Building a Home with My Husband (24 page)

“What did he mean?”

“He’s fully insured, and he said he’ll make up anything they don’t cover.”

“That’s incredible. That’s a huge reason for gratitude.”

“We’re lucky.”

“But what’s going to happen to the house?”

“We don’t know how bad the damage is, and the job’s shut down until we do. Tomorrow the insurance adjuster and a structural engineer are coming by to make decisions.”

“We were going to move back in less than four weeks.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“But Natalie’s house just sold.”

“Well, until we know more, let’s not worry. Let’s just say we’re in limbo.”

“How did this happen? Who’s responsible?”

“The fire marshal will be investigating. We just have to wait to learn more.”

He sounds matter-of-fact, but his voice seems small—so small, I have no interest in saying that the anxiety I’ve felt throughout the renovation now seems like premonition. He knows that anyway, and really, only one thing matters now: I say, “I’m worried about you.”

“You know, there’re some miracles about all this,” he says, conspicuously taking the focus off himself, and he elaborates. The carpenter smelled the gas as it began to leak. To play it safe he opened the front and back doors of the house, which meant that the concussive waves had voids in their pathways, which spared many lives. Coincidentally, no one was in the kitchen, where the blast was worst, thus minimizing injuries. The timing was favorable in other respects: the carpenter was ten minutes away from climbing a ladder on the patio, so he wasn’t on the front line of bursting windows, and because we’d just repaired the crumbling brick inside the dining room wall, it remained standing—thus keeping the house upright, too.

“As disasters go,” I say, “I guess we’re not doing so badly.”

“That’s true.”

“But are you okay?”

“Are you?”

I hesitate, and realize that my pulse isn’t beating nearly as wildly as it was when I was with Beth. This conversation has nudged away quite a bit of the panic, if not the shock. “You know, I’m all right,” I say, and hear the surprise in my voice. But I know from
his
voice that he’s not all right at all. “Please, tell me how
you
are.”

He says, “It was my job, and everything was going well, and that felt great. Now . . .”

I hear the chatter of shoppers as he enters a store to get warm. I want to say something comforting, but can’t think of what. So I just listen to us both breathe. Finally, he breaks the silence with, “Look, there’s nothing more to say. We can talk tomorrow.”

“Take care, all right?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice half-hearted, and adds, “You too, Baboo,” and at that word, I tear up. But by the time I think to ask if I should drive home tonight, he’s turned off his phone.

 

It is a night of no sleep.

After a sober review of the facts with my father and Theresa, who are as stunned as they are sympathetic, I make up their extra bed, though I already know that a stubborn awakeness will light my path all the way to morning. Yes, Hal relayed much about luck and miracles, and that has provided a measure of relief. But I feel as defenseless and needy as a child, and the riot of thoughts that began this afternoon has grown more cacophonous and plentiful.

Of course, I’m still castigating myself for not being on the road to Delaware. However, the storm that lurked all day is now battering the windows, and Beth is expecting to see me again tomorrow, and I know that Hal wouldn’t want me to scythe through this downfall, let alone stand my sister up. Our imminent housing quandary is also firing through my brain. Might my father let us live here? He might, but it wouldn’t matter. This place is too far from Hal’s job, as well as, once my semester off ends in January, the college where I teach. What about cheap hotels? We don’t have the money. Someone’s living room? How could we do that to a friend? My body tightens as I browse through all the options and see that we don’t have any.

But flickering among these regrets and dreads is a disturbing new concern. As I look out to the days, weeks, or, heaven help us, months of disarray that lie ahead, I know that this disaster will, in some way, change me—and I worry about what that change will look like. Will I come to incubate an anger I don’t yet feel, but that will run so deeply through my veins that it will blacken my disposition? If so, will it lead me to travel such a separate emotional journey from Hal that we will fall out of sync? Will I come to cast Dan, the workers, even the entire building industry, as enemies worthy of rancor? Will I dive into the bog of attorneys and paranoia and monitoring everything I say about every business transaction to the end of time? Right now, I can’t say I feel anything other than dazed. But I’ve seen other people forever changed in just these ways after fate dealt them a blow. Who, after I make it to the end of this misfortune, will I be?

I shouldn’t add to my insomnia, but the possibility of hardening my heart worries me. As rain drums against the glass and I watch sparkling shadows on the wall, I remember how, when Rosalie disappeared, it took me six years of aiming my rage and pain at her before I understood that my emotions had been curving back to strike me. That was one of the most important lessons I learned in the long educational process that I’ve come to call my life: although other people might create havoc for me, the more I seethe toward them, the more I make myself suffer. Since that realization, I’ve tried to resist acid feelings.

The problem is that I haven’t always succeeded. I’ve griped about inexplicable colleagues, used caustic names for imperious physicians, and wished harm on politicians who peddled poorly thought-out policies. Each time I’ll try to hold myself to my own standard, but thinking ill of others can, unfortunately, give a rush of pleasure. Also, anger, judgment, and their ilk roam through so much of American culture that sometimes when I take a charitable approach toward someone who’s done me, or others, a bad turn, I wonder if I’m just unsophisticated. Were I more worldly, I’ll think, especially after seeing ads and hearing radio shows and watching movies and reading books that portray the mind-boggling stupidity and shallowness of other people, I would finally come to my senses.

And it is this pull—between lessons I’ve already learned and lessons I hope to avoid—that is really to blame for me lying awake all night. I keep considering who I might become, and if I’d really want to know that person.

 

Late the next day, when I get back to Delaware, I decide to visit the wreckage first.

I park in the gathering dusk, and as soon as I see the house, my heart feels heavy in my chest. Yellow police tape seals off the front steps, and the windows—new only a few days ago—are boarded up. I walk carefully down the unlit alley, unable to see my footing. The backyard is heaped high with empty window frames, which are further squashing our fringe tree. The floor-to-ceiling windows are boarded up and roped off. But the new glass door, which was open at the moment of the blast, survived. I slip under the tape and peek through.

What a sight. The dining room-kitchen is knee-high in the drywall and plaster and insulation that blew off the walls, exposing chunks of framing and brick. Higher up, the ceiling is ripped in half like paper. Apparently, the whole back two-thirds of the house was ravaged. Only two days ago, I felt so happy at how alive the house was. Now I just want to cry.

I gape at the sight, shivering.
Turn around and get out of here
, I tell myself.
No. Give in to this sorrow and grieve.
I try to figure out what to do in the brittle November twilight, but before the answer presents itself, a memory that has nothing to do with explosions or anger returns to me. It is a memory of a lesson different from the one I learned about Rosalie, and I often call it to mind when something seems impossibly bleak.

It happened during the summer after Hal and I broke up. I was living in a friend’s attic—depressed, jobless, and destitute. All that sustained me were sleepover visits I kept paying to friends like Harriet or Sandy, where late-night conversations helped distract me from my hopelessness. One night I stayed with Lisa, a friend with a deeply spiritual core who made her living translating the writings of the seventeenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. For hours, I asked Lisa over and over what possible reason there could be for why things had gone so wrong in my life. Just before I curled up on her sofa to fall asleep, she said, “Maybe there is no reason,” which made me feel even more dismal. But in the morning, after Lisa drove me back to the house where I was living, just as I was leaving her car, she said, “Actually, Swedenborg does address what you were asking about, but he doesn’t say that things happen for a reason.” Then, paraphrasing Swedenborg, she said, “There is nothing that happens out of which good cannot occur.” I stood beside her car in the summer sun. Some lessons take their time to seep in, but this one struck suddenly and fully with the force of a revelation: what mattered was not what had gone wrong in my life, or even how horribly wrong it had gone, but that something had delivered me to a new shore, and now I had a choice about whether I would embrace the new land or stay right where I was, resenting the ferry that had carried me.

That morning was the first time I began to feel that something meaningful might lie beyond the agony of my breakup with Hal. Although good did not appear immediately in my life, and did not take any shape I could possibly have envisioned on that sunny morning, eventually, as I stepped into the next day and the next opportunity, it did.

It is a cliché to say that as we walk through life we enter a succession of classrooms, and that each one offers us new lessons. Yet I’ve gone down many unplanned corridors that have led, after much darkness, to precious truths, either because, as with Rosalie, I’ve been forced to counsel myself, or because I’ve had the good fortune to encounter someone like Lisa, who became my teacher at just the moment I needed one. So as I look in the glass door at the ruined kitchen, I tell myself that as freak an accident as this was, and as displaced and glum as I feel, maybe the best approach I can take is to see myself as a student again. Whether I’m now going to be reevaluating my attitude toward others, or trying to weave something good from so much that’s bad, I don’t know. I also don’t know whether I’ll be lucky enough to find someone like Lisa, who will say something that will light my way. After all, part of the definition of a student is someone who does not know what she does not know. But I do know that like my own students, I can enter this new classroom with humility or hostility. I can press on or give up. I can allow myself to transform or smolder that my time has been wasted.

I slip back under the police tape. Yes, I know: an exploded house is a pitiful classroom, and this is the time for me to be a wife and sister and, soon, a teacher. How can I also be a student? But a misfortune came to pass and here I am, groping down the alley in the dark.

 

When I finally get back to the rented house, Hal and I throw our arms around each other and don’t let go for what seems like hours. Then, since we’re keeping the heat down to funnel all our money toward the renovation, we get under the covers and keep on holding.

“The situation isn’t good,” Hal says, and proceeds to tell me about visiting the house today to assess the damage. Dan will have to take down much of what remains inside, layer by layer, stopping only when he reaches a layer untouched by the explosion. Only then will we know the extent of the repairs.

“It’s a sorry sight,” I say, my teeth chattering in the chilly bedroom.

“It is,” he says. “For a while last night I kept asking myself, ‘Why me?’ ”

“I was so worried about you. You sounded so bereft when I finally reached you.”

“I’d gone to Philly to calm myself by going to record stores. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was all over the place. I’d been feeling so good about the job, and then . . .”

“I guess no one’s immune from bad things happening.”

“Yeah. Not even a fool like me.”

“A fool? What makes you a fool?”

“ ’Cause when I did the drawings, I didn’t say, ‘Don’t open gas line and light torch.’ ”

We let a laugh slip out, and our muscles loosen. He says, “But talking to you helped.”

“It did?”

“I was concerned that you’d say, Oh, my God! But you were level-headed, and you were there for me. Standing in that cold, hearing your voice in my ear. That helped a lot.”

“I didn’t know I did anything.”

“Well, you did. You were okay, and that helped me regain my perspective. Our house is still standing. No one was seriously hurt. And you’re with me.”

“Two fools together.”

“Why are
you
a fool?”

“Because I’ve entertained the idea of getting angry about this. You could even say that I
want
to be angry about this. As soon as I figure out who to be angry with.”

“Maybe that’s only human.”

“But you’re not angry.”

“No. I’m sad.”

“I am, too.”

“But we’re sad together. That’s what matters. We’ll get through this.”

“Even if I do get angry?”

“Whatever you feel—whatever
I
feel—as long as we feel it together, we’ll be okay.”

His words are so comforting, I stop wanting to feel angry, at least for now. But anticipating that I’ll have this same desire for anger again, I ask, “Did you come to an answer for ‘Why me?’ ”

He’s quiet for a minute. “I think there’s only one answer, and that’s, ‘Why
not
me?’ None of us is so special that we can avoid suffering.”

The house is still a wreck and our future uncertain, but here, under the covers, students together, this cold night has come to feel warm.

 

For the next several days, we both go about doing what needs to be done. Hal attends meetings with the insurance adjuster, the structural engineer, and Dan. I review my syllabus for my return to teaching. Hal does not mope, and I stay level-headed.