Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

“You don’t have to stay,” Lizzie said, her mind already considering how much she needed them to. “The more I’m here, the more I feel like I can’t leave.”

  “Come on,” Elyse said. “You can barely move around with your knee.”

  Isobel, channeling their childhood, moved her index fingers in circles to indicate how crazy Lizzie was acting. “How are you going to fix a place when you can’t tell me the difference between a Phillips and a flathead.”

  “What is she talking about?” Lizzie said to Elyse.

  “Are you asking us to stay?” Isobel asked.

  “I’m asking,” Lizzie finally said.

  “Then it’s settled.” Elyse picked up Lizzie’s phone and scrolled through the contacts until she found the number for Lizzie’s parents in Russia. She pressed call and handed over the phone. Lizzie listened to the metallic ping of the ring and began a mental list of who she’d have to call next. Before her mother picked up, Lizzie put her hand over the receiver.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said to her cousins, who stood by the large windows looking over the bluff. She stretched out her leg on the empty chair next to her. Isobel blew her hot breath on the glass panes in the door, and Elyse reached over and traced out three figures connected at the hands, like a chain of paper dolls.

  When code enforcement finally caught up with them, Lizzie, in between conditioning and therapy appointments, had put on one of her grandmother’s cocktail dresses and had a fox stole, complete with leathery paws and glass button eyes, draped around her shoulders. Her cousins had offered to run errands while she sorted through the items that the three of them had cleared out from several of the house’s wardrobes. Clothing, hat boxes, shoes, and the like were piled on the kitchen floor. A deep pounding at the front door startled her. Although the noise demanded her immediate attention, her leg had stiffened while she’d been on the floor and getting up proved a challenge.

  Commands were shouted through the door. She couldn’t make out but a few words: police, unlawful. “I’m coming,” she called, as she leaned against the narrow hallway and limped toward the entrance. The wood of the front door groaned. Frantic to get to it before they could burst inside, Lizzie took a step on her right leg, and it buckled under her. She scooted toward the door, reaching to unlock and open it. When the door swung inward, she still sat on the floor. The fox had slid down her shoulder so that the tail tickled her collarbone.

  The men looked over her head and yelled more agitated words.

  “Why are you here? Who are you?” one of the officers shouted.

  Lizzie backed away in surprise. The man had appeared by her side as if by teleportation. He crouched next to her. The shoulders of his uniform shirt were too wide.

  “I live here,” Lizzie said. She struggled to stand. Another officer, this one large and imposing, held his arm out. When she reached for him, he grasped her by the wrist, pulling her to her feet in one quick motion. She swayed, unsteady and unsure who was in charge.

  “Who are you? Do you have identification?” the small officer asked again. He reached out and put his hand on Lizzie’s shoulder. The fox fell to the floor without her moving to pick it up. With his other hand he pointed at her purse, which was hung on the banister post at the base of the staircase. She realized they were the same height. “Is that yours?”

  Her knee wavered as if someone had kicked the back of it, and she felt the color drain from her face. The officer steadied her. A black man in a shiny suit pushed his way into the house. He had a clipboard and radiated authority.

  “This is my grandmother’s house. It was,” Lizzie corrected herself. “I mean my mother owns it now.”

  “You’re in violation,” the man in the suit said. He moved his hand across his clean-shaven head and looked down at his papers. “Didn’t you see the notices? This house is set to be sold at auction at the end of February.”

  “I don’t know.” Lizzie didn’t want to lie, but she wasn’t ready to admit to having ignored the signs until she knew how much trouble she was in. “I tried calling about the power and stuff, but nobody ever calls back.”

  “Our records show the certified letters we sent to the property owner were returned. Do you know anything about that?” The man rocked on his heels and made notes in block letters. He looked to be in his early thirties and had high cheekbones and full lips. Looking at him, she thought that despite his hard edge, he could be generous.

  He’d realized she was staring at him, and she felt the blush of embarrassment. “No. I mean my parents are out of the country and I—”

  “But you’re the current homeowner’s representative?”

  “I don’t understand,” Lizzie said. She wanted to fill up the space between them with words. To explain to the man in the suit and the police officers about all the work that they’d already done on the house, to prove to them that the place shouldn’t have been condemned at all. She thought that if she could walk the men through the house, have them feel its odd sturdiness and read Isobel’s wall lists, they’d clap her on the back and tell her what a good job she’d done and what a fine daughter she was.

  “Miss. Miss. Are you all right? Are you in an altered state?” The smaller officer had picked up the fox and was trying to settle it back onto her shoulders.

  The man in the suit smelled improbably like the beach. He pushed past them, motioning for the larger officer to follow him. “She’s fine. Get her identification.”

  “I don’t know about this, T. J.,” the larger man said, eyeing the narrow staircase. He turned to Lizzie. “You don’t have any dogs, do you?”

  The man in the suit compressed his lips into a thin line. Lizzie realized that his had been the signature on the paperwork tacked to the front door. T. J. Freeman, Code Enforcement. “Fine. You talk to the girl and Slim Jims here can come upstairs. None of this is code. None of it. These old houses drive me crazy. Built on a wing and a prayer with secondhand wood.”

  The two officers shrugged and switched places, the smaller one rolling his eyes as he followed T. J. up the stairs. Lizzie wondered what he was looking for. She grabbed her purse and motioned for the larger man to follow her, walking sideways down the hall so he wouldn’t feel crushed by the narrow space.

  “Did your grandmother pass away recently?” the officer asked, surveying the open trunk, photo albums, and old greeting cards scattered next to the piles of clothing.

  “No,” Lizzie said, digging through her purse for her wallet and extracting her identification. She gave him the license and tried to explain how her parents—or rather her mother, stepfather, and four younger half-siblings, were in Russia. “It’s a church thing,” she said finally, knowing how inadequate it sounded. “He’s in charge of the mission work they do over there.”

  “To each their own,” the officer said. “Did you want to call someone?”

  Lizzie raised her head up and looked at him. “Who?”

  “Your contractor? Your lawyer? Your priest? I mean, with a house like this . . .” he trailed off.

  “My grandfather built it,” Lizzie said, feeling a flush of anger at the dismissal of her and the house.

  “You think about it,” the officer said, taking the driver’s license she held out to him. He looked down at the plastic card. “Florida, huh? You’re a long way from home.”

  “It isn’t home,” Lizzie said. “It’s where I sometimes stay.”

  “Don’t go anywhere. Not that you look like a runner,” he said, explaining that he was going to go to his car and run her information.

  She took her phone from her purse and texted her cousins. Elyse sent back a frowning face, and Isobel assured her they were on their way. In the few moments she had to herself, she navigated to the city’s code enforcement website and tried to figure out how much trouble she’d gotten herself into.

  The oversized cop thumped back into the house, waving Lizzie’s license in front of him as he walked through the beaded curtain. “You’re clean. No warrants, no ar
rests.”

  Unlike that of his partner, his uniform fit well. “Will that help?” she asked.

  “Standard procedure in situations like this”—he gestured toward the ceiling, indicating where, she presumed, his partner and the enforcement officer were cataloging violations—“is to cite you and escort you off the property.”

  Lizzie didn’t listen closely to the rest of what he had to say. She put her head in her hands and held her breath in a vain attempt to hold back the tears. Her knee twitched with pain. The larger officer put his hand on her arm. His palm felt rough and calloused against her skin.

  The laughter of the other men echoed above them. He stepped away from her. “It’s not so bad as you think.”

  The back door opened, and a rush of wind blew dead leaves and small clumps of dirt over the threshold. Isobel threw out her arms, and said, “I’m here. Elyse is in the car calling some lawyer she knows in Boston.”

  “It’s hopeless,” Lizzie said.

  “Nonsense.” Isobel shrugged out of her coat and took off her sunglasses. She appeared oblivious to the officer, who hadn’t stopped smiling since her cousin entered the house. If Lizzie were a gambler, she’d bet that he’d seen every episode of her cousin’s show. Like most child actors, Isobel was often recognized but not identified. People tended to think she was someone they knew in school—a familiar face from their childhood. And in a way she was, especially for anyone close to her age. From the time Isobel was eleven until she was twenty, she’d played Gracie Belle Wait on Wait for It—one of the first attempts by a cable network at a sitcom.

  She turned toward the officer. “What can we do to fix this?”

  He looked over his shoulder and then in a low voice said, “Play dumb and flirt a little. Code enforcement spends their days dealing with slumlords and squatters. Pretty women like you ought to be able to change T. J.’s mind.”

  The tinkle of the beaded curtain announced the arrival of the other men. Lizzie watched her cousin transform into someone else. She pulled her shoulders back and lowered her chin, striking a pose that made her breasts seem larger. The officers snuck quick glances at her chest and, as if to encourage them, Isobel leaned toward them as they spoke. Lizzie saw that by closing the space between them, her cousin had made the men seem like old friends. She lowered her voice when she introduced herself; instead of shaking hands, she ran her hand down each man’s arm and then gripped his outstretched hand in both of hers.

  By the end of the visit, T. J. Freeman had explained their options—which consisted of paying a $500 fine for contempt and asking Judge Hootley, who ran the court where their case would be heard, for an appeal of the court’s decision to auction the property. As he spoke, T. J. kept wiping his shaved head with his hand and then drying it on his front-button shirt. Unlike the other men, he didn’t look at Isobel. Whenever Lizzie glanced at him, she found he was already looking at her. Before he left, he pressed his card into Lizzie’s hand, urging her to call him if they ran into any further problems.

  Elyse came in the back door. “I saw them leave,” she said, before looking at Lizzie. “What in the hell are you wearing?”

  Lizzie pulled self-consciously at the satin dress, getting a scent of mothballs as she did so. “It’s too much to explain. We got lucky, though.”

  “I didn’t even notice the fox,” Isobel said, reaching for the shrug, which had been dropped on the table and then hugged it to her chest before responding to Lizzie’s earlier comment. “That’s because he liked you.”

  “Hardly,” Lizzie said, pulling her hair out of its ponytail. “You’re the one they kept their eyes on.”

  “She’s right,” Elyse said. “You’ve got a vulnerability right now that’s working for you. In fact, I’ve never seen it in you before. You’ve always been so damn self-sufficient that a man can’t fathom how he fits into your life.”

  “So, the way to find a man is to fall on your ass in front of him?”

  “Not all men, some men. Men like T. J. are providers by nature. You’ve mostly dated takers.” Too often, Elyse’s assessment of the cousins proved uncomfortably accurate.

  “Let’s not talk about it.” Lizzie gathered the memorabilia she’d been absorbed in earlier that day, dumping the whole lot of clothing into the give-away pile. Isobel helped, stacking photographs into tidy piles.

  “Your grandmother was a hottie,” Elyse said, thumbing through several postage-stamp-sized pictures. “She’s got that thing where you don’t want to look away.”

  “Charisma,” Lizzie said, putting the last of the pictures back in the trunk.

  Isobel buttoned the fox around her shoulders. “Can I keep this?”

  Lizzie nodded. “I was planning to dump all this stuff at Goodwill.”

  “Let me ask you something.” Isobel leaned close. “What’s the plan here? If I learned anything today, it’s that we need to be serious with this. Do we have enough money in your grandmother’s trust to hire someone to work on this place?”

  Elyse interrupted. “What do your parents have to say about this mess? I mean, it really is their mess when it comes right down to it.”

  “What Mellie left should be enough—especially if I have the two of you helping with the stuff we can do. But when the money’s gone, it’s gone. You know how my parents are about debt.”

  “They still think credit cards are the sign of Satan?” Isobel asked.

  “They’re not that bad. I can’t ask them for money—not after all the sacrifices they’ve already made so I could play.” One of the guilt trips that Lizzie’s mother often laid on her was what it had cost the family to support her in soccer. They’d added it up one time and it totalled nearly fifty thousand dollars when they took into account fees and travel. “And I had this idea that if I do this, then my mother will finally owe me something.”

  “They really sold their house and used that money to pay for this mission?” Elyse asked.

  “Called of God is called of God,” Lizzie said, echoing what her mother always said. “I don’t have any money either, I mean not really. They don’t pay you to play soccer—at least not anymore.”

  “Let me at least pay rent,” Isobel said.

  “I’ve been thinking about getting a job,” Elyse said. “I could use the distraction.”

  Lizzie argued with Isobel. “We talked about this. Doing what you’re doing—taking charge of the stuff I don’t know about is enough. When we really get into the fixing stuff, then you’ll have to earn your keep—you know, look over the shoulder of whoever I hire to do this stuff and make sure he’s not cheating us.”

  “You got someone in mind?” Isobel backed down, and Elyse followed her lead.

  She nodded. In the last conversation she’d had with her parents, her mother had suggested a man she went to high school with who’d worked on the house over the years for Grandma Mellie. He worked cheap and he knew the house, which Lizzie guessed was what they needed. “Enough about money. It’s fine. Or rather, it’ll be fine.”

  “You’ve got to stop saying that,” Elyse said, touching Lizzie lightly on the head. “If I could change one thing about this world, it would be the need for everyone to hide their panic.”

  On the third floor, in the ceiling above the landing, there was a metal pull that concealed the stairs to the cupola. Since arriving in the house, Lizzie had tried in vain to get the stairs to pull down. With their first meeting with the contractor scheduled for the next day, getting into the cupola and then out onto the roof felt like a mandate. Isobel took the rope from Elyse and tied it to the brass ring. Lizzie stepped back, wondering at her cousin’s confidence.

  “If we all put our weight on it, the stairs will have to come unstuck,” Isobel said, grabbing the rope at a point near the top. The others copied her and on the count of three, they pulled down sharply and lifted up their feet.

  The stairs popped and then slid out with excruciating slowness. They made Elyse go first since she put up a fuss about climbing the backle
ss stairs. Isobel followed, carrying a broom. Lizzie had tried to warn them about how small the space was, but when she finally made it up the stairs, she found Elyse marveling that by stretching her arms, she could touch all sides of the cupola. Behind them, a second room expanded the area beyond the telephone-booth-like space that the stairs opened into. The larger room had a barn door on rollers and window seats. There were a few cast-off items littering the floor, including a smaller replica of Spite House that, if she remembered correctly, had once been a mailbox. The prisms that were so much a part of Lizzie’s childhood remained in place. Isobel pushed through both rooms, spilling out onto the roof with the relief of someone who didn’t like small spaces.

  “Did I hear you on the phone with that inspector last night?” Elyse asked, stepping out behind her onto the roof.

  Lizzie shrugged. He’d called officially a few days earlier to help her file the paperwork to get the utilities turned on and to get their property removed from the auction listing. The conversation had surprised her by feeling familiar and by the end of it, he’d given her his cell number and she’d called, at first to ask about garbage pick up, but mostly to hear his voice.

  “I told you he liked you,” Isobel said, turning and looking back at the cupola, holding her hands out in a frame and then walking around the structure. “Flat roofs are so much trouble. You need an angle, something for all of this crap to roll off of.”

  “When will anything not be trouble?” Lizzie asked, her good foot kicking at the muck of decomposing leaves that lined the outer edges of the roof.

  “Don’t you want gloves?” Elyse offered a pair to Lizzie before working the handle of the broomstick under the layer of debris on the easternmost corner of the roof and watching as several beetles crawled away after having their soft bellies exposed.

  Lizzie grabbed a handful of leaves and threw them over the side of the house, wiping her hands on her jeans before putting on the gloves.

  “What’s the story with this house anyway?” Elyse asked when the debris was mostly cleared.