Three Story House: A Novel

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “She asked you to—what—mediate?”

  “I don’t really want to be there, but—” Elyse didn’t finish because, as Isobel knew, it was what they both knew. She’d thought Lizzie would want T. J. there too, but somehow he’d escaped the event. Isobel figured it was precisely because he and Lizzie were serious that he wouldn’t be there. Whatever happened tomorrow would taint their relationship, and if he were there and things got ugly, he might never repair the relationship with Lizzie’s parents.

  “I’m going to leave this in front of her door. That way when she does wake up, she’ll have the right sort of start to her day.”

  Isobel made a cup of tea. Instead of sitting at the table, she stood on the lotus flower in the center of the room, tracing the mosaic with her toe. The kitchen had turned out beautifully—of course, the privacy scrims she and her father had installed on his last day there had cost her the last of her savings, but it didn’t matter. It was, if there were such a thing, a perfect space. The sheer window coverings cut the glare of the windows, but not the transparency, so light streamed in and the river was still visible.

  She’d never been able to watch herself perform without feeling a sharp pain in her chest at all the imperfections captured and preserved on film—or as was more likely now—in digital form. The kitchen felt different. There were minor imperfections, but they lent character to the space. If it had been flawless, it would have been sterile. She rubbed with her toe at a line of grout that rose above the tile line.

  Finishing her tea, she walked to the front of the house to look for Jake’s car. Meeting him on the porch felt preferable to letting him into the house—not that he’d done anything specifically wrong except work for Craig, but the whole crew felt tainted to Isobel. What they’d been planning, that surprise DNA test, was abhorrent in the same way children’s beauty pageants were. She pulled a sweater from the front closet and slid her feet into the boot slippers she kept there. Upstairs, she heard Lizzie turning on the shower and the high notes of an excited conversation with Elyse.

  Jake had shaved his beard. She blinked a few times to try to reconcile the man in front of her with the man she’d last seen. He grabbed her in a bear hug that lifted her off the ground. “You look worried,” he said. “Don’t be. I’ve got a plan for you and me. It’s a good one too.”

  Without realizing what she intended to do, Isobel reached her hand out and touched his bare chin. “I don’t get it, why shave in the winter when you need the extra fur.”

  “It was all for a bet. Now that it’s over I can go back to my real face,” Jake said. “Are you going to invite me inside? Like you said, I’d need fur to stay out here.”

  “As long as you’re not packing,” she said, opening the door and following him down the hallway.

  “You mean equipment? I’ve got nothing but a pen on me.” He whistled when he saw the kitchen. “Damn. You did fine work here. I didn’t think these cabinets would work, but with this countertop and the backsplash. Beautiful.”

  He continued to run his hands along the work she and her father had done in the last weeks while she made more tea. It pleased her to hear someone else praise the space. Lizzie had been too dead-eyed to notice, and Elyse had been full of complaints about the logic of the layout, wanting to move dishes and appliances around until it was suitable for her approach to cooking. “It makes me wish I could stay,” she said, realizing only as she said it that it was true.

  “Why don’t you?” Jake asked, bending over to look at the finished floor, which they’d sealed to prevent discoloration. “I’ve always loved the lotus. You know what they say about it?”

  She shook her head, the thought ringing in her ears that she wanted to stay, not just in the house, but also in Memphis, and especially with Tom.

  “It’s the only flower that blooms in shit.”

  “Mud,” Lizzie said from the doorway. Elyse stood behind her. “It was my grandfather who made the mosaic. One of the things I found in the boxes of Grandma Mellie’s stuff was an envelope stuffed with doodles of the flower next to snatches of my grandfather’s writing. I guess it was what he was good at. Thriving in difficult locations.”

  “You look good,” Isobel said, thinking that for the first time in weeks her cousin’s eyes didn’t appear cloudy. She started to explain to her cousins why Jake was there, but realized as she spoke that she didn’t really know. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” Jake said, gesturing to the table. “But first I have to plead mea culpa.” He explained that after the disaster of their fake Thanksgiving, he’d gone back to his workspace in Atlanta and looked over the footage that he’d shot. What he found most interesting in the hours and hours of recordings were the parts where Isobel was working on the house. He took a sip of his tea and turned to her, “You come alive in those shots and, frankly, in all the others you look like someone pretending to be you. That’s why reality shows with actors are difficult: they often don’t know how to be themselves in front of the camera.”

  “Ouch,” Isobel said.

  Elyse laid a hand on hers. “It’s not just actresses. There’s quite a few people out there pretending to be someone they’re not.”

  Jake had taken these bits of footage with her fixing or explaining what she was fixing and arranged them together in his own version of a sizzle reel and sent it to a production company he’d worked for in the past. “The guy loved it. They do a ton of stuff for those fix-it and home and garden networks. I mean he’s practically ready to sign you for a full order without even seeing a first episode.”

  Around her, the cousins talked to Jake about the possibilities this show offered. The sound of their voices was like the chatter of squirrels. The noise surrounded Isobel and took the air out of the room. It could be everything that she wanted, but it could also be a trap. “What about Craig and that whole mess?” she asked.

  “He’s done with you,” Jake said. “It’s a good thing too—his production company is having problems—ones bigger than your deciding not to work with him.”

  “He won’t make a fuss about the footage?”

  “I already paid him off,” Jake said.

  Isobel leaned away from him. “That’s not your concern. You shouldn’t have, and I’m sure I can repay you for your trouble.”

  “No, no. It’s not like that. He was ready to trash it all and I offered to buy it, to see what I could do with it. I told him I was ready to move out from behind the camera, do a little producing work on the side.” He dug through his pockets. “In all my excitement, I forgot this.” He held out a piece of paper.

  Isobel took it and examined the waiver, which absolved her and the cousins of any debt owed to Craig and turned over the footage to Jake.

  “He didn’t give you this out of the goodness of his heart,” she said.

  Jake looked away from them. “Look, I feel like I owe the three of you something. I should have stopped the paternity nonsense when Kitty brought it up. It’s not even compelling television. But I was pissed at him and thought I’d let him dig his own grave without considering how it would damage you guys.”

  “It’s okay,” Lizzie said. “I think it’s all going to work out in the end.”

  Isobel narrowed her eyes at Jake. The way he’d spoken quickly and then changed the subject made her suspect he was holding something back. “You had leverage, didn’t you?”

  Jake raised his hands, palms up. “I can’t say. It’s all part of the deal.”

  Elyse cleared her throat. “It was Kitty, wasn’t it? She and Craig in a compromising situation?”

  “I didn’t tell you anything,” Jake said. “But I’ve always been friendly with Mrs. Craig.”

  “I never liked Kitty,” Lizzie said. “Something about the way she was different with you depending on who you were.”

  Isobel wondered if she could be something other than a failed actress. She’d gotten good at rejection, at making up excuses for why she’
d failed—she wasn’t right for the part, her hair was the wrong color, she was too short, too tall, too skinny, too fat. It seemed like she needed a Goldilocks job—one where she could finally be right. Of course she didn’t know enough about this new job to know what that might be. “I’m not sure I understand what I’d be doing,” she said.

  “You’d be the host, you know, talk to the camera, chat with the homeowners and then get in there and make a plan for fixing their house. Easy stuff. Shoot three episodes in each town, you’re on the road a couple months out of the year and then off for the rest. Heck, you can pretty much live anywhere you want, as long as it has an airport.”

  Isobel nodded, realizing after he’d given her this last bit of information that she wasn’t ready to leave Memphis. “What’s it called?”

  Jake rubbed his hands together as if he’d been waiting for the questions. “Bad House.”

  Lizzie laughed. “I get it,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “Why not House Whisperer?” Elyse asked.

  “Houses Gone Wild,” Isobel said, allowing herself to get caught up in the celebratory mood that surrounded her. It was good news and she ought to take it at face value.

  The arrangement had been that the Triplins would be out of the house when Lizzie’s family came home. Isobel imagined that her cousin hadn’t wanted to confront her parents with her siblings present, but Lizzie didn’t share much of her plan with them. They sat on the second-floor balcony of a bar that jutted out over the river—or where the river would have if they hadn’t been in drought conditions.

  “It looks so different,” Elyse said, leaning over the balcony and staring at the river rocks below them.

  “It smells,” Isobel said, bringing her nose to her wrist to alleviate the drying-out smell that surrounded them. She looked at her phone to check the time and then back out at the river. Without water covering the flood field, Arkansas didn’t loom as close. There were large irregular patches of sand that made Isobel think of the beach.

  Elyse followed her gaze. “It’s more dangerous now.”

  “What?” Lizzie asked, drinking the last of her wine.

  “The river. When it’s flooded, all the treacherous spots get covered up and buried in water. But now everything’s exposed. A couple of kids drowned last month—they were fishing with their dad and got out to play on the sandbar, only it isn’t like regular sand. The water is still running underneath it so when you put any weight on it, you sink.”

  “I thought quicksand was a myth,” Isobel said. “The stuff of Saturday morning cartoons and melodramas.”

  “It’s the real deal,” Elyse said. “Rosa May knew the boys who drowned.”

  Lizzie’s phone buzzed. She looked down at it and then called the waiter over and asked for another glass of wine.

  “Are you sure?” Isobel asked. She hadn’t seen her cousin drink since they’d found the whiskey.

  “I’m sure,” Lizzie said, gulping down the wine as soon as the waiter brought it over.

  “It takes a while to work,” Isobel said. If she were her cousin, she wasn’t sure there would be enough wine in the world to take the edge off the conversation she needed to have.

  “Is your—” Isobel didn’t know how to refer to Lizzie’s father. “—Uncle Jim going back to his firm?”

  “Pretty sure. The guy who owns the place is Mormon,” Lizzie said. “They look out for each other.

  Elyse stopped Lizzie from ordering a third glass of wine. “So does family.”

  “That’s it,” Lizzie said, responding to the buzz of her phone. “They’re home, the kids are out at the movies.”

  “So we’re up?” Elyse asked, taking Lizzie’s keys from her purse. “I’ll drive.”

  “We could have walked,” Isobel said as they piled into the car. “Drive around the block a couple of times,” she said to Elyse.

  “No,” Lizzie said. “The faster I get this over with, the better.”

  Elyse idled the engine in front of Spite House. In the few hours they’d been gone, it already looked different to Isobel. Lizzie’s younger brothers had scattered their toys on the second floor balcony and her sisters had pulled up all the blinds in the cupola. Lizzie reached across the seat and turned the engine off.

  “Ready?” Isobel asked.

  In answer, Lizzie opened the car door and glided up the walkway with a fluidity that told Isobel the alcohol had finally started to work on her cousin.

  “She’s drunk,” Elyse said.

  “My guess is that what is waiting for her inside the house will sober her up fast.”

  “It’d be better if she weren’t,” Elyse said as they got out of the car. “I think she needs to hear, really hear what her parents have to say, and you know how a little bit of alcohol can make it all feel unreal.”

  Elyse followed Lizzie up the sidewalk and Isobel trailed them. “I don’t think she could do this if she weren’t.”

  They stood in front of the door and for the first time since she’d arrived at Spite House nearly a year earlier, Isobel stretched out her hand and knocked. In a similar gesture, Elyse reached forward and pushed the doorbell.

  “That’s probably overkill,” Lizzie said. She offered a strangled laugh and leaned against the doorframe. The sounds of someone fumbling with the lock made everyone straighten. Elyse pulled up the neckline of her shirt, Lizzie pulled her hair out of its ponytail, and Isobel stopped biting her thumbnail. They’d never locked the door in the daytime and it made opening the door take a thousand times longer.

  “Girls,” Aunt Annie said, stepping out of the house and drawing them into an embrace. The openness of the gesture confused Isobel, as did her aunt’s appearance. She hadn’t seen her in person in several years, but the image in the Christmas cards over the years had been one of a comfortably plump woman with shoulder-length hair dyed several shades too dark to cover the gray. The woman wrapping them in hugs bore only the slightest resemblance to those photos. She’d let her hair go gray and it was cut in a chin-length bob that didn’t look so much chic as severe. Her skin, although tan, had a yellowish cast and was loose with a crepey texture that Isobel associated with the elderly. She’d lost enough weight that she was thinner than any of the Triplins.

  “You look—” Isobel searched for the right word.

  “Terrible,” her aunt finished.

  “Oh, don’t say that,” Elyse said. “Skinnier is always better.”

  “If you’d had the year I’ve had, I’m not sure you’d say that. I had so many problems that I feel like my body has been to war the past year. Really too much to go into and now is not the time.”

  Lizzie found her voice. “Are you well now?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Let me just say that you shouldn’t drink tap water in Russia,” Aunt Annie said, ushering them through the doorway and down the hall. “I made cookies.”

  Isobel cleared her throat and exchanged glances with Elyse as they entered the kitchen. “I’m not sure today is the best day for cookies.” Earlier, they’d agreed that their job was to stand as witnesses for Lizzie. To be the people she could dissect the conversation with afterward. Elyse had explained the concept of an advocate in health care to them at the bar. When people were under stress, they weren’t able to process information in the same way. As Isobel understood Elyse’s explication, advocates came along to doctor’s appointments and listened to what was said, occasionally asking questions to clarify information or to support the needs of the patient. Over drinks, Elyse had asked Lizzie a series of questions about what outcome she wanted from the confrontation with her parents. They’d promised to keep quiet unless they felt that Lizzie needed help.

  “We might as well talk over food,” Aunt Annie said, practically pushing them into the kitchen and into chairs around the table.

  “Where’s Jim?” Lizzie asked, casting her eyes around the space as if there were a crowd of people.

  Lizzie’s mother passed around cookies. “I can’t believe wha
t wonders you all have done with the house.”

  “Mom, I asked where Jim was.”

  Aunt Annie sighed. “Just give me a minute. I haven’t seen you in three years and I want to pretend for a minute that we’re going to be okay. Your father will be here soon. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Is it true?” Lizzie asked.

  “Let me explain.” Aunt Annie took a cookie and nervously broke it into increasingly smaller pieces until it was a pile of crumbs. She licked her finger and dipped it into the crumbs and then brought her finger to her mouth, licking off the cookie fragments.

  “Explain what?” Lizzie slapped her hand on the table. “How you lied? How you managed to sleep with a teenager? Why you married him after so many years apart?”

  “If you want to know, you have to listen.”

  Elyse reached out and laid a hand on Lizzie’s arm. “She’s right. Let her get it all out.” Isobel made noises of agreement although she had no idea what course of action would be best. If it were her mother, she’d probably throttle her and ask questions later. Wasn’t that a useless thought? Her own mother hadn’t ever bothered to explain her behavior.

  Lizzie nodded, although to Isobel the savage way in which she inclined her head seemed to convey “fuck off” more than it did her cousin’s willingness to let her mother speak. Aunt Annie pushed the crumbs away from her. “Nothing tastes the same.”

  “Go on,” Elyse said, and Isobel admired the way her cousin was able to change the tone of her voice to one that encouraged without intruding. Without intending to, Isobel took one of the cookies and ate it. She wondered what a witness was supposed to do, what she could do. Her only expertise was in observing others. In learning how people’s faces looked when they experienced different emotions. It didn’t seem that she was born knowing how to mimic emotion like so many of the other actresses she knew. That Hollywood man, the one she’d fallen too far in love with, was the one who’d taught her the trick of face watching. After it was over and done with, she’d decided that he was a cipher—that he had never felt a real emotion in his life, but had learned his whole life to fake it, which was why he was such a good actor. Isobel watched her Aunt Annie, paying attention to the way her body shifted, the way she was unable to settle into one position. Occasionally she turned her gaze on Lizzie to see if she’d softened her posture or opened her face. She did this as Aunt Annie explained the past.