But she looked down now at what Nate had labeledDREAM HOUSEin neat block handwriting, at the carefully rendered plans done to scale: elevation drawings; close-ups of each wall, the roof, and the stairs; detailed illustrations showing how they would frame the floors and ceilings. There were materials lists calculating how many board feet of lumber they needed, how much insulation, how many bundles of shingles. Everything looked so tidy, so perfect on paper: his plan for her happiness laid out in neat columns.
And back in Connecticut, Nate managed to convince Helen that they could do this. He’d read books, watched videos, attended courses. “And you grew up building,” he’d reminded her. “It’s in your genes.”
But none of that had prepared Helen for how unnerved she’d feel at the familiar screech of the powerful saw. Or the way Nate had looked at her when she’d mismeasured. Like she was a goddamned idiot.
“It’ll get easier,” Nate said now, putting his hand over hers and giving it a squeeze. “I’m not saying it’ll be without its challenges, but we’ve just got to follow the plans. Stick together. We can do this.”
Follow the plans,she thought.
She smiled, took another gulp of wine.
She thought of all the times she and her father had dealt with jobs that didn’t go as planned: weather delays, bad batches of lumber, late deliveries, angles that didn’t work no matter how perfect they’d looked on paper. She worried that Nate seemed to live in a world where unpredictable things didn’t happen.
Her eyes moved to the little bundle with the tooth and nail, resting on the kitchen counter beside the sink now, next to the dirty dishes.
Nate rolled up the plans for their dream house.
“Tomorrow will be a better day,” she said.
Say it and make it true.
CHAPTER 6
Olive
MAY 19, 2015
Daddy’s truck was in the driveway. He was home an hour early.
Had the school gotten in touch with him? Told him Olive hadn’t shown up yet again? Had he come home to look for her?
Olive felt panic seeping in, a little dribble at first, then a steady stream as she got closer to the house.
She’d spent the day searching around with her metal detector on the northwest side of the bog. The metal detector was on the fritz—sometimes beeping when there was nothing at all beneath it, sometimes just dying altogether. It was crap, but she’d picked it up for thirty bucks at a church rummage sale last fall, so what did she expect? She was saving her money for a much better one, a hundred times more sensitive and powerful. It even came with headphones. Olive was sure that if she had this, she’d find the treasure in no time. She’d been saving her allowance, doing any odd jobs she could find. She’d even skipped eating school lunch and pocketed the four bucks Daddy gave her each day. And Mike had offered to buy the old crappy one from her for the same price she’d paid for it, which seemed unfair, but he insisted, saying he knew it would be good luck for him because it had been hers and look at all the cool stuff she’d found with it.
During today’s search, from time to time, she’d take a break and go up the hill on a little path to check on Helen and Nate (she knew their names now from hearing them talking, from watching them, but more than knowing their names, she felt she knew them). She’d been watching them from behind the moss-covered root system of a tree that had fallen over—it made the perfect cover. They were trying to frame one of the walls, but things hadn’t ended well—they’d started fighting as soon as things got hard. Olive almost felt sorry for them. Then they’d quit early (after getting into a fight when Helen cut a board too short) and gone down to the bog, which meant Olive’s searching was over for the day. It was time to call it quits anyway, because she wanted to get home before Daddy, get dinner started, and make it look like she’d gone to school and was doing her homework like the good girl he thought she was.
But seeing Daddy’s truck in the driveway wrecked all that.
She ditched the metal detector in the toolshed and scrambled to come up with a story to explain why she hadn’t been in school. Saying she’d missed the bus seemed pretty lame. She could tell him she was too upset and freaked-out about the accident, about the dead kids just a little older than her, to get on the bus, go to school. That would work. It would have to. It was the best she had for now.
“Hello?” she called from the kitchen around the growing lump in her throat. She went into the living room to see if he’d started work in there like they’d planned. But she heard telltale banging from upstairs. Was he working in the hallway, which was still bare stud walls, exposed wiring?
“Daddy?” she called.
“Up here,” he yelled back.
She jumped the stairs two at time, and then her chest got tight when she saw he wasn’t in the hallway and that the door to her bedroom was open. This room was her haven—beautiful and pristine, with a neatly made bed and all of her treasures lined up on shelves: stuff she’d found with her metal detector (old buttons, nails, musket balls), the pelt from a fox she’d shot and skinned herself, and her favorite photo of Mama, taken a few weeks before she left. Mama was outside at the picnic table holding a plastic tumbler, grinning into the camera. She had on her lucky necklace, the one she never took off those last weeks before she left—a pattern of a circle, triangle, and square nested inside each other with another circle with an eye at the center. Mama called it herI see allnecklace. Olive had taken the picture. It was a warm early-summer night and Daddy was cooking chicken on the grill. The radio was tuned to a classic rock station, and Mom and Dad were drinking rum and Cokes from big plastic tumblers. Olive had been happy because Mama had been home and in a good mood, and she and Daddy had been getting along so well, kissing and calling each other “honey” and “baby” and all those other terms of endearment that used to make Olive roll her eyes and make pretend gagging noises, when secretly she thought it so sweet that they were still so in love. That night, when she saw Mama take Daddy’s hand after he came back from the grill with a plateful of seared chicken legs, Olive really believed they were still in love and that everything was going to be okay.
Olive walked slowly down the hall, like the way you walk in a creepy haunted house at Halloween when you don’t really want to see what’s going to happen next.
But it was no use. She could shut her eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening, but she knew she had to look eventually. And she knew just what she’d see.
Olive walked into the bedroom to see that the shelves had been taken off the wall, the photo and all of her other things haphazardly shoved into cardboard beer boxes. Her bed had been pushed into the middle of the room and the boxes were piled on top of it. It reminded Olive of a life raft in the center of a turbulent ocean.
Daddy was standing in the back corner of her room, holding a sledgehammer, and he smiled at her. Half of the back wall was already down. He still had on his blue work pants and boots but had taken off his work shirt and was in a white T-shirt that was damp with sweat, stained yellow around the collar and under the arms, so worn it was practically see-through. She could see his wiry chest hair curled underneath it.
She hated him just then. Hated that he was a man who could do something like this. Who could betray her in such a huge, devastating way.
