since this afternoon. He had to help his dad sort through new gym equipment at school and get the locker room ready for preseason football.

  “Nice jammies,” he says. And then to Marisol, “So, how much for the room?”

  “Now, that is going to cost you!”

  Teddy laughs and I put my hand over his mouth because I hear Linus coming down the hall.

  He knocks quickly.

  “Goodnight!”

  “Goodni-ight!” Marisol and I singsong in unison.

  A few minutes pass during which Marisol and Teddy fake-haggle over how much he’s going to pay her to leave us alone for a few hours, and Marisol tries to figure out whose room to crash in.

  “How about Seth’s?” asks Teddy.

  Another knock arrives on the door. It’s not the special coded knock of Captain and Frances.

  We freeze. We figured Linus was long gone, so Teddy had stopped whispering, instead giving his voice over to his deep baritone.

  Another knock. More urgent.

  Without speaking we come to the agreement that Teddy should hide in the bathroom, and I follow him in and close the door. If Linus comes looking, I’ll fake some kind of distinctly female bathroom emergency.

  This plan leaves Marisol to do most of the covering up, and she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am.

  Teddy sits in the bathtub. I sit on the closed toilet lid. The light in the bathroom is attached to a noisy fan, so all we can hear is the door opening, some muffled voices. Not Linus. It’s probably Susannah. That’s a relief. I’d much rather be caught by Susannah.

  The door to our room closes again.

  There’s a pause and then Marisol knocks on the bathroom door. “Harper, I think you might want to come out here.”

  She sounds serious.

  I open the door, and there, in my motel room, like an apparition, staring at me with eyes the color of Tennessee grass, is Tess.

  I step out of the bathroom, Teddy behind me.

  We stand there, like four opposing points on a compass, all staring into the middle.

  I recall the image of Tess that came to me only minutes ago: in a fifties waitress uniform, juggling trays of french fries and milk shakes. I put that image of awkward Tess up next to the Tess who stands calmly before me, her loose hair falling over her shoulders. Her pale blue button-down shirt and jeans. Her flip-flops. Her perfectly pedicured toenails.

  I know I should say something, but I don’t know what to say.

  “I’m Teddy.” He breaks the silence. He sticks out his hand. Tess shakes it. “And I don’t usually hang out in the bathroom.”

  “Tess,” she says in a voice that betrays her. She’s not calm and confident. She’s nervous.

  “Nice to meet you, Tess. I was just leaving.”

  “Me too,” says Marisol. “I’ll be in Frances’s room, probably dashing Captain’s hopes for make-up sex.”

  Teddy gives my shoulder a squeeze and we exchange a look that is so familiar, so filled with understanding, that even with everything happening in this moment, I think: Remember his face, remember how he knows you, you’ll want to be able to remember this someday.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed as Teddy leads Marisol out the door. It closes quietly behind them.

  “Nice place,” Tess says.

  I smile, but then suddenly I’m irritated that I let her get off this cheap joke. Who is she to make fun of this room? This is where I live.

  “No, I mean it,” she says. “It’s cozy.”

  She takes a seat in the armchair.

  I look at her. She’s walked in here without anything. She doesn’t have a purse or a jacket or her cobalt blue suitcase that matches mine, gifts to us from Jane two Hanukkahs ago. She’s walked in here like she lives just down the hall, which I then learn, she actually does.

  “I flew to Chicago to meet Rose. Her friend took a plane back home. Rose agreed to drive me down here to see you. We checked in about half an hour ago.” She pauses. “Our room smells.”

  Rose is here! I think, but I still don’t say anything. I fold my legs underneath me on the bed.

  “You look good,” she says, and fixes her eyes on me. She picks up a pen from the table next to her and passes it absent-mindedly from one hand to the other. “Tan. Your hair has gotten even lighter. You look healthy. And I’m not just saying all this so you’ll talk to me instead of just sitting there staring at me like that.”

  “You look good too,” I say. But this isn’t a news flash.

  “And I’m guessing that the bathroom boy, Teddy, is your boyfriend?”

  I nod.

  “He seems really nice.”

  “He is. I like him. A lot. So do you think maybe, just as a small favor to me, you could refrain from sticking your tongue in his mouth?”

  “I can try,” she says, a slow smile spreading on her face.

  “Good.”

  She turns serious. “About that …”

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t. And clearly you can’t either. I should have told you I’m sorry.”

  “You should have told me?”

  “God. Do you always have to be the grammar police? What I mean to say is I should have told you earlier, and I’m telling you now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I knew how you felt about Gabriel, and I don’t really have a great explanation other than that I was stupid. And angry. Really upset about everything, about Art and what happened with Mom, and you’re so much like him, not that you’re dishonest, I mean you look so much like him, and you just make me think about him and what he did to Mom and all of us, and I wanted to hurt him, but I hurt you instead, and is this making any sense at all?”

  “Sort of,” I say. I think about launching into a defense of Dad, a speech about how it’s too easy to blame him for everything, but I also understand that what is happening right now between us is delicate and this probably isn’t the best moment for speeches.

  “And Gabriel never treated you right. He was a decent friend a long time ago, but all that fooling around or whatever, and he’d be with other people, and, I don’t know, I think he could have been more clear,” she says. “I probably did you a favor.”

  “Easy there. Don’t go making yourself into a martyr.”

  “You’re right. Sorry. I just needed to say that, because I’ve always thought it and never said it. I never liked the way he treated you. You loved him. He must have kno
wn that. And you were good to him, you would have been good for him, because that’s who you are, and he took advantage of you.”

  I get up and go over to my closet. I don’t feel right sitting here in my pajamas, but I don’t feel like changing in front of her either. So I grab some clothes and put them in a pile next to me on the bed, and I just let them sit there.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask. “How did you even know how to find me?”

  “Mom told me. She really misses you. She still makes zucchini bread sometimes, even though you were the only person in the family who ever liked it. The loaves sit on the counter until they’re hard as bricks.”

  Something hurts right behind my rib cage. I try to breathe into the pain, but that only makes it spread. A dull ache. It’s the space in there that hurts. The space where everything used to be.

  “Anyway, Mom told me to come see you. She says the best way, the only way, to work out your problems is to talk them through face to face. To not let too much time go by, where they grow so big it’s too late for talking. Rose agreed to drive me. And I came, even though I didn’t think you’d want me here.”

  “I slept with Gabriel.”

  She stares at me and gnaws away at her lower lip. “I didn’t know.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t have … Oh my God. That would have changed—”

  I cut her off. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  She sits on Marisol’s bed, facing me. I think about the nights when we’d talk from our beds on opposite sides of the room, whispering in the dark, when the only space between us was a few feet of striped carpet.

  “I thought he was what I needed,” I finally say. “I just needed somebody.”

  I pick up the pile of clothes next to me and take them into the bathroom. I close the door.

  “Can you get the keys to Rose’s car?” I call over the sound of the fan.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Because,” I say, “I have something I want to show you.”

  We park the car near the trailers and I can see by the light inside that the Wrights are still awake. I’m pulled toward them; I want to walk up the steps, open the door and blend right into their night, become a part of all they do just before going to bed.

  Instead I walk with Tess up the path to the building site, guided by a weak flashlight’s beam. Tess stumbles over a rock. I instinctively throw out my arm and she catches it to stop herself from falling. It’s the first time we’ve touched in so long.

  When we reach the house I try to illuminate it for her, but the flashlight just isn’t up to the task.

  Then I remember that the electricity works. This isn’t a building site anymore; it’s a real house.

  “Stay here,” I say, and take the porch steps two at a time. The front door is unlocked, there isn’t anything inside yet to steal. Anyway, Bailey isn’t a place where people lock their doors.

  I flip on the outside lights.

  Tess smiles and applauds and she looks like she did at her seventh birthday party when Professor Funster took a needle the length of a ruler and put it through a purple balloon without popping it.

  “It’s amazing. It really is. You did this?”

  I’m standing next to her now, looking up at the white house with dark green shutters and a black-shingled roof.

  This house doesn’t look nice, dependable, average. Tonight this house is lovely.

  “Well, I had some help.”

  “You really did this. You decided it was what you wanted to do with your summer and you went and did it. You know what I did? I studied SAT practice tests and served overpriced burgers to B-list celebrities.”

  “I heard. I want to see the uniform sometime.”

  “It’s a sight to behold.”

  I stop for a moment to soak up the sound of the cicadas. I’m so used to them now that I almost don’t hear them anymore, and I don’t want to miss out on one of my last chances to listen to their night music.

  “I wish I could have done better,” I say.

  “With what?”

  I nod at the house. “The house. It’s for Teddy. I wish I could have built him the Frick.”

  Tess has heard me go on about the Frick. I sent her a postcard that summer of Mistress and Maid.

  “Can I see the inside?” she asks.

  “Sure. It’s not finished yet, but we’re almost there.” I lead her up the front steps and when we get to the door I stop. “Take off your shoes.” I start to take off mine.

  “Did you just do the floors or something?”

  “No,” I say. “This is a home. We are walking on sacred ground.”

  STEP SEVEN:

  FINAL TOUCHES

  Over the next two days we finish.

  Everything is done, and every trace of us having even been here is gone. The work sheds and the portable toilets and the trucks and the extra materials and the trash. Everything has disappeared. Even the driveway up to the site, those well-worn dirt tire tracks, has been paved over with fresh asphalt. The only sign left that I spent my summer building a house is the house itself.

  Tess chipped in. She helped clear debris and clean the paint splatters off the hardwood floors and patch holes in the walls left by the electricians. Rose spent the days by the pool reading magazines and talking on her cell phone, but Tess wanted to help.

  I canceled my flight home to catch a ride with them. I’d have days in the car between here and there. It would ease the transition.

  I had to lend Tess some clothes. She brought only tight jeans and a few summer dresses, so she wore my shorts and T-shirts and she complained that she looked like a she-male, but of course she looked fabulous, her hair tied up over her head and her cheeks naturally rosy.

  At lunch we’d sit around eating our soggy sandwiches with an absence of taste I no longer minded, and Tess would talk with my friends, who had stockpiled an arsenal of questions for her. They were mostly about when I first started showing signs of the Girl Scout I was to become.

  “No,” Tess tells them. “Harper never actually joined the Girl Scouts, but I always figured that was because she was afraid the cookies would rot her teeth.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” I say.

  On the second-to-last night here, Tess convinces me to do something I haven’t done all summer. I show up for a midnight swim at the pool.

  Teddy comes too. The night is clear and the stars are bright. Captain and Frances have put their end-of-the-summer bickering behind them and he holds her in his arms in the pool, where you could get tricked into thinking he’s unusually strong, but then you remember that it takes no effort at all to hold someone up when you’re both standing in water.

  As usual there are boys circling Tess. There’s Jared, who broke up with Stacey two weeks ago, and Seth, who doesn’t seem to have let an entire summer of rejection discourage him in any way.

  Tess ignores them. We have a lot of catching up to do.

  We sit side by side on lounge chairs. I watch as Teddy does a running cannonball jump, and his body sails through the air like he was made to fly, and he lands with a ferocious splash and then is scolded by a chorus of harsh whispers. Cannonballs aren’t cool when you’re sneaking into the pool at midnight. I can see from the way he smiles that he knew he was causing trouble when he took the leap.

  “He’s great,” Tess says. “Really great. They don’t grow them like that where we’re from.”

  “I know,” I sigh.

  “How are you doing with the whole getting-ready-to-say-goodbye thing?”

  “I’d say I’m failing miserably.” I lean my chair all the way back so I’m looking up at the night sky. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “I can’t imagine you would.”

  I love that the first thing out of her mouth isn’t that I’m crazy or that even if I don’t want to, I have to go home again.

  “I just don’t know how to deal.”

  “It’ll be okay,” she says.

/>   “And then there’s Teddy …”

  “I know.”

  I think I see a shooting star, but I can’t be sure. It happened so fast.

  “Do you remember my bat mitzvah?” she asks.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m totally not. Did you pay any attention to my speech?”

  “I was concentrating on not dying of boredom. I guess I tuned everything else out.”

  “I worked hard on that, and if you weren’t even listening, who was?”

  I just look at her.

  “Right. Nobody.”

  “I’ll listen now. Give it another go.”

  “Like I could even remember it. I was thirteen. But I do remember I talked about this thing that this famous rabbi wrote once about how Christians build cathedrals, these gorgeous impressive structures, but Jews, with a long history of watching their buildings get destroyed, build their cathedrals in time. The High Holidays. Shabbat. Cathedrals carved out of time that can never be torn down. I know you’re no Jew, but I kind of think that’s what you did with your summer down here.”

  I feel like I could give myself over right now to a big cry. I could lose myself in the sorrow of the goodbyes that haven’t been said yet, or the changed life I never invited that awaits me back at home. Instead I look around me at everyone having a great time.

  “You think we could take them?” I motion toward the pool, where Frances is sitting on Captain’s shoulders and Marisol has climbed onto Teddy’s and they’re having a chicken fight.

  We’re up and stripping down to our bathing suits.

  “I haven’t been in a chicken fight since elementary school.”

  “You can sit on me,” I offer.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  We jump in and get eliminated almost immediately and we come up for air and we laugh.

  By the time I walk Teddy to his truck it’s already four-thirty in the morning. The sun will be up in less than two hours. He leans with his back against the door and I lean on him. He starts to pull away, but I hold him tighter and then I release him. He climbs in and unrolls his window and kisses me once more from the driver’s seat.