How to Build a House (4 page)

And then, finally, someone else started to notice me, it doesn’t really matter who, it was just a boy who wasn’t Gabriel, and it was only then that Gabriel showed his interest in me again.

HERE

There’s a knock at our door at six-thirty a.m.

I hear Linus’s booming voice. “C’mon, everyone. Break fast is in half an hour. Don’t be late. We need every single one of you beautiful people.”

He’s moving his way down the West Wing, pounding on every door.

Does this place have any other guests? If it does, how do they feel about Linus shouting about breakfast, as if it’s the apocalypse, at six-thirty in the morning?

I roll over and look across the room. Marisol’s bed is empty. As I adjust my eyes to the light, and this wonderfully dingy, anonymous room, I realize that the shower is running.

Marisol and I go to breakfast together, a spread of donuts and muffins and little boxes of low-rent cereals with too much sugar. I grab a banana and a cup of coffee that comes out looking like filthy tap water.

Starbucks. Peet’s. Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
.

I find myself whispering the names of the places at home, on every corner, where I could find a cup of coffee worth getting up at six-thirty for.

Everyone seems excited. They’re freshly showered. Dressed in tank tops and lace-up work boots. Hats emblazoned with the names of sports teams or local restaurants or vacation destinations on their heads.

The room smells of sunblock.

There’s a palpable buzz in the air. And I can say with absolute certainty, it isn’t from the coffee.

My stomach is unsettled. My banana is barely going down. I’m tired, sure, and wondering what it is I’m doing here with all these strangers in the conference room of a motel in the middle of nowhere, sitting in a folding chair drinking crappy coffee. But I also have that first-day-of-school feeling.

That delicious mix of anticipation and dread.

Linus comes in carrying a cardboard box filled with spiral notebooks. He begins to pass them around. They have our names on them. I start to open mine but then Linus is standing on a folding chair yelling about how there’s time for reading about what we’re doing later. Now it’s time to start
doing
what we’re doing.

“Here’s what you need to know: we’re going to do right by this family. They deserve it. Since April they’ve done nothing but help clean up their neighbors’ houses while their own lies in ruins. Those neighbors wrote to us on their behalf. They asked us to come and help and that’s what we’re here to do. We’re going to give this family something better, something safer than what they had before. You don’t know it yet, but you can do it. There’re some other teams down here working on some other houses, but you’re the only teenage group, and you’re the only ones who’ve given your entire summer over to this project. We’re going to prove that you can do this job better than anybody else. Now let’s get to it.”

He herds us all outside. The bus is spewing thick black smoke into the already scorching-hot air around us and I start to do some impossible calculation in my head about whether the bad by-products of trying to do good (individual cereal boxes, foam coffee cups, gas-guzzling buses) outweigh the good deeds themselves.

I get nowhere.

Marisol and I sit together. Roommates cling to each other like life rafts.

She does most of the talking. She’s into hiking and camping, which explains her hideous shoes.

“I can’t relate,” I say. “Why sleep on the ground when there are beds? Why walk when you could drive?”

“You’re so L.A.”

“And you’re so smug. Typical Northern Californian.”

She laughs. “I’ll take you camping sometime. I’ll convert you.”

“Please don’t.”

“So what brings you here?”

“You go first.”

“Well, my mom wanted me to go on a trip with my church youth group this summer. Of course. And I convinced her to let me come here by promising to go to church every Sunday, but I just don’t see that happening.”

“You have plenty to choose from in these parts.”

“I noticed. But I think I’ll work on learning how to sleep late instead.”

“I’m a bit of a sleep expert. So if you need some coaching, look no further.”

“Excellent,” she says, and readjusts her glasses. “Mom used to do missionary work, both my parents did, so they were pretty psyched about this program, but I think they were just as psyched that I’d be getting away from Pierre. He’s my boyfriend. He’s almost twenty. That they’re not so psyched about. They still think I’m eight.”

I start to tell her a little about why I wanted to come, how Dad found this program for me. I tell her about wanting to help, and less about wanting to run away, but I do say something about how things at home are a mess.

Then we fall silent. Most of the bus does. Struck dumb by what we see outside our windows.

Houses with their roofs torn off. Barns lying on their sides. Piles and piles of wood and insulation mixed up with unrecognizable appliance parts, furniture stuffing, panes of glass and the bright primary-colored plastic of toys.

In fact, the houses and the barns look sort of like toys, knocked over by one gigantic, clumsy toddler.

And in between are stretches of quiet, idyllic countryside that take on an eerie quality. Like in a horror movie when you know that too much quiet means something evil is lurking, a long stretch of green starts to hint that a new pile of wreckage can’t be too far off.

“This is it, people,” Linus says in a voice without its boom. “The path of the tornado.”

We pull off a dirt road into a big parking lot surrounded by about a dozen trailers. When we file out I take in a deep breath of the dust kicked up by the bus and some of the lingering exhaust.

I feel the heat through my clothes. On the crown of my uncovered head. I reach into my bag and pull out an L.A. Dodgers cap.

“Over here, campers,” Linus calls from the shade of a tree.

The trailers are lived-in. You can tell by the chairs clustered around barbecues. Soccer balls. Plastic kiddie pools. Shoes lined up outside front doors. Laundry hanging from ropes tied between the trailers’ roofs. But there aren’t many people standing outside, and I suspect that this has something to do with the heat.

We gather around Linus, clutching our water bottles.

He does a head count and then turns and starts walking. We exchange some puzzled looks and follow. I’m next to the guy who snapped Linus out of his meditative stupor last night. He’s pretty cute. We exchange a look, my first shared moment of understanding since I arrived here.

He’s got shaggy blond hair and a deep tan. He obviously didn’t read the instructions about what to wear to work, or else he chose to ignore them, because he’s got worn-out flip-flops on his brown feet.

We walk for what feels like a long time. The air is so thick it’s like wading through water. The land is flat. The grass is dried out and brittle and it crackles beneath my boots.

A single bird flies in a slow, lazy loop above us.

Finally we come to a large stretch of caramel-colored dirt flattened by some kind of truck or tractor.

Linus reaches down and begins to unlace his boots. In the distance I can see more wreckage. A pile of chaos.

“Shoes off,” he says.

I’m thinking that cute blond tan boy had some information I didn’t as I watch him slip right out of his sandals. I begin the long process of unlacing my heavy boots.

“Sit in a circle,” Linus says, and he waits as we arrange ourselves.

“By the time you leave here and go back to your lives, your friends, your family and your schoolwork, by the time our twelve weeks together is up, there will be a house. Right here where we sit.”

I take a look around. It’s pretty hard to imagine that a house will be standing here so fast.

Some kind of bug lands on my foot and I take a swipe at it and I wonder what on earth Linus was thinking, having us remove our shoes out here.

“This is sacred ground,” he says.

I look up at the empty sky. The bird is gone.

“This is going to be somebody’s home. Treat it with respect. Home is a sacred place.”

STEP TWO:
LAY THE FOUNDATION

T
hey moved out in October.

Even though Tess and I stopped sharing a room after Rose left for college, when Tess moved out of our house, somehow my room felt empty.

I tried rearranging the furniture.

Desk by the window. Bed in the corner.

I put new posters on the walls. I covered practically every square inch of the sea-green paint.

Nothing worked.

Here’s something it’s important to know about Tess: she’s my best friend.

Or at least she was. It’s all pretty unclear now.

She was my sister.

Now she isn’t.

That is crystal clear.

HERE

Linus gives out our assignments. He puts us in pairs, or what he calls our double-
y
partnerships, the double
y
standing for—are you ready for this—yin and yang.

But I quickly forgive Linus when he informs me that my double-
y
partner for the week is that cute shaggy blond boy.

His name is Captain, which apparently is not a nickname, but
his actual legal name
. I even check his driver’s license, and there it is.

Captain and I spend the day digging holes for the footing, which I now know is one of the first steps in laying the foundation of a house.

The house will be a rectangle, forty by sixty feet with a front porch and a set of steps from the kitchen in the back. The plans are in our notebook. A dizzying array of diagrams, measurements and terminology, as incomprehensible to me as if they were in Arabic. But flipping through the pages during a much-needed break from digging, I notice something.

“There’s no basement,” I say to Linus as he comes by to check on our progress. “Why?”

“Too expensive.”

“But where are these people supposed to go if there’s ever another tornado? Where do they hide?”

“There’s a shortcut for everything, and in this case it’s called a tornado-safe room. We buy it prefab and install it inside the house. No doubt it’d be better and safer to have a basement, but our budget simply doesn’t allow it.”

I look up and see that Captain has wandered over to Seth and Frances, who are putting wooden stakes in the dirt and then connecting them with bright pink plastic roll tape. Captain has taken some of the tape and tied his hair into pigtails with big pink plastic bows.

I nod in Captain’s direction. “Yeah. I can only imagine how tight your budget must be if we’re who you’re counting on to get this house built.”

Linus laughs and then he looks me in the eye. “You’re here because you want to be here, all of you. And that, Harper, is priceless.” He walks away.

Have I mentioned the heat?

There should be another word for what it feels like out here in the sun, because
hot
is coming up seriously short. I have big sweat stains under my arms like our sixty-year-old Russian next-door neighbor, Mr. Sidorov.

By the end of the day I’ve dug four holes. When we get back to the motel I’m exhausted, a little sunburned, and my body hurts all over.

There’s a barbecue going on out by the pool. Hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad. Limp American cheese in plastic wrap, the kind we were never allowed at home.

I’m sitting with my feet in the hot tub, next to Captain, who, I’m happy to report, has removed his pigtails. His legs are muscular and he has a scar on his left knee. I find myself wanting to run my finger along it, but don’t, of course.

I’m not sure what’s come over me. The humidity, maybe. One day of hard work in the heat and I seem to have forgotten my vow of solitude. My legs are on fire from the sunburn, but I sit here with my feet dangling in the too-hot water listening to Captain talk.

He’s from Florida, which explains the tan. He has some family who lost their home in a hurricane when he was seven, which explains why he’s here. He just broke up with his girlfriend of a year, which explains why I’m sitting next to him, and why, under the bubbling water, I just grazed his foot with my own.

Her name is Marcy. He says she never understood him.

I understand you
, I think, even though I also understand that I don’t know this guy at all. One shared puzzled look and a day of digging holes in the sun and I’ve lost all perspective.

But then I think about where knowing somebody has gotten me: nowhere. No, someplace worse than nowhere, because when you’re nowhere I’m pretty sure you feel nothing.

Maybe this is just what I need. I need to
not
know somebody. I’ve known Gabriel since sixth grade. I know everything about him.

I take my feet out of the water and fold them underneath me. “If you want my opinion, understanding someone, or knowing someone, or whatever you want to call it, is way overrated.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it doesn’t really matter how well you know somebody, it doesn’t make love any easier, it might just make it harder.”

He smiles a big broad smile at me that’s almost as beautiful as the last light of this fading summer night.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he says, and then his look turns conspiratorial. “Listen. There’s some talk of a midnight swim. You in?”

That’s against the rules
.

Oops—I said that out loud. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m a stickler for rules, but that’s not one of the first things I like someone knowing about me.

“It’s going to be a long twelve weeks with that kind of attitude.”

“Okay,” I say. “Count me in.” My sunburn has turned from a feeling that my skin is too tight for my body into a wonderful tingling feeling of skin that is suddenly alive.

“Awesome.” And then, because things always seem to end up this way when it comes to me and boys, he adds: “You know Frances, right? Wanna check with her? See if she wants to come too?”

This should make me feel sorry for myself, but somehow it doesn’t. Of course Captain likes Frances. Who wouldn’t? Just look at her. She’s standing on the other side of the pool talking to Seth, probably about music, with one earbud of his iPod in her ear, and she’s moving, slightly, but unmistakably, to the rhythm of hip-hop. Poor Seth. He doesn’t know yet that he doesn’t stand a chance.

I know why I’m here. I’m here to work and to forget and I don’t need any complications in the form of Captain, even if just a minute ago it was what I thought I needed.

We’ll be friends. Just friends who are not anything more. He will be a real boy friend.

It feels like a relief.

I reach out my finger and touch his scar and I ask him how he got it and when he tells me that he fell off his skateboard, I know something new about my friend Captain.

And when midnight rolls around, I stay in bed and watch as the red numbers on my digital alarm clock continue to flick by.

HOME

The last Thanksgiving before they moved out, we ate dinner at midnight. Jane had to work late, and the idea of having Thanksgiving without her was unthinkable.

So we invited our guests for a midnight meal, when the whole family could be together.

The Berkows and the Feldmans came, like they do every year. And Avi came too, with his new girlfriend, Lynn. We woke up Cole when all the food was spread out, and he ate his meal in his pajamas with the race cars on them, a streak of dried toothpaste still on his chin.

Tess and I made everything: sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top, creamed spinach, fresh cranberry sauce, roasted asparagus. Neither of us had ever done much cooking, so we were a little overwhelmed by this sixteen-pound bird with no head. We stood there in the kitchen that afternoon, staring it down.

“Cole was only eight pounds at birth,” said Tess, cocking her head. She was wearing a blue plaid apron and holding a wooden spoon as if it were a weapon. She leaned in closer to the turkey. “We probably could have fit him inside this thing.”

“And he might have tasted better than the stuffing recipe you picked. Artichoke hearts? In stuffing? Vomit.”

It was excellent. And so was the turkey when we took it from the oven at eleven p.m. Golden brown without the dry stringy parts I remembered from all the Thanksgivings before. It tasted even better because Tess and I did it together without any help from anyone.

Something felt glamorous about the night. Magical. While all the houses in the neighborhood were dark, while everyone else crawled into bed with too-full stomachs, our holiday was just beginning.

Our guests didn’t leave until the sun started to come up. We walked them to the door and watched as Avi and Lynn had to dodge the early-morning sprinklers of our next-door neighbor’s front lawn to reach their car.

We vowed to make this a tradition.

We’d have Thanksgiving at midnight every year, no matter what. A magical midnight Thanksgiving.

But this past year, the very next Thanksgiving, it was just Dad and me. Cole was with Jane and Tess, and Rose, who’d come home for the weekend. I don’t know what they did or when they ate or who cooked the turkey.

Dad and I went out for Thai food and were home in bed by ten.

HERE

I’m starting to realize that every place comes with its own ubiquitous noise.

In Los Angeles, it’s lawn mowers. In New York City, it’s cabdrivers abusing their horns.

In Bailey, Tennessee, it’s bugs.

The air is always humming. You can even hear it over the sound of power tools.

By the third morning at the site, I start to think I’ve developed a sleepwalking habit. I must be waking in the night, going to the middle of the interstate, lying down and letting the eighteen-wheeled semis en route from Nashville to Memphis run over my body, one after the other. The two little Advils Linus doled out at breakfast looked like a joke in the palm of his hand. Nothing that small could do anything for a pain this big.

But I’m here.

There are all kinds of people here, which comes as a relief. We’re a pretty solid bunch of kids. We want to do good. But there’s no way we can do this on our own.

So I’m thrilled to see plumbers, electricians and guys in orange hard hats with the keys to the heavy machinery. There’re other volunteers. A bunch of big burly guys wearing Bailey High Football T-shirts. There’s a woman, too old to even be out in the heat if you ask me, passing out fresh limeade in plastic cups.

There’s a huge mountain of gravel today that seems to have risen out of thin air. Seth and Frances and Marisol and her partner, Lana, are removing the gravel from the pile and raking it around the low cement-block walls of the foundation we put up yesterday.

Captain and I are cutting wood.

Linus gave us a lesson this morning on the ins and outs of a worm-drive saw, how we’re simply to guide it and let it do all the work.

“It knows what it needs to do,” he tells us, and with that, another look passes between Captain and me.

But then the wood vibrates beneath my gloves as it slides under the saw and breaks in two, and one end of it falls to the earth with a
ka-thump
. It’s pretty cool.

We stop for lunch. So far it’s been a brown paper bag with a slightly soggy sandwich, a tired piece of fruit and no-name potato chips.

Today there’s a table with a spread of ribs, roasted corn, a green salad and a vase of wildflowers. A tall woman with pale, freckled skin and thick blond braids is standing proudly behind it, serving spoon in hand. Diane Wright. It’s her house we’re building. This is a thank-you buffet lunch.

“Come and get it, y’all,” she says, complete with Southern twang. She’s the kind of woman you want to let hug you. Wide smile and wider bosom. She’s got a frilly apron and everything.

We eat, and I keep myself from hitting the buffet for the third time. I didn’t realize the true vileness of our poolside dinner cookouts until my first taste of Diane’s ribs.

Her family walks up from the trailers where they’ve been living since April. There’s her husband, Wesley, an inch or two shorter than Diane, with rich black skin, a salt-and-pepper beard and wire-rimmed glasses. They have nine-year-old twins, Alice and Grace, indistinguishable except that one wears a white summer dress and the other wears cutoff jeans shorts. The one in the dress takes a seat next to me on the grass and ties a pile of dandelions into a long necklace.

The son, Teddy, looks to be my age. His skin is the color of a latte, dotted randomly with some of his mother’s freckles, and his hair is cropped in tight curls close to his head. He’s tall and painfully skinny, with a crooked smile and deep dimples. He wears baggy skater shorts and a T-shirt from a blues club in Memphis.

As we sit in the shade, lazy with the heat and richness of Diane’s food, not too far from where their house once stood, they tell us about the tornado.

After, they thought about leaving. Going somewhere far away. But this is home. People needed them here. Diane is a nurse and the only doctor in Bailey had moved his family to Atlanta.

Tornadoes don’t have names like hurricanes do. But they should.

It doesn’t seem right that this thing came here and did what it did to these houses and farms and these lives—people living in trailers, some people not living at all—and yet this thing doesn’t have a name by which we can call it.

And curse it.

While Wesley is talking, the twin in the shorts climbs into Teddy’s lap and he takes her hair in his hands and twists it.

My insides ache.

My body feels like it wants to cave in on itself, and it isn’t because this family has lost everything. It’s because of the little girl sitting in her brother’s lap and the way he holds her hair, and the dandelion necklace, and Wesley’s protective arm around Diane’s pale, freckled shoulder.

I ache, not for what they don’t have.

I ache for what they do have.

HOME

When I saw Tess at school the first Monday after they’d moved out, she was wearing a shirt I’d never seen.

That might not sound like such a big deal, but it was. Tess and I always did all our shopping together.

I favor long-sleeved T-shirts over tank tops. Cords or cargo pants. Black Vans. Occasionally, a denim skirt.