Three Story House: A Novel (24 page)

who are you

How many times had she read it now? A hundred? Two hundred? No punctuation, no capitalization and no context. The carelessness of that made her think the response had to be from Landon. Her sister, like her parents, was a stickler for grammar. Daphne carried a red permanent marker in her purse and if she saw a sign that had grammatical errors, she’d vandalize it with the correct usage—complete with little copy editor’s marks. So, no, these three words were without a doubt Landon’s. It could be worse, she thought. It could have been
leave me alone
. But it also could have been better. The larger question now was how to respond. She had to believe that any response was a good response. If he truly loved her sister, he wouldn’t have time for such nonsense as secret admirers. Would he?

Her response had come to her last night in the middle of her dreams, which had been filled with bricks. Brick walls, brick paths, brick buildings.

           
I’m nobody! Who are you?

           
Are you nobody, too?

           
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

           
They’d banish us, you know.

It wasn’t a love poem. Emily Dickinson didn’t go in for those, but the stanza somehow expressed exactly what Elyse needed it to. She and Landon were a pair and if it worked out, then there’d be certain banishment. Before slipping into the bathroom, she’d studied the agenda her mother had sent. It listed everyone’s whereabouts and duties beginning two days before the wedding and ending the day after. She picked a time that Landon would be free of obligations and suggested a place to meet. The where was what she’d agonized over all morning. She wanted it to be a place that was special to them, but she didn’t want it to be obvious that it was her. Why? At the same time that part of her mind figured it was guilt, another part thought about what it would feel like to be rejected again. So, no. Not until he actually arrived at the location would he know for certain who he was meeting. She typed in the GPS coordinates of the gazebo where they’d kissed. Knowing him, he’d plug the coordinates into his phone, put in his ear buds and let the direction lady tell him where to go. She flushed the toilet in case her cousins were paying attention to her actions and then sent the message.

For the next twelve hours, Elyse was never alone. The cousins picked up a rental car and drove straight from the airport to the beach house, arriving late in the evening. Their grandparents had already tucked in for the night, but Gram had left sandwiches on the counter and a few extra sets of keys to the house with a note telling them to come and go as they pleased. Elyse ate a turkey sandwich and listened to Isobel and Lizzie reminisce about summers spent at the house.

“You’re quiet,” Lizzie said, poking Elyse in the ribs.

“Too quiet,” Isobel said. “You aren’t still mooning about the wedding, are you?”

Elyse shook her head.

Lizzie patted her arm. “You’ll be okay once they get married. You’ll see how it all floats out the window when you’re ready to let go.”

“I guess,” Elyse said. She didn’t understand why her cousins were so interested in her reaction to the wedding. It made her nervous and suspicious. She shouldn’t have told them her fears about Daphne marrying Landon, but she’d confessed to them when it had seemed as likely that they wouldn’t get married as that they would.

“Let’s go swimming,” Isobel said.

“We can count the stars,” Lizzie said, unzipping her bag and pulling her swimsuit out.

Elyse fought the instinct to stay and pore over her sister’s and Landon’s social media profiles for clues as to how they were handling the stress of wedding planning. She jumped up. “Race you,” she said, heading out the door in the clothing she’d worn on the plane.

Isobel followed and Lizzie, after starting and abandoning an argument about bathing suits, called out a challenge: “First one in the water wins.”

“Last one wears the seaweed,” Elyse shouted back, determined for once not to be last.

They hit the beach at almost the exact same time, but on the sand, Elyse’s run slowed to a trot as she peeled off her clothing. She was out of breath but still determined to beat Isobel to the water. Isobel did cartwheels the length of the sand, while Lizzie ran directly into the water, slowing only to shrug off her hoodie.

She arrived last, but nobody noticed. The water was cold and then it wasn’t. Isobel floated on her back with her magnificent red hair waving around her and glowing in a bit of moonlight that was streaming onto the beach. Lizzie, weighed down by her wet clothing, bobbed like a buoy. Elyse splashed them both and soon a full water battle erupted. It was as if in the ocean they’d shed their adult selves and become the children they’d been when they first met.

Elyse thought about the bay—how she’d previously wanted more from this stretch of beach—bigger waves, steeper drop-offs and even riptides. But as the women wrestled in the water, dunking and splashing each other, she realized that she’d underestimated the benefit of calm water. They played until they were too tired to move and then they followed Isobel’s lead and floated on their backs, spreading their legs wide and touching their toes together so that, as they moved, their feet created a contracting and expanding star.

“I see the W,” Isobel said. “Which one is that again?”

Without her glasses, the stars were a blur to Elyse.

“Cassiopeia,” Lizzie said. “And look, you can see her daughter tonight, Andromeda.”

“I didn’t realize the two were related,” Elyse said, considering what she knew of the Greeks.

“Jim pointed it out to me one time,” Lizzie said. It puzzled Elyse that her cousin had never taken to calling her stepfather by anything other than his first name. “And it stuck with me, like how I know ‘sequoia’ is the only word with all the vowels. Bits of trivia taking up space in my brain.”

“I wish I could remember their story,” Isobel said. “It’s something about how Cassiopeia boasted about Andromeda’s beauty and it got her killed.”

“Moms and daughters never get along,” Elyse said.

“Don’t do that,” Lizzie said.

“She has her own galaxy,” Isobel said. Her education had been so different from either Lizzie’s or Elyse’s. She’d had a private tutor throughout high school so that she could focus on acting. Elyse remembered her parents questioning the choice, saying the tutors they hired spent too much time on ancient society and not enough on math.

“Who?” Elyse asked.

“Andromeda,” Isobel said. “I remember it because of the boasting. Reminded me too much of my own mother at the time.”

“All daughters should be so lucky,” Lizzie said before diving under the water like a dolphin and swimming for shore. Isobel followed while Elyse squinted her eyes at the night sky trying to make the irregular “W” of Cassiopeia take form so she could find the hazy spot it pointed to and see Andromeda’s galaxy.

A few days before the wedding, the Triplins returned from the airport, having collected Elyse and Isobel’s great-great-grandmother, Anna, who because of her age was something of a celebrity. Elyse didn’t often remember that she was related to the oldest person in the world, but it did give her an occasional notoriety at parties or interminable meet and greets. Anna had become an easy answer to the question, “What’s unique about you?” Everybody else’s great-great-grandparents were so long buried that their descendants didn’t even know their names. Elyse conjured Anna when it was convenient for her; the matriarch sometimes came up in conversations with her parents, who still felt some connection to her.

Elyse pushed down on the gas pedal, glad for the distraction of moving from one place to the other. For the first time since arriving in Boston, she’d have to face Daphne. There was one version of reality in her head, where if Landon only knew how she felt about him, he’d realize that her sister was just a placeholder. The situation kept reminding her of how angry she’d been at the part in
Little Women
where Jo chose to marry the professor instead of Laurie. And that might have been okay, except that Laurie had turned around and married Jo’s little sister, Amy. Of course, her grown-up self understood that if she tried to explain any of this out loud, what she felt would sound less like true love and more like obsession.

In the backseat of the car, Isobel and Lizzie made small talk about California and olives with Anna. She half listened as her cousins discussed what they wanted from their own lives should they live to be half as old as Anna. The meeting with Landon was set for the next day. She tried to stop thinking about how Jo should have just said yes to Laurie in the first place and let herself, for one moment, imagine what the rendezvous would be like. She pictured him walking through the park to the gazebo, his face brightening with the memory of the time they waited out the thunderstorm.

Elyse’s phone chirped from the depths of her purse. She would have ignored it, but Isobel, who sat in the passenger seat, reached into the oversized bag and fished around until she pulled it out.

“It’s your mom,” she said, looking at the face of the phone.

Elyse panicked at the thought of her phone being in someone else’s hands. Her heart raced as she considered whether or not she’d logged out of her secret e-mail account before dropping her phone back into her purse at the airport. She nodded to Isobel, indicating that she’d take the call.

“Ma, what do you want?” she asked clipping off the ends of the words. She hated to be so short with her mother, but she knew that if she didn’t force her to get to the point, she’d be listening to her ramble on about a dozen wedding problems, told a dozen different ways.

“Making sure you collected Anna without trouble. Your sister tells me we should have sent her and Landon out there, and I’m beginning to think she’s right.”

As she listened, Elyse moved right, out of the carpool lane, and sped up in order to pass a caravan of SUVs that doggedly obeyed the speed limit. “She’s not right about everything—just because she’s getting married.”

Her mother sucked in her breath. “Your sister is causing me enough grief. You can’t possibly understand this, but the thing you don’t want to do is tell a bride no. Elyse Eloise Wallace, I don’t have the patience to deal with your attitude.”

“Who can say anything without an attitude? You’re either happy or bored or sad. All of it’s attitude.”

“Put me on speaker.”

Instead Elyse hung up the phone and pushed the button that turned it off, planning to explain the abrupt end to the call as loss of battery. She drove faster, wishing they’d rented a sports car or at least some vehicle with more than four cylinders. Speed had a way of outrunning the feeling of misery that had settled into her chest since hearing about her sister’s engagement. What she truly needed was twelve cylinders—that would give her enough power to outrun the bad thing she was planning to do.

Her sister sat on the porch swing with one leg curled under her and the other gently pushing off the ground to keep the steady rocking motion of the swing going. Lizzie helped Anna up the slope of the driveway while Isobel carried Anna’s two suitcases. The luggage had to have been purchased in the late sixties. It was hard sided and made of a pebbled plastic material. In addition to the suitcases, Anna had a powder-blue rounded cosmetics case that rattled when Elyse grabbed it off the backseat of the car. Daphne waved to them energetically and then held up a finger indicating she’d be a minute and returned to her phone, which she held cradled to her ear.

Elyse took the moment to appraise her sister, hoping for some sign that would make her feel better about the meeting with Landon. From head to toe, her sister looked perfect. Her hair was a light brown that with the help of a hairdresser became a rich caramel color with a white blond streak near the front that looked as natural as the striations in sandstone. At that moment her hair was rolled up into some sort of donut-shaped bun but she still looked more pulled together than Elyse ever had. She had wide-set light brown eyes that were framed with lashes so thick they didn’t need mascara. If she had one flaw it was perhaps her nose, which had been broken during a volleyball match and never quite healed right. Sometimes Daphne complained about it, but Elyse figured that without it, her face would be too smooth. It needed an irregularity to stand out. Her best feature, however, was her oversized mouth, which made people think at once of horses and of generosity and loud laughter.

At twenty-two, she had a perfect body. It didn’t look like it needed work to be thin, and her flesh had the gentle give of youth to it. Standing next to her, Isobel appeared as if she worked too hard at being pretty and Lizzie not hard enough. Whereas moments before if you’d have asked Elyse about her cousins, she would have gushed about their attractiveness. She guessed that was the difference. Her cousins were good looking, but her sister was beautiful. Where did that leave Elyse? On a good day, she felt like she was passable, but on a bad day—and there had been so many in the last few months—she felt like the troll underneath the bridge letting the billy goats prance by her.

Just before she would have crossed the line into rude, Daphne hung up the phone and exhaled an apology and explanation about a last-minute wedding snafu with the chairs. She ushered Anna onto the swing with her and took both her hands in hers, going on and on about what an honor it was to have her at the wedding. Elyse took the opportunity to slip into the house without having to speak with her sister. The cousins followed, talking about how happy her sister looked and how much fun weddings turned out to be.

“There you are,” Elyse’s mother said, telling Isobel that her father was in the kitchen and sending Lizzie upstairs with Anna’s luggage. “I expected you ages ago. What is this nonsense about you girls continuing to stay out at the beach house instead of the hotel?”

“We thought it would be easier. Our stuff’s already there,” Elyse said, following her mother through the kitchen where Isobel and her family were filling miniature bottles with olive oil. Wedding favors, she guessed. Probably as some tribute to Anna.