Three Story House: A Novel (2 page)

As her cousin spoke, Lizzie became aware of how different the word “beach” sounded when Elyse said it. Lizzie liked the way she talked. It reminded her of the time a girl from the middle of nowhere Mississippi had moved into her school. How that new girl had swallowed and meted out her words had been music to Lizzie.

It made her even more self-conscious about speaking, knowing that to her cousins’ ears, her Southern accent would sound as foreign. Elyse waved to a group of women hovering over a beach fire and several pots that Lizzie figured would soon be the clam bake she’d been told about. “My mom is over there,” she said, gesturing toward an apple-shaped woman who laughed so hard she jiggled.

Isobel unhooked the latches of her overalls and let them fall to the sand. “Watch what I can do,” she called, throwing her clothes and glasses toward Elyse’s mother.

Elyse sighed and picked up the scattered items, shrugging out of her sundress and dropping the pile of clothing on the edge of her mother’s towel. Her hands lingered for a moment, covering her body as if she were embarrassed at her chubbiness. Lizzie shaded her eyes against the sun and watched Isobel turning perfect cartwheels in the sand. “Go on,” Elyse’s mother said. “They won’t bite.”

Isobel, looking over her shoulder, issued a challenge to Lizzie and Elyse. “Last one to the sandbar wears the seaweed.”

Without thinking, Lizzie took off at full speed.

Behind her, she heard Elyse’s mom talking. “There she goes now. It’ll be fine.”

Lizzie liked to run. Her feet plunged into the shallow water without stopping and she laughed as she kicked up water into her face, delighted to taste the salt of it. She mostly swam in chlorinated pools in Memphis. The Mississippi, muddy and full of mysterious whorls, remained off-limits. She beat her cousins by ten yards and after they’d recovered their breath, Isobel plaited a crown from lengths of seaweed and eelgrass that she pulled from the floor of the ocean and set it atop Elyse’s head.

“I always wear the seaweed,” Elyse said.

Lizzie put her hand over her mouth to keep the words from coming out. She was afraid they’d be the wrong words.

“Do you talk?” Isobel asked. “You haven’t said one word to us. Nobody told us you didn’t talk. They said you were tall for your age.”

“She talks,” Elyse said, turning to Lizzie.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Lizzie said, looking down to see that the cuffs of her jean shorts were damp.

“Nobody cares about that, silly,” Elyse said, pulling the hem of Lizzie’s oversized T-shirt and tying it into a knot at the waist. “There. Just roll your shorts up some more and you’ll be fine.”

From the shore, Elyse’s mother waved at them and yelled at them not to go out any farther. Lizzie saw her own mother and Jim walking toward the clump of Wallaces on the beach. All of the other women were short. Lizzie watched as her mother stood apart from everyone; that was one of her tricks to appear shorter than she actually was. The Wallace men were all as handsome as Jim, with wide shoulders and full, thick hair. She blew a bubble so big that when it popped, she had to peel the gum from her nose. In the time that Jim had been with her mother, Lizzie had liked him okay. In the way that she liked her teachers. Every day he tried a different nickname with her—Sport, Chickadee, Chicken, Bunny, Elevator. She figured that was his way of trying to get comfortable. He did an Irish jig when he arrived at the jumble of beach towels and umbrellas, and Elyse’s mother hugged him as if he were her own brother. She pointed out the girls and Jim called to them, “Be careful, Lollypop!” That was the name he’d settled on in the car.

“Geez,” Isobel said, “You’d think we were actually in danger. This is the bay. The ocean is on the other side of the Cape. Nobody drowns here unless they can’t swim.”

“I can swim,” Lizzie said, trying to make up for the fact that she hadn’t worn her bathing suit under her clothing. “How far out can you walk?”

“Depends on the tide,” Isobel said, stepping off the sandbar and walking until the water swirled around her chin. She floated on her back, her toes pointed and her arms crossed as if she were dead. Her orange hair turned a deep copper when it was wet.

“She likes people to look at her,” Elyse said, sitting down on the sandbar so that the water came to her neck. She held her hair away from the waves to keep it dry and dipped her nose and mouth in the water to blow bubbles.

Lizzie dug her toes into the sand, feeling the larger rocks, and ventured a question of her own when Isobel had floated back toward them. “Y’all come here every summer?”

“Y’all,” they said in unison and then started shouting it out as if it were a curse word. By the end of the summer all of them would be using “y’all” and “wicked” in the same sentence.

When Isobel started clapping like a seal and barking “y’all,” Lizzie collapsed into a fit of giggles with them, forgetting entirely that she wasn’t dressed to be swimming. Elyse gave up trying to keep her hair dry and Isobel spent the next hour teaching them how to make arm farts. Once or twice a younger cousin ventured their way, but they persistently ignored Elyse’s mother’s pleas to let the little ones play with them and drove the interlopers back with splash attacks. During one of these bombardments, Lizzie swallowed what felt like a bucketful of the salty water and coughed so hard that Elyse and Isobel had to pound on her back.

They floated for a bit after that. Lizzie was already tallying up stories to tell her friends back in Memphis about her new cousins and the beach. Mrs. Dameron, who taught the third grade always had show-and-tell the first day back, and Lizzie had started to consider the perfect item to show. It would have to be something that was unique to this beach. Lots of kids went to Destin over the break.

“Where’s your other dad?” Elyse asked, and Lizzie couldn’t tell whether she’d been waiting to ask the entire time they’d been together or whether the thought had just occurred to her. As she got to know her cousin better, she realized that she never planned ahead. Every action in her life was a reaction.

Isobel, as if sensing there was no answer to the question, dunked Elyse, which started a spirited round of play fighting until Elyse got sand in her eyes, which made them all stop.

“I’m not crying,” she said before either one of them could accuse her.

“I don’t,” Lizzie said, surprised to be speaking even as the words left her mouth.

“You don’t what?” Isobel asked.

“Have a dad.”

“That’s okay,” Elyse said, pulling at the corner of her eye and trying to blink the sand out. “Lots of kids don’t have dads.”

“Everyone has a dad,” Isobel said.

“I know,” Elyse said. “I mean like my friend Susie, she doesn’t have a dad. He died or something.”

“I don’t think mine died,” Lizzie said, realizing how little her mother had told her. For most of her life, Lizzie hadn’t given much thought to the identity of her father. Occasionally, faced with a daddy-daughter dance or when her friends’ fathers would ferry them to one place or another, she’d remember that it was strange that she didn’t have one. But it wasn’t until her stepfather came along that she was forced to confront the idea that somewhere out there she had a father. Her mother tended to answer questions about her father with other questions. “What do you need a father for?” she’d ask in the same voice she used when Lizzie had been caught sneaking an extra cookie.

“Knock, knock,” Isobel said.

Elyse groaned and splashed water in her cousin’s direction. “She loves this sort of game. Knock-knock jokes, riddles, word puzzles.”

“Fine. Try this one. It’s a memory test. There’s a one-story house with yellow walls, a yellow roof, yellow fridge, yellow plates—”

“I get it,” Elyse said. “Everything’s yellow.”

Isobel continued listing the contents of the house. Lizzie knew the joke. The answer had been given away in the first sentence. She took a deep breath and swam under the water, keeping her eyes tightly shut, and closed her fist around a few errant strands of eel grass to keep her submerged. Once last year she’d asked about her father. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t asked. All the other times, that’s what she’d done, started with a question: Who is? Where is? Why is? But this time, she hadn’t given her mother a choice. “Tell me about my father,” she’d said. What Lizzie had wanted was a description, an occupation, a location. Instead, her mother had placed her hand on Lizzie’s head and smoothed her hair into a ponytail, twisting it in the back so it would hold. “You’ll meet him someday,” she’d said, “and he’ll love you enough to make up for not being here now.” And then, as if knowing what she’d said wasn’t even close to enough, she added, “You have his eyes.”

Her lungs burned. She let go of the eel grass, bursting the surface of the water, and gasped for air. When she looked around, she saw squiggles of confetti as her body adjusted to the sudden intake of oxygen and the bright sunlight above the water.

“Girls,” Elyse’s mother called, walking toward them. “We’re ready to eat.”

“Triplins,” Jim shouted after her. “Like cousins and triplets.”

“I don’t understand,” Elyse was saying, while waving impatiently at her mother. “You never told me what color the stairs were. Isn’t everything yellow?”

“There are no stairs,” Lizzie said, grinning at her cousin. “It’s a one-story house.”

They dunked Isobel together, their laughter echoing across the surface of the bay. Lizzie knew that for third-grade show-and-tell in the fall, what she’d bring would be a bottle of bay water, a nickname for the three of them, and their own secret whoomp dance.

Y
ou could move here,” Isobel said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lizzie said after flipping the switch that turned off the knee bender. The machine, designed to gently flex her knee after surgery, didn’t make a lot of noise, but the absence of the motor’s whir made every word they said sound as if it were an echo.

“But you don’t live here. You really don’t live anywhere.” Her cousin, in mid-transition from morning gym class to afternoon run, lay down on the floor next to the pull-out couch and stretched.

“It wouldn’t make sense. In a few months I could be back with the team, or playing in the European leagues, or—”

“Move into my extra bedroom and get a job teaching or coaching at one of the fine educational institutions here.”

“You sound like my mother. The next thing I know you’ll be sending me links to job applications and saying what a shame it is that I spent all those years getting a degree I don’t use.”

“The difference is you’re talking to me.”

“My mother and I talk.”

Isobel laughed. “No pretenses needed with me. I like having you around, even if you are incapacitated.” Isobel stretched her arms toward the wall and then pointed her toes, making it appear as if she were being pulled at both ends. “Besides, you need a home, and living here will give you the chance to accumulate more stuff than will fit in a duffle bag.”

“I’ll be around a good bit for the next few months.” Lizzie needed to walk, test out how well her leg was healing. Getting up would stop the conversation from becoming about her mother. Although at least she and Isobel were in the same spot, neither one of them on friendly terms with their mothers. She massaged her knee and then maneuvered herself to the edge of the bed. Isobel, anticipating her next move, reached under the couch and pulled out the crutches. The motion set off the dancing Santa Claus on the mantle, and the canned sound of “Jingle Bell Rock” filled their half of the duplex.

The song ended and Isobel picked up the tune and continued singing as she helped Lizzie onto her crutches. At practice a few weeks earlier she’d torn her ACL and now, a few days after surgery and a month before Christmas, Lizzie found herself convalescing at her cousin’s house. Such a Jane Austen way of explaining the situation, but how else to describe being propped up by half a dozen pillows on the pullout couch as a machine bent and unbent her leg to the prescribed post-surgery degree? No other word would do.

“It’s the right time,” Isobel sang as she let go of Lizzie’s crutches.

Sighing, Lizzie started to do cautious laps around the small living room while Isobel shadowed her, anticipating any hesitations in balance. “Coaching is for people who are finished playing. I’m not finished.”

“I never said you were.”

There was a quality to Isobel’s voice that made Lizzie reconsider their conversation. Maybe it wasn’t all about getting her to think about life after soccer, maybe her cousin needed her around. Lizzie paused to rest a minute and leaned against the wall. “I’m just grumpy about all of this.”

“It doesn’t have to be coaching, you could stay and do something else. I’ll teach you about houses.” Isobel thumped her heel against the floor. “Sanded and stained these myself. You should have seen this place when I bought it. Owners had poured wax down all the drains. Wax.”

“You can’t escape who you are,” Lizzie said. “Got your mom’s looks and your dad’s passions.”

Isobel wiggled her ears at Lizzie. Her cousin was the perfect mix of her father and her mother. As a child, when she wasn’t acting, she’d been her father’s shadow—handing him hammers and using fine-grain sandpaper on intricate crown molding. She’d learned to use a jigsaw before taking the training wheels off her bike. When her career had skidded to a halt after her show ended, she put that knowledge to use by leveraging her acting money to buy dilapadated houses around Los Angeles and make them beautiful again. The bungalow Isobel lived in now was actually a duplex, with the rent from the other side covering her mortgage. But she was her mother’s child too. She could be pushy and vain.

“Am I driving you tomorrow? To that soccer thing?”

“You mean the holiday party?” Lizzie had no intention of going to the hotel to spend hours decorating store-bought cookies and exchanging secret Santa gifts with her teammates, or rather, former teammates. “I’ve got a therapy appointment,” she said.

“It’s after that. You know, your coach called me to say how they especially want you to be there, and I don’t mind as long as we figure out how to get out there without hitting much traffic. I heard some of the girls have endorsement deals. They do commercials and stuff, huh?”