How to Build a House (19 page)

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

O
ver 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.

I gesture to the hood.

“You really should have this thing fixed.”

“Someday,” he says. He turns on the ignition and pulls away slowly. I stand outside staring up the road until I no longer can see his taillights.

I stand there for a few more minutes. Finally I go back to my room, and since it’s too late to bother with sleep, I begin to pack.

Today, our final day, is move-in day. Tonight there will be a party, but first we have some heavy lifting to do.

Most of the Wrights’ belongings, the things that survived the tornado, have been sitting in a storage unit in Jackson. As we move their furniture, their lamps and their boxes off the truck—careful to lift with our knees, not our backs—I see for the first time all the things that make their home their home.

There’s a corduroy armchair that reminds me of one we used to have in our house, which Jane took with her when she moved out and had re-covered in brown Ultrasuede. I used to sit in it and read and rest my feet on Pavlov.

We move new beds into the twins’ room. Grace’s on the left, Alice’s on the right. The walls are a color called Eggshell, but Teddy and I used the leftover bright pink paint from the fort in the woods to paint the inside of their closet. And also, we painted a thick pink line up one wall, across the ceiling and down the other Eggshell wall.

“Ooohhh! Look at our closet! And I love the stripe!” Grace jumps up and down.

“What’s it for?” Alice asks.

I shove her bed into place. It fits just inside the bright pink line.

“That’s where the invisible wall goes.”

I help Teddy set up his room. I fold his clothes and arrange his guitars on the built-in stands. I step back as he holds the Miles Davis poster up over his bed, and I try my best to tell him if one side is higher than the other.

When we’re done I don’t know where to sit. Teddy stretches himself out on his bed. He kicks off his shoes. He motions for me to come over and lie down next to him.

I shake my head. It doesn’t feel right. This is Teddy’s room and I don’t belong here.

“Just for a minute,” he says. “Please.”

I shake my head again. My throat starts to constrict. I open the door to leave and he follows me in his socks.

The house has cleared out now. It’s lunchtime. Everyone is outside and I’m going out to join them. Outside. Where I belong.

I head for the front door, but then Teddy grabs me by a belt loop on my shorts and pulls me into the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?”

I don’t want him to see me cry, so I put my hands over my face.

“In here,” he says. He crouches down, opens the door to the tornado-safe room and climbs in. I look in after him, but all I can see are the whites of his socks. The claustrophobic in me is screaming to run away.

But I climb in and shut the door and it’s blacker than night in here and Teddy finds me, wraps his arms around me and kisses my eyelids and then my lips.

“I’m going to miss you,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”

I think about the literature that came with this room. Those outlines of people huddled together. The pamphlet didn’t lie. Just being in here makes me feel safer.

“Thanks for everything,” I say.

“You’re
thanking
me
?”

“Yes. If I forget to say that later, if I get moody or sad or I have such a hard time saying goodbye that I don’t say anything at all, I wanted to make sure that I thanked you for everything. Thanks for choosing me, for wanting to be with me, and thanks for making the rest of my life fade away at a time when I needed to stop thinking about the rest of my life, and thanks for reminding me that I couldn’t keep going on like that, not thinking, and thanks for helping me start talking to Tess again. Thanks for loving Jesus radio as much as I do. And thanks for the pie.”

“Harper, I …”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“I don’t?”

“I know.”

“You know what?”

I lean against him, nestling in the crook of his arm. I talk into his neck. I don’t need to be able to see to find the parts of him I know.

“That morning in the trailer, when we had it to ourselves, and you made me breakfast, I wondered whether you would tell me you loved me, if you’d ever tell me, and I looked at you, and I thought you were going to say it, but instead you went off on a tangent about boysenberry jam.”

“And?”

“And it was funny. And it was close enough to the real thing for me. Just sitting there with you like that.”

“Boysenberry jam?”

“Boysenberry jam.”

“Harper,” he whispers into my hair.

“Yeah?”

“I boysenberry jam you.”

The party is on the lawn out behind Teddy’s house. This is the same spot where we had our first lunch with the Wrights, when Diane brought us a picnic and it felt like we were eating in the middle of nowhere. But it’s a backyard now, neatly landscaped with a smattering of pink hibiscus, and small white lights that twinkle at night like distant planets.

If things were different, this would be a night where we all dressed up. The girls in strapless chiffon gowns, the boys in tuxedos. This is our big night. But we have nothing with us other than our T-shirts and shorts and work boots and jeans, and the best we can do is to wear something clean.

Teddy’s friend Mikey, his one true friend, returned from his summer away in time for the party. When Teddy introduced us, Mikey smiled and shook my hand and said how nice it was to meet me. But he also looked at me like:
Who are you?

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

We write messages in each other’s notebooks. Inside jokes we probably won’t remember by next summer. We make certain we have each other’s e-mails, cell phone numbers.

Marisol is coming down from San Francisco in October, so we pretend that we don’t even need to say goodbye, and we end up ignoring each other all night, but I watch as she takes Seth aside and says something to him, and he smiles, and she then delivers a quick kiss right to his lips.

I well up when Captain hugs me. I’ve never been to Florida and I can’t imagine when I’ll ever go. He hugs Tess too, even though they’ve only known each other a few short days, and over her shoulder he shoots me a perverted look as he makes a fake grab for her ass.

We dance under the stars. I dance with Coach Wes. I hold hands with Alice and Grace as they jump up and down with no relation at all to the song’s tempo. I find Linus by the punch bowl and I ask for his e-mail to add to my book, but he gives me a look to remind me that he is a man of no address.

“You know,” he tells me, “next summer there’s a project planned in Ecuador. Up in the mountains near Quito. As long as you don’t have trouble with altitude sickness, I’d love to have you in on that. And I was thinking maybe Teddy could do it too. You’ll be college age by then. You could be chaperones. Both of you. Do you think you could handle making sure everyone’s where they’re supposed to be when the lights go out?” He smiles at me. We stand facing each other and then he makes a move as if to hug me, but instead reaches out and musses up my hair.