Three Story House: A Novel (21 page)

The ride down was exhilarating. She’d gotten a good start, a quick start, and in a moment she flew by Lizzie going so fast that instead of stopping at the base of the hill, she glided as if on snow onto the concrete and into the portion of the Mississippi meant to represent Vicksburg. She laughed out of victory and out of the thrill of the race ending unexpectedly in a splash. Standing up, she brushed the grass from her legs and arms and looked around to see who’d watched her performance. Aunt Annie and her mother stood clustered around the strollers, their hands over their mouths. At the base of the hill, Lizzie sat, cradling Daphne in her arms, as Uncle Jim and Elyse’s father rushed to her.

“She fell, she fell,” Elyse heard her mother saying.

“It wasn’t that bad, it can’t be that bad. It was a tumble, just a tumble. The boys take those all the time,” Aunt Annie said, patting her mother’s arm.

“Oh, God,” her mother said.

A look flashed across Aunt Annie’s face that conveyed an inner struggle and then before anyone understood what she was doing, she sank to her knees and started pleading with God to let Daphne be unhurt. Elyse’s family was technically Catholic, but they’d had the sort of casual religious upbringing that had left her with only the briefest of familiarities with such prostrations. She’d never in all her time on Earth seen an adult pray outside of a church.

Elyse’s mother didn’t notice, but everyone else, even the few passersby who’d stopped to watch, echoed Aunt Annie’s “amen” at the end of her words. For Elyse’s part, she listened to her sister’s cries. She’d come to know which sounds she made when she was playing it up for her parents and which sounds she made when she was scared. Her hurt cry sounded like a kitten—more mewing than yowling.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Elyse started to say, knowing even as she spoke that she shouldn’t be defending herself. But she couldn’t help it. She wanted someone else to take the blame. It made her feel too awful to take responsibility for her carelessness.

“There, there,” she heard Uncle Jim say.

Daphne let out a few soft cries and a hiccup.

Her father took Daphne from Lizzie and ran his hands across all the parts of her sister that could be broken. His hands seemed to double in size as they passed over Daphne’s head and arms and gently tested joints. At last, he stood her up. “I think she’s hurt her ankle. A sprain.”

The women murmured to each other, and Elyse’s little brothers, Daphne’s Lost Boys, ran toward her, relating to each other the awesomeness of the fall. The day was, of course, over. The mothers packed up everyone, and the fathers took turns giving Daphne piggyback rides to the tram so she wouldn’t have to walk.

Lizzie, who the parents seemed to feel was some sort of hero, didn’t even talk about what had happened. Instead, sitting on the tram, in the back away from the family, she whispered a plan into Elyse’s ear. As the group exited the tram, Lizzie spoke as if she were offering a favor. “Why don’t Elyse and I walk over and visit Grandma Mellie? I’m sure she could use the company and then you can have adult time while the kids nap.”

“Oh no,” Elyse’s mother said.

Uncle Jim cut her off. His light blue eyes twitched and it felt to Elyse like he was on their side. “That’s a fine idea.”

The two adults looked at each other and, for the first time, Elyse thought that her mother might not be so fond of Uncle Jim. Elyse dropped her chin to her chest, convinced that she was in for an afternoon of reprimand. The adults lowered their voices to talk about the proposition. And Lizzie, who seemed to always get what she wanted, at least for all those years she played soccer, barely waited for the yes to come before grabbing Elyse by the arm and taking off as if she’d heard a starter pistol.

“Why are you always running?” Elyse asked, trying to keep up and to catch her breath.

“Why not?” Lizzie responded, undoing her hair from its ponytail and letting it stream out behind her. It was even blonder than Elyse remembered from previous summers.

“Well then, at least tell me where we’re going,” she said, settling into a pace that allowed her to talk and race. They ran out of the parking garage and instead of waiting for the walk sign to show up indicating it was safe to cross, they sprinted across four lanes of traffic, trying to beat the cars honking at them for jaywalking.

“Away. I couldn’t take them anymore. Any of them,” Lizzie said. “Did you see my mother? Why has she got to be so ridiculous?”

Elyse couldn’t hide the surprise on her face. She’d felt the whole visit that Lizzie had gotten a life better than a fairy tale. Instead of an evil stepmother, she’d gotten Uncle Jim, who as far as stepfathers went, was pretty awesome. They had enough money and everyone was beautiful. Elyse still had enough fat on her stomach and arms to be pinchable. Her cousin was tall and looked nearly insect-like in the way you could see how the muscle attached to her bones.

Lizzie must have thought she meant the trouble with her sister. “Not Daphne. She’s fine. A brave little girl and I love your family. It’s my mother,” Lizzie screamed as if it would take too much from her to explain the whole of the situation.

“I get it,” Elyse said, thinking how much her own mother irritated her.

Lizzie stopped running and put her hand to her side. “A stitch.”

They walked, turning down several streets and then once again without warning, Lizzie sprinted away, leaving Elyse to do her best to catch up. Finally, as she closed the distance between them and was on the verge of passing her cousin, Lizzie slowed.
I’m winning, I’m winning,
Elyse thought before stopping short at the strange sight of Spite House.

“That can’t be real,” Elyse said, taking in the thin columns and odd windows that fronted the house. Back then it had been painted canary yellow and in the late afternoon light it appeared to glow.

“That’s Grandma Mellie’s house,” Lizzie said, smiling and racing up the steep stairs for one last sprint.

The house hadn’t yet settled into neglect and the yard looked well tended, although shaded by the office complex on one side. An atypical mailbox fronted the property. It looked like a replica of the house itself, or as if a dollhouse had been put on a post with a red flag stuck on the side of it. There was a sign, the kind where the letters were burned into the wood, that read “Spite House” hanging down from the top of the porch.

“Does your grandmother know we’re coming over?” Elyse asked as Lizzie bounded up the steps toward the front door.

“She’s never surprised by company—it’s sort of her thing, you’ll see. She’ll have cookies and lemonade and—”

The door opened before Lizzie could finish her sentence. “Girls,” said an old woman whose back hunched in such a way that her chin rested on her shoulder so that she looked up at them sideways—as if her neck muscles had ceased to work.

Elyse averted her eyes and tried to not think the word that had instantly sprang into her head:
hunchback.

Lizzie bent down and wrapped her grandmother in a sideways hug. She appeared to be almost twice as tall as her grandmother. “I’ve got cousin Elyse with me,” she said.

“They didn’t tell you I was crookback, did they?” Grandma Mellie asked, as if she were commenting on the weather. Her voice was high and sweet, like a cardinal. Elyse followed her cousin’s lead and offered a hug, pressing her cheek to the old woman’s. She was so much older than either of Elyse’s grandmothers.

Walking down the dim hallway, she followed the sound of Lizzie’s footsteps toward a beaded curtain in the back of the house. She sucked in her breath as the walls narrowed around her and threw up her arms against the unexpected light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. She blinked, trying to erase the bursts of yellow and orange in her vision and find Lizzie.

“I told you treats,” Lizzie said, holding up the largest chocolate chip cookie Elyse had ever seen.

“I’ve got lemonade too,” Grandma Mellie said as she entered the kitchen.

“You’re the best,” Lizzie said, halfway through the enormous cookie.

“Had enough of your mother for today, did you?” she asked, settling into a rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen.

“Always,” Lizzie said, glancing at Elyse to see whether or not she could be trusted.

“I raised her, but I’ll be the first to tell you how impossible she is.”

The deformity of her spine was less noticeable in the chair. Elyse remembered her manners. “Thank you,” she said and then because they were in the South, she added, “Ma’am.”

“Oh no, none of that,” Grandma Mellie said. “I don’t go in for that sort of business anymore. My father made sure I used the word ‘sir’ after every sentence. The day I left his home is the day I stopped all of that nonsense.”

Lizzie started eating a second cookie. “Mom still makes me call her ‘ma’am,’ at least in public.”

“Your mother didn’t used to have such ideas about what was proper, but then she had you and I suppose she’s still bending over backward trying to make up for the impropriety of that.” Grandma Mellie turned away from the girls and whistled a bit of song and what sounded like bird calls to Elyse.

“Oh,” Elyse said.

“She speaks her mind,” Lizzie said, nodding toward Grandma Mellie and holding back the sort of smile Elyse had only ever seen on grown-ups.

“She belongs in this house,” Elyse said. From the moment they’d stepped into this strange world, Elyse had been captivated by the house. The oddness of its shape and the peculiarity of Mellie made it instantly a bastion of myth and legend and, if Elyse had to guess, romance.

“My mom hates this house,” Lizzie said. “I’m going to live in it someday just to spite her.”

From the corner of the kitchen, Grandma Mellie let out a chattering sound, like the engine of a car trying to turn over, which Elyse soon realized was laughter. Lizzie joined in and Elyse felt like an outsider. She excused herself to find a bathroom and left the two of them wiping away tears of laughter and telling each other stories about Lizzie’s mother.

She left the bathroom and felt herself pulled farther upstairs—toward the roof. Along the walls, the framed photographs alternated between pictures of Lizzie and photos of Lizzie’s mother. They appeared to be placed so that a portrait of Lizzie at age two appeared next to one of her mother at the same age. The line of smiling girls who looked nothing alike was bookended by wedding-day pictures of what must have been Grandma Mellie and her husband.

Sound traveled in strange ways in the house. She reached the top floor and opened the door that allowed access to the one large room that took up much of the third story. All of the furniture had been pushed to walls, and a pair of roller skates sat in the center of the room. Elyse crossed to them, wishing she’d learned how to skate. She’d only ever been to one rink—for a friend’s birthday when she was six or seven, and she hadn’t been brave enough to let go of the rails and try to skate. The floor of this upper room with its wide planks and dark stain looked exactly like that rink. She picked up the skates, thinking she’d take them to Lizzie, who might know a trick or two for moving around on eight wheels. She was about to leave the room when the sound of Lizzie’s voice—more childlike than it had been all day—carried up through a vent. She picked up the skates and walked to the opening.

“You have to talk to her. It’s not fair. None of it is and now with the new babies, it’s all gotten so much worse. You should see the way they fawn over each other. Happily ever after.”

Elyse froze and although she knew she shouldn’t, she moved closer to the vent, and her heart fluttered at the thought that the wavering in her cousin’s voice meant that her life wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. She couldn’t hear Grandma Mellie’s response. What she understood from the tone of the response was that Lizzie wasn’t being coddled.

“I won’t do it. I won’t join their stupid church. Just because Mom found God and tricked Jim into believing it doesn’t mean I have to have anything to do with them. I’m still a good person.” Lizzie sniffled.

“God loves you,” Grandma Mellie said. Elyse guessed from the other noises in the room that she’d left the rocking chair and moved closer to Lizzie. “I probably should have taken your mother to church, given her the traditions and ceremony she’s craved her whole life, but after your grandfather died, all of it seemed pointless—an exercise for those who needed other people to see their faith.”

“It’s all so silly. They got baptized. Dunked under the water and everything and when Mom came out of the water, she smiled at Jim and all I could look at was her dumb pregnant belly.”

“You’re too emotional over this to get any answers,” Grandma Mellie said. “Try some leverage.”

“Leverage?”

Elyse pressed her ear to the vent and plugged her other one, concentrating on their voices.

“Tell her you’ll give in on the church stuff if she’ll tell you about your father.”

Elyse gasped and dropped the roller skates. She’d never heard an adult speak this way—with malice and also to give such direction to a kid. Elyse could have spent all day dreaming up ways to get back at her mother and her sister and never come up with such a tactic. She felt ill and at the same time reckless. She bent to retrieve the skates.
How hard could it be anyway,
she thought and instead of slinging them over her shoulder and going downstairs, she loosened the laces.

They were too big for her. She looked around the room, took two small balls of yarn from a basket and placed them in the toes of the shoes. Lacing the boots as tight as she could and using the wall, she got unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms wide out to the side, she shuffled her feet, surprised that the motion propelled her forward. She made a tentative lap around the room before trying to get more momentum by pushing down and out with her feet. “Oh,” she cried, comforted by the sound of her voice. She started to coach herself through it, using familiar phrases, like “you can do this,” and “just a little bit faster.” Pretty soon, she was moving at a decent clip and the conversation with herself had become like the chatter of an audience at a baseball game. She didn’t even notice when Lizzie opened the door.