How to Build a House (18 page)

I think ahead to the rest of my night. I’ll sit through dinner and watch the Wrights, and tell myself they’re perfect, when of course there’s no such thing as a family who has everything, but I’ll still long for something that’s been gone from my life since well before October, and maybe was never there at all.

I don’t know how long Dad has been done talking. How long there’s been silence on the line between us.

“Dad?” I ask. “Are you there?”

“Yes, Harper. I’m here. Of course I’m here.”

Monday morning I ride with Linus into Jackson to pick up the butcher block that we’ll use to cover the tornado-safe room.

The highway is a flat blur of green trees. The news is on the radio, and the bits and pieces that find their way through the morning fog in my head seem to be coming from a distant land. I’m far away from everything. Nothing that this radio woman with the commanding voice and vaguely European accent says seems to have any relationship to me or to this life that I’m living.

Then she says the word
Kyoto
.

I try to tune in, but I’ve missed the story.

There was a time when I would never have missed a story about global climate change. But this morning I’m too lost to pay attention to the things I once cared most about.

It’s ten o’clock now and the news station has turned into a country music station and I switch the dial to Jesus radio.

“Excited to go home?” Linus asks.

This feels like one of those questions that doesn’t really need an answer, like when someone asks you if you have a cold right after you’ve blown your nose. He’s just letting me know he’s caught my mood.

I answer anyway.

“Dreading it. You?”

“This is home.”

He doesn’t mean Tennessee, he means working on houses. I pretty much picked this up from his bio. This is what he does all the time. This is his entire life.

From the outside, it looks pretty lonely.

“What’s with your tattoo?” I finally ask.

He takes his left hand off the steering wheel and he rubs the spot on his right arm where the letters are, and then he holds his hand there, squeezing it hard, until his knuckles go white.

“They’re initials.
GL
and
AD
. Two people who used to mean everything to me.”

I wish I hadn’t asked. Despite the fact that it’s written on his body, this is his private world, his history, and I’ve stepped into it uninvited. Are they dead? Divorced from him? Have they let a distance too big to cross grow between them?

We’ve exited the highway and we’re pulling into the parking lot of the lumberyard.

“Some things you can never put back together again,” he says, and he puts the van in park. He pulls off the big ring of keys and clips them to his belt loop.

It becomes a ritual.

I do it maybe three times a day. I dial everything but the 8.

Tonight I do it just before bed. I’m standing in the hallway in my pajamas.

I look at my graffiti in the phone booth. HE+TW 4EVER. I could easily have been writing about Tess Waxman. The lie would have been just as big.

I start to dial the numbers. I figure maybe I’ll catch her working at the diner. I picture her in her uniform, balancing a tray piled high with dishes, struggling to dig her cell phone out of her apron pocket. I picture this, and it makes me smile, even though I know her phone won’t ring.

When I get back to my room Teddy is there.

“Surprise,” he says, and he kisses me.

I look over at Marisol.

She rolls her eyes. “He begged me to let him in, and when I said no, he offered me a dollar.”

Teddy shrugs. “She’s cheap. I was willing to go up to five.”

I haven’t seen Teddy since this afternoon. He had to help his dad sort through new gym equipment at school and get the locker room ready for preseason football.

“Nice jammies,” he says. And then to Marisol, “So, how much for the room?”

“Now,
that
is going to cost you!”

Teddy laughs and I put my hand over his mouth because I hear Linus coming down the hall.

He knocks quickly.

“Goodnight!”

“Goodni-ight!” Marisol and I singsong in unison.

A few minutes pass during which Marisol and Teddy fake-haggle over how much he’s going to pay her to leave us alone for a few hours, and Marisol tries to figure out whose room to crash in.

“How about Seth’s?” asks Teddy.

Another knock arrives on the door. It’s not the special coded knock of Captain and Frances.

We freeze. We figured Linus was long gone, so Teddy had stopped whispering, instead giving his voice over to his deep baritone.

Another knock. More urgent.

Without speaking we come to the agreement that Teddy should hide in the bathroom, and I follow him in and close the door. If Linus comes looking, I’ll fake some kind of distinctly female bathroom emergency.

This plan leaves Marisol to do most of the covering up, and she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am.

Teddy sits in the bathtub. I sit on the closed toilet lid. The light in the bathroom is attached to a noisy fan, so all we can hear is the door opening, some muffled voices. Not Linus. It’s probably Susannah. That’s a relief. I’d much rather be caught by Susannah.

The door to our room closes again.

There’s a pause and then Marisol knocks on the bathroom door. “Harper, I think you might want to come out here.”

She sounds serious.

I open the door, and there, in my motel room, like an apparition, staring at me with eyes the color of Tennessee grass, is Tess.

I step out of the bathroom, Teddy behind me.

We stand there, like four opposing points on a compass, all staring into the middle.

I recall the image of Tess that came to me only minutes ago: in a fifties waitress uniform, juggling trays of french fries and milk shakes. I put that image of awkward Tess up next to the Tess who stands calmly before me, her loose hair falling over her shoulders. Her pale blue button-down shirt and jeans. Her flip-flops. Her perfectly pedicured toenails.

I know I should say something, but I don’t know what to say.

“I’m Teddy.” He breaks the silence. He sticks out his hand. Tess shakes it. “And I don’t usually hang out in the bathroom.”

“Tess,” she says in a voice that betrays her. She’s not calm and confident. She’s nervous.

“Nice to meet you, Tess. I was just leaving.”

“Me too,” says Marisol. “I’ll be in Frances’s room, probably dashing Captain’s hopes for make-up sex.”

Teddy gives my shoulder a squeeze and we exchange a look that is so familiar, so filled with understanding, that even with everything happening in this moment, I think:
Remember his face, remember how he knows you, you’ll want to be able to remember this someday
.

I sit down on the edge of the bed as Teddy leads Marisol out the door. It closes quietly behind them.

“Nice place,” Tess says.

I smile, but then suddenly I’m irritated that I let her get off this cheap joke. Who is she to make fun of this room? This is where I live.

“No, I mean it,” she says. “It’s cozy.”

She takes a seat in the armchair.

I look at her. She’s walked in here without anything. She doesn’t have a purse or a jacket or her cobalt blue suitcase that matches mine, gifts to us from Jane two Hanukkahs ago. She’s walked in here like she lives just down the hall, which I then learn, she actually does.

“I flew to Chicago to meet Rose. Her friend took a plane back home. Rose agreed to drive me down here to see you. We checked in about half an hour ago.” She pauses. “Our room smells.”

Rose is here!
I think, but I still don’t say anything. I fold my legs underneath me on the bed.

“You look good,” she says, and fixes her eyes on me. She picks up a pen from the table next to her and passes it absent-mindedly from one hand to the other. “Tan. Your hair has gotten even lighter. You look healthy. And I’m not just saying all this so you’ll talk to me instead of just sitting there staring at me like that.”

“You look good too,” I say. But this isn’t a news flash.

“And I’m guessing that the bathroom boy, Teddy, is your boyfriend?”

I nod.

“He seems really nice.”

“He is. I like him. A lot. So do you think maybe, just as a small favor to me, you could refrain from sticking your tongue in his mouth?”

“I can try,” she says, a slow smile spreading on her face.

“Good.”

She turns serious. “About that …”

“Forget it.”

“I can’t. And clearly you can’t either. I should have told you I’m sorry.”

“You
should
have told me?”

“God. Do you always have to be the grammar police? What I mean to say is I should have told you
earlier
, and I’m telling you now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I knew how you felt about Gabriel, and I don’t really have a great explanation other than that I was stupid. And angry. Really upset about everything, about Art and what happened with Mom, and you’re so much like him, not that you’re dishonest, I mean you
look
so much like him, and you just make me think about him and what he did to Mom and all of us, and I wanted to hurt him, but I hurt you instead, and is this making any sense at all?”

“Sort of,” I say. I think about launching into a defense of Dad, a speech about how it’s too easy to blame him for everything, but I also understand that what is happening right now between us is delicate and this probably isn’t the best moment for speeches.

“And Gabriel never treated you right. He was a decent friend a long time ago, but all that fooling around or whatever, and he’d be with other people, and, I don’t know, I think he could have been more clear,” she says. “I probably did you a favor.”

“Easy there. Don’t go making yourself into a martyr.”

“You’re right. Sorry. I just needed to say that, because I’ve always thought it and never said it. I never liked the way he treated you. You loved him. He must have known that. And you were good to him, you would have been good for him, because that’s who you are, and he took advantage of you.”

I get up and go over to my closet. I don’t feel right sitting here in my pajamas, but I don’t feel like changing in front of her either. So I grab some clothes and put them in a pile next to me on the bed, and I just let them sit there.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “How did you even know how to find me?”

“Mom told me. She really misses you. She still makes zucchini bread sometimes, even though you were the only person in the family who ever liked it. The loaves sit on the counter until they’re hard as bricks.”

Something hurts right behind my rib cage. I try to breathe into the pain, but that only makes it spread. A dull ache. It’s the space in there that hurts. The space where everything used to be.

“Anyway, Mom told me to come see you. She says the best way, the only way, to work out your problems is to talk them through face to face. To not let too much time go by, where they grow so big it’s too late for talking. Rose agreed to drive me. And I came, even though I didn’t think you’d want me here.”

“I slept with Gabriel.”

She stares at me and gnaws away at her lower lip. “I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t have … Oh my God. That would have changed—”

I cut her off. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She sits on Marisol’s bed, facing me. I think about the nights when we’d talk from our beds on opposite sides of the room, whispering in the dark, when the only space between us was a few feet of striped carpet.

“I thought he was what I needed,” I finally say. “I just needed somebody.”

I pick up the pile of clothes next to me and take them into the bathroom. I close the door.

“Can you get the keys to Rose’s car?” I call over the sound of the fan.

“Sure. Why?”

“Because,” I say, “I have something I want to show you.”