How to Build a House Read online

  When something comes along and rips your home right off its foundation, you have to use everything you have just to try to hold yourself together.

  HOME

  Tess came up to me at school on the Monday after the party and apologized.

  Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe this is Tess coming back around.

  “I shouldn’t have left you like that. And I definitely shouldn’t have left you and then gone off and done four Jell-O shots.” She made a face. “Jell-O is disgusting. I don’t even understand what it is. I mean, what are its properties? Is it a solid? A liquid? By the way, adding vodka into the mix sheds absolutely no light on these complex questions.”

  For the briefest moment, I forgot everything and just laughed at her like I used to.

  “So, how was your night? I’m guessing it was better than mine because I didn’t see you anywhere near the Jell-O shots.”

  I had seen Gabriel talking to Sarah Denton with his face about three inches from hers, and I took off without saying goodbye to him, figuring he could find his own way home.

  I didn’t say any of this to Tess because I couldn’t even figure out what it was I was feeling. And anyway, with her gone only about ten days, there was too much to fill her in on standing in the hallway between classes.

  “It was okay,” I lied.

  There was an awkward silence. I suddenly felt like a shy boy trying to muster up the courage to ask an untouchable girl out on a date. I didn’t know how to begin. Was the cooling-off period over? Could we start talking again?

  Tess and I never had to part not knowing when and where we would see each other again. We always knew we’d meet up back home, in the kitchen.

  “So, maybe we could hang out later,” I said.

  “For sure. You know, you should come by our new place. Check it out. Cole has a terrarium with a tarantula in his room. Mom’s overcompensating. You know how freaked out she is by spiders, so she must really be worried about him.”

  “That’d be nice,” I said. “And you can always come by the house too. You know how to find it.”

  Her face fell. She was suddenly Tess from the party again.

  “I can’t do that. I won’t do that. If you want to hang out it has to be at my place, or somewhere else, anywhere but your house.”

  It was as if she’d slapped me. Kicked me in the gut. Yet she hadn’t moved.

  Tess was still far, far away from me.

  “But …” But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t want to go to that house ever again.”

  In a second, a whole world was revealed.

  Tess blamed Dad.

  I let this wash over me. I soaked in it as the bell for fourth period rang and Tess disappeared down the hallway.

  I was never late. To anything. Ever. But today I was going to be late.

  No, today I was going to miss class altogether.

  I leaned against my locker and slid down.

  I started to get angry. I started to think of things in terms I’d never had to think of them before.

  My father. Her mother.

  Is that what this was going to come down to?

  You didn’t see me refusing to go to Jane’s. In fact, I’d gone to lunch with Jane, and I let her hold my hand and tell me she still loved me.

  I was trying to be generous. I was trying to stay above all that, the mine and the hers.

  But not Tess.

  I sat on the cold stone floor of the empty hallway.

  HERE

  This morning the heat came early.

  By ten, my hair was soaked through. I lifted up my goggles to wipe away the sweat that had pooled just below them, and like an idiot, or maybe like someone in the throes of heatstroke, I forgot to put them back on before returning to the worm-drive saw.

  I got some dust in my eye. At least, that’s what I assumed it was, but now it’s after lunch and my eye is still stinging and tearing and nothing seems to make it stop.

  I can’t check if it looks okay because one of the many drawbacks to portable toilets is that they don’t come equipped with mirrors.

  I need to have someone look at my eye.

  Stacey is my partner this week, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Probably snuck off to the woods to be alone with Jared.

  I go find Teddy. He’s hammering with total concentration and precision. He works like his life depends on it, and in a way, it sort of does.

  “Can you look at something for me?” I ask.

  “Sure.” He wipes his hands on his shorts and I take a step closer to him.

  “It’s my eye.”

  “What about it?”

  “It won’t stop tearing.”

  “Maybe you’re just overly emotional. Or maybe you’re hormonal? I hear chicks get that way sometimes.”

  “Seriously, does it look okay?”

  He takes my face in both hands and looks closely.

  “It does look red. And kind of sad. What happened?”

  “I forgot my goggles.”

  “You? Impossible!”

  “I think there’s something stuck in there.”

  He pulls down my lower lid and then lifts my upper one, exposing the red ugly part around my eye. He’s dangerously close to my eyeball, but somehow it doesn’t freak me out.

  “I don’t see anything, but I think you should have it looked at. C’mon. Let’s go see my mom.”

  We find Linus and tell him that Teddy is going to take me into town to see his mom about my eye. When Linus looks puzzled, Teddy says, “She can’t stop crying.”

  I glare at him.

  “It’s okay, Harper,” Teddy says. “Crying is nothing to be ashamed of. We all need a good cry every now and then.”

  “It’s probably her cornea,” says Linus. “Some debris may have gotten in there and scratched it. You’ll drive her to the clinic?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Teddy. If Captain called Linus sir, you’d know he was being obnoxious, but with Teddy it’s charmingly authentic.

  “Go ahead.” Linus waves us off.

  I’m having a little trouble navigating the rocky path and Teddy takes me by the arm.

  “That’s so cool your mom’s a nurse,” I tell him. “My dad’s a doctor, but he’d be completely useless in a situation like this. He’s a shrink.”

  “So you must be either totally evolved or seriously messed up.”

  “Both,” I say.

  We get into a blue pickup truck with a smashed-in hood.

  I gesture at it. “Should I be worried about your driving?”

  “No, that’s tornado damage. It’s a miracle this baby survived at all. The same can’t be said for the cow that landed on it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Actually, it was a tree.”

  “So why’d you say it was a cow?”

  “In my head it sounded funny, but not so much when I said it out loud.”

  “No, sick is more like it.”

  “At least I’m not the one who can’t stop crying.”

  I turn the radio to my favorite station. I’ve been listening to it obsessively. It plays only Christian rock, a genre with which I have no previous experience, and I’m amazed at how many songs can be written about Jesus.

  They say that Eskimos have fifty words for snow, so I guess Christian rockers have infinite ways of saying they love Jesus.

  I explain my obsession to Teddy so he doesn’t think I actually like this music, but soon we’re belting out the chorus to this really rocking song that just repeats the lines: What’s up? Only Jesus, baby.

  We pull up to a little storefront with the words BAILY MED. CLINIC in gold stickers on the door. If you didn’t look too closely, this small stretch of Main Street would appear to be postcard perfect. Colorfully painted buildings. A brick sidewalk. Brand-new American flags, still showing their creases, flying from the lampposts.

  But then you see that the businesses on either side of this clinic are boarded up, and the s
idewalk has a few huge cracks in it that look like earthquake fault lines in California, and there are empty metal frames where awnings used to be.

  We sit in the truck for a minute as Teddy does his best to describe how this town used to look.

  “It was untouched by time. On the surface. The crazy thing is that underneath, well, this place has changed. When my parents first moved here twenty-five years ago, it was unheard of, a mixed-race couple. This was a mostly white town with a few black residents. Now we even have a black chief of police. But on the outside everything still looked exactly the same until this tornado came along.”

  Teddy walks around to my side of the truck and opens the door for me.

  “This is temporary,” he says, motioning to the clinic. “The real one was up the road, but it was destroyed. We’re hoping to rebuild it sometime this year, but who knows.”

  There’s a woman in her sixties sitting at a reception desk with purple-framed glasses.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Coyle,” Teddy says.

  “How you doin’, sweetness? You stayin’ out of trouble?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And who’s this pretty little thing with you?”

  I feel my face go red.

  “This is my friend Harper.” Teddy gestures at me. “She can’t stop crying.”

  I wait for her to pick up on the joke.

  Nothing.

  She’s still smiling at Teddy.

  She grabs her phone, presses a few buttons, slams it down and tries the whole routine again, gives up, swivels in her chair and shouts, “Diane! Your boy’s here!

  “Go on back,” she tells us.

  Teddy’s mom gives him a hug and musses his hair and Teddy introduces me.

  “Mom, this is Harper. You met her at the picnic, remember?”

  “Of course I do.” She smiles and takes my outstretched hand in both of hers. “Teddy speaks highly of you. Thank you for everything you’ve been doing for us.”

  She looks at my eye and confirms Linus’s diagnosis of a scratched cornea. She gives me some eyedrops and a patch to wear for the next several days.

  “Do I have to?” I ask.

  “If you want your eye to get better.”

  As we step back out into the heat, Teddy says, “C’mon. You heard what my old lady said.”

  “Yeah, she said you speak highly of me.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. The patch. Put it on.”

  I take it out of its package, stretch the elastic around the back of my head and lower the patch over my eye. “Are you going to make fun of me?”

  He throws his arm around my shoulder and leads me back to the truck. “You can count on it.”

  I spend the next two days back at the motel while everyone else is off at the site.

  Nurse’s orders.

  Sure, I appreciate the extra sleep. I appreciate the time alone in the room. It’s what I’ve been craving since I got here. But I have to admit, I get kind of lonely.

  And maybe it’s the control freak in me, but I wonder what’s happening to the house while I’m away. Will the site look different? I want to be there when they raise the walls.

  The good news is that my tan is in tip-top shape.

  I’m sitting out by the pool listening to my favorite Christian rock station, which I’ve dubbed WWJD.

  I’m singing along:

  “I’ve seen your face,

  I’ve heard your voice,

  I’ll walk your path till my feet are sore.”

  It occurs to me that in singing these words, and singing them out loud, I’m probably as close right now as I’ll ever get to praying.

  It’s not like I’m against religion. I’m just not a believer. And that’s not for lack of exposure. Growing up we’d have Shabbat dinners from time to time with candles and wine and challah, and when I’d bristle at the idea, Jane would tell me to think of it as just another of our theme dinners.

  “This time,” she’d say, “the theme is Judaism!”

  I’ve been in houses of worship. Tess and Rose were both bat mitzvahed in a synagogue. I went to a wedding at a church where I almost took communion until Dad yanked me out of line.

  I stop singing, but then I start up again because I realize this isn’t praying. It’s just singing along to the radio. It’s no different than reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  One nation under God.

  I’ll walk your path.

  They’re just words. And words alone don’t really mean anything. It’s what you feel and what you believe when you say them that matters.

  The gate to the pool swings open and I look up expecting to see another family with small children that has made the mistake of stopping in what I’m sure they thought would be a quiet motel on their trip cross-country, but instead I see Teddy.

  I’m happy to see him because, well, he’s Teddy. But also I was just starting to think that wedding vows are the perfect example of words that don’t mean anything unless you believe what you’re saying, and that got me thinking of Dad and Jane, and I just want to enjoy the sun.

  He’s walking toward me with something in his outstretched hands.

  A pie.

  “My mother made it for you,” he says. “It’s peach. And it totally kicks ass.”

  I’m so caught off guard that I don’t even try to grab a towel or anything to cover up.

  I’m wearing a bikini, but I feel naked. Teddy has seen me in my sports bra and shorts, but this is different. If I grab a towel and wrap it around myself, I’ll be letting on that I don’t want Teddy to see my body, which would be worse than just letting him see it. I give up. “My very own pie?”

  “There’s no stopping Mom when she gets it in her head to bake someone a pie. Now, let’s see that eye, Bluebeard.”

  I lift the patch.

  He leans in close. “Looking good.” He pulls a chair over and starts to remove his boots and socks. “Okay if I join you?”

  “They won’t miss you at the site?”

  “Linus told me I should check on you and not to bother coming back. Not like he was firing me or anything, he just thought you could use the company.”

  Good old Linus.

  Teddy takes off his shirt. I hand him my bottle of water and he takes a long drink.

  We sit side by side in the scorching-hot sun.

  “How old are you anyway?” I ask.

  “I’m eighteen. But you probably thought I was older, right? I mean, one look at these bad boys and you gotta figure I’ve been lifting weights for at least a decade.” He flexes both of his skinny arms.

  I laugh. “I guessed you were out of high school.”

  “Graduated in June.”

  “The school wasn’t damaged?”

  “The roof was torn off the gym. God’s way of telling the jocks that they’d better remember who’s really in charge.”

  “So you’re not a jock?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Would it surprise you if I told you my dad is the football coach?”

  “Not really. The burly guys hanging around the site in the Bailey High Football T-shirts are kind of a giveaway. But I thought he taught English.”

  “He does both. So it all evens out. I’m lousy at sports, but I’m pretty good with the learnin’.” He taps his temple. “And teaching summer school provides a nice professional symmetry: Most of the students who couldn’t keep up during the school year also happen to be Dad’s football players.”

  He’s lying on his side with his elbow propping up his head. I can see each one of his ribs.

  “You sound kind of bitter,” I say.

  “About the fact that Dad’s a football star and I’m a ninety-pound weakling? Nah.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Look. He likes sports; I like music. So what?” Teddy shrugs. “He’s a great coach. Everyone loves him. Even the redneck jocks who might not have liked the idea of taking orders on the field
from a black man eventually come around to worshipping Dad. They’ll spend every free minute they have fixing up our house. Some of those same guys will call me a pussy any chance they get, but at least they respect my dad.”

  “High school really can be as bad as they say.”

  “As bad as who says?”

  “I don’t know, the movies. Horror novels.”

  “I have a theory that as long as you have one good friend, one real friend, you can get through anything.”

  “So who’s yours?”

  “Mikey. He’s away for the summer.”

  “Some friend.”

  I reach for my radio and flip it off. Suddenly Jesus radio is unbearably annoying. Maybe it’s this one song. I’ve heard it too many times.

  Without the radio there’s quiet. No saws. No hammering. No voices. Not even cicadas.

  “What’s it like to graduate?” I ask.

  “Graduation was one of the best days of my life. We had the ceremony in the roofless gym, sort of a symbolic gesture, I guess, our way of saying nothing was going to stop that day from coming, and coming the way it always has. Without the roof, the sun lit up every corner of the room, and my dad took the stage to hand me my diploma, and I cried like a baby through the whole entire thing.”

  I could take this moment and turn it around and tease him about crying, like he teased me about my eye, but nothing feels funny about what Teddy just told me.

  So instead I tell him how my parents are going through a divorce. I actually say the word divorce, which comes surprisingly easy, but I don’t go into any details of how Jane isn’t really my mother and Tess isn’t really my sister, and I don’t tell him how far away from me all the people are who I love.

  We sit there a minute; then he says, “Want to take a swim?”

  I stand up and pull off my patch. He takes my hand, and we jump into the water together.

  HOME

  Jane and Tess moved into a house in Laurel Canyon. With its walls of glass and slate floors and high ceilings and white paint, it was in every way different from what used to be our house, with its wood trim and creaky stairs.