How to Build a House (3 page)

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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 just 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.

Gabriel wasn’t always so serious. He once read comic books. He perfected a dead-on imitation of the lunch lady. He’d put his hands over his head and jiggle his hips and bare his stomach like a belly dancer. It was his good-luck dance, performed in the moments when he needed some luck, like when he dialed our local radio station, praying that he’d be caller ninety-four, so we could score free tickets to the Green Day concert.

This was all before I grew breasts and he grew six inches.

Cheekbones pushed their way out of his doughy boy cheeks. His eyes sank in a little deeper and green flecks appeared out of nowhere.

One night when he was over and we were watching a DVD, I was lying with my head near his lap, and the arm he’d draped over the back of the couch slipped and grazed my newly grown breasts, and something started buzzing in me in a place I hardly knew existed.

He quickly picked up his arm and draped it back over the couch.

A few minutes passed. Then he gently picked up his arm, and lowered his hand purposefully onto my breast and left it there.

I stopped breathing.

We were still. We didn’t move an inch.

Then, slowly, I arched my back and pushed against his hand, and he grabbed me harder, and I let out a mortifying moan.

We heard the key in the front door and I sat up. Panic crashing through me like a dropped stack of dishes.

Dad and Jane.

When the movie with a title that to this day I can’t recall ended, Dad drove Gabriel home. We were only fourteen.

We didn’t speak after that for a month.

Eventually we found our way back to each other, but without any honest conversation, or confession about true feelings, like you see on TV. One day we just started talking again as if there hadn’t been this month of silence, or the hand-to-breast contact, between us.

We went back to being friends for two more years. I’d help him shop for clothes. He’d burn me CDs. I’d read his English papers. We developed an addiction to blueberry-banana smoothies from a stand near the beach.

During that time he had many girlfriends, not just friends who happened to be girls, but girlfriends who also noticed his cheekbones and green-flecked eyes. Girlfriends he took to school dances and parties on nights I’d hang out with Tess and pretend I didn’t care.

Did I care?

I don’t even know how to answer that. Something resembling jealousy gnawed at me, but I don’t know if that was because of Gabriel’s interest in other girls, or because those girls basked in the warm light of a boy’s interest. It made them walk taller. Heads high. Chests out. Smiles adorably coy.

Gabriel became somebody who probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day if we hadn’t become friends early on. He became the boy all the girls talked about. Quiet, serious, cool Gabriel. And I was the girl who could approach him at school without getting tongue-tied, the girl everyone knew was Gabriel’s old friend Harper, who nobody envied, because nobody wanted to be the girl he saw, with those beautiful green-flecked eyes, as just a friend.