How to Build a House

Also by Dana Reinhardt

A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
Harmless

This book is for my parents
.

STEP ONE:
SELECT THE PERFECT SITE

T
he world is drowning.

Sinking.

It’s being swallowed up. Glaciers are melting. Oceans are rising.

It’s an indisputable fact: We’re ruining the planet.

I’m finding it hard to keep this in mind gazing out my window. From where I’m sitting things look, well, dry. The earth looks
thirsty
. All I can see is dusty brown. Miles and miles of it stretching on forever.

Here comes a flight attendant now with her big block of a metal cart to ask me if I’d like something to drink.

If
I’m
thirsty.

I order a diet root beer. She smiles. Diet root beer is not a beverage she keeps in the recesses of her metal cart.

Okay. Make it a Diet Sprite.

Out of luck again.

I take water. No ice.

I swore off regular soda about a month ago and took up the diet variety. This has nothing to do with my body image, which I’ll confess, like most of us, isn’t exactly stellar. But this is about something bigger than just my thighs. It’s about the national obesity epidemic. It’s about taking a stand against the sugar water that’s turning our children into Oompa-Loompas.

So I stopped.

I know diet soda isn’t great for you either, but you have to start somewhere. And anyway, right now I’m drinking water. No ice.

We’re about an hour away.

I’ve flown over this part of the country before. Many times. When you live in California and you have relatives in New York, everything in between feels like a big inconvenience. It’s what keeps
you
from
them
, or
here
from
there
, and you want it out of your way as quickly as possible because your headphones aren’t working, and anyway you’ve already seen the movie three times.

But today I’m watching that big inconvenience and how it’s changed from a flat, endless grid of look-alike houses to snowcapped mountains to red valleys to dusty brown, thirsty earth. Today I’m waiting to be dropped down in the middle of it.

Tennessee.

To be more precise, I’m going to Bailey, Tennessee, which almost nobody has ever heard of.

If you watch TV or read the newspaper or if you have a pulse, then you know about what happened in New Orleans. You know about the hurricane with the name of a princess that left the city underwater.

But that wasn’t the world’s last catastrophe.

Catastrophes come, and they come. They come in all shapes and sizes, one after the other, lined up like planes in the sky, waiting for their turn to land. The tornado in Bailey came this past April, and nobody paid attention except for one small organization with a teen volunteer program where I am spending my summer vacation.

Sure, the tornado in Bailey wreaked havoc on the lives of an insignificant number of people when you compare it to Hurricane Katrina, but when it’s your life … I doubt it feels insignificant to you.

Tornadoes. They’re just another indication that the planet is going to hell in a handbasket. A handbasket that’s been meticulously crafted and woven by us, the backward-looking members of the human race. If it weren’t for how we’re ruining things with our trash and our gas emissions and the way we’re turning the planet into an Easy-Bake Oven, there might not have even been a category F4 tornado in Bailey, Tennessee.

Then again, maybe it would have come anyway.

Tornadoes can happen out of nowhere. Without warning.

HOME

It’s one of those sad stories. I hesitate to even talk about it, because when I do, people start to feel sorry for me, and that isn’t necessary.

My mother died when I was two.

Okay. Now I’ve said it. Now I can get that out of the way.

The important thing is that my dad didn’t die. He lived. He still lives. In fact, right now he’s probably back at his office, after fighting through traffic from the airport, listening to one of his patients drone on and on, staring out the window. And then he’ll see a plane flying overhead with a white, gauzy streak trailing behind it, and he’ll wonder why it seemed like a good idea to let me go all the way to Tennessee for the summer.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run away.

Once, when we were about eight, Tess and I stuffed a backpack with a towel, some socks and a box of Lucky Charms. We figured what’s the point in running away unless someone knows about it?

So we told Dad.

He said fine. Just remember, you aren’t allowed to cross the street.

We stopped at the corner and ate a few handfuls of stale Lucky Charms before turning. We turned the next corner, and the next, until we arrived back where we’d started: at our own front door.

It isn’t like that now. I’m running away, and I’m not only crossing the street, I’m crossing this dried-out country and I won’t be back for twelve weeks and Dad is going to miss me because he’ll be all alone.

Tess is gone.

So is Rose.

So, of course, is Jane.

He has Cole, sure, but Cole is only six, and what kind of company is a six-year-old who talks to insects? Especially when Dad sees him only some weekends and every other Wednesday night?

I guess I should start at the beginning.

There are so many beginnings to choose from. There’s me and my birth almost eighteen years ago with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, a detail Dad likes to remind me about when I do something particularly boneheaded. There’s Mom’s death, which although it’s an ending, the Big Ending, is also the beginning of my life without a mom. Then there’s when Dad met Jane and the beginning of the only family I’ve ever known.

Yes. I’ll start there.

I would hide behind his legs.

I know the backs of Dad’s knees, the way they feel against the top of my head, almost as well as I know the sound of his voice. I spent years of my life there, my arms locked around his calves, while he would say with mock befuddlement, “Has anyone seen Harper?”

Then I met Jane and I came out of hiding.

We went for a picnic at the beach. It was a perfectly gloomy day.

June Gloom.

It’s an expression you hear often growing up in Southern California. I always imagined June Gloom as a character, an irresistibly spunky and wisecracking kid with pale skin and flyaway hair.

I was five. So was Tess. Rose was seven.

Dad said he wanted me to meet his friend Jane. She was a very “special” friend, he told me. Not the kind of special you might be if the umbilical cord gets pulled a little too tight around your neck at birth, but the kind of special that meant he ironed my sunflower dress for me that morning.

Her blanket was striped the colors of a rainbow that had no business at the beach on such a gloomy day.

There was fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, corn on the cob and chocolate pudding. Basically a greatest hits of my favorite foods when I was five, and I guess this should have been my first indication that something important was going on with Dad and Jane.

Tess and Rose were down at the water’s edge, playing a game of tag with the chilly gray surf. The wind blew their long hair around their faces and tangled it together so they looked like a two-bodied creature, connected by this mass of moving hair, black as the bottom of the ocean.

“You must be Cinderella,” Jane said, and did a little bow. She wore chunky silver rings on her fingers and big dangling earrings. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness.”

“Nooooo.” I giggled from my spot behind Dad’s knees.

“Sleeping Beauty?”

“Nope.”

“Ah, you must be Snow White.”

“No. I’m Harper.” I stepped to the side and scoped out the picnic spread.

“Good thing, because that’s what this crown says.” And she took from her bag a paper crown decorated with plastic jewels, my name spelled out in glitter.

Jane turned toward the water and whistled. One long loud whistle followed by three short ones. It would become the whistle she’d use to call me too if I was far away. One long. Three short.

Tess and Rose came running, red-cheeked and sandy.

There were crowns for them too, and later there were pink pedicures and juice drunk from big silver goblets.

When I spilled my juice on my sunflower dress, Jane reached into her bag and pulled out a dry one. Purple eyelet.

Dad never thought to bring a change of clothes.

“That’s my dress,” Tess said. “It’s my favorite one.” She brought her eyebrows together and turned to me with what looked like a glare. Then she tucked her hair behind her ears. She studied my face. She smiled. “But you can borrow it.”

After Jane zipped it up in the back, Tess grabbed my hand.

“C’mon. The water’s freezing. Let’s go!”

We ran down to the surf after Rose, where the wind did little to move my new pageboy haircut with the too-short bangs.

There would be many more dinners in our future organized around a theme. Chinese New Year with pajamas from Chinatown and parasols and dumplings. Cinco de Mayo with sombreros and paper flowers and enchiladas. But our first themed dinner, dubbed the Royal Feast, took place on a June Gloom afternoon, the gray sky punctuated by a bright rainbow-striped blanket and pink toenails.

HERE

We’re landing now. Dusty brown has morphed into lush green.

No matter how many times I fly or wherever I go in all my life, I don’t think the experience of watching the earth draw closer will ever lose any of its beauty.

A note about how I got here, and I don’t mean the flight. What I mean is the
why
of how I got here.

I want to help. There are people whose homes have been destroyed. Their lives uprooted. Everything gone. And I want to help.

That’s the easy answer.

That’s the answer that convinces your dad to write that check to Homes from the Heart Summer Program for Teens.

Then there’s the other answer.

The one about needing to run away.

There are too many things to run away from. There’s what’s happened to Dad and Jane and how what happened to them happened to everybody in our family. There’s Gabriel and how everything between us seems to add up to nothing. There’s Tess and who she is and isn’t to me anymore. There’s the way I feel when I wake up in the morning in my empty house. There are the days I walk down the halls at school and I can’t even hear my own footsteps. There’s the space that’s opened up inside me, blooming slowly, like a large black flower.

But also, I do want to help. That answer is no less true just because it’s the obvious one.

And anyway, I know a thing or two about people whose homes have been destroyed. Their lives uprooted. Everything gone.

I’m looking for a sign.

One with my name on it, somewhere near baggage claim. I’m not speaking metaphorically.

I’m here. Finally.

I collect my suitcase and still, no sign.

Instinctively I reach into the side pocket of my backpack, into the little compartment designed to hold my cell phone. It’s empty. It’s one of the rules for all the teen volunteers this summer: no cell phones.

And even if I did bring a cell phone to Tennessee, who would I call? I’m standing smack-dab in the middle of the big inconvenience.