Three Story House: A Novel (3 page)

“Nobody there will be of any use to you. All that’s stuff done with the sports media guys—not an actor to be seen for miles. Besides, my being there is bad luck. If this”—Lizzie gestured to her knee—“could happen to me, it could happen to them.”

“You remember that I’m no good at sympathy, right?” Isobel plaited her flat-ironed hair into a loose braid as she spoke. As beautiful as her cousin was, she had the trappings of a woman who worked at her appearance—the byproduct of being a kid who’d worn thick glasses and picked at her scabs. “I can do two things. I’ll tell it to you straight or I’ll take you out and we’ll have a good time ignoring our problems. Which do you want?”

“I want Elyse.”

Isobel adjusted her face, making her cheeks larger and widening her eyes. She spoke in a near-perfect imitation of their cousin’s husky Boston-coated voice. “You’re going to tell me about it and afterward I’ll figure out a way to make it better, even if it means drinking for both of you.”

“Be kind,” Lizzie said. While Lizzie and Isobel had spent most of their twenties getting exactly what they wanted out of life, Elyse had floundered. She’d started and stopped two dozen careers. The latest misstep had been opening a bed and breakfast. In all the years she’d known Elyse, she’d never seen her cousin get out of bed with time enough to make even so much as toast. “She’s the best at telling us what we should do.”

“That’s because she listens. You and I”—Isobel made a dramatic show of pointing to each of them—“are terrible at listening.”

Lizzie smiled. “I didn’t hear you. Did you say I’m amazing?”

Isobel rolled her eyes in dramatic fashion. “She does all her listening on the phone, which is easy. You can multitask. What do you want to bet that while we’re droning on repeating ourselves, she’s painting her nails. All she has to do is ask questions and make sympathy noises.”

“Sympathy noises?”

Isobel offered several variations on the “oooh” sound.

“Your sympathy noise sounds like sex noise.”

“I didn’t say I was good at it.”

“Listening or sex?”

Isobel responded by pulling up the corner of her T-shirt as if she intended to strip. “This coming from the girl who had to ask me if the wet spot on her boyfriend’s jeans after they made out was normal.”

“I was sixteen! Besides, you know how my mom and Jim are about that sort of stuff.”

“I don’t know any parents who aren’t that way. You don’t want to know how much I knew at sixteen.”

As close as they were, they didn’t often talk about sex. It had been established early on that Isobel had lost her virginity too early and Lizzie too late. Elyse, in typical fashion, had lost hers on prom night her senior year of high school. Lizzie’s back ached from keeping her knee off the ground. She wiggled her toes. “I should walk a bit more.”

Isobel tried again to talk to Lizzie about her team’s Christmas party. “They’re expecting you to be there,” Isobel said. “Isn’t your coach looking for a show of commitment? I mean if you don’t go, then no matter if you’re healed in time or not, won’t it be a black mark against you?”

“I should, but I can’t.” Lizzie rested the toe of her right foot on the floor, careful to keep her knee bent. She put a little weight on her leg, feeling the shock of pain as it ebbed through her body.

Being house-bound the last few days, Lizzie had watched dozens of documentaries—on animals, historic figures, celebrities, archaeology—all the while collecting an impressive assortment of facts. Cats can bark. The king of hearts doesn’t have a mustache. Women blink twice as much as men. When she was alone, she’d string them together to try to create some larger narrative out of all the smaller pieces. When she wasn’t alone, she discovered her facts could be used to deflect conversations. Given what had happened to her and the uncertainty of what would happen, there were many discussions she didn’t want to have. She searched her brain for a topic that would divert her cousin’s attention. “The bigger question is what do we do now that we know this is our last year on earth?”

“Come on.” Isobel kept her eyes on Lizzie’s knee. “You can’t start believing in all of that apocalypse stuff. Don’t you have to believe in God first?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with God. It’s the Mayans. They’re the ones with the stone calendar that abruptly stops tracking time. Or maybe I should trust the new-agey folks like your mother who say there’s some secret hidden planet, that will appear when Earth crosses the Milky Way.”

“My mother would only think the world was ending if she had a sure way out,” Isobel said, taking the bait. She kept talking about the end of days as Lizzie hobbled into the bathroom. “Let me know if you need help,” Isobel said when Lizzie shut the door.

She leaned against the sink and washed her hands. There was no reason to think she couldn’t get through this injury and the rehab. Yet, why wouldn’t anyone mention the Olympics? Her coach had been silent on the matter, her own mother kept talking about post-soccer careers and now her cousin had started talking around her future. If Elyse were there, she’d be on her side, telling Lizzie that there was no reason she couldn’t be a hundred percent by July when they’d announce the final team roster.

Outside the door, Isobel was coming up with her own end-of-the-world theories. Twice before Lizzie had torn her ACL—once in college and once when she was much younger and had first started to play seriously. Why was this injury so much harder to face? It had come at a bad time—just before the Olympic season—and Lizzie was older now. So many of the girls at the training camp had been children—not even out of college and playing as strong as the veterans. They had young knees and had been taught the importance of finesse and strength. Lizzie closed the lid and sat for a few moments on the toilet. She liked the smallness of the room. The fact was, even if she hadn’t been injured, her spot on the team wouldn’t have been guaranteed. She’d been one of those players perpetually on the cusp. In for one tournament and out for another. But being at the camp a few weeks earlier had felt different. The other girls had said that to her—told her how well she played, how fast she’d gotten. It was supposed to be her year.

The tear happened during scrimmage. Unlike most Southern California mornings, that day there’d been almost no sunshine. The bit of light filtering through the heavy clouds had a greenish cast that made Lizzie think of the stacks of aquariums in pet stores. Everyone expected the clouds to blow out, but they remained even after lunch. Her teammates, louder than usual, took the field grabbing pinnies and talking smack with each other. It seemed clear from the division of teams into red and green which girls would be going to Canada for the first of their pre-Olympic tournaments and which would not. Still, they had two more weeks of camp left, and Lizzie knew from all the other years she’d been in this position that there’d be movement before the full three weeks were over.

The team’s captain pulled her hair back into a ponytail, tightening it before braiding it and securing it with another elastic. She gave Lizzie a thumbs-up and then called over the girls they were playing with. “Friendly game,” she said. “Ease into it.”

Lizzie shook her head. The media had been portraying these athletes as girls next door for so long that they almost believed it themselves. However, each one of them had an interior wolf that emerged the moment the ball touched the grass, even at these practice games. The drive to be better than everyone else separated them from everyone else.

Lizzie liked the captain. The coach had been right to keep her on the team even though she was nearly thirty-five and had two kids. She’d been one of the heroines of the 1999 World Cup team. People tended to speak about the good the captain had done for women’s soccer, but lately Lizzie had been thinking of how the woman had kept playing long past the point when everyone thought she’d have to stop. This woman had played through pregnancy and injury. It gave Lizzie hope that she had plenty of time left to play the game and afterward have the life she wanted. The only problem was she didn’t know what she wanted out of her second life.

She punched her legs in excitement waiting for the game to start. One of the coaches rolled the ball in and the players fought for it. Their kicks, when they missed, stabbed into the turf, leaving behind moon-like craters. A few minutes into the game, Lizzie anticipated a sharp cut by one of the young forwards and spirited the ball from the player’s foot. The opposing forward moved three or four steps toward the goal before realizing she didn’t have the ball, while Lizzie swiftly booted it downfield. She felt the coach’s eyes on her and then a short, quick nod of approval.

The match continued and Lizzie let herself be swallowed by the game chatter, listening to the goalie’s directions and keeping her eyes as much as possible on the ball and on the young powerful forwards in green pinnies on the opposite team. When she was in a game, time moved at a different speed—not faster or slower, but she became aware of every second in a way she never could outside of the field.

Rain began to fall as the game neared its conclusion. The forward who Lizzie had embarrassed got the ball on a breakaway and crossed into the backfield. Stepping forward to challenge her, Lizzie kicked the ball out of bounds. When her foot returned to the ground, it slipped, hyperextending her knee and sending her sprawling to the ground. There was almost no pain, but the moment Lizzie tried to stand on her own, she felt a looseness in her leg and the sharp searing that accompanied the fear of realizing that her body wasn’t working the way it should.

“Did you hear a pop?” her teammates asked each other as they gathered around her waiting for the trainer to come onto the field. Most of them reflexively touched their own knees. Those who’d had surgery massaged the thin scars that scalpels had sliced into the fronts of their knees and the backs of their legs. The captain got close and grabbed her hand. “It’ll be a sprain,” she said, and then, as if not understanding that some words weren’t to be spoken, “definitely not your ACL. Not again.”

Lizzie closed her eyes and lay back on the turf, letting the rain pelt her face like gravel. When she opened her eyes, it was because she’d heard Isobel’s voice an octave higher than its normal tenor, asking questions of the team doctor. “If they called my emergency contact, I know it’s bad,” she said, letting her cousin take her hand to help her hear what she already knew, even without the MRI confirmation.

Isobel knocked on the door, her voice strained as it had been in the trainer’s room a few weeks earlier. “You didn’t fall down or something, did you?”

Lizzie opened the door and hopped on one foot to the bed, where she struggled to get her leg back into the knee-bending machine. “I’m not ready,” she said.

Isobel locked the machine and pushed the button to start it. The hum of its mechanics filled the small living room. “Who is? All this talk about the end of the world is like a jolt, you know? And you.” Her cousin used her hands to shape a ball out of the air. “It’s everything.”

“It was.” Lizzie’s mind returned to the coach’s face when she’d talked with her about her injury. That woman’s face, with its wrinkled, puckered mouth, was the true reason Lizzie wouldn’t go to the holiday party. The coach’s mouth had said all the right words, talking about how as long as Lizzie’s rehab went well, she’d be among the players considered for the Olympic team, but her eyes had darkened and dismissed Lizzie with every glance.

Isobel went on talking. “I think if Elyse were here, she’d tell me that I’m bugging you so much about what’s next because having you here makes me think about my own life.”

“What’s wrong with your life?”

Isobel reached down and tightened the laces on her shoes. “Don’t make me say it.”

Without meaning to, Lizzie’s eyes settled on the statue her cousin kept tucked into a corner of one of the bungalow’s many built-ins. Isobel had been ten when the cast of her cable show got that award. “You ever think that the world is a walled maze full of dead ends?”

“Sometimes,” Isobel said, setting her wristwatch and putting her hand on the doorknob. “But I keep thinking it’s like what you said earlier.”

“Like what?”

“That tomorrow could be the first day of our very last year.” Lizzie hadn’t expressed it that way, but Isobel had somehow managed to put into words exactly what had been buzzing at the corners of her brain ever since she blew her knee out. That what she needed was for her first life to be over so she could figure out her second.

“I guess the question is what are we going to make of our very last year?”

L
izzie wished her mother would learn how to text. In the last few years, during the period that Isobel and Elyse called the cold war, texts had become her primary way of communicating with her mother, and yet her mother was terrible at it. Take these messages—more than a dozen sent one after the other and they all added up to nonsense.

THEY say grand burn is splice

#eYEsorE

On TV last night . . . what should we do

Emergency. Your closet.

Grandmas Memphis

In the last one, her mother had typed the word “condemned” six times, with random letters capitalized. Who does that? There was something about the sheer number of texts coupled with their insanity that made her finally want to call her mother. It wasn’t that Lizzie and her mother hadn’t been speaking to one another, but since her grandmother’s death, the distance between them had widened from a chasm to a canyon. She steeled herself for the painful conversation. Talking with her mother was like trying to walk after her foot fell asleep—all pins and needles and awkward stumbling. As the phone rang, Lizzie figured the time difference. California was a little more than half a day behind Yekaterinburg and sometimes when Lizzie spoke to her family, she felt as if she were calling the future. While it was Wednesday night in Los Angeles, it was already Thursday morning in Russia. Early. Maybe too early to call, but as she was about to hang up the phone, her mother’s voice came across the line as clear as if she were in the next room.