Three Story House: A Novel (26 page)

They’d painted the wood since she’d been there last. Instead of a creamy off-white, the structure was green—they’d left the interior roof alone and it remained a lightly stained wood—almost blond in color. She sat on a bench along an inner wall of the structure and looked at the woods that ringed the park. The squirrels were fat—obese, really, and were probably a sign that there were too many people here. In the distance she heard children screaming. Funny how the sound of happy children could at first sound like anguish. Each time she heard an engine, her throat constricted and her stomach turned over. She was sure he’d be riding his motorcycle. It had a distinct purr that she’d recognize before it came into view.

She counted to 500 forward and then backward. In the letters she’d confessed her love, stating and restating the reasons he didn’t belong with Daphne. All the words she wrote were directed toward trying to convince him that this anonymous woman knew him best and therefore must love him the most. She was in love with him enough for both of them, but she hoped it was mutual. The wooden steps of the gazebo creaked. Elyse said her ABCs before moving—not wanting her eagerness to show. She pulled at her skirt. She took a deep breath and then turned around.

Isobel and Lizzie stood inside the entrance to the gazebo.

“What are you—?” Elyse didn’t finish her thought. She needed to get them out of there before Landon showed up. Her cheeks colored and then she leaned over the side of the gazebo and threw up. “You have to leave,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“He’s not coming,” Lizzie said, walking slowly toward Elyse.

Elyse backed away. “What are you talking about? You don’t know why I’m here.” Even as she spoke, she understood that her cousins knew exactly what she was planning. Her back touched the railing and her knees buckled, leaving her sprawled on the wooden floor that matched the ceiling. She’d sat in gum.

“Oh, honey,” Isobel said.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Elyse moaned, dropping her head into her hands. “You can’t know why I’m here.”

Lizzie reached down and picked Elyse up as if she were a child. “Come on,” she said.

Isobel put her hand on Elyse’s back. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. Just think of this as an intervention.”

“I don’t need an intervention,” Elyse said, thinking she ought to be standing on her own two feet. She struggled a bit, but her cousin was so much stronger than her.

“You can’t do this,” Isobel said.

Elyse stopped fighting, and Lizzie set her down. They didn’t touch her, but they walked behind her—essentially herding Elyse toward their car. Once she was in the front seat, Isobel buckled her in and asked for the keys to the truck. “I’ll follow you.”

Lizzie slid into the driver’s seat; her hands shook. “I wasn’t sure about this,” she said. “I’m still not sure.”

Elyse reached for the door.

Lizzie started the car, not even bothering to look behind her as she put the car into reverse. “It’s so messed up. What were you thinking? It’s not like we’re teenagers. What did you think would happen?”

“He loves me,” Elyse said, knowing even as she spoke how pathetic she sounded.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lizzie said.

“It has to.” Elyse threw open the car door and moved to get out, forgetting entirely that she’d been buckled into the seat. As she struggled to unlatch herself, a car leaned on its horn and Lizzie slammed on the brakes. The canoe, which was tied precariously to the top of the car, made terrifying squeals and groans as it strained against its ropes.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lizzie flipped off the car she’d almost backed into and then let out a guttural scream that sounded to Elyse like a war cry.

The seatbelt unlatched. “I’m staying here,” Elyse said, knowing that in the end she wouldn’t get out of the car.

“You’re acting like a crazy person,” Lizzie said.

In the face of her cousin’s fury, Elyse tried logic. “What if he comes? I can’t let my sister marry someone who doesn’t truly love her.”

“You realize you’re the problem. None of this would be happening if you hadn’t started stalking him with those ridiculous letters. And he’s not coming. We e-mailed him yesterday from your phone. Told him it was off. Are you even sure it’s him? What if it was your sister pretending to be him?”

Lizzie’s outburst answered so many of the questions that raced through Elyse’s mind. They sat silently in the car for a moment, each of them breathing as if they’d finished running for their lives. She supposed she could still stop the wedding—go and find Landon and her sister and tell them what she felt. The thought of it seemed like too much work and as she considered being honest, not just to Landon, but also to her sister, the heat of shame crept up her back. She reached for the open door and closed it.

After they’d been on the road several minutes, Lizzie cleared her throat. “I get it. The second time I blew out my knee, I thought I might kill myself. Not in that dramatic
Heathers
teen suicide way, but real. You know? I used to go for long drives and I’d stop the car on bridges that spanned freeways or lakes or railroad tracks and what I did was think about all the choices I’d made and how they’d all been the wrong ones. Then I’d stand as close to the edge and dare myself to take that last step. Finally I tried to talk to someone, a therapist, and it was all bullshit.”

Elyse reached for her cousin’s hand.

“He’d listen to me and then offer platitudes—say crap like even your failures have value or you learn the most from your regrets. And it’s all useless. Sometimes you make the wrong decision and it sets you back years or screws you up in ways you can’t foresee. You know this. You have to know this.”

Lizzie paused, lifting up the corner of her T-shirt to wipe at her face. “Isobel wasn’t sure we should do this—get involved, but I know we did right by you. Right up until this morning, I didn’t think you’d go through with it. And maybe you can’t see it now, or maybe you’ll never see it. But it was right.”

The sun was still too bright and the road curved in nauseating ways. The trees that lined the highway cast their shadows on the asphalt and created almost a checkerboard pattern of light and dark. Elyse closed her eyes against the sick that rose in her stomach, trying to block the harsh variations of light.

A motorcycle passed them in the opposite lane. Elyse whipped her head around, listening to its engine and trying to remember the sound of Landon’s bike. She caught a glimpse of the rider’s silver helmet and the back of his fringed jacket.

“That’s not him,” Lizzie said. “Too old, wrong jacket.”

“He would have come,” Elyse said, as her cousin reached to turn the radio on. “It would have changed everything.”

“Not for the better,” Lizzie said.

Elyse turned the air conditioning vents away from her and rolled down the window. She stuck her arm outside and let the air push against it. Who was to say what would be better? Lizzie left the main highway and made several turns. The trees thickened and the pavement turned to gravel. Just as Elyse thought to ask where they were going, the road ahead of them dead-ended at a boat dock.

“We’re really going canoeing?”

Isobel had parked her truck off the road, hidden among the trees. She walked forward and started to untie the boats from the top of the car. “I was afraid you’d gotten lost,” she said.

“We almost did,” Lizzie said, shutting the car off and stepping out to help with the boat. “Get the oars and the life jackets, will you?” she said to Elyse.

Elyse’s eyes shifted to her legs. She wasn’t dressed for boating. She wore a thin cotton sundress and flip-flops. Stepping out of the car, she shaded her eyes against the sun’s reflection off the water. The lake—or rather pond—was as still as glass. It mirrored the surrounding trees and small houses perfectly.

“It’s bigger than it looks. Opens up into a river that’s shaded all the way down. Or at least that’s what it said on the Internet,” Lizzie said. Elyse only half listened. The water spoke to her and without thinking about making a decision, she ran down the dock, dodging past her cousins, who nearly dropped the canoe, and did a cannonball into the water. Screaming as loud as she could and as long as she could until the water entered her mouth, tasting like fish and grass. When her head broke the surface, she saw that her cousins had set the canoe down and were laughing and clapping. Elyse knew that they’d spend the day on the water not talking about Landon, Daphne, or the wedding and they’d only go to the wedding if Lizzie and Isobel believed that Elyse would be okay. At that moment, she wasn’t sure she would be, but at the edges of her brain, she felt buoyant, like a cork. All her extra fat was keeping her afloat and it would continue to keep her afloat throughout the difficulty of seeing her sister married to the man Elyse had always loved.

Daphne and Landon were married without incident and the day after the wedding, the Triplins found themselves at the airport once again with Anna, whose flight left at about the same time as theirs. Elyse’s shoulders and face had burned something terrible during the day they’d spent in the canoe, and her skin had started to peel that morning. She’d felt it slough off in the shower and now, waiting in line to be ushered through security, she couldn’t keep herself from using her nails to peel long strands of skin from her shoulders.

The line was incredibly long, and Elyse had begun to worry about how well Anna would hold up. She appeared fine, not even leaning on Lizzie, although her cousin’s arm was around her in case she did falter. A security employee tapped Elyse on the shoulder, and she winced. “We can take you through the pilots’ line,” she said, indicating Anna. “That’s not a woman who should be standing.”

“I’m older than I look,” Anna said, handing her license over for inspection. The security officer waved his blue light over her California license to make sure the document wasn’t fraudulent and then did a double take at the birthday. “You don’t drive, do you?”

“I passed the test,” Anna said, smiling at the man’s discomfort. She patted his arm. “Don’t worry, I only drive in Kidron, and even then I only make right turns.”

Even though their gates were in different parts of the airport, the Triplins waited with Anna. Once they’d seated her in the chairs, she’d started to tell them stories—one after the other about her childhood, about her trip to Australia to try to find her real mother, about a turtle. There seemed to be no pattern to her stories, and the only connection between the events was Anna herself. Gratitude for her great-great-grandmother overwhelmed Elyse. It didn’t seem possible that life could be so long or so chock-full of so many stories. Her cousins’ body language indicated that they were less compelled by Anna’s stories. Isobel had her phone out and was typing an e-mail—she responded to Anna with an occasional “uh-huh,” or an “isn’t that right?” Lizzie appeared to listen to Anna, but her face kept a skeptical expression—as if someone had just given her a million dollars and she was examining the gift for any attached strings.

Anna paused to drink some of the water Lizzie offered.

“Are you going to live forever?” Elyse asked.

“I’ve stopped thinking about it,” Anna said. A dribble of water escaped the bottle and fell onto her shirt. “I wake up every day excited to consider what comes next. For me, for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the lot of you. What is it you are?”

“Great great grandchildren, I think,” Elyse said

“Who even knows what forever is,” Lizzie said. “I mean one hundred seventeen years sort of seems like forever.”

“At least until you’re that old,” Anna said, laughing so hard that she doubled over.

Lizzie laughed, and Isobel set aside her phone to ask what was so funny.

“I wish we really were related,” Lizzie said. “They say it’s all in the genes and I wouldn’t mind living to see what changes over a hundred years.”

“Blood matters far less than you think,” Anna said. “Besides, you are all my Elizabeths.”

“No, that’s just me,” Lizzie said. “Although I never use my full name. My mom said she named me after the queens of England before she even met my stepdad and found out it was a family name.”

“Is that so?” Anna asked, in a tone that hinted at all the knowledge she had that the Triplins couldn’t possibly appreciate.

“But I’m honored, I mean, if you associate the name with your daughter,” Lizzie said.

Elyse listened as her cousin continued to fumble around trying to find the right words to lessen the sting of what she’d said. A few years earlier, Anna’s daughter had drowned after following her husband into the Sacramento River.

Nearing tears, Lizzie finally got more words out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. From what Grandpa Matthew and Jim say, Bets was an extraordinary woman. She died trying to save her husband.”

“She died because she was tired of living,” Anna said, her mouth compressing into a thin line.

“I’m sorry,” Lizzie said again, her voice cracking. “I don’t even know who my father is, and sometimes I say the wrong thing because my family is such a mystery to me.”

“No matter, no matter,” Anna said. “Not that any of you realize this, but you’re all named Elizabeth. Same name, different forms. There’s only a handful of names and most of them are from the Bible. We used to have to read it in school. There wasn’t much else and now whether you believe in it or not, you ought to at least know where your name comes from.”

Elyse said their names aloud, sounding out the vowels and trying to make them sound alike. She didn’t hear it.

“I hear it,” Lizzie said.

Elyse thought she was eager to make up for her earlier gaffe.

“Doesn’t matter, they’re all the same. Just like Anna is Hannah. So, now I’ve given you a gift, makes you even more like triplets, huh?”

“You don’t think our parents did it on purpose?” Isobel asked. “I mean did they know they were naming us after Elizabeth? After each other?”

“Must have been an accident,” Lizzie said. “Not like we share the same blood.”

“There’s no accidents in this world,” Anna said. “You, my dear, were always meant to be in this family. Isn’t that what we take away from weddings? The ability to create relations in ways other than by blood?”