Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “You’ve got to give yourself time,” Phil said, watching Lizzie jog on the treadmill.

  “My leg feels good. I feel ready,” Lizzie said, reaching for the buttons that would propel the machine faster and steeper.

  “I say when you’re ready,” Phil said, swatting her hand away.

  “Now that I’m out there with the girls, I want so badly to play. Biking and jogging and balancing on rubber balls isn’t even close to the same feeling. How can I get my body ready if I can’t even play a pick-up game with high schoolers?”

  “Patience,” he said, running his hand over his recently buzzed hair. He insisted on keeping it in the same style he’d had since serving in the military. Gray hair was never meant to be in a flattop. The old people didn’t like Phil because he talked in a soft voice that none of them could hear when he worked with them on their strengthening exercises.

  “But I’ve got full movement,” Lizzie said, switching her walk to a march to show him how well her knee was doing.

  “You’ve got to have strength too,” he said, tapping her knees to stop any bounce in her step.

  The receptionist called Phil to the front. He left Lizzie to walk for a few more minutes to warm up. “Look,” he said, backing away, “today might be the day I tell you that your knee is as good as new, but I won’t know until I put you through the paces. So let me do it. Okay?”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “You don’t look very happy, girlie,” the man on the treadmill next to her said. “What’d he say to you? Bad news?”

  Lizzie tapped the arrow on the treadmill, sending her speed up one-tenth of a mile. She smiled at the old man next to her.

  He took it as encouragement. “I got a new set of knees, and I told the therapist that I’m going to run a marathon with them.”

  “Is that so?” Lizzie asked, thinking how short older people were. The man barely came up to her shoulder.

  “What?” he said.

  Lizzie swallowed and spoke as loud as she could. “I don’t doubt that you will.”

  The man gave her a wink and then pushed his speed button twice.

  What Lizzie wanted most was to be told that she could play soccer again. The surgeon had warned her against it. He said that if her knee blew a fourth time, they might not be able to fix it. She’d known girls who’d come back from their fourth or even fifth surgery and maybe they didn’t play at the national level, but they played professionally. Not that being paid to play was even an option anymore unless you wanted to go to Europe. The problem with the surgery before this last one, Lizzie decided, had been the cadaver tendon. It had seemed like the perfect fix when the surgeon suggested she consider using someone else’s tendon instead of crafting one from parts of her own body. In the end, she’d had only a year of use with that tendon before it had blown. When she thought about it, Lizzie kept hearing the captain’s voice ringing out over the practice field asking about her ACL.

  The treadmill slowed and Lizzie stopped moving, letting the last rotation of the machine push her off the back end of it. She strained her eyes over the heads of the elderly in the room, trying to find Phil. Now that she’d warmed up her leg, he’d manipulate it to see if she’d regained full mobility.

  “Good luck, sweetheart,” the older man called as she walked toward reception. She peered through the small glass window separating the exercise room from the waiting area. Phil was deep in conversation with what appeared to be the parents of a teenage girl who had a cast up to her hip and headphones big enough that they obscured most of her head. She considered interrupting but instead fished her phone out of her pocket and situated herself on Phil’s examination table. The tables weren’t even screened off from each other; two tables down, a woman in her mid-sixties pounded her fist against the bench in pain and protest at the bend her therapist was putting into her knee.

  She read over the text messages she’d been exchanging with T. J. about their second date. Lizzie had made it with a sense of celebration in mind. She felt sure that Phil would give her the go-ahead to play, which meant she could talk to the coach about maybe working out with the team. Tentatively, she flexed the thigh muscles in her left leg and then her right. So much muscle mass had been lost in the past year. One leg was literally twice the size of the other, and there was an uncomfortable stiffness when she bent her knee. There was only so much conditioning could overcome.

  She picked up the piece of plastic pipe that Phil used to massage the back of her leg where they’d taken out part of her hamstring. Last week, he’d expressed concern that the small lump of scar tissue he’d noticed on earlier visits seemed to be increasing in size. He’d given her the length of pipe and told her to do it at least three times a day. It felt like walking on marbles, but she’d been doing it. He kept bringing up the possibility of surgery, but she resisted. “Sorry, so sorry,” Phil called as he crossed the room to Lizzie. “Young girl broke her leg in three places playing roller derby. Roller derby at fourteen! Can you imagine? Anyway, I wanted to talk with them before the cast came off so we’d have some sort of plan.”

  Lizzie lay flat on her back as Phil continued to talk about the girl. She kept her good leg flat, while he bent and twisted her right leg, occasionally interrupting his story to ask her to bend or flex or stretch as he took measurements. When he was done, he put a warm towel over her knee and told her to sit still. “I need to look at your chart,” he said.

  He returned and leaned over the table. “It isn’t what you want to hear.”

  “But it’s better, right?”

  “I’m still concerned about the grinding noise and the fact that you can’t straighten your knee.”

  Lizzie looked away from him. “Today’s just a bad day. I’ve been massaging it.”

  “This is a whole different area. You can’t get to it with massage. I think we’re looking at scar tissue, maybe a cyclops lesion.”

  Over the next thirty minutes, she learned more than she ever thought she would about the body’s reaction to being cut. It turns out that scar tissue is made up of the same material as the tissue it replaces, but an abundance of collagen means it’s knitted together in a way that makes it inflexible. Some people never get scar tissue and others, especially those who’ve been immobile, had painful buildups of the material that interfered with motion. “This is what I get,” she said.

  “I know you’re opposed to more surgery, so let’s see what happens if you keep working, massaging the area as you increase the muscles around it.”

  “Can I play?”

  “With due caution, yes.”

  At home, she gathered her cousins around her and told them in a burst not only about her leg, but in an attempt to leave them with some good news, about T. J. Isobel hugged her and told her it was about time she took that code inspector for a test drive. Elyse’s face changed for a moment when she heard. It hardened in a way that made her look much older. Seeing this version of her cousin’s face made Lizzie think that not having a dream of her own had taken its toll on her.

  “I’ve got to be eating or cooking to talk,” Elyse said. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a pile of ingredients.

  Isobel eyed it with suspicion. “What’s that going to become? Please tell me you aren’t actually going to use that heavy cream for anything.”

  “Stop worrying about your weight for once,” Lizzie said.

  “It pays the bills,” Isobel said, moving her hand along her body as if she were displaying wares.

  “Not right now it doesn’t,” Elyse said.

  “Whoa,” Lizzie said. She wasn’t prepared for the shift in the emotion.

  “See, that’s frank talk. We need more of it. Because if there are people I don’t have to be careful with, it should be the two of you.” Elyse lined up celery, carrots, and onions and began chopping. “I can maybe see how you can act and not eat, but there’s no way you can write a script and not eat. Your brain needs food.”

  “Are you crying?” Lizzie asked El
yse, still shocked at how coldly she’d spoken to Isobel.

  “It’s the onions.”

  Isobel stood up and walked to the counter. She put her arms around Elyse. “If I stand next to you, can I claim it’s the onions too?”

  “You can say what you need to,” Elyse said, waving the knife in Isobel’s direction. “Crying is cathartic and whether you’re crying out of relief or joy, I’d say what we all need is a good cry and a bowl of soup.”

  “What are you two crying about anyway?” Lizzie asked, and even as she said it a sob rose up in her throat and made the words come out muddled.

  “I don’t cry,” Isobel said. “I mean, sure I get teary eyed watching movies on the plane, or listening to any torch song on the radio. What I don’t do is cry over my own life.”

  “You’re fooling yourself,” Elyse said. “All those little tears stand in for the big ones you don’t have time for.”

  In a moment the three of them were crying—each one only vaguely aware of what the other two were crying about.

  “Isn’t there some superstition about getting tears into the soup pot?” Isobel finally asked, sniffling and wiping her eyes and nose on the edge of her shirt.

  Elyse dumped the vegetables into the Dutch oven and added a splash of oil. Then she blew her nose on a paper towel and dried her eyes. “I think it has to do with salt. A salty soup means the cook is in love.”

  “That pot is definitely going to have too much salt in it,” Isobel said.

  “You should find a way to move on with your life,” Lizzie said.

  “I’m not ready for that. I can’t even talk about it,” Elyse said. “All I know for sure is that I can’t be in Boston right now. My sister keeps calling and asking me about being a bridesmaid and wants to know what I think about flowers and appetizers. But I can’t do any of it. So I’m here because, as my parents are so fond of saying, the only way to forget your own problems is to get involved in helping someone else overcome theirs.”

  By the time the soup was ready, the women had cried themselves out. When she heard T. J.’s knock on the back door, Lizzie thought about how the beauty of a rainstorm was that it made the whole world a little bit cleaner and occasionally gave way for a brief moment to a rainbow.

  Second Story

  Elyse

  May 2012: Memphis

  As etiquette demanded, the invitation arrived exactly eight weeks before the wedding date. It had remained unopened for the last twenty hours—doing a better job than caffeine at keeping Elyse awake and agitated. She ran her fingers around the edge of the textured paper and over the indentations made by the nib of the calligrapher’s pen. Because her little sister still lived with their parents, the return address was that of Elyse’s childhood home in Boston. The last time she’d been home, snow had covered the ground, dampening the boisterousness typical of her family’s gatherings. She weighed the envelope in her hand, glad at its heft. Lord knows people have been undone by something as insubstantial as an e-mail, but Elyse needed her problems, especially this particular difficulty, to carry weight.

  “My sister is marrying the man I love,” she said to the window.

  The indistinct chatter of Benny and his crew answered her. She listened to the house, hoping for some acknowledgment of what she’d said. The usual hum of her cousins getting ready for the day and the creaks and groans of an old house greeted her. No single sound rose above another, which was how it should be. She took a deep breath.

  “The man I love is going to spend the rest of his life with my sister.”

  A small brown bird landed on the sill of her open window and ruffled its feathers. It wasn’t enough. Her admission still held an omission. That version of the problem put the blame on Landon. But wasn’t it his fault? She’d loved him since she’d known how to fall in love. And that business he’d said at Christmas dinner when they announced their engagement—the bit from Plato about how the gods divided the soul into two halves, leaving people to spend their lives searching for the missing part to make them whole. He said he didn’t know where he’d heard the story. Elyse knew. After reading the Symposium in a classics course, she’d heavily highlighted Aristophanes’ speech and then deliberately left the book in Landon’s car. How could he not know? Right up in the front of the book she’d written Property of Elyse Wallace.

  The bird turned its head and dipped its beak down as if urging her to go further. She tightened her grip on the wedding invitation. A warble escaped the bird’s throat and it nodded at her again before alighting and flying toward the river.

  “I love my sister’s fiancé,” she said.

  From below the house, voices rose quickly, followed by a deep clanging sound. She said it again, louder and then with a quick flip of the wrist, she sent the card sailing out the window.

  After a good cry, she padded down the stairs in her bunny slippers and walked through the beaded curtain without first moving it aside. Neither of her cousins raised their heads from their phones as she took a seat at the table. Lizzie had pushed her cereal bowl to the side of the table and, based on the rapid finger typing, Elyse guessed she was texting with T. J. before he left for work. Isobel, still in her workout clothes, had positioned her chair directly underneath the ceiling fan. Judging by the way she gripped her phone, her thumb hovering over the screen, she’d spent the last five minutes refreshing her e-mail. Since filming the television special last month, Isobel hadn’t gone three minutes without checking for an airdate for the project.

  “You realize it’s like six in the morning in Los Angeles, right,” Elyse said.

  Isobel looked at her as if she’d been caught picking her nose. She set her phone down and busied her hands holding her hair off her neck. “I forget,” she said.

  “They’ll get in touch,” Elyse said and then asked if she could eat some of Isobel’s cereal.

  “It’s so sticky,” Isobel said, pulling her shirt away from her chest. “Besides, I thought you didn’t eat hippie food.”

  “Too hot to eat anything better,” Elyse said, lifting the box of organic something or other crunch off the table. The wedding invitation, its ink smudged and slightly damp, leaned against a half-gallon of soy milk. One of the workers must have found it and brought it in. Elyse swallowed and turned away from the table.

  “This isn’t hot. This is just the summer preheating. Wait until August, then it’s like standing inside an oven with a damp towel around your head,” Lizzie said, glancing up from her phone at Elyse. “What’s going on? You never eat healthy.”

  Elyse pinched the fat on the side of her stomach. “I’ve been thinking I ought to start.”

  “That stuff’s not low-cal,” Isobel said. “It’s just good for you. They only buy grain from small farmers and the ingredients are designed to work together to give you energy and vitamins and—”

  “Let me guess,” Elyse said, “sunshine.”

  “It’s full of fiber. Guaranteed to make you fart rainbows,” Lizzie said, the corners of her mouth twitching.

  Isobel laughed, sounding like an angry goose. Lizzie giggled and Elyse, because crying could be mistaken for laughter, joined in until they heard the men outside mutter about crazy girls.

  Elyse wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and glanced at the envelope on the table. “Seriously, what’s the best way to lose weight?”

  “Eat less, move more,” Lizzie said, flexing her arms.

  “Depends,” Isobel said, fanning herself.

  “On what?” Elyse asked.

  “How much you want to lose and how quickly. Some of the actresses I know decide they want to drop ten pounds and choose to eat one thing—like grapefruit or carrots and then they chew nicotine gum to curb their hunger.”

  “That’s terrible advice,” Lizzie said. “You don’t need to lose weight anyway. You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m not looking for compliments,” Elyse said. Since exiting adolescence, neither of her cousins had struggled with their appearance. Tall and at
hletic Lizzie never looked as if she carried any fat on her. Her body had the sort of purposeful beauty people admired in Michelangelo’s sculptures. Isobel’s attractiveness lay in her face—oversized eyes, all the more alluring because they were so closely spaced, framed by wild auburn hair. Arresting. That was the word used to describe her when she appeared occasionally on the pages of those garish tabloids. Of course she was too thin, but all actresses were too thin. Isobel didn’t have any of Lizzie’s muscle tone, but that would have drawn attention from her face, and the whole point of Isobel’s attractiveness was her face.

  “You’ve got your boobs working for you,” Isobel said. “Men get tunnel vision when they see a good rack. And you, my dear, have a great rack.”

  “The day is wasting,” Lizzie said, looking at the time on her phone and then at Elyse. “What do you have planned for the day?”

  Elyse shrugged and grabbed a handful of cereal from the box. She decided to forgo milk as it would mean acknowledging the wedding invitation. “I’m off today and it’s too damn hot to consider any kind of cooking,” she said. She couldn’t admit the truth, which was that from the moment that invitation had arrived, she’d spent every waking second plotting. She played out all the scenarios in her mind trying to find the best way to stop the wedding and get Landon for herself.

  “Yeah, the girls are in finals and can’t practice,” Lizzie said, setting aside her phone and glancing at Isobel with more directness than the observation deserved. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  Elyse doubted that her cousin didn’t know what to do. Lizzie kept a running list of things to do—not only what she had to do, but what she could do. There were lists of books to read, albums to listen to, places to visit, people to write letters to. When she was younger, she’d kept these lists, organized by category, in a spiral notebook, but now they were all on her phone. Turns out there was an app for her cousin’s obsessive list making. If Lizzie had five minutes of spare time, she’d find an activity to fill it. Lately most of her extra time had been spent trying to put that diary of her mother’s back in order.