How to Build a House (2 page)

I don’t know a soul.

This realization has the surprise effect of calming my nerves.

I don’t know a soul
.

Then I see it.

H. EVANS

The man holding the sign is tall with red hair and a red beard. I’ve never met a lumberjack, and I’m not really sure if they’re real or imaginary, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see this man holding a sign with my name on it is that he looks like a lumberjack to me.

He squints when he sees me walking toward him.

“I’m H. Evans.”

“I figured. I’m Linus.” He sticks out his hand and I shake it. “Welcome to Memphis International Airport.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“I’m your Homes group leader for the summer.”

I know this already. I read the short paragraph about him that came with the paperwork. I read all the paperwork. I’m nothing if not thorough.

Linus Devereaux. The paragraph said he’s built homes in Alaska, Mississippi, the Florida Gulf Coast, South Dakota, Watts, Haiti, the Congo and the Ukraine. It didn’t say anything else about him, but it did end with this quote from Gandhi that all the posers at school like to put on their senior yearbook pages: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Then again, those posers go off to UCLA or USC or sometimes Yale, and they drink too much and throw up out their dorm windows, and this guy is off building houses in every corner of the globe, so I guess maybe he’s actually earned the right to put Gandhi’s quote beneath a picture of himself with an uncomfortable smile.

I wasn’t in the brochure. No picture, no biographical information.

Harper Evans lives in Los Angeles, California, with her father. And sometimes her little brother. And sometimes the family border collie. And nobody else
.

We walk through the terminal until we reach the baggage claim area for another airline and now Linus holds a sign that says
F. GREGORY
.

Linus the Lumberjack smiles at me. “I hope you’re not in too much of a hurry.”

“Not at all. I’m just happy for the lift. I’m a little out of my element here.”

“Most of you will be, I’d guess. We’ve got lots of city kids coming. Kids from all over. There’s plenty to learn, but we’ll help you through. And we’ll ply you with plenty of Advil.”

Seeing my quizzical look, he adds, “The muscles tend to go into a wee bit of shock during the first days of work.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It is.”

Linus looks down at the signs in his hands. “We’ll be on the road soon. Two more of you coming in. And I’ve just noticed that you kept it easy on me by arriving in alphabetical order.”

“Yeah, we planned it that way. Me and F. Gregory. He called me to make sure I caught an early flight.”

“It’s a she.”

“Oops.”

“You had a fifty percent chance of getting that right.”

“Actually, I had a fifty-point-seven percent chance.”

“Those are good odds.”

“I thought so too.”

I sit down on my suitcase and grab my backpack and again I reach for the phone that isn’t there. It’s a reflex. An addiction.

Dad and I have a thing. Whenever I arrive wherever it is I’m going, I call to tell him I got there. It’s a little neurotic, I know, but you can’t really blame him when you consider what happened to Mom.

Linus reaches into the leather case attached to his belt, pulls out a cell phone and tosses it to me. I catch it one-handed. “Call your father,” he says.

I check myself. Did I say something out loud? I could have sworn I was just
thinking
about how I needed to call Dad. Maybe I’ve become one of those annoying people who mutter. God, I hope this isn’t true.

I take this as an opportunity to step outside.

Tennessee heat is brutal. I’ve been told it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. A distinction I’ve never understood until right this very moment.

I’m wearing this heat like a heavy, damp blanket.

Dad picks up right away and sounds relieved when he hears my voice, but also different.

Small.

Like a miniature version of Dad.

“I’m here. In the airport. I haven’t seen any more of Tennessee, but the airport’s perfectly nice.”

“I really miss you,” he says.

I feel my lungs filling up with something I don’t recognize. I can scarcely breathe.

“I have to go. Other people are arriving. In alphabetical order.”

“Listen, I know we have a rule about me not going through your things and generally keeping my hands and eyes off of anything that belongs to you, so please, let me humbly seek your forgiveness for having slipped a little something into your backpack. The inside zippered pocket.”

“You went through my stuff?”

“I opened the zipper with my eyes closed, but I couldn’t help having to touch a few things.”

“Dad. I’m joking.”

“I know.”

“I really do have to go.”

“I know that too.”

I snap the phone closed and stare at it while the blanket of heat wraps itself tighter around me.

HOME

At the wedding I wore white.

The dress had no sleeves and a bow that tied in the back.

It was a small party, held in our backyard. Jane’s friend Daniel, a rabbinical school dropout, performed the ceremony. He drew on the Jewish rituals important to Jane while also making it a comfortable experience for my atheist father.

Me? I didn’t care about rituals or God or vows. I just loved my dress and couldn’t wait to get my hands on that cake.

We danced outside. The grass was damp because Dad forgot to turn off the sprinklers that morning, so we all went barefoot. I remember the hem of my dress getting splattered with mud and stained from the grass and how I started to panic until Jane came over and took me by the hands, and the look on her face was so calm and content and happy that a rare moment of rationality took hold of my six-year-old self, and I decided nothing as silly as stains on white tulle could ruin the day.

It was perfect.

They’d moved into our house about two months before. I was thrilled to share a room with Tess. I’d always wanted bunk beds. The problem was, so had she, and like me, she had her heart set on the top bunk, so we settled for twin beds on opposite sides of the room, and this arrangement put a halt to my pattern of waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was.

They moved in one day, and the next it was as if they’d been there forever.

I know how that sounds. It sounds ridiculous. Like a lie. The hallways should have echoed with the shrill screams of bickering girls. Doors should have slammed. Harsh words spoken. Feelings bruised.

That would all come later, like it inevitably does between sisters. But that isn’t how it was those first few weeks, and maybe that’s because I’d just turned six, and the idea that one day your family looks one way and the next day it looks another way was all that I knew.

The years between then and now taught me the dangerous lesson that comfort and solace can be found in the everyday rhythms of a predictable life. The years in between taught me that you can rely on things to be a certain way when you wake up in the morning.

Now I know again that one day things can be going along like they always were and then, suddenly, in a simple rotation of an overheated planet, everything can change.

It’s a hell of a lot harder to take this lesson at seventeen than it was at two. Or six.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to the day of the wedding and my white tulle dress with the splattered mud and electric-green grass stains.

It was perfect.

HERE

F. Gregory has short dark hair that sticks up in just the right way and in just the right places. She has three earrings in one ear and two in the other. She’s sporting the perfect pair of jeans.

I hate her.

No, I don’t hate her. Of course I don’t hate her. Let’s be honest. She has the look I’ve always wanted but never even tried for because it’s so far beyond my reach I’d dislocate something just attempting to graze it with my fingertips.

She’s cool. I’m not, particularly.

I have long blond hair. It doesn’t ever do a thing that would come close to approaching stylish. It’s straight and flat and thin. It’s blond, sure, and some people will tell you that it’s a beautiful color, but they’re lying. It’s dull.

I don’t have anything pierced because I’m a complete wuss when it comes to pain. If I could step into a world where the idea of somebody taking a gun and shooting some part of my flesh with a sharp metal stud didn’t make me physically ill, I think I’d get a nose ring. A small diamond just above my left nostril. Something on my face that sparkles, that would make you want to look at me.

Also, I can’t wear jeans.

This is a fact. I’ve tried. I even tried wearing the expensive kind of jeans. The upward-of-two-hundred-dollars kind. Well, they were two hundred and twenty-four dollars. After I wore them three times I had to admit that they didn’t work on me.

I sold them on eBay.

For two hundred dollars.

So basically I spent twenty-four dollars plus postage and handling to learn something I already knew: that I can’t wear jeans.

F. Gregory is wearing forty-dollar Levi’s and they look fantastic.

Her plane arrived from New York. So we have something to talk about while we stand around waiting for
S. JARVIS
.

“Sue?” I ask Linus.

“Seth,” he says. “I believe that places you in the wrong forty-nine-point-three percent.”

“Damn.”

F. Gregory’s real name is Frances, and she lives in the West Village with her mom; her dad lives on the Upper East Side. My grandparents live on the Upper West Side and I have an uncle in the East Village, so between us we have the four corners of New York City fairly well covered.

I just tell her I live in Los Angeles and don’t say anything else about whom I live with or where, and she doesn’t ask, and I’m totally and completely relieved because I start to taste my pounding heart just thinking about how to answer any more questions. I sit down on my suitcase and start digging through my backpack like I’m looking for something, and she turns and starts talking to Linus, probably writing me off as a stuck-up bitch who’s too cool to make polite conversation.

I don’t really care.

I didn’t come here to make friends. I came here to forget friends. And sort-of boyfriends. And sisters. And mothers.

Seth Jarvis has a buzz cut. He’s from Salt Lake City and he’s wearing khaki shorts, flip-flops and a baggy white T-shirt that doesn’t quite mask his boy boobs. He’s carrying a big bottle of water.

In the van, as we leave Memphis behind and I take one last longing look at civilization, Linus turns the radio to a country music station. Seth Jarvis seems to know the song that’s playing. He and Linus discuss another version that Seth likes better.

I hate country music.

I hate country music so much that I considered
not
coming to Tennessee. Homes from the Heart has other summer programs for teens. There’s one in Guatemala. But I haven’t heard enough Guatemalan music to know if I hate it or not. And anyway, I knew about the tornado. I saw the picture of the boy with the tear running down his dusty face.

Disasters don’t pass me by just because they’re small.

There was an article about this tornado on the Web site I visit devoted to climate change. This scientist believes that tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and fill-in-the-blank disasters are a direct result of global warming. They’re caused by human activity. If we change the way we live our lives, he argues, we could decrease disaster in the world.

I’ve read plenty of the other types of articles too. The ones where the scientists argue that disasters are inevitable, that no matter what we do, there are certain disasters that will always befall us.

After a long drive we turn off the highway and spend another twenty-five minutes traversing smaller roads. I notice a pattern. It goes something like: church, church, fast-food restaurant I’ve never heard of, church, muffler shop, church, church.

We stop at an intersection.

“Downtown Bailey, people. Blink and you’ll miss it.” Linus takes his foot off the brake and we roll on. I look out the window behind me. Some storefronts. American flags. A woman with red hair sits on a bench.

In another few minutes we arrive at what Linus calls our hotel, though actually it’s a motel on the side of an empty road. No restaurants or muffler shops. Not a single church. It sits alone. Even trees keep their distance.

I’m assigned to 7W, room 7 on the West Wing. Girls on the West Wing. Boys on the East Wing. By the way, calling the two sides of this place wings won’t fill it with glamour.

But here’s the thing.

I love it here.

As I turn the key in my door and step into the floral-polyester-curtained darkness, a smell wafts over me of a room that was once a place where you could smoke. I take in the tacky art on the walls, the moth-eaten orange armchair, a cracked mirror, and I fall in love.

It’s a place of anonymity. A generic room that could be anywhere. It
is
anywhere, and it’s nowhere, and for the next twelve weeks, it’s a place I can call my own.