Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “They don’t really mean that,” Isobel said, tapping her knuckles against the wood. “It’s to warn bums off and stuff.”

  Lizzie’s eyes adjusted to the dusk and she turned back to the house, seeking out the turtle-shaped rock where the spare key would be. The rock looked as if it had never been moved. She patted its top, which had been sun warmed, and then pried it up, breaking two fingernails in the process. A single key sat underneath the rock, embedded with dirt and as cool as a lizard’s belly. She raised her hands in gratitude and in a moment she had unlocked the back door and stepped inside the house.

  The aroma of wet dirt and moldering books made her recoil. When her grandmother was alive, the house had smelled like cleaner and vanilla. She used her phone as a flashlight, holding it firmly in one hand and clasping the strap to her overnight bag with the other. After sitting for so long on the plane and then in the taxi, her knee felt unstable. Isobel reached out and put a hand on the small of her back to steady her. With the windows covered in plywood, not even moonlight penetrated the house. Any optimism that Lizzie had felt earlier dissipated. The back door opened into the kitchen, which was one of the largest spaces in the house. Lizzie groped her way around the perimeter, banging her head on the metal cupboard doors that had been left ajar. It didn’t look as if her mother had removed much of anything from the house after her grandmother’s death. Orderly rows of jelly jars filled one of the metal cupboards, and the baker’s rack still held cookbooks and spices.

  They should go to a hotel. That would be the sensible action. Instead, Lizzie collapsed into a kitchen chair that was covered with a sheet and had a good cry. Her cousins, knowing she needed to be alone, explored the house using their own phones as flashlights. She knew girls who didn’t cry, who prided themselves on it, but not Lizzie. So many times in her childhood, she’d stepped behind a tree, or into a closet, and one memorable time into a large cardboard box that held the first grade’s red rubber balls, and allowed herself a body-wracking cry. And afterward, she always found she could do what was needed. Of course, it hadn’t worked very well over the last year. Even after crying, the weight of hopelessness remained ever present, better at casting a shadow than even the sun itself. She blew her nose on the sheet, using the underside to avoid the layer of dust.

  “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Lizzie said to the empty room. In response, the beaded curtain with its lotus flower pattern rustled. She listened to her cousins as they opened doors and called out to each other. In the time she’d sat, the house had become familiar to her again. She groped underneath the sink until her hands touched the gas lantern that her grandmother had kept there. Memphis was prone to storms and full of aging trees set too close to power lines. Moving cautiously to the stove, she found the long-tipped lighter and then after a few minutes of fumbling, the lantern illuminated the house.

  Walking through the curtain, Lizzie embarked on her own exploration of the house. The hallway narrowed as she walked along it so that by the time she reached the stairwell and the open space by the front door, her shoulders almost touched each opposing wall. She started at the front door in the constricted space her grandmother had often called the receiving room. Two slivers of stained glass framed the front doors. Lizzie stood at length in the warm entryway, soothed by the proximity of the horizontally laid poplar walls before allowing their seamlessness to pull her deeper into the house, past the pocket door that opened onto a tiny closet and up the stairs.

  The stairs divided the narrow portion of the house from the large trapezoid-like rear rooms. The second and third floors were identical to each other. At the landing of the stairs were three doors: one opened to the front bedroom, the other to the back bedroom and the third to the bathroom. The front rooms were barely five feet wide, but they had French doors that exited onto the balconies above the porch. The bathrooms were as long as the front bedrooms and only three feet wide—they shared a wall with the front rooms. The trapezoid rooms had the same floor plan as the kitchen and featured the same tall windows running nearly the height and length of the walls that faced the river. On the third floor, the entryway to the cupola took up most of the landing.

  Each door she opened made her a little angrier with her mother, who had assured her that she’d taken good care of the house before leaving nearly two years ago for Yekaterinburg. Clearly her mother had a skewed perception of caretaking. At the door to her grandmother’s room, Lizzie picked up the overnight bag she’d left on the landing and entered. Her phone buzzed a warning of a low battery as Lizzie opened the wardrobe in her grandmother’s room and searched it for linens. It seemed as if every spare sheet in the house had been used to cover furniture. There were several wool blankets and what appeared to be a wedding dress sealed inside a cloth covering. Behind her, the pewter urn on the mantle reflected the moonlight streaming into the room at eye level above the plywood boards.

  Picking up her phone, she started to search out the nearest hotel, but she didn’t even get to the point where she could call before the battery died. What she ought to do is find her cousins and work out a plan. But the thought of all that would have to be done with the house overwhelmed her. It was too much to take in. At least they had a place to sleep. Count your many blessings, Lizzie thought, bouncing on the bed and listening to its springs groan in protest. Her leg throbbed. She didn’t plan on being in Memphis long enough to find a permanent therapist, but the doctor and the trainer had insisted she follow a demanding schedule of therapy and rehabilitation. One day into her travel, and she’d already let the exercises slide.

  Life had a way of being a son of a bitch. The dampness of the room left her with clammy skin and again the earthy smell tickled her nose. At least it was warm, especially for being nearly January. Why had her mother left so much of her grandmother’s stuff in the house? The thought of all that would have to be done exhausted her. Without intending to, she slept.

  The fireworks woke her. They flared above the river and ignited into patterns of light with such ferocity that the panes of glass shook. A sheet she recognized as having been on a table in the hallway covered her, and the lantern was gone. She stretched and walked to the windows. Placing her hand against one of two rock-sized holes, she looked out and saw that Isobel and Elyse had wrapped themselves in blankets and were sitting at the edge of the bluff watching the celebration. She must have been asleep for hours and wondered what her cousins had done with themselves and why they hadn’t woken her.

  Outside, it wasn’t as cold or as deserted as she expected. A rowdy group of young people had set lawn chairs in the vacant lot next to the house. They waved to her and offered best wishes on the start of a new year. Lizzie returned their greetings and then faced the river, sitting down next to Elyse and putting her head on her cousin’s shoulder. “We brought you food,” Elyse said, sliding over a Styrofoam container.

  Lizzie opened it and then closed it without looking at the contents. Without discussing it, she understood that it had been decided that they’d stay in the house that night. The wind blew sporadically, carrying hot ashes one moment and murmurs of awe from the crowd in the park below the next. She stared at the flat gray water until a mirror image of the explosions in the sky appeared in the river. She felt like that—as if she were a blurry reflection of herself. Her eyes drifted to the bulky brace wrapped around her right leg. Before the fireworks concluded in a bombardment of color and sound, headlights illuminated the asphalt lot adjacent to the river park. Determined to beat the traffic, eager fathers hurried children into cars and gunned their engines in a bid to be the first to leave. Her own father, or rather stepfather, mocked such pragmatism. He preferred to wait for the park to clear, wrapping the children in blankets and naming the few stars visible against the wash of city lights.

  He’d use those waiting moments to teach his children to tell time by drawing an imaginary clock around the position of the big dipper. “The stars are proof that we’re never standing still,” he�
�d tell them. Scratching an itch on the back of her calf, Lizzie wondered why they’d never watched the fireworks from the bluff before. She supposed it was her mother’s doing. Most everything that didn’t make sense to Lizzie could be traced back to her mother.

  The vacant-lot revelers called to them as they tromped off the land, blowing noisemakers and swigging the last of their alcohol. One last firework, launched well past the finale, exploded behind them and the sound of it pressed in on Lizzie like all the losses from the previous year.

  As if sensing her thoughts, Isobel raised an invisible glass. Elyse followed, then Lizzie. “To our very last year,” Lizzie said.

  “To the Triplins,” Isobel offered.

  Elyse ducked her head and then cleared her throat. “May the most we wish for in the coming year be the least that we get.”

  January 2012: Memphis

  Lizzie unplugged her phone and put it inside the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. What was it they said about insanity? Repeating the same action and expecting different results? She knew what her trainer and her coach had told her before she left Los Angeles, and yet she’d still expected them to tell her what she’d wanted to hear this time around. The fact was, they didn’t know her. Neither one of them had been there the first two times she busted her ACL. A year. It hadn’t taken her but six months to get back on the field the first time. Lizzie knew there were other messages about other problems on that phone, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to listen to them. She closed the mirrored front, leaving it fogged from her shower, and maneuvered down the narrow steps and then the equally small hallway that led from the base of the stairs to the kitchen, careful to keep her knee from straining.

  Here it was a week into their occupation of Spite House, and none of the women had made any move to leave. The first few days had been rough, but instead of decamping to a hotel, they hooked a generator to the circuit box, turned the water on with the curb key, and claimed rooms. The guy at the hardware store warned them against the generator as a permanent solution, but he’d sold them an inverter that gave them enough juice to power the refrigerator, a few lights, and when it got really cold a space heater. Using a permanent marker, Isobel scrawled lists of what each room needed on yellowed wallpaper. She called contractors and talked about electrical updates and plumbing issues of homes built in the Jazz Age. In the mornings, Lizzie often found Elyse making her way through the house with a pad of sticky notes, tagging every item of potential value to check it against similar antiques online. Nothing about these actions appeared temporary to Lizzie.

  Her body ached from the rehab and conditioning she’d put herself through that morning. She eased into a chair next to Elyse, who wore three shirts and was paging through one of Lizzie’s grandmother’s ancient cookbooks.

  “Found these for you,” Elyse said, pushing over several dusty shoe boxes. “They were in the wardrobe in my bedroom.”

  “Grandma always did like to hide stuff. You can’t open a closet or a drawer or even dust under the bed without unearthing some container stuffed with bits of her life.”

  The back door opened, letting the chill of the January air into the sun-warmed kitchen. “We’ve got to get the power back on. That generator is ridiculous. I have to drive to the gas station every day to fill the damn thing.” Isobel dusted her hands against her jeans. She had dried leaves in her hair. “You get in touch with code enforcement yet?”

  “Can’t find my phone,” Lizzie lied. She opened a tan box marked “Halloween.”

  “So, you haven’t talked to your mother? Or code enforcement?”

  “I will.” Lizzie tried not to be defensive, to expect Isobel of all people to understand how hard it was to call her mother and have a conversation—about money, expectations and failures.

  Isobel looked as if she were about to say more, but instead she mentioned cleaning up and disappeared upstairs.

  “She’s not going to let you slide much longer,” Elyse said.

  Lizzie let her fingers sift through the contents of the box, which contained dozens of letters and handfuls of photographs from three or four different decades. “What about you?”

  “I’m a free spirit,” Elyse said, dog-earing a page in the cookbook. “Nobody cares if I disappear for weeks, or even months. Besides, it’s a place I could see myself staying.”

  “Honestly?” Before Lizzie could push her cousin further on the idea, she glimpsed several Polaroids of her mother with feathered hair. Lizzie turned the box upside down and let its contents spill onto the floor. She’d seen a photograph like that once before—it was from the year her mother was pregnant with her.

  Isobel reappeared with a towel wrapped around her. “I found your phone. Forty-two text messages and seventeen missed calls.”

  Lizzie ignored her. Among the pictures she clutched was one of her mother taken when she must have been six or seven months pregnant.

  “What are we going to do about this?” Isobel asked, putting an emphasis on the word “we” that made Lizzie think there was about to be an intervention.

  “Why do we have to do anything?” Lizzie moved her thumb over her mother’s face and studied the photograph for clues about what had been happening in her life that year. Who had she spent time with? What had she been like?

  “What if we wake up tomorrow and they’re bulldozing the place on top of us?” Isobel brought her hands together, as if the house had collapsed in on itself.

  “That won’t happen,” Lizzie said. In the photograph, a man a little older than her mother stood to the side. He had heavy eyebrows and splotchy skin. She couldn’t tell if he was with her mother or just in the background. “Last time I talked to that secretary over there, she said to wait for them to call me.”

  Isobel handed Elyse the phone. Looking up, Lizzie saw that they were reading her messages. “You can’t ignore your family,” Elyse began before changing topics. “And what about your leg? When does your trainer want you back in Los Angeles?”

  Lizzie didn’t want to talk about her knee. During their last phone conversation, her trainer had kept talking about where Lizzie should be instead of where she was. The fact that he wouldn’t talk about the Olympics and cautioned her about expecting too much from her body worried her. “What about you? Why is it that you left Boston?”

  “I’m on vacation,” Elyse said, looking at the photograph in Lizzie’s hand. “That your mother?”

  “We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Isobel said.

  Elyse had taken the picture from Lizzie. “I bet this house is full of stuff from your mom.”

  Lizzie looked around the kitchen. The walls were lined with handwritten notes from her grandmother and mementos from her mother’s childhood. She thought about the other rooms in the house and the sheer amount of miscellany hidden in its nooks. The most success she’d ever had in rehab had been with her first therapist, Phil. He’d believed in her in a way no one ever else had. She thought about what her mother would owe her if she rescued the house. “I’ve been thinking about staying,” Lizzie decided. “I mean for a while. For as long as it takes.”

  “To fix the house?” Isobel asked.

  Lizzie didn’t meet her eyes. She wasn’t thinking only about the house.

  “You can’t do this stuff on your own. Hell, I can’t even do some of it. We’re talking wiring at the very least, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the plumbing is compromised.” Isobel looked at Elyse, who passed her the photograph.

  “I’ll hire someone.”

  “You’ll be lonely,” Isobel said and then nudged Elyse as if to give her a line prompt.

  “It has to be her idea.”

  Lizzie reluctantly set the photographs aside. She’d been right to suspect her cousins of intervening. They talked over her, as if she weren’t in the room.

  Isobel rubbed Lizzie’s back in slow circles. “But she won’t. You know that.”

  “You have to ask us,” Elyse said.

  Lizzie shook her head. S
he couldn’t ask them. It was too much, even for almost sisters.

  “Wonder if your mother still has that T-shirt.” Elyse had a sense of when to press people and when to give them a break. “My dad talks about being at that game all the time, says the AC was out and that it must have been a hundred degrees in the arena.”

  Lizzie took the photo back, staring at her mother’s green Celtics’ shirt and started to ask Elyse when she needed to go back to work, but instead of answering, Elyse again brought up her rehab plans.

  “I could do it here. I’ve done it before.” And then before she could lose her nerve, she asked about Elyse’s timeline. “How long could you stay?”

  Elyse looked away from her. “A day, a week, a month. I paid extra for one of those open-ended tickets.”

  Isobel caught Lizzie’s eye and then shrugged; there was a sense in everything Elyse had told them about her visit that she was holding back. Before she lost her nerve, Lizzie asked Isobel about staying. “Don’t you have to get back to auditions and your property and such?”

  “I don’t have to do anything. If you asked me to stay, I could,” Isobel said, stepping back from the two of them and running her fingers over the frames of the doors and the windows. “I can rent out my half of the duplex if we stick around here a while. That’ll give me some walking-around money.”

  “Your trust fund all tapped out?” Lizzie teased. They’d always given Isobel a hard time about the money she’d earned from the show. Mostly because the sums, at least when they were children, had been staggering. They pictured rooms full of gold coins with Scrooge McDuck swimming through them. “It’s all tied up in real estate,” Isobel said, her voice flattening.

  “I like this house,” Elyse interrupted. “It’s a little bit pissed off, like all of us.”