Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “How long have you known that was there?”

  Benny shrugged and the corners of the lips tugged upward into a smirk.

  “What the hell?” She tore a chunk of the damp plaster from the wall and threw it at Benny. It hit him in the chest. He staggered backward as if he’d been hit by a rock. “You checked these windows out in February. That was your first job and you ignored the broken seal?” She threw another piece of the wall at him and he stumbled, falling down the porch steps and onto the gravel beside the entryway.

  Isobel jumped from the counter, getting close to Benny. “You’re fired.”

  He looked like a pill bug trying to right itself. Finally he rolled onto his stomach and then using the handrail pulled himself into a standing position. “You can’t fire me.”

  “I can,” Isobel said. “I did.”

  In her periphery, she saw Jake walking around the corner of the house, holding his camera down by his knees.

  “You’re not the boss,” Benny said, taking one step toward her. “You’re a little girl.”

  “Get out of here,” Isobel said, her voice rising. “Give me your keys—to everything, the trailer, the house, all of it. I can’t even let you drive home in this condition.”

  “What’s going on?” Jake said.

  “Nothing. We’re fine.”

  “Are you sure?” Jake asked, bringing the camera to his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to. He’ll be pissed if I don’t get any of it.”

  She ignored him and kept her eyes on Benny. The presence of the lens appeared to have a calming effect on him. He’d avoided the cameras when they were at the house and now that Jake’s was on his shoulder and pointing in his direction, he couldn’t get away fast enough.

  “Give me the keys,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Benny turned his back to the camera and dug around in his pants pockets. “How am I going to get home?” he asked. “Ain’t no bus runs along here.”

  “Walk,” Isobel said. “You got any of your personal effects in the trailer?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll let you get them and put them in your truck. But you’re not driving.”

  Jake pulled his phone out and began texting furiously. Before putting the camera back up, he explained to Isobel that he’d planned on filming some exterior shots—close-ups of the house’s unique architectural details. “Mostly for my own reel,” he said. “Craig doesn’t care about that stuff. They’re on their way. I’m really sorry about having to film this.”

  “You should apologize to Benny. He’s the drunk one.”

  By the time Benny had emptied the trailer, Kitty and Craig had arrived and offered to get Benny home themselves. “We can do the exit interviews that way,” Kitty had said to Craig.

  “Good stuff,” Craig had said to Isobel before getting inside the cab of the truck.

  His voice chilled Isobel. She hadn’t fired Benny for the show, and yet objectively, it created the drama that had been missing the last few days. She shook her head, trying to figure out her own motives.

  Jake and Kitty followed them in the SUV and in a moment Isobel was alone again in the house. The whole exchange had taken less than an hour. The sun sat in nearly the same place it had been when she’d come home. She stepped up onto the back stairs and took her keys out of the door. She still had to take the hardware to get painted. But she felt protective of Spite House and didn’t want to leave it alone.

  Instead, she stood in the kitchen and looked at the torn-up wall and thought about Elyse, with her broken heart, and Lizzie with her broken leg. She supposed both were doing what Benny had been doing to Spite House. They were working on fixing the outward appearance of something without first finding all the damage that had been done.

  Summer 2001: Old Silver Beach

  At sixteen, the Triplins were oblivious to the world outside themselves in a way that was abhorrent in anyone but teenage girls and saucy sitcom sidekicks. To make matters worse, Isobel and her cousins had been adolescents before terrorist attacks and the recession became the bulk of news headlines. That summer the news had been filled with old men flying balloons around the world, a missing Washington intern, and sharks. All issues of little consequence, especially given what would come after Labor Day that year. Isobel wouldn’t have taken notice of any of this news, except that every other day someone at the beach would think they’d spotted a fin and scream at everyone to get out of the water. The lifeguards would take up the false alarm and whistle until a whole shivering mass of wet bodies stood at the shoreline, craning their necks trying to get a look at what could possibly be a shark. So far, in her time at the beach, this crying wolf business had happened half a dozen times.

  As always, Isobel and her family had been the first to arrive at the Cape, but that particular year, her brothers hadn’t come. Joel was studying in Amsterdam and Carl hadn’t wanted to leave his girlfriend. Her mother and father typically arranged their schedules so they could spend most of the summer at the Cape. This was because for the whole of the eight years she’d been working on Wait for It, her family hadn’t lived together. Her mother lived with her in Los Angeles and her father and brothers lived in Sacramento. They spent most weekends together and any stretch of time when the set was closed—like during holidays and the beginning of summer. Isobel hadn’t ever been lonely at her grandparents’ house, but she’d also never been there without her brothers. Complaining about her boredom elicited little sympathy from her parents. “You’ve got to learn to live without an audience,” her father had said.

  After the first week, which had been among the slowest of her life, she convinced Elyse to drive up to the Cape on the weekends and arranged to fly Lizzie out early since her cousin was on a different school schedule than her siblings. Several years earlier when the depth of her soccer talent had become evident, one of the private schools in Memphis had snapped her up. As a result, she was always on breaks at a different time than her family.

  So it was that the three of them were at the beach for the first real shark sighting. It had come on a Sunday near the end of May when the weather was warm enough for tourists and weekenders to fill the beaches with their blankets and coolers. The Triplins had been sunbathing and because it was unusually hot, they’d also been taking periodic plunges into the bay—strategically staged in front of the lifeguard. Isobel remembered toying with the idea of faking a cramp so the boy wonder with his chiseled chest would have to save her. They’d laughed about it but agreed that if anyone could fake needing to be saved, it would be Isobel. When the piercing cry of “shark” echoed over the water, they’d been directly in the line of sight of the lifeguard. It shocked Isobel to hear such a high-pitched scream from the boy. First of all, he looked like a weightlifter and second, the other shark alarms had been made by beachgoers. Usually a mother in one of those suits with a skirt, wearing a floppy hat, would run into the shallow water, snatch up her toddler and scream to the people around her about seeing a shark. Then, eventually, the guards, blowing their whistles in a way that always made Isobel think of sex, would herd everyone out.

  “He’s serious,” Lizzie said, tugging on Isobel’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, diving under the water to pull at Elyse’s ankles.

  Elyse refused to get her hair wet. She fended off Isobel’s attempt to dunk her and explained the panic to Lizzie. “They’ve been doing this all week. It’s like that wolf thing.”

  “Except that in the end of that story there really was a wolf,” Lizzie said. She linked arms with them and half pulled and walked them to shore. Isobel would have continued to object, but looking up at the shoreline, she saw that they were among the last out of the water. It had never cleared so quickly before. Also, instead of searching the horizon and the endless stretch of water, people were pointing and murmuring to one another. Excited voices occasionally rose to a near shout.

  “I saw it.”

  “I think it swam by me.”


  Despite her natural disdain for adults and their concerns, Isobel felt herself get caught up in the panicky buzz that surged through the crowd. She shaded her eyes against the sun and searched for the telltale fin of a shark.

  “This is exactly like Jaws,” Elyse said. Later that summer, when they found the book on their grandparents’ bookshelf, they read it aloud to each other, giggling over the author’s description of a woman swimming naked. When they got to the horrible parts where people were killed, they stopped and talked through the what-might-have-beens in that dramatic and self-involved way only teenagers can do without the practicalities of life slapping sense into them.

  The fin, when she saw it, broke the surface of the water like a knife sliding into soft butter. The ripples came after it had come up. She saw it before anyone else, but she couldn’t bring herself to point at it, to scream out, as another woman did seconds later. The beach erupted into chaos then, with mothers grabbing their children and the lifeguards on their bullhorns telling people the beach would be closed for the rest of the day.

  Lizzie had started a conversation with a teenage boy standing next to her. He talked on and on about all that he knew about sharks, explaining why he knew, without a doubt, that the fin they’d seen belonged to a great white. He was nobody any of the cousins would have given notice to before. Except for his height, he didn’t look like he’d hit puberty. His chest was concave and he hunched his shoulders, which were covered with pus-filled acne. Despite his appearance, his deep voice and the confidence with which he spoke to Lizzie had drawn eavesdroppers—Isobel among them.

  “If you do see a shark in the water, you can’t out swim him. You have to face him. I’ve read of men in shipwrecks who punched the sharks in the nose and that was enough to convince them you were a predator. So that’s what I’d do. You can also grab him in the gills—that’s like our eyes. It’s where the soft tissue is.”

  “Can you dig your nails into its eyes?” Isobel asked.

  “I don’t think so,” the boy said, his voice thick with superior knowledge.

  At being so dismissed, Isobel’s face turned red and she stepped behind Lizzie, muttering under her breath to Elyse, who stood next to her, about the asshole, while a small portion of the crowd stepped closer and nodded. Isobel was glad when Lizzie disagreed. Her cousin shook her head at him as if he were confused. “No, no, no. Seems like the best thing to do is stay out of the water. I don’t think I’ll ever win a fight with a shark.”

  “It’s not a fight, it’s survival,” the boy said, staring at Lizzie as if he didn’t quite understand what she was saying. It might have been her accent, which in times of stress became thick and heavy. Or it might have been that Lizzie had a distinctive view of the world. Isobel didn’t notice such differences anymore.

  On the walk back to the house, they talked in low whispers about the shark. Isobel was more angry at the dismissiveness of the boy than fearful of the shark. The shades on the house were drawn, which she might have noticed and thought strange, but they were too intent on the drama of what had happened at the beach. Their grandfather’s truck was gone. Her grandfather liked to spend his afternoons at the American Legion, while their grandmother browsed the antique stores in town. Because Isobel’s brothers hadn’t come that year, the Triplins had taken over the sleeping porch, which usually became home base for whoever the oldest cousins were.

  They went in the side entrance, still talking quietly, and flopped down on their cots. Isobel reached into her bag and pulled out several fashion magazines she’d purchased over the preceding weeks. The others threw their own reading material onto the pile and before long, they were mindlessly looking at photos and reading lists of tips and tricks. Elyse paged through a tabloid, asking Isobel what was true and what wasn’t. Lizzie, who would be the last of them to lose her virginity, made faces at Cosmo as she read it.

  “I’m not allowed to get this,” she whispered, covering up the word “orgasm” on a page. “Mom says it’s pornography.”

  “Nah, it’s the stuff you need to know that moms will never mention.”

  Lizzie continued to read the article, the whole time a blush of red creeping up from her neck to her face.

  Elyse peered over her shoulder. “Do you know what my mom said about blow jobs?”

  Isobel had looked up then, aware of loud stomping on the stairs. She’d also wanted to know what Elyse’s mom thought because she seemed too square to even know what a BJ was.

  “She says that men—”

  “You lazy piece of shit.” Isobel’s mother’s voice cut through what Elyse had been about to say.

  They froze. And then looked around to see if they were being yelled at. Lizzie flung the magazine onto the floor, where it lay open to a picture of a woman wearing a man’s white collared shirt straddling a chair.

  “What the duck,” Elyse said. It was a holdover from the year they’d discovered swear words. Their parents had all made them stop using them and to thwart the system, they’d started saying “What the duck” as often as possible to irritate their parents. “Duck” had become an inside joke among the Triplins.

  “What are you doing, Nora?” Isobel’s father said. “What’s all this about?”

  Isobel’s eyes grew wide. She’d never heard her parents fight. She’d actually rarely seen them together in the last few years. At first they’d all tried living in an apartment in Hollywood during filming, but her brothers hadn’t wanted to leave their schools. Instead, their father had stayed with the boys and for the months that they filmed, Elyse’s mother lived with her in a one-bedroom apartment that was near the set.

  Before she could process the sound of her parents fighting, she heard a commotion—sounding like something had been thrown down the stairs.

  “We should go,” Elyse said in a low voice. “They don’t know we’re here. We were supposed to be out until dinner.”

  Isobel wanted to leave. She knew she should leave, but she couldn’t make herself move from the cot. If they’d been a little older with more insight into the adult world, they would have made their presence known by dropping a book or faking a loud conversation. Elyse pulled at Isobel’s arm. Lizzie opened the side porch door, which made an awful squeaking sound.

  “Shh, they’ll hear us,” Elyse said.

  “What do we do?” Isobel asked, looking at the door and back at the house where her parents’ fighting had dropped low enough that they couldn’t hear them.

  “Try not to listen,” Elyse said, throwing her a pillow to put over her ears.

  There were more loud thumps and then it was her father’s voice, as angry as she’d ever heard it, that boomed around the house. “What did you expect me to say? That I’m glad for you? That I want you to sleep with other people?”

  The fight continued with each of them lobbing sentences at each other as if it were a tennis match. “It’s like we aren’t even married,” her mother said.

  “I feel married. Or at least I did until you told me about the men you slept with.”

  “I thought we could get a clean start. That’s what you said this summer would be about. Isobel’s old enough to live on her own now and she’d be fine in the apartment by herself.”

  “She’s sixteen.”

  “She’s old for her age and she’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

  “How do I know that? I haven’t spent any time with her over the last few years. It’s been the two of you and it turns out you’ve been down in L.A. fucking strangers.”

  Her parents had argued their way to the parlor, which was where the side porch connected to the main house. They were no longer yelling, but Isobel could hear them as if they spoke directly to her. She’d long since dropped the pillows on the cot and although neither of her cousins would meet her gaze, she knew from their posture that they’d also heard the fight between her parents. Elyse had moved to the door as if she couldn’t bear to miss any word, even one spoken under Isobel’s mother’s breath. Lizzie star
ed out the window, her shoulder blades drawn back toward each other as if she were trying to get them to touch.

  Her mother’s voice lost its edge. “I wish that sex had never gotten mixed up in marriage. It would be so much better if they had nothing to do with each other. You’re a great dad and good partner and that ought to be enough—”

  “Stop making bullshit excuses, Nora. Stop it. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but you can’t tell me this. When you let me, I was a good lover. Sex and marriage? That’s the package—there’s no pulling them apart.”

  Isobel had lost her virginity earlier that year. The kid who played her younger sister had a brother who sometimes visited the set. He was a regular kid. His parents thought he might be a hockey star for a while, but then he never got good enough so they left Canada and put all their eggs into their daughter’s basket, which, judging by the success of Isobel’s fake kid sister, was probably a smart move. Anyhow, she’d seen him around for years and then last year he’d shown up with a mustache and a guitar and Isobel had let him get her drunk on wine coolers in her trailer.

  She wasn’t sure it counted as sex. They’d gotten undressed and he’d put his dick in her. Her mind was screaming, I’m having sex, I’m having sex, but part of her was nervous about the fact that he wasn’t wearing a condom. When she asked him if he had protection, and that was the only word she could find to describe what she wanted to say to him, he pulled out and masturbated until he came on her breasts and stomach.

  As she listened to her parents fight, the images from that almost sex night kept flashing in her head, only in her mind she kept replacing her mother with herself. It made her want to throw up to think of her parents having sex. To think of her mother having sex with someone else made her want to take out her eyes and stuff them in her ears. Instead, she took all the pillows from the cots and crawled underneath her cot. “Make it stop,” she repeated a dozen times. Lizzie joined her and after a long while, Elyse left her post at the side door and lay down on top of the cot they were under. She leaned her head over the side to speak to them.