Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  That had been why the thing that Lizzie had said about it being their very last year had rung so deep in her. If it were, then she didn’t have the life she’d always wanted, she had a life full of other people’s problems, when what she wanted were her own problems. Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Elyse couldn’t abide her world ending in ice—in a culmination of all that she’d left undone in the world, unsaid. Sighing, she looked at the corners of the cards, where Lizzie had shown her the numbering system Aunt Annie used and then decoded it. A number represented each day of the year. How much work had it been to untangle this mess? It made Elyse’s head hurt to think about it.

  She looked at a few of the other stacks. They were white, untouched, and, judging by the subjects on them, Elyse guessed that they’d come through the mix-up and remained in pretty much their original order. Lizzie hadn’t told them what she was looking for, but it had been pretty clear that her objective was to figure out who her father was. She wanted clues, or even evidence that would point her to the man who gave her half her DNA. The unsorted cards remained in a pile in the center. This jumble of paper reminded Elyse of a fact she’d learned as a child practicing magic tricks: each time a deck of cards was shuffled, it created an arrangement that had never been seen before. There were more possible arrangements of a deck of cards than there were stars in the sky. Then, of course, she’d offer a deck of cards and urge them to shuffle it. Find an arrangement that works for you, she’d tell them.

  Looking at the scattering of cards on the table, Elyse imagined different ways they could be arranged and what it would tell them about Lizzie’s mother. What would happen if Lizzie got it wrong, if she put the 134th day of 1981 into the pile with the cards from 1972? Would the arrangement of her life change? The notes were so cryptic—take the one with the notation “swan boats.” Elyse hadn’t even realized they had those in any other place but Boston’s public gardens. But Aunt Annie hadn’t ever been to Boston before she met Uncle Jim, had she?

  Everyone has their love story—and none of them are easy. Imagine two people so different and so far apart falling in love? She wasn’t even sure how the two of them had met, only that they had. Something about a business trip that Uncle Jim took for FedEx. Elyse ran her fingers over the paper, thinking of the cards she’d sent to Landon and the fake e-mail address she’d set up waiting for a response. Cards with postmarks from places that evoked lovers, cards that urged Landon not to turn marriage into the practical choice, but to try for love. True love. “I’m someone you know,” she’d written in the last letter. “Someone who knows you well enough to tell you that marrying Daphne is a mistake.”

  That last one might have taken it too far. She finished her glass of wine and poured another before sitting down at the table. She checked her phone. No texts, but it was nearly five o’clock and they could still be in the courtroom, which probably didn’t allow phones. She squinted at the cards on the table—moving them in and out of focus.

  Elyse had always loved Landon. When she’d lost her virginity on prom night to Jeff Lee, she’d closed her eyes and pictured Landon’s eyes. All during her impetuous engagement to the German pastry chef, when he’d ask her about children (The man had wanted at least a dozen in some fantasy of being von Trapp himself.), she’d said no children, not ever. And it wasn’t true. She’d always seen herself as a mother—but to Landon’s children. Waiting for other people’s stories to work out—Lizzie’s and Isobel’s just brought to mind the first time she’d met Landon, the moment she counted as her beginning.

  His family had moved into their neighborhood when Elyse was ten. Any older and she’d never have developed a friendship with him—the next year she’d become acutely aware of boys and the ways that their attentions made her fizz up inside, like a shaken can of soda. She liked the attention. But she’d met Landon before the fizzing, so they remained friends. There was no television in Elyse’s house. Her parents had heard someone tell them to kill their television, and they’d actually complied. There were photos in an album of her parents with long hair and her dad with a mustache that was too long at the ends standing by a television they’d dropped out of the window of their two-story apartment. Her mother would look at that photo and shake her head. “We should have sold it,” she’d say. And if her father was in the room, he’d always reply, “But that would be passing the evil along to someone else.”

  In her mind, she and Landon stood barefoot in the sunroom eating sugar and butter sandwiches. Her parents also didn’t believe in Hostess products. Why were they barefoot? It had been raining, and there had been some issue with their shoes being too wet to come inside. He’d run his fingers along her bookshelf and pulled out the X volume of the encyclopedia. “I’ve never seen one of these,” he’d said, fanning the book open until it landed on xenophobia.

  “An encyclopedia?” she said.

  “No.”

  “A book?” At this suggestion, he alternated raising one eyebrow and then the other at her until she collapsed into a fit of giggling.

  From above her, he dropped the slender volume onto her chest. “Just an X volume. The ones we have at home are grouped with Y and Z.”

  She rolled onto her stomach and paged through the book, licking her fingers to get more traction on the slippery pages. That afternoon, they practically memorized the entries, reading back and forth to each other. Xebec, xeres, xenon. This trading of x words was a habit they’d continued into their adult lives. Sometimes when he broke up with a girl, he’d call her and offer a one-word explanation: “Xanthippe.” As if one word could cover the breadth of falling in and out of love. Of course they dated other people. More often than not, it was Elyse who had a serious relationship. In high school it had been Jeff, a football player who gave her a kitten for her birthday, even though she was allergic. In college it had been Josh, a short boy with an overly large head and a sweet voice. He’d been the driving force behind Smooth Sounds, the men’s a cappella choir. She remembered his serenading her, snapping his fingers and singing new arrangements of songs his parents had grown up falling in love to.

  But always, in her heart, there had been her love for Landon. She never wanted to act on it until it was the right time because she knew that when they fell in love it would be forever. Then last December, Landon had shown up at their house on Christmas Eve and in front of the entire family, knelt down and asked her sister to marry him. Elyse hadn’t even known they were dating. She thought the fact that Landon hadn’t told her held some deeper meaning, but she couldn’t be sure. The truth was, and she had a difficult time admitting this, she hadn’t known she’d planned on marrying Landon, at least not consciously, until she’d seen him propose to her sister, and just like that, plans she hadn’t known she made evaporated into the air and she felt as if her soul were trying to claw itself out from inside her flesh. She’d left Boston feeling less as if she were running away and more as if she were running toward something.

  She picked up a handful of cards and instead of reading the notes on the cards and looking at the numbers in the corners, she tried sorting them based on what looked like it belonged together. Stack, stack, stack. Placing the cards quickly into piles, she kept her mind on the problem of Landon. The wedding was only a few weeks away, and she would have to face him. She’d have to face her sister and, worst of all, she’d have to stand up there as one of the bridesmaids and offer her support.

  Happily ever after. Elyse knew in her brain that those words were useless. They were more than nonsense, they were dangerous. She could be practical with other people. With herself. What? She was still waiting for her happy ending. In the movies, in books, and especially in pop songs, the men always ended up with the women who loved them most. Honestly, she thought that her sister loved the idea of Landon more than Landon himself. What did they know of each other?

  Her phone chirped. Looking down she saw that her cousins were on their way home. “News,” the text said. Not good or bad, but just
news. Her thumb moved to the e-mail icon, and she checked for any messages in the account marrymeinstead@gmail.com. It remained empty. It was too needy, too obvious. What was her proof? Why should Landon choose her over Daphne?

  Before Elyse had left for grad school and Landon for his Teach for America assignment, they had spent the summer together. Both were living with their parents, and neither had a real job. Instead, they volunteered at a Boys and Girls Club day camp and on their days off, she’d ride on the back of his motorcycle to her grandparents’ beach house. He’d worked for nearly two years to modify the motorcycle to allow him to ride—switching the controls to the left and working out the stability issues with his prosthetic. Elyse liked the freedom the bike gave him. That might have been their summer to fall in love, but he was at the very end of a relationship with his college sweetheart. Landon made a perfect boyfriend. His girls were usually the president of the student body or the head of the debate club. High achievers were attracted to him because he was smart and laid back. They liked that he only had one arm—it made them feel like they were better people. Lacey, the girl he’d dated throughout most of college, had political aspirations. Teach for America had been her idea for Landon, although it suited him perfectly. She’d planned on working in Washington, DC, for one of the local congressmen at the same time he’d be teaching in a low-income school in the city.

  A week before Elyse and Landon were to leave on their last day off together, they ignored the weather report predicting an afternoon storm and rode out to the beach anyway. The day was like most days they spent there—they had lunch with her grandparents, built sandcastles with some of the younger cousins who were still spending their summer there, and played pinochle with Elyse’s parents before heading back to Boston. Daphne, who was sixteen that year and coming into her beauty, had begged Landon to take her around the block on his bike before they left for home. He’d done it and when he came back, he held the helmet out to Elyse and everyone had tried to get them to stay, citing the storm. They hadn’t listened.

  For most of the trip, the weather cooperated beautifully, but about thirty minutes before they reached their neighborhood, the skies opened up and poured down on them. She was never sure how it happened, but Landon pulled off into a secluded park, studded with trees. He slowed the bike to a stop and pulled a yellow bloom off one of the low-hanging trees. The color was so vibrant that it glowed in the shaded light of the storm. They talked about how they hoped their new lives would go—Elyse defending her decision to pursue her master’s in hospitality and Landon talking about how he expected his Teach For America assignment with middle school children to go. They complained, as always, about their families and the expectations they were failing to live up to.

  By the time they took shelter in a wooden pavilion designed for family reunions and weddings, they were drenched. She undid her hair from its ponytail and tried to wring it out. The damp fabric of her T-shirt clung to her nipples. She blushed. He shrugged out of his jacket and set it on the edge of the railing. When he leaned forward, Elyse could see the sharp bones of his shoulders through the thin fabric of his shirt.

  He’d gone through a chunky, awkward phase before he’d had his growth spurt, and because of that, he was one of those men who didn’t know how handsome he was. During college, he’d grown a beard to hide his baby cheeks. Elyse thought about how soft it would be if she kissed him and then about how it would feel to have him rub his face against her skin.

  After their initial burst of conversation, each found they didn’t know what to say, so instead they stared out at the sky and watched the lightning jump from cloud to cloud. He had his back to her and the translucence of his shirt felt like an invitation. She loved everything about him, even the prosthetic arm that looked real until you noticed it never moved. She put her hand on the small of his back, and then pressed herself against him.

  “I don’t know how to be with you, like this,” he said without looking at her. “Xystus.”

  “Xystus,” she repeated, looking over his shoulder at the thin strips of wood that made up the interior of the gazebo. How was it that they’d come to a place that the two of them had a name for?

  He turned and it was exactly like she’d imagined. The look he gave her reminded her of the reflection of two mirrors—endlessly bouncing the light from one space to the next. He swept her up in his arms and kissed her softly at first and then with more urgency. “You’re everything to me,” he said. “You always have been and you always will be.”

  “I love you,” she said. They kissed each other more and his hands wandered over her body, making her feel weak-kneed. The air smelled as if they were at the base of a waterfall—crisp and wet, and there was the same loud roar in the air. His hands worked at the clasp on her bra. She slid her fingers inside the waistband of his pants as he pushed up her shirt and kissed her nipples.

  They fumbled with each other in a way that made her think of the first times she’d slept with a man. She became conscious of the stiffness of his prosthetic. Landon spread his hand across her chest, rubbing her nipples with his thumb and pinky. The base of his palm was calloused and the roughness felt good against her skin.

  “Yes,” she said as he teased at her neck with quick bites.

  She reached for the buckle on his pants and was glad when it came open quickly. She pressed her palm against his jeans, feeling how hard and long he was. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

  He took his hand from her chest and pushed at the top of his pants. With his hand gone, she felt the cold chill of the day on her. She pulled his face to her breasts and leaned back. She thought of all the ways in which her life could change, now that they were together. He was sliding off her pants, his tongue working its way down her stomach when shouts of children echoed around the pavilion. The rain had stopped. They hastily covered themselves, not looking at each other as a group of boys, no older than ten, appeared on the sidewalk as if out of nowhere. All of them were on bicycles. One of them broke away from the pack and rode through a large pool of standing water that had gathered at the back edge of the pavilion. The others followed, and in a moment the boys were covered with mud, and she and Landon quickly pulled their riding gear back on and walked toward his motorcycle. Elyse held her wet T-shirt away from her body and reached for Landon’s hand. She fumbled around a bit before realizing she’d grabbed his prosthetic. Looking at him, in hopes of sharing a joke, she found that he wouldn’t meet her gaze

  When Landon dropped her off at her house, she invited him in. He shook his head, not even taking off his helmet before riding away. She assumed that he felt guilty because of Lacey. The day before she left for grad school, she drove over to his house in the middle of the night and snuck into his bedroom. It wasn’t what she’d intended to do, but when she tried the back door and found it unlocked, she couldn’t help herself. She slipped into his bed and they finished what they’d started in the gazebo. Never once speaking about what might come next.

  Elyse wasn’t sure what she expected. What happened was that he moved to Washington and taught in a middle school there for two years. They resumed writing pithy e-mails to each other and life moved on. She dated. She quit the hospitality program and switched to urban anthropology. He and Lacey broke up, and he spent two years in Uruguay teaching English and then a little more than a year before, when Elyse was in the middle of a messy relationship and trying to make her bed and breakfast be something more than a failure, Landon had gotten a job teaching at the same middle school as Elyse’s parents and started spending time with everyone in her family, including Daphne. What a screwed-up concept time was in the end. You could spend hours, weeks, months with a person and none of it mattered if it wasn’t the right hour at the right time. When had he and Daphne fallen in love? During family dinners that Elyse hadn’t attended because of a water leak, or during Saturday barbecues when she was busy dealing with bed bugs? She didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. What she wanted she couldn
’t have.

  The door opened and Isobel swept in. “It was a disaster,” she said and collapsed into one of the chairs pulled up to the table.

  “Do we have to leave?”

  “We’re not leaving,” Lizzie said, standing in the doorway.

  “They can’t make us move,” Isobel said, “but they’re making us test for lead, asbestos, and a dozen other potentially dangerous chemicals.”

  “Sounds expensive,” Elyse said, tapping the edges of the cards she’d sorted so they stood up in straight columns.”

  “It is,” Lizzie said, sighing. “And if they do find anything toxic, removal is going to kill the budget.”

  “At least the ants are dead,” Elyse offered.

  “Put out a fire and find out there’s an earthquake,” Lizzie said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Isobel said.

  “Agreed,” Lizzie said, coming up behind Elyse’s shoulder. “Solve any mysteries for me?”

  Elyse shrugged and checked the e-mail on her phone again. Lizzie picked up a few of the cards from one of the stacks. She shuffled through them and then quickly put several of them in order before reaching for more from the same stack.

  “How’d you do this?”

  “Do what?” Elyse asked, considering another glass of wine. She turned her phone off, tired of being disappointed by the lack of a response. If her phone were off, it would take her longer to check that damn account and maybe she could break the habit.

  “These all seem like they’re from the same year. It’s a whole series of entries about working at the law firm. Do you know that’s what my mom did after she got out of college? I guess she’d intended to be a lawyer before she got pregnant.”