24. Marcus
MARCUS
There is a particular danger to a good stretch of days, which is that you start to trust them.
I knew better. I am a man who has built a whole personality out of knowing better. And still, that middle week of November, I caught myself doing a thing I had not done in years, which was looking forward to the morning.
The work was going well, which helps. The front of the house was tight against the weather at last, the new sill plate true, the staircase sound enough to take a grown woman taking the steps two at a time, which she does, loudly, narrating.
We had beaten the freeze. The house that I had spent two years keeping barely alive was, for the first time since Sully, actually coming back, board by board, and I had stopped being able to tell where the restoration ended and the rest of it began, the her of it, the us.
We had found a rhythm by then I could not have described to you a month before.
She handed me tools a breath before I reached for them.
I set the work-lamp where she would need it without being asked.
She narrated and I grunted and Dozer supervised from the warm spot, and somewhere in all the racket the house got better, and so, quietly, did I.
People talk about falling in love like falling, all speed and no floor under it.
Nobody warns you it can also feel like the other thing.
Like something settling true. Like a door finally hung so it swings clean and latches soft and quits fighting its own frame.
We had taken to eating dinner in the half-finished kitchen, the two of us on overturned buckets because the chairs had not happened yet, our plates on a plank laid across two sawhorses.
It was the worst dining room in the state of Colorado and I would not have traded it for anywhere on earth.
She talked the whole way through every meal, about the day, about the comments, about a finish nail she had developed strong personal feelings about, and I listened the way you listen to a radio you would miss if it ever cut out.
Somewhere in those dinners I stopped doing the thing I had done every night for two years, which was checking the clock for when I was supposed to drive down the mountain and go back to being alone.
"You're whistling," Piper said one afternoon, not looking up from her camera.
"I don't whistle."
"You were absolutely whistling. Three notes. It was practically a Broadway number for you." She finally looked over, delighted, like she'd caught me at something. "Marcus Webb. Are you happy?"
"Don't make it weird."
"You are. You're happy and you don't have a system for it."
"I have systems."
"You have one for grief and one for sanding. This is neither. You're going to have to wing it like the rest of us."
"I don't wing things."
"You're winging it right now. You're winging it so hard, and it is the bravest thing I have ever watched you do."
She came over and bumped her shoulder into my arm, and I let her, and that was the truth of it. She was right. I had no map at all for standing in a half-finished house at the end of a good day, wanting nothing except for it to keep being exactly this.
That was the day I started to think the unthinkable thing. Not in words yet. Just a feeling, the way you feel a board is going to hold before you put your weight on it. The feeling was: I could stop here. I could stop running.
I have never owned a house. People find that strange about a man who builds them.
The truth is simpler than they want it to be.
You do not put down roots in a place you are braced to lose.
I have lived my whole adult life one duffel bag from gone, in rentals and a borrowed cabin, because a man who owns nothing can lose nothing, and I had decided a long time ago that losing nothing was the closest thing to safe I was going to get.
I have moved eleven times since I was sixteen.
I counted once, on a bad night. Eleven times, never more than what fit in the truck bed, and I called it freedom every time, a man who could be packed and gone by noon.
The philosophy, it turns out, was just a long way of admitting I had never once owned a thing I could not bear to load up and leave.
Standing in that house, I understood I had finally found the thing I could not load.
Two things. The house, and the woman making it loud.
And in the place where the old animal panic should have been, the need to be down the road before it cost me, there was only a strange settling, the way a building finds its weight on a footing that means to hold.
And then a loud woman bought the one house on earth I would have wanted, and started filling it with light and noise and terrible coffee, and I stood in it one ordinary afternoon and let myself imagine, for the length of one held breath, that I lived there.
That I did not drive down the mountain at night. That this was mine. That we were.
The imagining did not stay one held breath.
Once I let it in, it filled the rooms on its own.
I caught myself pricing out a real kitchen, not the camp setup, a range she could actually cook on, a deep sink under the east window where the morning light comes in best. I caught myself thinking the loft wanted a proper stair instead of that ladder.
I caught myself, God help me, standing in the doorway of the back bedroom, the one Sully died in, the one I had not gone into since they carried him out of it, and thinking it could be a good room again.
A room for sleeping in and waking up in, if somebody filled it with the right life.
I had kept that door shut all that time.
Now I stood in the hall planning what went behind it.
It should have terrified me. It did not. That was the thing that should have warned me, how little it terrified me.
I told her about Sully that evening, the rest of it, the part I had never said.
We were in the parlor. She had been strange about that room for a week, guarding the door, waving me off with some excuse about lighting, and I had let her, because everyone is allowed one locked room and I of all people was not going to argue the point.
But that night she took my hand and pulled me in, almost shy about it, and I saw that she had been quietly tending the mantel.
Sully's mantel. She had stripped the bad paint off it by hand, careful as a surgeon, and brought the wood up warm and true, the way he made it, and she had not touched one line of his work.
She had honored it. She had spent a week of stolen hours honoring the thing I nearly walked off the job to protect, and she had done it without being asked, and I had to stand there a moment and work my jaw before I could trust my voice.
"You did this," I said.
"I'm not done. It's supposed to be a surprise, so act surprised later." She watched my face. "Is it right? I tried to match what he did. I didn't want to change it. I just wanted to bring it back."
"It's him." It came out rough, because it was true. "You brought him back into the room."
And standing there in front of the one thing the old man made with his hands going bad, with the woman who had spent a week loving it back to life, the rest of the story finally came up out of me easy.
"He didn't want a museum," I said. "Sully.
That's the part I never told you, or let myself say.
Everybody up here thinks I kept this place frozen out of respect.
Out of love. The truth is I kept it frozen out of grief, and grief is the most selfish thing there is, and it made me do the one thing he would have hated. "
"Which was?"
"This." I gestured at the whole quiet shell of the house.
"Keeping it perfect. Keeping it empty. A clean dead monument to a man who could not stand a quiet room.
" I shook my head. "You should have heard this house when he was in it.
He had the radio going and a kettle going and the dog before Dozer underfoot and somebody always coming by, and he used to say a house is not finished when it is pretty.
A house is finished when it is loud. When there is life banging around inside it making a mess.
That was the whole point of the work to him.
Not the work. The life the work made room for. "
I told her about the parties, the ones I had not let myself remember in three years.
Sully threw them for nothing, the end of a job, the first snow, a slow Wednesday.
Half the county in this parlor, somebody's fiddle in the corner, Dale losing at cards and pretending he meant to, Cole and me too young to drink and drinking anyway while Sully looked the other way on purpose.
The house so full the windows fogged from the inside.
That was what he hauled every board of it back from the dead for.
Not to be admired. To be filled. And I wanted it back, I realized, standing there.
For the first time since it all went quiet, I wanted the noise back more than the silence that had kept me safe.
She had gone very still, listening.
"And he died," I said, "and I took the loudest house this mountain ever had and I made it a tomb, because a tomb does not change and a tomb cannot leave you.
I told myself I was protecting his work.
I was just afraid to let the place be alive again without him in it.
" I looked at her. "Then you drove a box truck up my mountain and would not stop talking, and you have been making this house loud for two months, and I fought you on every wall because some part of me knew you were going to do the exact thing he wanted and I was not ready to forgive the house for being able to live without him. "
"Marcus." Her eyes were wet.
"He'd have loved you," I said, which was as far over the edge of myself as I had ever gone. "That's the part that gets me. He would have taken one look at you filling his house with noise and he'd have handed you a better hammer and told me I was a fool, which I was."
She laughed, the wet kind. "I would have liked him."
"He'd have hated being called a saint, if that's where you're headed."
"Saints are boring. Tell me one real thing about him. One the eulogy left out."
So I told her how he cried at dog food commercials and denied it to his grave.
How he could not carry a tune and sang anyway, loud, on ladders, where nobody could make him stop.
How the cruelest thing he ever did to me was be right about everything and never once say I told you so.
She laughed and wiped her eyes in the same motion, and I felt myself hand her another piece of him, and the handing over did not cost me the way I had spent years assuming it would.
It felt like the exact opposite of losing him.
"You'd have driven each other insane. You both never stop talking." I ran my hand along the warm wood of his mantel, her work and his work now the same work, and I said the thing I had been circling all week. "I want to finish it for real this time."
"You are finishing it. We're ahead of schedule, even, which I will be putting in the next video as entirely my doing."
"That's not what I mean." I made myself say it plain, because plain is the only thing I have ever had to offer and she deserved the whole of it.
"Not as a job. Not as a monument to a dead man.
I want to finish it the way he meant it.
As a place somebody actually lives. Loud.
Full. A mess." I held her eyes. "For real this time. "
I did not say the rest of it. I did not have to. We both heard the part I left in the air, the with you, the not driving down the mountain anymore, the whole unspoken shape of a life I had not let myself want since before I learned that wanting was how they got you.
For the first time in my life I stood in a house and thought, plainly, I could stay. I should have knocked on wood. I was, after all, standing in a whole house full of it.
The light was going. The parlor windows had gone to that deep blue they get at the end of a short November day, and the room was full of the smell of stripped wood and her, and somewhere out in the hall Dozer turned around three times and lay down with the groan of an old dog who has decided a place is safe.
I stood in the bones of the room Sully built and the room she was bringing back, and I felt the want come all the way up, unguarded, with nothing braced behind it for once.
"I think I could be happy here," I said. Half to her. Half to myself. Half to the old man in the walls.
It was the most dangerous sentence I had ever said out loud, and I did not know it, which is the only mercy in the whole thing. I said it like a man laying down a burden. I said it the way you say a thing when you have finally, after years, stopped being afraid of it.
She smiled at me. She turned the whole of it on me, that smile, the real one, the one with no camera anywhere near it, and for a second the room was as warm and as full and as alive as Sully ever dreamed it.
Then she turned back to the mantel, to the work, quick, and bent her head to a seam that did not need her, and I thought she was only shy with the size of what we had both just said.
I was a happy man in a house I was ready to stop running from.
I did not see her face. I have spent a long time since being grateful, in the worst way, that I did not see her face.