The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  August 1996

  Each time I see Isabelle, it’s for the very first time. I know this isn’t true, because there are pictures of us all through the house, because she is my daughter, because I gave birth to her and William is her father. I have their names written on a piece of paper on my desk: Elizabeth, Diana, and Isabelle. But I am always struck by the same surprise: who is this girl, with her long dark hair and her thin arms? She seems so perfect that I want to touch her. I have to keep my distance to avoid doing this; it would frighten her if I did. She carries tennis rackets with her. She is the child of William and Adelia. But she gives me long looks, as if asking for something secret I can’t remember. And I can only notice that she’s pretty. It’s surprising every time how pretty she is.

  Just now she came up to my door and looked at me as though there was something she needed me to explain. She was wearing coral shorts and a sleeveless denim shirt tied at the waist. She stood in my doorway, waiting for me to explain, and I had no idea what it was that I was supposed to say. “Is it just erased in the end?” she asked, pulling all of the air. “Is it all just erased?” She seemed terribly upset, so I shook my head. “No, no, it’s there,” I told her. “It’s definitely there, forever.” I thought this would comfort her, but she only looked more lost. I wanted to be close to her, but I knew I’d misunderstood. I needed the distance to see her and remember her. “Do you want it to be erased?” I asked her. She only covered her face with her hands.

  It wasn’t the right thing to say. If I could remember who I am to her—why she looks at me with her expectant eyes—I might have helped. But she’s new to me each time I see her.

  • • •

  Having read this in the darkness of the abandoned kitchen, lit only by the narrow beam of a single lamp, Louise was washed with new light. She looked up to see Adelia standing at the doorway, ringed with white rays from behind. She flicked on the overhead lights, and it became clear that she was staring at the book in Louise’s hand.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “My journal,” said Louise. She had never struggled with lying.

  Adelia stared. Her face was jagged. “Why are you reading your own journal?” Louise was about to explain the merits of reading one’s own journal when Adelia lunged, quick as a descending falcon, and grabbed it out of Louise’s hands. Louise tried to hold on, but the surprise of the attack was so total that she had little time to prepare an adequate defense. And then Adelia was reading the page. She turned to its cover. She looked up at Louise. “This is Margaux’s.”

  “She gave me her permission to read them.”

  “And you took it?”

  “She gave me her permission,” Louise repeated, hating the whine in her voice.

  “Stay here,” Adelia said, then left Louise in the light-flooded kitchen, strangely calm while she waited for the moment of her judgment.

  When William returned with Adelia, he held the journal in one hand and looked at Louise in such a manner that she immediately glanced away and attempted to forget. “You will leave tomorrow. We’ll arrange your pay through the agency,” he said. “My wife”—at this point Louise thought she could see Adelia shudder—“is a woman who values her privacy. You’ve violated that. These should have been left undisturbed.”

  There were things that Louise could have asked. What about you, who didn’t let her go to a home when she wanted to? And what about Adelia, who came to live in her house? Didn’t that get in the way of her precious privacy? But Louise couldn’t stir herself to fight. Why did it matter if she stayed in yet another temporary home for yet another temporary year? It was time for her to leave. She’d miss the journals, but it was time to move on.

  All night she packed her bags. She’d acquired so many toiletries that it was impossible to fit them all. In the end she dumped a trash bag the size of a baby, full of unused lipsticks and hand creams, into the bin outside. When she came back in the house, Adelia was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing her white nightgown, waiting for Louise. She was not going to permit any final shenanigans. For old time’s sake, Louise left the door to her room open a crack. She was not the only one being watched. When she was done packing, she gathered all of Margaux’s journals—even the one with the guilty stain—and carried them with her when she tiptoed upstairs to Margaux’s room, followed by otherworldly Adelia. “What are you doing?” Adelia whispered at the top of the stairs. Her whisper was violent. “Giving these back,” Louise told her. “Quickly,” Adelia said, pursing her lips.

  In her room, Margaux was asleep. The profile of her resting face was so familiar that it gave Louise a stab of regret. She leaned over Margaux’s bed. “Goodbye,” she whispered, placing the journals at the foot. Empty-handed, she watched Margaux sleep, aware of Adelia’s presence in the doorway. Margaux’s eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. “Bye now,” Louise said one more time, and she was somehow very sad to have to leave without a response, without any recognition of all they’d accidentally shared.

  On her own, back in the writer’s den in which she had made very little writerly progress, Louise couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of how casually she had said goodbye to her mother in Melbourne when she first left for London. More casually than she’d just said goodbye to a woman who never wanted to know her. She couldn’t stop remembering how easily she’d walked away, how she’d failed to return for nine whole years. At the time, she thought of her parents as depressing. They had a dismal way of dragging themselves through the door when they arrived from the outside world, toting their groceries or their thermoses. It seemed so defeated and bland. She couldn’t imagine living such an unimpressive life. The Great Louise Herself. One of the most powerful girls in her school, with her quick wit and her shapely calves. These ridiculous things gave her so much confidence that she was willing to wave goodbye to her mother at the hedge. Her mother was holding a tea towel in one hand and waving with the other as Louise’s cab pulled past the corner and out onto the street.

  For some reason, while she lay awake, this image remained stuck in Louise’s head. It was impossible to sleep. In the end she stayed up reading a gossip magazine until the light outside was grayish and the first bus was due to arrive. Then she shouldered her bags.

  On the front porch, Isabelle was waiting in a rocking chair, holding a mug of hot chocolate. She was draped in a velour blanket to ward off the chill that had crept into the air since summer ended. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Your father fired me. I’m leaving.”

  “But where will you go?”

  Louise shook her head. She had no idea; she hadn’t gotten that far. She could stay with Arlene in Breacon until she settled on new plans, but Arlene’s apartment seemed bleak from where she stood at this point. “Back home to Melbourne, I guess,” she said, and she was surprised because she hadn’t admitted this until now. She wondered where her mother would be sitting when she walked back in the door, whether she had spent the last eight years with the ghost of her daughter, or whether her mother had simply waved goodbye at the hedge and then shut the door behind her. Just then the bus rounded the corner at the end of the street. Louise gestured toward it. Isabelle saw it, smiled at Louise, then waved and wordlessly let her leave them behind.

  Chapter 25

  Diana oversaw construction, alone on Little Lane, for the months of September and October. The speed at which the house went up was amazing to her. It was like watching a creature come alive. A conjured being composed of beams and panels and cement. At the end of the day, she walked to the grocery store for dinner makings, and after dinner she wandered through the frame of the house. It was different each evening, more complicated and complete. She started eating her dinner there, carrying a card table and a desk lamp out and sitting in the company of the frame’s even lines while clouds passed the empty space above her. One night it rained, a quick, heavy rain, and when she went out to the hou
se afterward, the wood was so fragrant that she pressed her nose against it and closed her eyes.

  On the second Friday in October, the roof went up. She watched from the patio as it become complete, shingles covering the open beams that had crisscrossed the crowns of maple trees when she sat beneath them in the afternoons. Shingle by shingle the house enclosed itself, battening down. Afterward, she brought the builders beer and thanked them for all their work. She sat with them on the lawn, strewn with fallen maple leaves, until it was time for them to clear out. Alone except for the finished house, she packed up the car to return to the beach.

  When she walked in the door, Isabelle was curled in the overstuffed armchair, studying her anatomy book. She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Di’s back,” she said to no one in particular.

  Diana kissed her little sister on the head. The book in her lap was open to a picture of the heart, with its purple and red highway system of twisting aorta, ventricle, and vena cava.

  “I missed you,” Isabelle said.

  “Me, too, Izzy.” There was a deep brown scar on her collarbone where the bone had snapped in half and broken the skin; Izzy reached up and touched it absently as she continued to study the anatomy book.

  William was out in the backyard with Margaux, clipping tomato plants. For a minute, Diana watched them from the screened-in porch. It was funny to see her father in his gardening gloves, glancing back at his wife for advice. Margaux sat on her heels, eclipsed by her large straw hat. Occasionally she pointed, and William adjusted his efforts. They worked in such suspended harmony that Diana hesitated before interrupting them. When she did move out to join them, the screen door clattered behind her.

  “You’re back,” William said.

  “I am.”

  “You’ve gotten some sun,” he said. “Your looks are improved.” Satisfied, he resumed weeding the flower bed.

  When Diana went back inside, she found Adelia glaring into the refrigerator as though she could cause something missing to appear simply by virtue of staring hard enough.

  “Adelia.”

  She spun around, bumping the refrigerator shut with her angular shoulder. “You’re back, Di. How is it? How did it go?”

  Diana took a deep breath. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. Relief flooded Adelia’s face. “It still needs paint and plumbing. But Adelia, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Oh, Di! I’m so proud of you.” Adelia moved across the kitchen to hug her. Her embrace was bony and sharp. “I’m so proud of you, I could tear you apart.” Diana, grateful, pressed her palms hard against Adelia’s shoulder blades.

  Chapter 26

  Isabelle playing tennis was a thing to see. Lifting the ball between her racket and her shoe, crooking her leg like a shore bird. Strolling from side to side between points, twirling the racket on her finger. Concentrating. She was tan from spending her days outside, and she had put on enough weight since the operation to look healthy again. She was very tall. It was a good thing he had married a woman with Margaux’s height. His girls were tall. Wide-shouldered, with real wingspan. Perfect for tennis. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up around her shoulders, and a Nike tennis skirt that she must have gotten at Smith’s. Shopping at Smith’s Sports on Main Street was something Isabelle never would have done in the past. She had always looked down on things that young girls like to do, such as shopping at places like Smith’s Sports. And now she was chewing gum while she bounced the ball on her strings, playing tennis with her dad and rolling up the sleeves of her T-shirt to avoid a tennis tan.

  Somehow the accident had caused her to take several steps back. That was how William described it to himself. It had caused her to reconsider the speed at which she had headed off, and to move at a more appropriate pace. The shift was enormous but invisible. The only remaining evidence of the accident was the scar on her collarbone. Otherwise, she was the same girl, and yet it was as though her body were occupied with a different version of herself.

  He liked this version. This was a strange thing to admit, since this version was the result of a terrible accident. But the truth was that William liked this iteration of his daughter, who enjoyed playing tennis with him, picking up the ball like she used to, with her leg effortlessly crooked. When she prepared to return his serve, she swayed low, squinting across the net, and when she moved, there was an easy fluidity that his other girls had lacked. Diana was tenacious and her vision was better than that of any kid he’d ever seen, professional or not. She set her heart on winning something and didn’t give up, at least not back then. Izzy wasn’t so determined. She would never be as good as Di, mostly because she had taken too many crucial years off. Those years could not be gotten back. They were lost. Moreover, she had none of the killer instinct that Elizabeth had inherited from him. He would have liked to see her acquire a bit of Lizzie’s grit, that glint in her eye when she was battering a kitchen appliance. But to see Isabelle’s side-to-side movement, effortless and naturally economical, was to be convinced that she had been born to play this sport. With another year of hard training, she could play at college. Not D-1, but maybe doubles at an Ivy League school, as William had done. She could follow in his footsteps, the fourth Adair, including Henry, to play tennis at an Ivy. It was different now, of course. The girls on the Princeton team were basically pros. William did not find those girls attractive. Their legs were overly muscled, and it would be a shame for Isabelle to look like that. But maybe she could play JV. It would give her a nice community. He liked to imagine her strolling over green lawns, friends by her side and a racket slung over her shoulder.

  William was glad she wasn’t going to college yet. She wasn’t quite strong enough. It was a documented fact that her immunity was low because of the removed spleen, but also she emerged from the hospital fragile in ways that couldn’t be attributed just to anatomy. It was as if she were a child again, looking to her father for strength. Not that you would know it, to see her play! Powerfully, she returned the ground strokes he fed to her backhand. She was best in a pattern of ground strokes, when she wasn’t trying to win the point. Just spinning out shots like bright thread. She had the most technically perfect backswing that William had ever seen. She was admittedly slower than Diana had been. There was a long loping rhythm to her movement that wasn’t ideal. But Isabelle was Isabelle, and she was still his, if only momentarily. She was still there with him, playing tennis every morning, rolling her sleeves and calling to him over the net.

  She jogged to the service line. Once, twice, three times she bounced the ball in front of her tan knee. She tossed it up, up, watching it rise above her with the slightest frown between her eyebrows. And then, all in one fluid movement, she unfurled her body, arm and racket continuous like a long silver blade, turning. It was such a lovely serve that William had to remind himself to return, and he was off balance so that only his stronger forehand kept him in the point.

  “Good get, Daddy,” Isabelle called over to him when the point was over. Everything was going so well with her that William was tempted to drive her back to the club to play a match in front of Jack Weld, so that he would see how undefeated the Adairs remained. He would see Isabelle’s perfect backswing, and William would mention that she was deferring college for a year because she wanted to work in the hospital, and that he was hoping she’d apply to Princeton. But William was not so far away from the night of the accident that he was unaware of the subterranean thing that had existed on Little Lane. Though he didn’t understand it, it woke him up sometimes in the middle of the night. Then he lay beneath its shape. All he had to do was picture Isabelle’s face after the dinner party, with those shadows etched into it, her dark arms floating above her white dress, drinking that bottle of wine before telling him she’d talk to Weld about the carriage house.

  To imagine that was enough to make him recoil in shame, even when he was lying in bed at night and even though he di
dn’t entirely understand the cause for his recoiling. He felt it with certainty. It had been there, and it was disturbing enough for him to want to stay far away from that street. He could forfeit his grudge against Jack Weld, if only for the benefit of his kids. He could just let it go. What’s done was done; none of the old territory was reclaimable. And it was enough for him that Izzy was here, playing tennis with him, her brown legs creaturely, bouncing the ball once, twice, three times before she tossed it up to the sun.