How to Build a House Read online

  They moved in one day, and the next it was as if they’d been there forever.

  I know how that sounds. It sounds ridiculous. Like a lie. The hallways should have echoed with the shrill screams of bickering girls. Doors should have slammed. Harsh words spoken. Feelings bruised.

  That would all come later, like it inevitably does between sisters. But that isn’t how it was those first few weeks, and maybe that’s because I’d just turned six, and the idea that one day your family looks one way and the next day it looks another way was all that I knew.

  The years between then and now taught me the dangerous lesson that comfort and solace can be found in the everyday rhythms of a predictable life. The years in between taught me that you can rely on things to be a certain way when you wake up in the morning.

  Now I know again that one day things can be going along like they always were and then, suddenly, in a simple rotation of an overheated planet, everything can change.

  It’s a hell of a lot harder to take this lesson at seventeen than it was at two. Or six.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Back to the day of the wedding and my white tulle dress with the splattered mud and electric-green grass stains.

  It was perfect.

  HERE

  F. Gregory has short dark hair that sticks up in just the right way and in just the right places. She has three earrings in one ear and two in the other. She’s sporting the perfect pair of jeans.

  I hate her.

  No, I don’t hate her. Of course I don’t hate her. Let’s be honest. She has the look I’ve always wanted but never even tried for because it’s so far beyond my reach I’d dislocate something just attempting to graze it with my fingertips.

  She’s cool. I’m not, particularly.

  I have long blond hair. It doesn’t ever do a thing that would come close to approaching stylish. It’s straight and flat and thin. It’s blond, sure, and some people will tell you that it’s a beautiful color, but they’re lying. It’s dull.

  I don’t have anything pierced because I’m a complete wuss when it comes to pain. If I could step into a world where the idea of somebody taking a gun and shooting some part of my flesh with a sharp metal stud didn’t make me physically ill, I think I’d get a nose ring. A small diamond just above my left nostril. Something on my face that sparkles, that would make you want to look at me.

  Also, I can’t wear jeans.

  This is a fact. I’ve tried. I even tried wearing the expensive kind of jeans. The upward-of-two-hundred-dollars kind. Well, they were two hundred and twenty-four dollars. After I wore them three times I had to admit that they didn’t work on me.

  I sold them on eBay.

  For two hundred dollars.

  So basically I spent twenty-four dollars plus postage and handling to learn something I already knew: that I can’t wear jeans.

  F. Gregory is wearing forty-dollar Levi’s and they look fantastic.

  Her plane arrived from New York. So we have something to talk about while we stand around waiting for S. JARVIS.

  “Sue?” I ask Linus.

  “Seth,” he says. “I believe that places you in the wrong forty-nine-point-three percent.”

  “Damn.”

  F. Gregory’s real name is Frances, and she lives in the West Village with her mom; her dad lives on the Upper East Side. My grandparents live on the Upper West Side and I have an uncle in the East Village, so between us we have the four corners of New York City fairly well covered.

  I just tell her I live in Los Angeles and don’t say anything else about whom I live with or where, and she doesn’t ask, and I’m totally and completely relieved because I start to taste my pounding heart just thinking about how to answer any more questions. I sit down on my suitcase and start digging through my backpack like I’m looking for something, and she turns and starts talking to Linus, probably writing me off as a stuck-up bitch who’s too cool to make polite conversation.

  I don’t really care.

  I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to forget friends. And sort-of boyfriends. And sisters. And mothers.

  Seth Jarvis has a buzz cut. He’s from Salt Lake City and he’s wearing khaki shorts, flip-flops and a baggy white T-shirt that doesn’t quite mask his boy boobs. He’s carrying a big bottle of water.

  In the van, as we leave Memphis behind and I take one last longing look at civilization, Linus turns the radio to a country music station. Seth Jarvis seems to know the song that’s playing. He and Linus discuss another version that Seth likes better.

  I hate country music.

  I hate country music so much that I considered not coming to Tennessee. Homes from the Heart has other summer programs for teens. There’s one in Guatemala. But I haven’t heard enough Guatemalan music to know if I hate it or not. And anyway, I knew about the tornado. I saw the picture of the boy with the tear running down his dusty face.

  Disasters don’t pass me by just because they’re small.

  There was an article about this tornado on the Web site I visit devoted to climate change. This scientist believes that tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and fill-in-the-blank disasters are a direct result of global warming. They’re caused by human activity. If we change the way we live our lives, he argues, we could decrease disaster in the world.

  I’ve read plenty of the other types of articles too. The ones where the scientists argue that disasters are inevitable, that no matter what we do, there are certain disasters that will always befall us.

  After a long drive we turn off the highway and spend another twenty-five minutes traversing smaller roads. I notice a pattern. It goes something like: church, church, fast-food restaurant I’ve never heard of, church, muffler shop, church, church.

  We stop at an intersection.

  “Downtown Bailey, people. Blink and you’ll miss it.” Linus takes his foot off the brake and we roll on. I look out the window behind me. Some storefronts. American flags. A woman with red hair sits on a bench.

  In another few minutes we arrive at what Linus calls our hotel, though actually it’s a motel on the side of an empty road. No restaurants or muffler shops. Not a single church. It sits alone. Even trees keep their distance.

  I’m assigned to 7W, room 7 on the West Wing. Girls on the West Wing. Boys on the East Wing. By the way, calling the two sides of this place wings won’t fill it with glamour.

  But here’s the thing.

  I love it here.

  As I turn the key in my door and step into the floral-polyester-curtained darkness, a smell wafts over me of a room that was once a place where you could smoke. I take in the tacky art on the walls, the moth-eaten orange armchair, a cracked mirror, and I fall in love.

  It’s a place of anonymity. A generic room that could be anywhere. It is anywhere, and it’s nowhere, and for the next twelve weeks, it’s a place I can call my own.

  HOME

  Tess and Rose have a dad.

  They have a dad who isn’t my dad.

  At first I found this really hard to take. When they moved into our house and we were a family and Jane was the mom and Dad was the dad, I took it as a personal affront every time Avi showed up to collect Tess and Rose. I pretended I didn’t hear the doorbell.

  If we didn’t answer the door I thought maybe he’d go away.

  If a doorbell rings in your house and no one goes to answer it, do your sisters have a different father?

  I sulked. I moped. I did all the things kids do when they feel sorry for themselves.

  Finally it was determined that it made more sense if, when Avi came to take his daughters, he just took all three of us.

  I don’t know whose idea this was, but it was brilliant.

  I grew to love Avi.

  I still do even though he’s soon to become my ex-stepsisters’ father or my ex-stepmother’s ex-husband, and that may be too wide a gap for us to bridge. We were already nothing to each other, strictly speaking.

  Avi lives at
the beach.

  When you walk in the front door of his apartment and you look across the living room to the glass sliding doors that lead out to the deck, for a minute all you can see is water, and it feels like you just stepped onto a boat.

  When we were younger, we’d spend our Saturday nights there. Avi would order Chinese food. We’d rent movies. In the mornings we’d eat bagels sitting on the sand in our pajamas.

  Avi’s a writer. He writes for the Los Angeles Times.

  Now when the paper comes to our house in the mornings, I skim it to see if he has a byline, and if he does, I fold the paper up and throw it in the recycling bin.

  HERE

  Our first community meeting is tonight.

  We’re meeting by the pool. Our motel has a pool. Hooray.

  I’ve got a few hours to kill so I decide to take a walk, but I only make it as far as the gas station up the road, where I go in and fight the urge to buy a real root beer. I reach for a diet Hines root beer in a can and I feel a pang for L.A. with all its fancy brands of microbrewed sodas in their designer bottles.

  I stand inside the air-conditioned gas station mart and watch the heat melting the asphalt road. It rises like a spirit. Like all the life is picking itself up off the surface of the earth in search of someplace better. Or at least cooler.

  Even before arriving here, I spent a lot of my time thinking about heat. It’s hard not to think about heat when the ten hottest years in recorded history have all occurred in my lifetime, and every shred of reliable science points to the earth only getting hotter. But I’ve never seen what heat actually looks like, until this empty asphalt road in the middle of nowhere.

  When I walk back to the motel and open the door to room 7W I find a girl unpacking an enormous suitcase.

  I didn’t count on this.

  This was my spot of anonymity. My place to be alone. I don’t know a soul.

  Yet I trip over someone else’s shoes at my very own doorstep.

  Apparently I have a roommate.

  She has dark curly hair and thin, rectangular black glasses. Her shoes, the ones I tripped over at the door, are those outdoorsy, hiking-in-the-mountains-but-if-you-come-across-a-stream-you’ll-be-okay-in-the-water kind of shoes.

  “Oops. Sorry about that,” she says as she grabs them and puts them in the closet. My closet. “I’m in the habit of taking off my shoes whenever I step inside anywhere. My mother is compulsive about her imported rugs.”

  I’m trying to readjust. I feel the quiet nights of lying in bed alone, staring at the ceiling, or maybe writing letters I’ll never send, slipping away from me.

  “I’m Marisol. My flight was late. There was a power outage at the San Francisco airport, which didn’t do much to boost my confidence in the aviation industry.”

  “I’m Harper.”

  I try to seem upbeat, happy to meet her, thrilled to find her unpacking, but I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.

  The best I can come up with is to offer her some of my diet Hines root beer in a can. She takes a pass.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “Los Angeles,” I say, and then I go into the bathroom and shut the door behind me even though I have no business to take care of in there. I turn on the faucet and let it run for a minute. Then I feel guilty about wasting water.

  It’s a paradox. The polar ice caps are melting. The oceans are rising. A terrifying future of too much water looms ahead of us, yet water is something we’re constantly told we need to conserve. It’s a precious resource. It’s precious and yet there’s a very real threat posed by having too much of it.

  I’m pretty sure that’s a paradox.

  I splash some water on my face, dry it with a threadbare towel and come out of the bathroom to try again with Marisol.

  “It’s hot as hell here,” I say, and as soon as I do, I notice a crucifix around her neck. “Oh, damn.” My hand flies up to cover my mouth. “Oh my God. I said damn. Sorry for that. And for the hell. And while I’m at it, I guess I should apologize for the God too.”

  She looks at me like I’m completely insane.

  I gesture to her neck.

  “Oh please.” She worries the crucifix between her fingers. “I swear like a sailor. Honestly. It makes my mother crazy. She’s from Mexico. She doesn’t speak much English, but she knows the four-letter words. I try, but it’s like the more I think about cleaning up my language, the dirtier it gets. It’s my one vice. That and caffeine.”

  “That’s two.” I wish I hadn’t just said that. I have this habit of being annoyingly particular and literal about language.

  She smiles and takes off her glasses, cleaning the lenses with her tank top. “So it is.”

  We walk together to our first community meeting, because that’s what roommates do. They stick together. Everyone is flocking to the pool in pairs, like various species on our way to the ark.

  We sit on lounge chairs missing vinyl straps. I do a quick count. There are sixteen of us. An even mix of boys and girls. I wonder who they are and why they’re here. Are they running from something? Did they see a heartbreaking photograph?

  Linus is wearing a white T-shirt and his arms are covered with a forest of red hair. He’s sitting on the concrete with his back to the pool and his legs folded underneath him.

  His eyes are closed.

  People are starting to get uncomfortable now, waiting for him to acknowledge that we’ve arrived for the meeting, but he’s still sitting there with closed eyes, his chest rising and falling with slow, deep breaths.

  I guess by people, I really mean me. I’m getting uncomfortable now. I feel like I’m witnessing a private moment, but I can’t seem to take my eyes off him. He looks like he’s meditating, which seems weird because from what little I know of lumberjacks they aren’t the meditating kind. They’re big and strong and simple, if they even exist at all and aren’t just made up to sell paper towels.

  Finally someone says, loudly, “Dude. What’s up?”

  Linus opens his eyes and smiles. He stands and stretches. He takes a deep breath and clasps his hands together.

  “Welcome. It’s a blessing to have you all here, gathered in this beautiful place. Over the next twelve weeks, we will learn the value of togetherness, what happens when we get together, when we open ourselves up to one another, and to the greater community beyond. I hope what we find is that with two hands you can do divine work, without limitation, as if you had an infinite number of hands.”

  All I can think about while he’s talking is, I’m going to kill Dad.

  All I knew was that I wanted to help that boy in the picture, the one with the tear on his dusty face. It was Dad who found the Homes from the Heart Summer Program for Teens. I could go spend the summer building a house, he said. It’s a great program, he said, and it’s one of the few teen volunteer programs not affiliated with any religious institution. Or cult. He said.

  I take a quick look around to catch someone’s eye for a quick eye roll, a shared moment of understanding about how weird this guy is, but then I realize that those eye rolls only work with people you know and who know you back.

  “How many of you have ever built anything?” Linus asks.

  That’s a reasonable question, so I begin to consider it.

  At home on the living room rug: Lego towers, Lincoln Log cabins. At school: dinosaur dioramas, Popsicle-stick bridges.

  This probably isn’t what he’s after, so I don’t raise my hand.

  I’m the only one who doesn’t.

  So, naturally, the next word out of Linus’s mouth is “Harper.” He looks at me and smiles. “You’ve never built a thing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing other than kid stuff.”

  “What about friendships?” He scratches his beard. “Dreams? Plans for your future?”

  “Well, yeah, sure, but …”

  “Then you’re prepared. You already have the important tools. I’m j
ust going to introduce you to a few new ones like a leveler and a circular saw. Simple stuff.” He scans the rest of the group. “We’ll start with all that tomorrow, okay? Tonight your work is to get to know each other.”

  Other employees of Homes from the Heart arrive with trays of food and buckets of bottled water and soda. I watch as everyone sizes up everyone else. We’re all we’ve got for the next twelve weeks.

  There are a few kids who’ve done this program before, but most of us are here for the first time. There’s a lot of talk about wanting to do something that matters, rather than teaching campers how to weave a proper lanyard. A few kids are genuinely interested in learning carpentry skills. One boy says his father thought this experience would teach him how to be a man.

  There’s a beautiful Japanese girl named Marika with hair to the small of her back and the body of a ballerina.

  “You mean we have to work?” she deadpans. “I thought this was a performing arts camp.”

  Dessert is served, and even though it’s turned dark and the moon sits low in the sky, the Popsicles start melting the minute the wrappers come off. I soak up as many details about everybody as I can without giving too much of myself away.

  There are sounds all around me. Noises I’ve never heard. A symphony of Tennessee insects humming in the darkness.

  And then I go back to my room, and I sleep facing the wall, and I try my best to pretend that I’m alone.

  HOME

  I dream of Gabriel.

  I wish to God I didn’t.

  I met Gabriel in sixth grade when both of our elementary schools fed into the same middle school. Seated next to me in Mr. Ratner’s math class, he became my first friend who also happened to be a boy.

  It’s not as if I didn’t know boys growing up. There were boys on my street and boys whose parents were friends of Dad and Jane. But Gabriel was my first friend who also happened to be a boy with whom I talked on the phone and went to the movies, or just hung around the house complaining about how there’s nothing to do when you’re too young to drive in L.A.