Three Story House: A Novel (5 page)

“Something is wrong with her.”

“Her vitals are fine.”

“No, I mean in the head. She’s talking about angels.”

Coughing, the nurse turned away for a moment. “I know I should quit, but we all need our vices. Does she seem altered? Not know what day it is or who you are?”

Lizzie understood that there was nothing the nurse could do for them at that moment. “No. In fact, if anything, she knows too much.”

“Oh, that’s as common as a housefly. Being under, you know, anesthetized, it does stuff to some people’s brains. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But she’s not who she was.” Lizzie corrected herself. “I mean she never before believed in anything and for her to be talking about—”

“She’s fine.” The nurse looked up as a light went on in the hallway.

“You aren’t listening to me. She’s telling me about heaven, God, and holy angels, but it all sounds like she’s out of her head.”

“We should all be so lucky to be so close to our maker.” The nurse gave Lizzie a hard stare, and then turned on her heel, telling her to “have a blessed day” as she strode down the hallway.

Lizzie looked up to find her own mother standing at her grandmother’s door. She hadn’t realized how late it had gotten. Her mother looked as if she were ready for bed, with her hair pulled into a low ponytail and not a smidge of makeup on her face. Without it, her mother had a more difficult time concealing her emotions. She smiled at Lizzie and then, as quickly as the smile came, it faded. Her mother wrinkled her forehead. “I thought you’d come by our house before coming over here. The children were all dressed for their school Halloween party. There’s so much of their childhoods you’re missing.”

“They missed all of mine.” Even as these words formed on Lizzie’s lips, she knew they were cruel. “Besides, since when do teenagers get dolled up for Halloween?”

“Preteens,” her mother corrected. “That’s on me and on Jim. You’ll find the age doesn’t matter so much later. They love you so much. Third year in a row that Reagan is going as Mia Hamm.”

“That jersey must be tiny on her now,” Lizzie said. She’d been too old when they were born and too often gone since then to become close to her siblings. Besides, seeing the way they adored their father often felt like pulling a scab off a wound. Not that Jim had ever made her feel less than, or as if she weren’t also, his child. The resentment was something Lizzie carried into their relationship.

“And Grant went as an actual soccer ball. Blew up black and white balloons and pinned them to his shirt. He made a little soccer net with pvc pipe and strapped it on the dog.”

“You got a dog?”

“Dexter. He’s more like a horse. One of those greyhounds from the racetrack across the river.”

“I thought you were allergic.”

“No.”

“But that’s why we couldn’t keep that dog,” Lizzie said.

“You mean Peg?”

“Peg?” Lizzie tried to remember if she’d ever known the dog’s name.

“The one I hit with Mellie’s car?”

“In the Datsun. But Peg wasn’t her name, it’s what I took to calling her when the Bishops adopted her. I can’t remember what they named her, Scout, I think. No. Bear.”

Her mother had been driving her to soccer practice, and the dog had run out in front of them out on Summer Avenue, which before the freeway had been the main highway between east and west Tennessee. When they looked at it together, it was clear from the heavy teats on the dog that it had puppies. They’d spent days combing the area trying to find them.

“As in leg, right peg leg?” her mother asked looking away from her and reaching for the handle of the hospital door. Her forehead creased as she tried to recall the dog. “It cost me three hundred dollars to get that stray patched up, and even then Mellie wouldn’t let us keep her. Do you remember how she was back then? I saw her step on a cat’s tail while it sunned itself on our porch.”

“I always thought that it was you,” Lizzie said. “Mellie’s different now.”

“Oh, I know. Everyone mellows with age.” Her mother compressed her lips and ground her teeth in an expression of irritation, as if she were chewing on gristle. Lizzie had seen a picture of herself with that same look.

“No, I mean since the surgery. I don’t know how to explain it. She believes in God, or at least angels.” Lizzie was on the verge of saying more.

From the floor desk, the nurse offered her audible prayer. “Praise Jesus.”

“Don’t be that way.” Her mother moved her hands in large gestures punctuated with intent. “We didn’t raise you to—”

“Who’s we? You and Jim? You and Mellie? You and my real father?”

“You can’t bring that up too,” her mother said.

“Why not? Wouldn’t now be the time to tell me since you all hate me so much already? What’s the secret? Is he in jail? You don’t remember his name because it happened at an orgy? Tell me.”

“Don’t be so nasty.”

“We have nothing to talk about,” Lizzie said, turning her back on her mother. She walked through the hallway door, trying to slam it behind her, but the hinges prevented her from doing so, and instead of a satisfying thump, the hydraulics emitted a slow hiss as the door closed.

After that her relationship with her mother became different. Neither one acknowledged it, but they didn’t talk beyond what was necessary. Most holidays Lizzie spent away from home. Any conversations they did have took place in written form or became monosyllabic. Her stepfather stepped in and translated for them, carrying messages and intentions between the two women. But at that moment, Lizzie thought the fight inconsequential. She slept at her grandmother’s house, checked her out of the hospital, and drove her home in the Datsun.

Stepping from the yellow car, the smell of canned peaches tickled her nose. There were pockets of land around Memphis that had housed food manufacturers who took delivery of perishable goods from the trains chugging through town and turned out fried pies, canned fruit, and syrup by the ton. Over the years, the soil around these factories had become a dumping ground for products that perished. When the heat of the day reached deep into the earth, the smells (some fifty years old) evaporated into the air. As she looked at the steep stairs that led up to her grandmother’s front door, she realized she’d need to find another way to get Mellie, who held a folded aluminum walker on her lap, into her own house.

She returned to the car, backed up, and drove over the curb. The vacant yard next door was all mud.

“Be careful,” her grandmother said, bracing herself against the jostling from the uneven ground.

“We’ll be fine,” Lizzie said, praying that the car’s tires wouldn’t get stuck. She continued to press firmly on the accelerator until they arrived near the back door. She cut the engine and moved to help Mellie out.

“I’ll do it myself.”

“You can’t,” Lizzie said, trying to slide an arm around her grandmother, who’d swung her feet out of the car and was working to unfold the walker.

“Let me at least try,” Mellie said, slapping away Lizzie’s arm.

She stepped back and watched Mellie struggle to transfer her weight from the car to the walker. Her grandmother looked taller and as she pulled herself to a standing position, Lizzie understood the reason.

Mellie rocked her walker forward as she stumbled behind it. “See, I’m not dead yet.”

Lizzie hardly heard her. The humping of her spine, which for years had kept her head tilted to the left, her eyes looking upward as if she were in a dark hole, had dissipated. She stared at her grandmother’s back. The hump wasn’t exactly gone, but it had shrunk in size enough that for the most part, her grandmother looked straight ahead. Her head wobbled, though, as if her neck were an infant’s and not quite strong enough.

“Your back,” Lizzie said, jumping ahead of Mellie to open the back door.

“It’s a miracle,” Mellie said. “Angels said I had to bear a few other people’s burdens for a while, so they lifted mine.”

“Come now,” Lizzie said, opening the door for her grandmother. “You know none of us believe in miracles.”

“And yet they exist.”

By the time Lizzie left a few days later, Mellie had stopped using the walker, and her neck had grown strong enough to support her newly straightened spine. The doctors didn’t have a good explanation for the correction. Sometimes these things happen, they said. One mentioned that the time she’d spent prone could have started the process. Another suggested the hip replacement and the removal of her limp. Lizzie said her goodbyes, her mind already on the upcoming series against Korea and her impending move to Los Angeles to play for the Sols. Nothing about that visit—except that Mellie’s walk, which although it no longer had a limp, still held a hesitation, as if her grandmother didn’t trust the ground not to move.—gave Lizzie any sense that her grandmother was on the verge of death.

Her stepfather explained again that they’d gone over to visit for Veteran’s day and had found her in her bed. Mostly he apologized for her mother not being able to tell her. “You don’t have to come for the services,” he said.

Lizzie knew they expected her to come, that this offer was merely a courtesy. “I can’t believe she’s gone. It’s a trick. She can’t have died.” She wanted to say more, but she found she couldn’t speak over the sobs that exploded out of her chest as if her heart were trying to leap out of her body.

Her mother took the phone from Jim. “No matter what they say, there’s never enough time on this earth.”

“Breathe. You’ve got to find your breath,” her stepfather said in the background.

In the end Lizzie agreed to look at flights and let them know her plans. Instead, she played three games, traveling to Richmond, Cincinnati, and Tampa before sending off an e-mail saying she’d be spending the holidays in Los Angeles with Isobel.

F
rom the street, the façade of Spite House gave an impression of stinginess, while from the banks of the Mississippi, the rear of the house, with its sharply angled glass walls, rejected onlookers by offering only a view of their own unsettled faces. Being half as narrow as a standard house in front and three times as wide in back gave 260 Wagner Place the disturbing appearance of having been built without forethought. Already standing well above the structures around it at three stories, the proportions tricked the eye into estimations of even greater height. Every cornice bore a different embellishment. The yellow clapboard and the green trim emphasized the home’s slight tilt. Preceding the arched front doors, skinny columns created a porch-like space that repeated itself on the upper levels. Heavily hooded windows contributed to the exterior menace of the house, as did the legends about the family within.

Looking up at the house, Lizzie saw for the first time how elderly neighbors might complain that the cupola had the same architectural lines as a panzer. In the back of her mind, a memory fluttered of reading books in the greenhouse-like warmth of the room with her grandmother, stopping to take sips of peach tea and count the rainbows cast by the pieces of glass her grandfather had hung before Lizzie was born.

“Looking at a place like this, you realize there’s not much difference between ugly and beautiful,” Isobel said, staring at the house head-on despite the blazing sun creeping toward the west.

Lizzie brought her hand to her eyes and squinted, trying to find the signs of neglect that would have prompted the city to board the lower levels with plywood and string caution tape across the porch. She picked up her cousin’s observation. “They might as well be synonyms, it’s another way of saying something looks different. No, what you truly want to avoid is being like everyone else or everything else around you. Ugly is beautiful because it makes you want to keep looking.”

“What sort of shape do you think the glass is in?” Isobel asked, starting up the precipitous concrete steps that led to the front porch. There was no front yard to speak of—only a steep drop from the edge of the house to the street.

“There’s no telling.” Lizzie stopped to fiddle with the historic sign cemented into the middle of the sidewalk at street level. The bolt holding the bottom of the sign to the post had rusted away, leaving the placard to move with the wind. She took the elastic from her hair and looped it through the sign, working to secure it as best she could. Then she ran her fingers over the raised white lettering on the green background—most of the paint had rubbed off, making the sign impossible to read from any distance. Satisfied, she limped up the stairs behind her cousin.

The sound of firecrackers set off early in anticipation of the new year startled Lizzie and made Isobel yelp. The two of them moved to the porch as quickly as Lizzie’s leg would allow them. She saw how battered the plywood appeared, covered in spray paint and pieces of paper matted by wind and rain. They ducked underneath the caution tape and stepped up to the front door.

In the corner of the porch, the swing rocked slowly. Lizzie took her eyes from the house and squinted into the shadows. Before she could say anything, Isobel bounded across the porch and leapt onto the swing, hugging Elyse around the neck and asking questions faster than anyone would have breath to answer.

“How can you be here?” Lizzie asked, leaning her weight against the boarded-up front door.

“I needed a break,” Elyse said. She anticipated Lizzie’s next question. “I didn’t know I was coming. I woke up this morning and instead of getting off the blue line, I stayed on it all the way to Logan. Couldn’t face spending another night at my parents’ place, and so the next thing I know, I’m on a flight bound for Memphis.”

“Anyone know you’re here?” Isobel asked.

“You didn’t have to come,” Lizzie said.

Elyse stayed silent. Lizzie tore one of the notices from the plywood and read over the information—it wasn’t much more than what her mother had told her. There were hearing dates that had long passed and a phone number for the code enforcement office as well as a name. T. J. Freeman. No one in the office had been able to help her the last few times she’d called. People were either on vacation or said that what she wanted couldn’t be done over the phone. “You have to be here,” they kept saying.