Three Story House: A Novel (20 page)

Lizzie passed him the yellow paper. “It isn’t right, is it?”

“It’s unusual,” he said, working to smooth a crease from the paper.

“How unusual?” Lizzie said, putting all her weight on her good leg.

“I don’t understand where this scrutiny is coming from,” he said.

“I know,” Lizzie said, and Elyse got the feeling that the two of them had discussed the situation before. To her left, Elyse felt Isobel’s agitation at the situation. Her cousin had the ability to give off heat when she was angry or upset. She looked at her, wondering when Isobel had become so invested in Spite House. Her direction of Benny and the construction had become over the last few months a real job. She raised an eyebrow at her cousin, who shook her head and continued listening to T. J., who was relating a worst-case scenario for them.

“They might tell you to get out, there are still the issues with the electrical, the plumbing, and I’m not sure the insulation’s up to code, and Lord help you if you find asbestos or lead paint. The ventilation in the—”

“There’s nothing inhabitable about this place,” Isobel said, half rising from her chair.

T. J.’s eyes widened. Elyse put her hand on her cousin’s arm. “Isobel’s upset because she’s gotten invested in the changes to the house. Benny can be—”

“Unpredictable,” Lizzie said, and again Elyse had the feeling that T. J. knew much more about them than they knew about him.

“I don’t think this is coming from Judge Hootley,” T. J. said, his fingers running along the signatures at the bottom of the paper. “Or if it is, he isn’t particularly interested in this case. My guess is that it’s being pushed at a higher level.”

Lizzie nodded at him, as if telling him to divulge what he knew. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, drawing Lizzie closer to him. “It’ll be easier to clarify if I can show you what I mean.”

The four of them slipped out the back door, and Elyse listened to T. J. explain how code violations typically worked. Most of his job consisted of working with new construction or renovation. The idea was to have those doing the work get the permits and then pass inspection. Most of the time they did. It was all very informal. On a few of those jobs, he’d get word that if possible he was to let the little stuff slide. He walked them to the edge of their property and then glanced back. “You understand this isn’t stuff that will make or break a house. But I have leeway, so if the guy is a jerk to me, I may look real close at exact measurements, or have little tolerance for variations, but if the guy’s a good dude, treats his crew right, takes us out to lunch once in a while, then I’m nice to him. And the thing is, sometimes I don’t make that call on who to be nice to.”

Elyse suspected that the world worked this way. She guessed Isobel did as well, judging by the way she nodded along to T. J.’s explanations. Lizzie looked stricken and although Elyse couldn’t be sure, she might be limping again. They stopped walking at the property line. T. J. gestured to the large empty lot that sat to the north of Spite House. “If I had to say, it’s this.”

“Dirt?” Lizzie asked.

“You’ve got to see the big picture,” Isobel said. “What do they want to put here? A restaurant? An office tower? A—”

“A little bit of everything. Hotel, condos, office space, retail. You name it, the plans call for it.”

“We’d heard something about a hotel,” Lizzie said. “Back when Grandma was still alive. They tore down the warehouses and then there was the recession and”—she gestured toward the lumpy mounds of dirt and weeds—“nothing happened.”

“Guess nothing got bigger while they were waiting,” Isobel said.

“It seems to me that problems never get smaller.” Elyse watched as her cousin leaned against T. J. Lizzie wore shorts and for the first time that she could remember since arriving in Memphis, she got a good look at her cousin’s legs. She hadn’t been limping. The change in her gait seemed to be a result of the difference between her two legs. They were both pale, but one was twice the size of the other and the muscles rippled under the skin. The damaged one, her right leg, looked childlike. Not so much withered as undeveloped.

“My guess is that when they expanded the project, they decided they needed more land and if you look around—” T. J. trailed off.

It was obvious to everyone that Spite House and the sliver of land it stood on could be useful to those developing the property next door. The two parcels looked like they belonged together—as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be joined.

“Who signed the paper?” Isobel asked. She paced along the perimeter of the property as if marking the boundaries.

“She’s done this before,” T. J. said to Lizzie. The two shared a smile that spoke of other conversations.

“Not in a long time,” Isobel said, “but you don’t forget that the world runs on favors. The guy who signed the permit probably owes the mayor or the developer, and maybe this judge of yours wants somebody to owe him. Who’s it going to hurt to enforce the law and make sure some dead woman’s house meets all the requirements for occupancy?”

T. J. nodded. “It’s a lot easier to take a property by paperwork than it is to take it by eminent domain. They got in trouble with trying to do that a few years back. Lots of court costs.”

Elyse didn’t understand the conversation. They continued to talk around her, walking the property and discussing contingencies of what would happen at the hearing the next week and what they needed to prepare. It seemed to be happening a world away from the muggy June evening. She turned her back to the river and looked at the house. The bubble of glass windows, like a funhouse mirror, distorted their reflections. Elyse’s reflection, because she was closest, loomed large and the others, moving about the property, were watery images of colors that bled into one another.

The house had called them there. Elyse was sure of it. The place was practically alive, and there was something in the way that its façade failed to accurately represent its oddness that reminded her of all her favorite drinkers at the bar. She watched the reflections of her cousins and T. J. morph into large and small versions of themselves. To Elyse, their worries were irrational. She knew it would all work out. This house had to have been built for more than spite.

From behind her, Lizzie approached, the shape of her reflection growing more solid the closer she got. “They speak the same language,” she said, kicking the dirt with her strong leg. Behind them, T. J. and Isobel talked with large gestures and voices punctuated with intent.

“What do you know about your grandfather?” Elyse asked.

“What does anyone know about their grandparents?”

Elyse guessed that was true. She was among the lucky few who’d known not only her grandparents, but her great-grandparents well. Hell, last she heard, her father’s great-grandmother was still alive on some olive farm in California. The women were as distant to her as they were legendary in the family.

“I’m curious about how he built the house,” she said.

Lizzie glanced at her sideways and turned as if she had a secret to share. Elyse knew the look from countless times of listening to people talk at the bar. The trick to hearing the secret was to appear uninterested. People wanted everyone to think they were the center of their world, and holding back often made them desperate enough to open up. She held her breath, not sure if silence would work on her cousin.

“There might be some of his papers mixed in with the stuff we pulled out of the window seats in the cupola,” Lizzie said.

That wasn’t her secret. Elyse held still, not even acknowledging that her cousin had spoken.

“Seems like this house is full of papers. Trouble is making sense of them. Sometimes I feel like the person writing has to know they’re writing for someone else. If you’re only writing for yourself, none of it makes any sense. It’s like a person trying to prove the existence of aliens or that we’re all part of some computer simulation.”

Elyse searched her mind to try to put together the pieces of what her cousin was telling her.

“Like all those note cards of your mom’s?”

Lizzie kicked at the ground some more, knocking away gumballs from the neighbor’s sweet gum tree. “There’s an answer in them, but I can’t put them back in order and—”

Elyse let her cousin take in a few deep breaths. She wrapped her arms around Lizzie and urged her to let the air out. “Still wish your mother would come out with it, huh?”

Her cousin shook her head and then pounded her fists against her legs. In the reflection of the window, Elyse saw T. J. pick up his head and look at them, and then look away. Isobel started to walk toward them and then, when she was several strides in front of him, T. J. followed.

“We sort of thought she would have by now,” Elyse said, still rubbing her cousin’s back. “It can’t be that important. Trust me when I tell you it won’t change anything.”

Gently squeezing Lizzie’s hands, which were long and elegant, Elyse worked to keep her voice even. Those on the edge often took offense at even the slightest inflection on a word. It was normal for Lizzie to want to know who her father had been, or who he was, but in the end it wouldn’t do her any good. Chances were her mother had a logical reason for keeping the information from her. It might be incest, or abuse, or that the guy was a bad man. But she couldn’t tell her cousin that. She couldn’t explain to her that not knowing was better than a truth so awful that it changed who you were. And now with DNA and genetics, it seemed that people put too much stock in heredity.

In a moment, Isobel had wrapped her arms around them. “It’s been a long day,” she said.

“Such a long day,” T. J. echoed and somehow embraced all three of them. They stood in the yard a long while. Elyse listened to everyone’s heartbeats, noting how the rhythms seemed to echo one another. Lizzie opened her mouth and did this funny breathing pattern that took the place of sobs. She and Isobel withdrew, leaving T. J. to comfort Lizzie.

“Was that about the house?” Isobel asked as they entered the back door.

“About her father,” Elyse said.

“Family,” Isobel said, opening the refrigerator.

Elyse slipped her hands in her pockets and felt the thick envelope, thinking about her own family and all the tears she’d shed over them.

Before moving to make dinner, she stood a long while in the kitchen, facing her altered reflection in the heavy window glass. The sky and the river stretched beyond the glass taking on what Elyse thought must be their true form. It was only the reflection of Elyse that smeared and folded in on itself in the old glass. The next day she mailed the envelope to the postmaster in Lovejoy, Georgia. Maybe if she got outright rejected, that would help her to fall out of love.

D
uring spring break just before she turned fourteen, Elyse and her family took a road trip to visit her father’s brother in Memphis. For most of the trip, Elyse hadn’t understood why they were in Memphis. Of course there’d been the stated reason, which was the birth of her twin cousins a few weeks earlier and the understood reason—that her father and Uncle Jim were more like twins themselves than brothers. But that year, there was an urgency to the trip that Elyse didn’t understand until it had ended and she and her sister were back in the car, drowsy from the medicine their mother had given them to help them sleep on the long car ride home.

Mostly Elyse had been bored on the trip. Her younger sister, Daphne, was close in age to Lizzie’s younger brothers and the three of them quickly became the best of friends—with Daphne acting as a Wendy to their Lost Boys. The plan had been for Lizzie and Elyse to pair up and leave the adults to their visiting and holding of babies, but Lizzie didn’t have time for Elyse. Soccer ate up nearly every waking moment, and it wasn’t until nearly the last day of their trip that she and Lizzie got to spend any real time together.

The families drove downtown and took an aerial tram to a riverfront park that boasted a scale replica of the Mississippi and, according to Lizzie, steep grassy hills that were perfect for sliding down. The adults pushed strollers filled with sleepy babies, a picnic lunch, and squares of cardboard. “For the hills,” Lizzie had whispered, sliding them into the bottom of the strollers when the parents weren’t looking. The park fascinated Elyse—every step was the equivalent of a mile. She walked the length of the river to the place it ended in a pool meant to represent the Gulf of Mexico and then raced back again to where she and Lizzie had left the parents at their meandering stroller pace.

Her little sister and the boys had taken off their shoes and were walking in the river. Lizzie reached underneath the stroller and snagged the cardboard, telling the parents they were going to do some sliding. They walked up the steep hill, which sat adjacent to an outdoor amphitheater, and Elyse tried to engage Lizzie in conversation about boys, about Isobel, about her parents, but all she wanted to talk about was soccer. A few months later, America would watch their women defeat the Chinese in the World Cup finals held in California and would fall hopelessly in love with the game. But this was before anyone knew about Mia’s goals and Brandi’s sports bra and especially the crazy rule that allowed games to be decided by what essentially amounted to a roll of the dice. What Elyse did remember of their conversation was her annoyance that Lizzie kept asking her how close she lived to the stadium where the Patriots played and if she was going to buy tickets to see the preliminary games. She also remembered thinking that the Lizzie of Memphis was a different creature than Lizzie at the beach.

At the top of the hill, they realized that her little sister, Daphne, shoeless and breathless, had tagged along with them.

“Are you ready?” Lizzie’s voice cracked when it got loud.

Elyse looked down the hill, which appeared twice as steep as it had from its base.

“Let me go first,” Daphne said, pulling at Elyse’s square of cardboard.

“No, it’s mine,” Elyse said. “Get your own.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lizzie take a running start at the hill. She felt the deep urge of competition in the pit of her stomach and for the first time since meeting Lizzie when they were all eight, Elyse felt she had to prove her worth. Maybe it was because they had always felt so inadequate compared to Isobel that it never occurred to them to measure themselves against each other, or it could have been that Lizzie’s star seemed that much brighter because they were on her home turf. Either way, Elyse wanted to beat Lizzie to the bottom of the hill like she’d never wanted anything in her life. Without thinking, she shoved her sister, tearing the cardboard out of her hands and then ran as fast as she could before leaping onto the square and sliding down the hill. She heard a cry behind her and thought how tired she was of everyone babying her little sister. It was time she grew up.