Three Story House: A Novel (22 page)

Her cousin stepped into her path, and shouted, “Boo.”

Elyse looked up when she heard the noise, but she was moving too fast to stop and wasn’t skilled enough yet on the skates to avoid a collision. She screamed and threw up her arms as if she were crashing into a solid object. Lizzie, laughing, flung her arm out and Elyse went over and around it in a perfect front flip landing safely on her feet, or rather on her wheels, with her cousin’s steadying hand on her back.

Lizzie didn’t confide her secrets and insecurities to Elyse. Instead they spent the afternoon trading turns with the skates. The competitiveness she’d felt earlier in the visit melted away, and she found herself worrying that Lizzie was pushing herself too hard and putting too many eggs in the idea that her escape would come through soccer. By the time the sun started to set and the cicadas took up their dusky song, Elyse had learned how to skate forward and backward and could even do small jumps over a footstool they’d placed in the middle of the floor.

Her parents drove twenty-two hours straight on the return to Boston—with her father driving the entire leg telling Elyse’s mother to stay awake and keep him company. Daphne, with an ice pack on her ankle, slept from sunset to sunrise. Elyse pretended to sleep. She listened to her parents talk about their jobs—they both taught at the same middle school Elyse would graduate from that year—their summer plans, bills that needed paying, items around the house that needed fixing, and their children.

Her preferences were for other people’s problems and while her parents were too steady to have their own problems, she’d discovered by listening that they shared Elyse’s preference. Like her, they listened for the telling change in other adults’ tones that indicated conflict. Some of the adults yelled, while others dropped their voices, but the words, no matter the volume, all sounded to Elyse as if they were being strangled. Overhearing these disagreements, these secret accusations, sent a thrill of delight down her spine. Years later, the few times she got high, she’d experienced a similar rapture.

On that drive home, she didn’t learn anything she hadn’t heard one of the dozen other times she’d eavesdropped on her parents, but finally close to two in the morning her father had shaken her mother awake again, wanting to talk about Uncle Jim.

He didn’t understand his brother’s sudden conversion, and he talked about their religion with contempt, calling it a Ponzi scheme. “Adult baptism. I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. We’ve already been baptized, christened like good Catholics when we were infants. I don’t know what sins he’s trying to wash away. Becoming Mormon of all things—it’s practically like joining a cult.”

“I like that Lizzie,” her mother said, clearly trying to change the subject. “She’s a good child, and I wish that Elyse could be more like her.”

“Lizzie’s the only one with enough sense not to get involved in it, and she’s just a child.”

Elyse’s ears burned listening to her parents discuss her so candidly. “Don’t be too hard on our Elyse. She’s not showy. She’s like an iceberg—keeps most of herself hidden.”

“I’m afraid she’s too selfish. Look at what happened with Daphne.”

“Nothing happened. She fell. Children fall.”

“She pushed her.”

“Don’t make her into a villain.” Elyse loved her father fiercely for standing up for her. Maybe she had pushed her sister, but she hadn’t meant to.

“I guess. But afterward, it was Lizzie who tried to make it better and it should have been Elyse.”

“Lizzie was there,” her father said, changing lanes.

They didn’t speak for several minutes and then in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from far away, her mother asked her father if he knew who Lizzie’s father was.

Her father grunted. “I have my suspicions,” he said. “Jim tells me it’s none of his business.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t even know. Tell me. Would you marry someone who kept that sort of information from you? Would you?” her mother had said, fiddling with the radio.

“Lower your voice,” her father said.

“If I were her, I’d be more concerned about marrying a man who was so much younger than me. I’d be afraid my husband would leave me. At least they were able to get fertility treatments to have that last set of kids.”

“I’ll never leave you,” her father said.

“No one’s going to take well to this new religion. Did you see her? The way she knelt down and prayed over that little fall Daphne took?”

Her father grunted. “I don’t think we should criticize prayer, it feels dangerous.”

“Fine,” her mother said, settling on a radio station playing Billy Joel.

The two of them were silent for a while, and then the chorus of the song started and they sang along. Elyse fell asleep, wishing her parents had kept talking about Uncle Jim and Aunt Annie.

T
he court date had been set for the last day of June in the late afternoon. Elyse didn’t go to the hearing to find out whether or not they’d have to move out of Spite House. What could she possibly contribute? She spent the day looking for more of Grandma Mellie’s recipe cards. For almost a week now, she’d been trying to find the woman’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. How had she made hers crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside? Over the last few months, she’d found cards slid into cookbooks, taped to the underside of pans, and on the inside of cupboards. Lizzie had found one or two in the pile of note cards that were her mother’s diary—copied in her own mother’s handwriting from some lost source.

What surprised her most about Lizzie’s relationship with her family was how she failed to see how romantic it was. Thinking about being the sort of woman who kept secrets from her family gave Elyse chills. When she was alone in Spite House, she often pretended it was her house, making up elaborate backstories about how she’d come to live in such an extraordinary place. She had one reccurring fantasy of being a Cinderella sort of character who becomes caretaker to her overly large stepmother and stepsister. Her revenge comes when the sister gets stuck trying to wedge herself through the impossibly small front door of Spite House.

She looked at the clock every twenty minutes, surprised to find herself waiting for them to come home or to text her the news about the hearing. She hadn’t realized before that she’d come to care so much about the outcome. As dinnertime neared, she poured herself a glass of wine and texted the cousins. Looking around the kitchen, her eyes fell on the pile of cards Lizzie had been trying to sort. Why Aunt Annie had put her diary together like this puzzled Elyse. Most people kept a diary knowing full well someone else would eventually read it. Why else write anything down? The cards were spread across the table and stacked in various piles. Some of the papers were smudged and beginning to look dirty from being handled so often, while others were as white and crisp as hotel sheets.

She thumbed through the stacks. The one that had been handled the most contained cards having to do with Aunt Annie’s pregnancy. Most of that year was in order, and flipping through the cards was like watching a time-lapse video of pregnancy.
Test positive. Feel great. Threw up. Still throwing up. Morning sickness lasts all day. Pants don’t fit. Skirts don’t fit. Underwear doesn’t fit. Lots of energy. Baby kicked. Baby has hiccups
. A small part of her began to think about what her life could be like in the next year if everything worked out. Maybe she’d be having a baby before thirty after all. Maybe not. But maybe. If Landon didn’t work out, then she could always have a baby on her own, throw caution and other people’s idea of what she should do with her life to the wind.

That had been why the thing that Lizzie had said about it being their very last year had rung so deep in her. If it were, then she didn’t have the life she’d always wanted, she had a life full of other people’s problems, when what she wanted were her own problems.
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.
Elyse couldn’t abide her world ending in ice—in a culmination of all that she’d left undone in the world, unsaid. Sighing, she looked at the corners of the cards, where Lizzie had shown her the numbering system Aunt Annie used and then decoded it. A number represented each day of the year. How much work had it been to untangle this mess? It made Elyse’s head hurt to think about it.

She looked at a few of the other stacks. They were white, untouched, and, judging by the subjects on them, Elyse guessed that they’d come through the mix-up and remained in pretty much their original order. Lizzie hadn’t told them what she was looking for, but it had been pretty clear that her objective was to figure out who her father was. She wanted clues, or even evidence that would point her to the man who gave her half her DNA. The unsorted cards remained in a pile in the center. This jumble of paper reminded Elyse of a fact she’d learned as a child practicing magic tricks: each time a deck of cards was shuffled, it created an arrangement that had never been seen before. There were more possible arrangements of a deck of cards than there were stars in the sky. Then, of course, she’d offer a deck of cards and urge them to shuffle it. Find an arrangement that works for you, she’d tell them.

Looking at the scattering of cards on the table, Elyse imagined different ways they could be arranged and what it would tell them about Lizzie’s mother. What would happen if Lizzie got it wrong, if she put the 134th day of 1981 into the pile with the cards from 1972? Would the arrangement of her life change? The notes were so cryptic—take the one with the notation “swan boats.” Elyse hadn’t even realized they had those in any other place but Boston’s public gardens. But Aunt Annie hadn’t ever been to Boston before she met Uncle Jim, had she?

Everyone has their love story—and none of them are easy. Imagine two people so different and so far apart falling in love? She wasn’t even sure how the two of them had met, only that they had. Something about a business trip that Uncle Jim took for FedEx. Elyse ran her fingers over the paper, thinking of the cards she’d sent to Landon and the fake e-mail address she’d set up waiting for a response. Cards with postmarks from places that evoked lovers, cards that urged Landon not to turn marriage into the practical choice, but to try for love. True love. “I’m someone you know,” she’d written in the last letter. “Someone who knows you well enough to tell you that marrying Daphne is a mistake.”

That last one might have taken it too far. She finished her glass of wine and poured another before sitting down at the table. She checked her phone. No texts, but it was nearly five o’clock and they could still be in the courtroom, which probably didn’t allow phones. She squinted at the cards on the table—moving them in and out of focus.

Elyse had always loved Landon. When she’d lost her virginity on prom night to Jeff Lee, she’d closed her eyes and pictured Landon’s eyes. All during her impetuous engagement to the German pastry chef, when he’d ask her about children (The man had wanted at least a dozen in some fantasy of being von Trapp himself.), she’d said no children, not ever. And it wasn’t true. She’d always seen herself as a mother—but to Landon’s children. Waiting for other people’s stories to work out—Lizzie’s and Isobel’s just brought to mind the first time she’d met Landon, the moment she counted as her beginning.

His family had moved into their neighborhood when Elyse was ten. Any older and she’d never have developed a friendship with him—the next year she’d become acutely aware of boys and the ways that their attentions made her fizz up inside, like a shaken can of soda. She liked the attention. But she’d met Landon before the fizzing, so they remained friends. There was no television in Elyse’s house. Her parents had heard someone tell them to kill their television, and they’d actually complied. There were photos in an album of her parents with long hair and her dad with a mustache that was too long at the ends standing by a television they’d dropped out of the window of their two-story apartment. Her mother would look at that photo and shake her head. “We should have sold it,” she’d say. And if her father was in the room, he’d always reply, “But that would be passing the evil along to someone else.”

In her mind, she and Landon stood barefoot in the sunroom eating sugar and butter sandwiches. Her parents also didn’t believe in Hostess products. Why were they barefoot? It had been raining, and there had been some issue with their shoes being too wet to come inside. He’d run his fingers along her bookshelf and pulled out the X volume of the encyclopedia. “I’ve never seen one of these,” he’d said, fanning the book open until it landed on xenophobia.

“An encyclopedia?” she said.

“No.”

“A book?” At this suggestion, he alternated raising one eyebrow and then the other at her until she collapsed into a fit of giggling.

From above her, he dropped the slender volume onto her chest. “Just an X volume. The ones we have at home are grouped with Y and Z.”

She rolled onto her stomach and paged through the book, licking her fingers to get more traction on the slippery pages. That afternoon, they practically memorized the entries, reading back and forth to each other.
Xebec, xeres, xenon.
This trading of x words was a habit they’d continued into their adult lives. Sometimes when he broke up with a girl, he’d call her and offer a one-word explanation: “Xanthippe.” As if one word could cover the breadth of falling in and out of love. Of course they dated other people. More often than not, it was Elyse who had a serious relationship. In high school it had been Jeff, a football player who gave her a kitten for her birthday, even though she was allergic. In college it had been Josh, a short boy with an overly large head and a sweet voice. He’d been the driving force behind Smooth Sounds, the men’s a cappella choir. She remembered his serenading her, snapping his fingers and singing new arrangements of songs his parents had grown up falling in love to.

But always, in her heart, there had been her love for Landon. She never wanted to act on it until it was the right time because she knew that when they fell in love it would be forever. Then last December, Landon had shown up at their house on Christmas Eve and in front of the entire family, knelt down and asked her sister to marry him. Elyse hadn’t even known they were dating. She thought the fact that Landon hadn’t told her held some deeper meaning, but she couldn’t be sure. The truth was, and she had a difficult time admitting this, she hadn’t known she’d planned on marrying Landon, at least not consciously, until she’d seen him propose to her sister, and just like that, plans she hadn’t known she made evaporated into the air and she felt as if her soul were trying to claw itself out from inside her flesh. She’d left Boston feeling less as if she were running away and more as if she were running toward something.