How to Build a House (8 page)

“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 sidewalk 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.

I went for the first time several weeks after Tess said she’d never come over again. I was angry. If she wouldn’t come to my house, I decided, then I wouldn’t go to hers.

Then Dad intervened.

We were sitting in the park drinking vanilla ice-blendeds. Cole was spinning himself sick on the tire swing. Pavlov was sitting obediently at Dad’s feet.

Ever since the separation Pavlov had become extra-vigilant. This was one of the by-products of his shuttling back and forth along with Cole. He wouldn’t let Dad out of his sight. I’m sure he was the same way with Jane.

Pavlov had also become a middle-of-the-night pacer. He wandered the halls and his nails clicked on the wooden floors, reminding us that things had changed so much that even the dog couldn’t sleep at night.

“I think he’s going to puke,” I said to Dad. Cole had just eaten a red, white and blue Popsicle, and he was spinning so fast all I could see was a tangle of hair.

“He’s a strong boy. Iron constitution, just like his father.” Dad patted his stomach. This was a joke. Dad spends more time in the bathroom than the world’s vainest teenage girl.