Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “Where’s your other dad?” Elyse asked, and Lizzie couldn’t tell whether she’d been waiting to ask the entire time they’d been together or whether the thought had just occurred to her. As she got to know her cousin better, she realized that she never planned ahead. Every action in her life was a reaction.

  Isobel, as if sensing there was no answer to the question, dunked Elyse, which started a spirited round of play fighting until Elyse got sand in her eyes, which made them all stop.

  “I’m not crying,” she said before either one of them could accuse her.

  “I don’t,” Lizzie said, surprised to be speaking even as the words left her mouth.

  “You don’t what?” Isobel asked.

  “Have a dad.”

  “That’s okay,” Elyse said, pulling at the corner of her eye and trying to blink the sand out. “Lots of kids don’t have dads.”

  “Everyone has a dad,” Isobel said.

  “I know,” Elyse said. “I mean like my friend Susie, she doesn’t have a dad. He died or something.”

  “I don’t think mine died,” Lizzie said, realizing how little her mother had told her. For most of her life, Lizzie hadn’t given much thought to the identity of her father. Occasionally, faced with a daddy-daughter dance or when her friends’ fathers would ferry them to one place or another, she’d remember that it was strange that she didn’t have one. But it wasn’t until her stepfather came along that she was forced to confront the idea that somewhere out there she had a father. Her mother tended to answer questions about her father with other questions. “What do you need a father for?” she’d ask in the same voice she used when Lizzie had been caught sneaking an extra cookie.

  “Knock, knock,” Isobel said.

  Elyse groaned and splashed water in her cousin’s direction. “She loves this sort of game. Knock-knock jokes, riddles, word puzzles.”

  “Fine. Try this one. It’s a memory test. There’s a one-story house with yellow walls, a yellow roof, yellow fridge, yellow plates—”

  “I get it,” Elyse said. “Everything’s yellow.”

  Isobel continued listing the contents of the house. Lizzie knew the joke. The answer had been given away in the first sentence. She took a deep breath and swam under the water, keeping her eyes tightly shut, and closed her fist around a few errant strands of eel grass to keep her submerged. Once last year she’d asked about her father. No, that wasn’t right. She hadn’t asked. All the other times, that’s what she’d done, started with a question: Who is? Where is? Why is? But this time, she hadn’t given her mother a choice. “Tell me about my father,” she’d said. What Lizzie had wanted was a description, an occupation, a location. Instead, her mother had placed her hand on Lizzie’s head and smoothed her hair into a ponytail, twisting it in the back so it would hold. “You’ll meet him someday,” she’d said, “and he’ll love you enough to make up for not being here now.” And then, as if knowing what she’d said wasn’t even close to enough, she added, “You have his eyes.”

  Her lungs burned. She let go of the eel grass, bursting the surface of the water, and gasped for air. When she looked around, she saw squiggles of confetti as her body adjusted to the sudden intake of oxygen and the bright sunlight above the water.

  “Girls,” Elyse’s mother called, walking toward them. “We’re ready to eat.”

  “Triplins,” Jim shouted after her. “Like cousins and triplets.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elyse was saying, while waving impatiently at her mother. “You never told me what color the stairs were. Isn’t everything yellow?”

  “There are no stairs,” Lizzie said, grinning at her cousin. “It’s a one-story house.”

  They dunked Isobel together, their laughter echoing across the surface of the bay. Lizzie knew that for third-grade show-and-tell in the fall, what she’d bring would be a bottle of bay water, a nickname for the three of them, and their own secret whoomp dance.

  November 2011: Los Angeles

  You could move here,” Isobel said.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Lizzie said after flipping the switch that turned off the knee bender. The machine, designed to gently flex her knee after surgery, didn’t make a lot of noise, but the absence of the motor’s whir made every word they said sound as if it were an echo.

  “But you don’t live here. You really don’t live anywhere.” Her cousin, in mid-transition from morning gym class to afternoon run, lay down on the floor next to the pull-out couch and stretched.

  “It wouldn’t make sense. In a few months I could be back with the team, or playing in the European leagues, or—”

  “Move into my extra bedroom and get a job teaching or coaching at one of the fine educational institutions here.”

  “You sound like my mother. The next thing I know you’ll be sending me links to job applications and saying what a shame it is that I spent all those years getting a degree I don’t use.”

  “The difference is you’re talking to me.”

  “My mother and I talk.”

  Isobel laughed. “No pretenses needed with me. I like having you around, even if you are incapacitated.” Isobel stretched her arms toward the wall and then pointed her toes, making it appear as if she were being pulled at both ends. “Besides, you need a home, and living here will give you the chance to accumulate more stuff than will fit in a duffle bag.”

  “I’ll be around a good bit for the next few months.” Lizzie needed to walk, test out how well her leg was healing. Getting up would stop the conversation from becoming about her mother. Although at least she and Isobel were in the same spot, neither one of them on friendly terms with their mothers. She massaged her knee and then maneuvered herself to the edge of the bed. Isobel, anticipating her next move, reached under the couch and pulled out the crutches. The motion set off the dancing Santa Claus on the mantle, and the canned sound of “Jingle Bell Rock” filled their half of the duplex.

  The song ended and Isobel picked up the tune and continued singing as she helped Lizzie onto her crutches. At practice a few weeks earlier she’d torn her ACL and now, a few days after surgery and a month before Christmas, Lizzie found herself convalescing at her cousin’s house. Such a Jane Austen way of explaining the situation, but how else to describe being propped up by half a dozen pillows on the pullout couch as a machine bent and unbent her leg to the prescribed post-surgery degree? No other word would do.

  “It’s the right time,” Isobel sang as she let go of Lizzie’s crutches.

  Sighing, Lizzie started to do cautious laps around the small living room while Isobel shadowed her, anticipating any hesitations in balance. “Coaching is for people who are finished playing. I’m not finished.”

  “I never said you were.”

  There was a quality to Isobel’s voice that made Lizzie reconsider their conversation. Maybe it wasn’t all about getting her to think about life after soccer, maybe her cousin needed her around. Lizzie paused to rest a minute and leaned against the wall. “I’m just grumpy about all of this.”

  “It doesn’t have to be coaching, you could stay and do something else. I’ll teach you about houses.” Isobel thumped her heel against the floor. “Sanded and stained these myself. You should have seen this place when I bought it. Owners had poured wax down all the drains. Wax.”

  “You can’t escape who you are,” Lizzie said. “Got your mom’s looks and your dad’s passions.”

  Isobel wiggled her ears at Lizzie. Her cousin was the perfect mix of her father and her mother. As a child, when she wasn’t acting, she’d been her father’s shadow—handing him hammers and using fine-grain sandpaper on intricate crown molding. She’d learned to use a jigsaw before taking the training wheels off her bike. When her career had skidded to a halt after her show ended, she put that knowledge to use by leveraging her acting money to buy dilapadated houses around Los Angeles and make them beautiful again. The bungalow Isobel lived in now was actually a duplex, with the rent from the other side covering her
mortgage. But she was her mother’s child too. She could be pushy and vain.

  “Am I driving you tomorrow? To that soccer thing?”

  “You mean the holiday party?” Lizzie had no intention of going to the hotel to spend hours decorating store-bought cookies and exchanging secret Santa gifts with her teammates, or rather, former teammates. “I’ve got a therapy appointment,” she said.

  “It’s after that. You know, your coach called me to say how they especially want you to be there, and I don’t mind as long as we figure out how to get out there without hitting much traffic. I heard some of the girls have endorsement deals. They do commercials and stuff, huh?”

  “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.