Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “It wasn’t self-pity,” Lizzie protested as her cousin set the box next to her bed. “Grief. I was grieving.”

  “Same difference,” Isobel said, turning on the television and surfing for the soccer match.

  “Not even close,” Lizzie said.

  “The farther you get from grief, the more you realize it’s always selfish.” Elyse, hearing her phone buzz, silenced it, afraid she’d get reprimanded by the nurse. She looked at the number and then excused herself, finding her way to the smoking area outside the building.

  She dialed her voicemail and listened to the message at least a dozen times, not even caring about the cigarette smoke she inhaled. He said their flight had them stopping in Memphis, and they’d changed to a later connection. “I wanted to talk to you about the letters. Expect us around lunchtime,” he’d said. Us. Why hadn’t her sister been the one to call? The thought that Daphne might know what Elyse had been planning turned her stomach to ice. It clenched. Why had they changed their stopover? Why had he lied about it? It had to be deliberate—planes, especially those from London, flew direct to Boston or, at worst, had a stopover in Atlanta. No one but FedEx had layovers in Memphis anymore.

  She considered lying to her cousins to try to get home to meet him. But, no. They were as much a part of this now as she was. The glass walls of the hospital reflected her worst self. Her wild hair hung in a sad ponytail. Red blotches from the heat covered her face. Without considering the consequences or the long-ago pact made with the cousins, Elyse dug through her purse and pulled out a pair of scissors she’d used to cut coupons. Holding her ponytail out from the side of her head, she cut it off, watching it fall on the concrete patio.

  “Holy hell,” said a man smoking a cigar.

  She pulled out the elastic and made random cuts until she was crying so hard she couldn’t see her reflection.

  Isobel waved to her through the windows and then walked around to the door “Lizzie’s waiting for you.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Are you crying?” Isobel squeezed past the cigar smoker and around two sisters sharing a cigarette. “She’s not in any danger.”

  Embarrassment flooded Elyse. She kicked at the piles of hair on the cement, trying to move them out of sight. “It isn’t that.”

  Her cousin looked first at Elyse’s head and then at the ground. “The heat get to you?” she asked.

  “Something like that,” Elyse said, sniffling and then wiping her nose with her T-shirt. She held her phone out to Isobel. “He left a message.”

  Isobel’s face remained passive as she listened to Landon’s call. “You should see her before she goes into surgery, and maybe when you’re done, you should bring Daphne and him up to see her. The whole procedure only takes an hour or so.”

  Gratitude overwhelmed Elyse. She couldn’t have taken being told not to see him. “Definitely.” She reached out for the keys Isobel held out to her and then linked arms and walked through the hospital to wish Lizzie good luck.

  They arrived before lunch. Elyse watched her sister get out of the cab and immediately lift her long hair off her neck as the humidity hit her. Elyse scratched at her bare neck. Before she left the hospital, Isobel had done her best to clean up the mess she’d made of her hair, giving her an asymmetrical bob and side-sweeping her bangs. Somehow, even though it was choppy, it made her face appear thinner. Or maybe she’d finally lost weight. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on a scale. Before the wedding maybe. Turning away from the window before Landon could exit the taxi, she pressed her ear to the door and listened for their steps on the porch.

  She needed to find a way to speak to Landon alone. Who knew what he’d told Daphne? It had to be a good sign that they’d decided to come to Memphis in the first place. She heard them speak softly to each other before one of them rang the doorbell. She counted to thirty before opening the door.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,” Daphne said, leaning in for a shoulders-only hug. “I mean I’ve heard Lizzie talk about it and you too. But seeing it.” Her sister shook her head and then ran her fingers along the doorframe.

  They were tan with sunburned cheeks. Landon’s nose had peeled, leaving behind pink skin. “Catch a sunny day in London?” she asked.

  “They have beaches not too far from there,” Landon said and then offered an awkward hug. He held her away from him for a moment and then playfully hit her on the chin. “Who ever thought you’d be my sister?”

  “Sister-in-law,” Elyse said. She ushered them inside and explained Lizzie and Isobel’s whereabouts. “I’ll take you up there when she’s out of surgery.”

  “I can’t imagine going through that,” Daphne said. Landon looked at his arm and then looked away. He had a new prosthetic and stood taller than she remembered. “She’s not going to be able to keep playing, huh?”

  “Everyone’s optimistic,” Elyse said. She didn’t volunteer her own observation, which was that Lizzie needed an excuse not to have to play anymore.

  They started the tour of the house in the cupola. Her sister marveled at the prisms and the rainbows they cast. “It’s exactly like Pollyanna.” She sighed and sat down on the window seat with her feet pulled up under her. “I totally understand why you abandoned Boston for the chance to live here.”

  “It has its charms,” Elyse said. How much she’d hated that book. That stupid glad game. Her sister had lived her entire life as an embodiment of looking on the bright side. By the time they reached the kitchen, it was clear to Elyse that Landon hadn’t spoken to Daphne about the notes she’d sent him before the wedding. Instead of relief, she felt disappointment.

  “I have to use the ladies’ room,” Daphne said, rising and kissing Landon on the cheek.

  “The water’s not on yet,” Elyse said. Typically when the cousins had this problem, they’d use the portable toilet that Benny had put on the corner of the vacant lot, but she saw in this dilemma an opportunity to be alone with Landon. She dug through her purse and held out the keys to the Datsun along with a few bills. “There’s a gas station on the corner. Maybe pick up a few cold drinks?”

  Her sister kissed Landon goodbye. Elyse walked out the back door to the edge of the bluff and looked out at the Mississippi. She waited, knowing he’d follow. Landon cleared his throat and when she turned toward him, he extended his left arm as if they would shake hands. She ignored it and walked to the Adirondack chairs that had been left behind by Isobel’s production crew. “Sit,” she said. “I don’t know how long we’ll have. We’ll hear the car when she comes back. It has a squeaky belt you can hear a mile away.”

  “It’s a nice view of the river.” He glanced at her, taking in her haircut, and then continued to speak as if nothing had changed. “Daphne talks about Memphis sometimes, but never this house.”

  “She’s never been.” Elyse thought about trying to explain how it had been Lizzie’s grandmother’s house and how her family hadn’t had much to do with the woman, but she didn’t want to waste what time they had talking about what didn’t matter to them.

  Although she’d changed her clothes when she got home from the hospital—putting on a green top that highlighted her cleavage and made her eyes look less brown—she hadn’t been able to brush away all of the bits of hair that had fallen down her back. She scratched at her shoulder blade and then rubbed at it through the thin cotton of the shirt. A trolley whistled half a mile down the tracks. They turned their heads toward the sound and watched it motor toward them. Although there weren’t any stops along the south bluffs, the trolley slowed as it approached their yard. A child leaned out the window and waved to them. Elyse nodded to where the bushes had been. “Used to be more privacy out here.”

  “Do we need any more of that?” Landon asked.

  “Privacy is different from secrecy,” Elyse said. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with Landon, but she understood its necessity. She looked again at his new prosthetic. He’d never found
one that he felt comfortable with—switching from the purely cosmetic, which looked like a mannequin’s hand, to one with limited movement that he controlled with his own body. This new arm was unlike any she’d ever seen. Instead of flesh-colored plastic, it had been painted to look like an x-ray of his arm—or what it would look like if his arm were still intact—and the robotic hand looked to be straight out of a science fiction movie.

  He saw her looking at his prosthetic. “Daphne picked London for our honeymoon so I could get fitted for this. I was on the waitlist for two years.” He winced and then touched a few spots on the arm. The robotic hand closed into a fist and gave her a thumbs up. “I’m still figuring it out.”

  “Me too,” Elyse said, glancing back toward the street and wondering how long they had. How long would they need to talk about falling in love with the wrong person? “I could make you happy.”

  “I already am.” He started to say more, but another trolley rolled by. Unlike the last car, this one was filled with tourists—they looked to be on a sponsored trip with several of them wearing gold sunglasses in cheap imitation of Elvis. The driver pulled the whistle and slowed as it approached the house. People leaned out of windows to take pictures of Spite House. They wouldn’t turn out well. The glass made the house nearly impossible to shoot from the back—mostly what people would see when they scrolled through their pictures were watery reflections of themselves.

  “Why are you here?” Elyse said, swinging her feet around the side of the chair and sitting up. She needed to face him.

  “Daphne—”

  “I’ve heard a lot about my sister since you got here. But that isn’t why you came over here, is it? To tell me what my sister thinks. Because I’m not sure that’s any of my business.”

  “You’re right.” He mirrored her posture and looked toward the house. “Don’t you feel watched up here? Like you’re on display?”

  “Sometimes.” When Elyse imagined her life with Landon, their children had his eyes. They were brown, but with tiny flecks of gold near the pupil. She thought of those flecks as bits of his soul peering out into the world, like sunlight breaking through the clouds. Her chest tightened and then inside of her she felt a collapse and the coming heat of tears.

  “I should have told you,” he said. “I lied to myself about us because it was easier and because what happened between me and your sister felt different. Almost like it wasn’t happening to me, but to some better version of myself.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elyse said. She swallowed, thankful that he hadn’t brought up her blunder of asking him to meet.

  “It does.” He blinked and Elyse saw that he too was close to crying. “Because you were right about me. I’d thought for a long time that we would have our moment. You know? When we were both in the right place, then we’d find each other. It’s why girls kept breaking up with me. I wouldn’t commit because I’d already committed to you.”

  Elyse took a deep breath and held it. There was nothing about his posture or in the words he’d said earlier that had prepared her for this. “We’d talked about it,” she said, softly. “That day in the gazebo. Do you remember? So when you responded to my love letters, all of that came back up—”

  But Landon had kept talking, clearly wanting to get out his prepared speech. He talked over her, and afterward Elyse was never sure he’d heard her—not that it mattered. “But then I saw your sister. I mean really saw her and it was like a flood washing away all the dams and locks and canals that I’d been down when I thought I’d been in love before. Love is so much bigger than waiting for the time to be right. I mean, didn’t you ever think, Elyse, that if we were waiting for the right time that something was wrong?”

  “No.” Elyse let out her breath.

  During his speech, Landon’s gaze had jumped around the yard, focusing on the back of the house, the corner of Elyse’s chair, and the trolley tracks. But when she didn’t agree with him, his eyes landed on her as if pulled by an unseen force. They looked at each other a long time.

  “You’ll find it. You will. Maybe.” Landon dropped his gaze to his hands. The prosthetic unclenched. “The thing is, with her I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Elyse said, realizing that the collapse in her chest wasn’t out of not being loved, but anger because he’d found what he wanted. “What were you going to say? Got a diagnosis for me?”

  “I don’t have to say it,” Landon lowered his head. “You know all this is because you’re as afraid of commitment as I used to be.”

  “Is that why we never talked about that night after the xystus?”

  “Xystus.” He grinned.

  “I like you better with a beard.” Elyse wasn’t afraid of commitment. All those other men had been as real to her as dolls. She’d spent her love life rehearsing for the one true thing and it had gone and found that with someone else.

  “You like the idea of me better than me.”

  “That’s just what you tell yourself to make all of this okay.”

  “I have my own idea of you too.” Landon shook his head. “That’s all we ever would have been to each other—nostalgic ideas.”

  “What is it about her?”

  “She hasn’t got any faults.” Before Elyse could point out a few, Landon corrected himself. “I mean, to me. I keep trying to find what I don’t like about her, and there isn’t anything. She even understands what you did and even why you had to do it. She’s on your side and maybe if you’d talk to her about what you’re feeling, you can be more like sisters. You can’t know how much she wants that.”

  “I didn’t think you’d told her.”

  “We’re married,” he said.

  “We’re sisters.” She thought again about how her sister had been with her as they toured the house. It hadn’t been like old times, but it hadn’t been awkward either.

  Landon closed his eyes. “You aren’t though. She can’t be what Isobel and Lizzie are to you, and that keeps you two from really being close.”

  “My parents did that when they played favorites.”

  “Let it go,” Landon said. “You realize that believing that, believing that you are less, is going to keep you from ever being loved.”

  “We’re through, aren’t we?” Elyse stood.

  “Are we?” Landon looked up at her, searching for confirmation. “You could come back to Boston for Thanksgiving.”

  She scratched at her right shoulder blade again. “I can’t.”

  “You won’t,” Landon said.

  “I’m not ready. But I promise that when I do come back, I’ll be ready for you to be my brother-in-law.” A flock of birds flew up into the sky, leaving their power line perches simultaneously at some unheard signal. The squeak of Mellie’s Datsun echoed in the wake of their flapping wings. Elyse started for the house, but he called her back.

  “Wait, I have another trick.” He touched the prosthetic near his elbow and extended his hand. Awkwardly, she slid hers into the outstretched Teflon-like attachment and they shook hands. “It’s a deal.” He grinned, looking as young as he had the day they first met.

  To celebrate the Where Are They Now? episode, the Triplins held a viewing party. Everyone had been warned beforehand about the plumbing issue. (There was always the port-a-potty.) As the airdate for the show had grown closer, Isobel had become increasingly energetic. Elyse heard her late at night moving around on the third floor, making phone calls to friends on the West Coast who were still up because of the time difference and because of their lifestyles.

  Now she was waiting for Isobel to come out of the flower shop. They’d been running errands the entire day in an attempt to make Spite House appear less like a construction zone and more like a home. Lizzie hadn’t wanted to have people over, but Isobel insisted, saying it would be bad luck to watch it anywhere but where it had been filmed. Through the window of the shop, Elyse could see Isobel making oversized gestures with her hands at the clerk. I
t looked as though she were telling a story—most likely about Spite House. Since learning that the house itself might be part of the pitch for the series the network wanted, Isobel had started to exaggerate their living conditions when she spoke of it to strangers. She angled the air conditioning so that it blew onto the backseat, where they had a dozen trays and boxes of premade food for their guests.

  “I got snapdragons,” Isobel said, settling bunches of flowers into the backseat. “Greenery too. She threw that in for no cost because it was all about to turn yellow.”

  “Hope it doesn’t turn before tonight,” Elyse said.

  “Don’t be such a pessimist. If it does, it does. It was free anyway and I can always cut a bunch of stuff from that lot next door. It looks like a jungle. T. J. told Lizzie we ought to get a cat to hunt the snakes and rats that are probably running through it.”

  “Or let the snakes eat the rats,” Elyse said, pulling away from the curb.

  Her cousin shuddered and then struggled to fasten her seatbelt. “I hate snakes.”

  “Since when? I remember you catching striped garters at the beach and sticking them in Lizzie’s Keds because it was the only thing she was afraid of.”

  Isobel started to disagree with Elyse and then stopped. “Wait, you’re right. I’m not afraid of snakes.”

  “You’re crazy,” Elyse said, stopping at a red light and taking the opportunity to study her cousin. She’d lost weight in the last few weeks, and there were dark circles under her eyes that couldn’t be erased even with Isobel’s skilled touch with foundation.

  “Sometimes I think I am crazy,” she said. “Green light.”

  Elyse stepped on the gas pedal too fast and nearly rear-ended the car in front of them. The man leaned out his window to flip them off.

  “No, I mean it,” Isobel said. “I do this all the time. For some role I have to pretend that I’m afraid of snakes or that I don’t like beets. And then it’s like I’ve reprogrammed my brain so I come to believe stuff that’s not true. I love beets.”

  “Maybe you’re a good actress,” Elyse said, worried that she’d insulted her cousin.