Three Story House: A Novel (25 page)

“It’s not easier. We’ve only got three days until the wedding. I’ll need you here tomorrow and no arguments. You can stay there tonight and bring back your stuff first thing in the morning. We still haven’t had you try on the bridesmaid’s dress, and I’m afraid it’s going to pucker in all the wrong places. For now, you can help me with the centerpieces,” her mother said, handing Elyse a pair of garden shears and a basket before pointing her toward the rose bushes. “Only cut the pink ones.”

“How many?”

“All of them,” her mother said, turning away from the bushes before Elyse could make her first cut. The roses were her mother’s pride. She’d never before cut them, preferring to watch them from the kitchen table as they moved from bud to bloom and then she’d deadhead them gently with her own hands and collect the petals to make rosewater that she gave away anytime she needed a hostess or housewarming gift.

From the rose bushes, Elyse had a clear view of the kitchen. She saw her mother move about as if she were directing a play—repositioning and appropriating people as they came through the doors. By the time she finished with the centerpieces, the day had escaped. Her cousins had wandered off with different visiting family members for dinner with promises to meet at the beach house that next morning before moving their stuff to the hotel, which would be closer to the wedding festivities.

It worried Elyse that her time was being accounted for. She needed several hours tomorrow to make the rendezvous work. She left the centerpieces on the patio table and moved into the house, opening the refrigerator in search of a snack. Most of the racks had been removed to make room for the cake, which stood five layers tall. It surprised her to find how much of the work of the wedding her parents were doing themselves. The figurines of the bridegroom and bride were already in place. They were exact effigies, even down to missing the lower part of Landon’s left arm.

Elyse shut the refrigerator door at the sound of footsteps padding into the kitchen.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it?” Daphne asked.

“Where’d Mom hide all the snacks?” Elyse asked. When they were alone together, the pretense of sisterly closeness evaporated. Without an audience, they didn’t know how to be with each other.

“I was worried that they wouldn’t get it right—cut off the right arm instead of the left. And then Mom said it was in bad taste. Landon wanted us to get”—her sister’s voice faded as she walked into the pantry and reemerged with an oversized candy bar and cheese crackers—“these monster figurines. Cute monsters, you know?”

“Of course,” Elyse said, reaching for the chocolate bar. It was her favorite, the one with toffee and nuts. “The summer we were twelve, we made up an entire line of monsters—drew their pictures and made trading cards of sorts.”

Daphne smiled at her choice. “I love that Landon has always been a part of our family. He was like an older brother to me back then. The two of you were inseparable for so long.”

“Inseparable,” Elyse echoed.

“But Dad, of all people, said no monsters. He went on and on about how it wasn’t a party it was a wedding and that we should have proper figurines that look like little versions of ourselves. So I told them to cut off the arm and he almost said no to that, but then Landon laughed.”

“Dad’s like that.” Elyse ate her chocolate bar, breaking off a piece and handing it to her sister. “Intractable when you least expect it.”

“He told me I was too young to get married, but because it was Landon, he wasn’t worried. Something about having had Landon grow up with you that made him more like family. Can you imagine?”

Elyse folded the aluminum foil from the candy into increasingly smaller squares. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to imagine—her father’s hesitation at his youngest child getting married, or how being married to Landon made everything all right. “I think they’re afraid you’ll break his heart,” Elyse said.

Daphne took her sister’s observation as a compliment and blushed. “He’s good for me. And I think good for the family. Like the son he never had.”

“Who says Dad ever wanted sons?” Elyse asked.

“Of course he did. He just said he never did so I wouldn’t feel bad about being a girl.”

Elyse hadn’t thought her sister capable of understanding such truths. When they were still living at home, they’d found a box of their father’s childhood memories stored in the attic. On the box, which had once held bottles of rum, their father had written in careful script
For my son
. Inside were his letterman’s jacket, a stash of baseball cards with a rubber band around them, a baseball glove, several Superman comic books, and a handful of paperback books—
Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace,
and
The Godfather
. Each of them had taken a book and started reading. When their father had seen Elyse curled up in the sunroom devouring his boyhood copy of
Lord of the Flies,
he hadn’t mentioned it directly, but over the course of that year, various items from the box appeared on each of their beds, which was why to this day Elyse carried a thumb-worn Lenny Dykstra card in her wallet.

“Do you still have the stuff he gave you?” Elyse asked. Judging by the look on her sister’s face, her thoughts were on the wedding or on Landon, and Elyse wasn’t sure she could talk rationally about the nuptials with her sister. If she changed the topic, she could leave Daphne with the impression that the two of them were as they’d always been, which is like two people who share a background but are too different to truly understand each other.

“I sold a few of the baseball cards. They weren’t in mint condition, but we got enough money to pay for our plane tickets.”

“You sold Dad’s cards?” Elyse’s voice rose and echoed back to her in the cave-like kitchen. She realized how accustomed she’d grown to Spite House with its narrow spaces and sound-absorbing windows.

“We’re not all sentimental,” Daphne said, picking up Elyse’s trash and refastening the lid of the box of crackers. “I like my birds in the hand.”

“Sentimental is better than selfish,” Elyse said, knowing that her voice had taken on a hard edge that contained all the resentment she’d ever felt toward her sister.

“Oh, come off it,” Daphne said. “It was Dad’s suggestion. If your cards were worth any money, he’d tell you to sell them too.”

“I’ve got a long drive,” Elyse said. Her hands were balled into fists, and she imagined that that if she didn’t leave the kitchen first, she’d open the refrigerator and put all her frustration at the unfairness of life into a helpless cake, and then she’d never be able to explain herself.

“You’re not leaving,” Daphne said. “I thought we could do a sisters’ slumber party. I mean, it’s been so strange with you in Memphis these last months. My whole life it has been you and Landon and now you’ve disappeared on us.”

“Later,” Elyse said, still walking out the door. She took the keys to the spare vehicle—the one her parents had kept long after their children had grown up. Sometimes she didn’t know if her sister was oblivious or willfully ignorant. She’d overheard her once telling her friends that she never fought with her family. Which on the face of it was true. She never allowed anyone to fight with her.

The truck was blocked in, but instead of going inside and figuring out whose sedan was parked behind her, she angled the truck and reversed across the lawn, realizing only as she backed off the curb that it had rained earlier. She glanced at the tire marks she’d left in the soft grass and then peeled away, embracing the sense of satisfaction she felt at seeing those dark gashes from the tires in her parents’ perfectly manicured lawn. Whether her sister wanted it or not, conflict was headed her way.

It was past midnight when Elyse pulled off onto the private road that led to her grandparents’ beach house. In addition to their vehicles, the rental car was parked along the curb. Before going into the house, Elyse pulled her purse into her lap and searched it for her phone. It wasn’t there. She turned on the overhead light in the car and looked again. Still no phone. Her heart started to pound and in a rush, she dumped out the contents of her bag onto the seat next to her.

It wasn’t there. She reviewed the day, trying to figure out when she last remembered using it and frantic at the thought that her sister or her mother or anyone would find it and snoop. She let herself into the house quietly. Picking up her grandparents’ landline, she dialed her own number, realizing as the phone clicked through to voicemail that she’d deliberately turned her phone off. Her mind wandered to all of the worst-case scenarios. She worried that she’d be found out. She worried that Landon had e-mailed her and she’d missed it. Taking several deep breaths, she looked around the kitchen, leaving her shoes at the back door. The floor was grainy against her feet. There was no getting the sand out of the house. Her mother complained for weeks after coming back from the beach house about there was sand everywhere. Elyse liked the feel of the granules against her feet. It gave her movements purpose.

There was nothing to be done. Nothing. She should sleep. Climbing the stairs to the attic, which had been converted years ago into a dorm-like sleeping space, she forced herself to think positive thoughts. She knew the odds were that the phone was inconspicuously at her mother’s house—sitting on a table in the backyard or on the counter next to the refrigerator. Her cousins were asleep in their cots—Lizzie’s long legs dangling off the end of hers and Isobel curled into a ball like a cat.

Elyse stripped to her underwear and fell onto her cot. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness—the room’s only light came from a small dormer window at the north end of the house. She rolled over and something clattered to the ground. She leaned over the edge of the cot and looked around until she saw her phone with a sticky note attached to the face. Relief flooded her mind—she tore the note off, glancing at her cousins’ explanation of finding her phone in the rental car. It was still off. She turned it on, holding her hand over the speaker so the noises of the phone coming to life wouldn’t awaken her cousins. It looked as if it had been left alone. There were no new messages from Landon. She fell asleep with the phone clutched to her chest, dreaming of being kissed.

In honor of it being their last day at the house, Grandpa Matthew had made pancakes. He stood in the kitchen surrounded by flour and eggshells, grinning at the chastising his wife was giving him over the mess. Her cousins were seated around the table with half-finished plates pushed away as if they couldn’t stomach any more food. Improbably, they were dressed and looked as if they’d been up since dawn. Elyse checked the clock. It was not even eight. She had plenty of time to fix herself up before she had to leave for her meeting.

She grabbed the counter, her knees shaking at the thought of what she was about to do. “You can go back to bed, pumpkin,” her grandfather said. “Your ma told me today was a relaxing day. She wanted everyone in shipshape form for the day before the wedding.”

“The day before the wedding,” Gram echoed. “Sometimes I don’t understand that woman. When Matthew and I got married, we walked to the justice of the peace and then had a little reception at my mother’s house.”

“And my mother never did forgive me for telling her I got married after the fact,” Grandpa Matthew said.

“Your mother was a crazy woman.”

“Not as crazy as Anna,” Grandpa said, leaning over and sprinkling a bit of flour on his wife.

Lizzie looked up from the table. “They’ve been like that all morning.”

Isobel nodded. “You should hear the things they told us about Anna.”

Elyse took several pancakes from her grandfather and sat down at the table. She wasn’t paying close attention to what was happening around her. Each time she tried to concentrate on her grandparents or her cousins, her mind drifted to imagine one of three scenarios that would happen in a few hours. He would see it was her and confess his love for her. He would see it was her and leave. He wouldn’t come at all.

“What do you say?”

Elyse swallowed and realized after the silence left in the air that the question had been directed at her.

“To what?”

“Going canoeing.” Lizzie smoothed her hair away from her face and plaited it into a single braid that reached halfway down her back.

“We’ll be back in time for that girls’ night out your sister has planned.”

Elyse massaged her temples. “I’ve got a headache. Probably best if I stick around here.”

“It’ll be better if you come along,” Lizzie said, clearing her plate and helping their grandmother wipe up the mess their grandfather had made.

“So much better,” Isobel said, taking Elyse’s plate with her to the counter.

Her eye twitched and her stomach heaved. They didn’t know how right they were. It would be better for everyone if she abandoned her foolishness and spent the morning on the water watching the herons and hoping to sight a dolphin. But she also knew herself. If she didn’t see this through, she’d always wonder what might have been. And wasn’t it much worse to break up a couple after they were married? Not that they would break up, but if they did, doing so two days before the vows would be so much less destructive. “I can’t,” Elyse said, not looking anyone in the eye.

The sunshine irritated Elyse. The glare on the window of her parents’ beater truck never let up the whole drive to the rendezvous spot. She had sunglasses, but they weren’t prescription and when she put them on instead of her regular glasses, the glare dissipated, but so did the road and the cars opposite her. It wasn’t safe. Instead, she fiddled with the visor until it settled into an awkward angle that cut most of the sunlight out of her eyes. She’d driven too fast. As she approached the turn-off for the park, she glanced at her phone—she was twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

The park was well shaded, which made her feel safer and less exposed than she had when she was on the road. She parked away from the gazebo, preferring to walk to it as they had during that day in the storm when they hadn’t been able to see straight and so had made a run for the covered building across the great lawn of the park—only realizing when they arrived that there was a parking lot behind the structure.