The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  He didn’t move. She had never particularly warmed to him. His success in the restaurant business had momentarily impressed her, but she had her doubts about his substance. As a kid, he seemed unimpressed by her family to the point of disrespect. He came to Little Lane wearing sneakers with holes in the toes, and Elizabeth’s own sister had fallen in love with him, and he had spent a good deal of his time in the Adair house. Despite all this, he always glazed over when they showed him the clippings about their tournaments, or told him about when William was a kid on the same street, walking over the same golf course to the same club. Those stories were who they were, and if Arthur had no interest in them, Elizabeth wasn’t sure how he could have known Diana. Or how he could possibly care about Isabelle, except to assuage his own guilty conscience over drinking with someone who was only eighteen before letting her burn down a historical monument and then drive off in the Jeep.

  “Look, Arthur,” she said without standing, one hand on the pumpkin for support. She was taking care of her sister, tending to her family. She was proud of her ability to be strong in this role. “I’ll let her know you came by. But I have to tell you that she’s been doing very well this summer, and I think it’s best if she doesn’t spend too much time in the past. What’s done is done. She’s moving on. She has a sense of purpose now. I don’t want to see her lingering over things that are over and finished.”

  “Sure,” Arthur said. “Of course.” With some triumph, Elizabeth thought she could detect a deepening of his slouch. “That’s good,” he tried again, then broke off. “I’m glad she’s done well this summer.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “It is good. We’re proud of her.”

  He was studying Margaux’s shrub roses, and he didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his voice was steadier. “Please tell her I came by,” he said. “I won’t bother you again, but will you tell her I went back to Little Lane and I saw everything she’s done? It’s beautiful. Could you tell her that for me?”

  Elizabeth watched him go. She was perplexed about what exactly Isabelle had done in Breacon other than burning down the carriage house. She experienced a moment of doubt about whether she had understood anything he had been talking about, and she was irritated by the way this doubt clouded her autumnal mood. Arthur hadn’t once asked about her. She wondered why people on Little Lane were so narcissistic that they never thought to show interest in her life, as though they assumed, now that she had kids, she was boring and plain and content to live in the shadow of a husband somewhere, projecting former glory onto her children. She remembered again, as Arthur drove off, that on Sunday night she would have to chauffeur the girls back to Breacon, and the ascent that she experienced in herself at the shore would once again come under attack by suburban mediocrity. There she would fall into an uncomfortable nap until she could return to the beach, and that would be the pattern of her life as long as the girls were in school. Even as she comprehended this, she detected the faintest smell of winter in the air, wafting from inland to the beach. A slight uptake in the wind and a clamping down of the light. Elizabeth took the emptied pumpkin and went inside to the kitchen. Heaving her whole weight into the task, she cut it into segments that she could lay in a pan, and as she did that, Diana and Adelia came in from their trip to Breacon to deal with the painting of the carriage house. Feeling their entrance behind her, Elizabeth was suddenly terribly angry that she had been left to deal with Arthur’s visit on her own.

  “Well, we found the right shade,” Adelia said. Diana beamed. They were so busy with their triumphs that they didn’t notice how hard she was working, on her own, without anyone to help.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, chopping an onion.

  “You can’t believe how many colors they offer. It’s confounding, trying to find the differences between a thousand different variations of white.”

  “I’m glad you found the right one,” Elizabeth said, but she was not glad, and it made her no more glad when Isabelle and William came in with their deep tans, flushed from exercise and carrying their discarded sweaters. She remembered once more that it was only she who would have to go back to Breacon on Monday in order to live her life and raise her children, and the rest of them would continue to live in a beachy dreamland where people did not get divorced and sick people never declined. She felt bitterly alone, the only one who had to go home, which may have been what prompted her not to keep Arthur’s visit from Isabelle, as she had planned to do.

  “Izzy,” she said, “Arthur Schmidt stopped by to see you. He told me to tell you hello.”

  There was a halting of activity and a spreading silence. William sighed and lowered himself onto the couch to bend over the jigsaw puzzle with which he had become morbidly involved since coming to the beach.

  “He probably wanted to be sure that you’re better, since the accident and the carriage house fire,” she said, emphasizing “carriage house fire.” Even as she did, she felt uneasy in the awareness of her ill intentions.

  “What did he say?” Isabelle asked. She was standing with her tennis bag sloping over her scarred shoulder.

  “He said that he’s glad you’re doing better. I said you’ve moved on and none of us are lingering in the past. He said he was happy for you.”

  Diana sat down abruptly. Isabelle unshouldered her tennis bag and sat down opposite William, watching him work. Adelia was staring with her uncomfortably protruding eyes. There was the sound of William dragging puzzle pieces across the glass coffee table.

  “The soup will be ready in an hour,” Elizabeth said, trying to change the subject. She looked over at the vase of sunflowers that she had placed at the center of the table back when she was excited about the idea of making an Autumnal Feast to celebrate her family.

  “He didn’t want to stay for dinner?” Isabelle asked weakly, as though she didn’t know what else to say to break the awkward silence.

  “No, he was just checking on you. He said he was leaving again, and he only wanted to stop by.” Elizabeth looked around at the room. Everyone was strangely quiet. She felt confused. She had defended them against an intrusion from the early summer, and they were acting as though she’d lost a crucial battle. Were they worried for Diana? Diana, who was so triumphant about her success with the carriage house that surely she was no longer nostalgic for a slouchy kid she dated when she was just eighteen? Elizabeth looked around. Other than the sounds of William’s puzzle pieces, they were completely silent. Adelia and Diana hadn’t moved. Why were they so hideously mute? What strange new weight had settled on them all? She wanted to reach out and shake them. “Why are you all so quiet?” she asked. “It’s not as though the pope stopped by.”

  Without answering, Adelia swooped in and grabbed the colander of peas that Elizabeth had placed in the sink. “I’ll make these,” she said severely, and Elizabeth knew she would boil them into oblivion. She felt helpless as she watched Adelia dumping the peas into the water she had prepared for the soup, aware that she had miscalculated her announcement about Arthur but not entirely sure how. She had the sinking feeling that they might all stand there forever, suspended in the rental kitchen, having each individually missed each other’s point and therefore doomed to a lifetime of paralysis.

  “Why are you all so quiet tonight?” she asked again. No one said anything. “This is our last weekend here for a while, and I’d rather, when the girls come in from the yard, if you could act as though you’re not all slaughtered seals.”

  No one said anything. William did not look up from his puzzle. That goddamned puzzle and his renewed closeness with Margaux were infuriating to Elizabeth, as if he had given up on his vitality and decided to prematurely age along with his wife. She wanted to go get her crowbar and bash it over the coffee table, sending fragments of glass and puzzle flying into the oppressive air. “Is no one going to say anything? We’re going back tomorrow, and you’re all just going to sit there and r
uin the weekend we have left?”

  “You don’t have to go back, Lizzie,” William said. “You could stay here, and the girls could go to school. You can keep acting with the company.”

  “We’re not going back to Breacon?” came Lucy’s voice from the door. “Wait, we’re not going back to Breacon?” She was hovering on the verge of tears.

  “No, honey pie, we’re going back,” Elizabeth said, lifting Lucy up. She had gotten too heavy to pick up easily, but Elizabeth wanted to be holding something close to her in the midst of this strange, unfriendly living room. “We’re going back, but Granddaddy and Grandmama and Izzy are staying here for a while.”

  “Why aren’t they coming with us?” Lucy asked, and Elizabeth wanted to tell her that it was because they were the only grown-ups in the family, but she noticed that Lucy hadn’t cursed once in her distress, and somehow that disturbed her, so she said, “How the fuck do I know?” Lucy’s eyes widened. “Huh, honey pie?” Elizabeth asked. “How the fuck do I know?”

  Lucy grinned. It had been right to say that. She opened in Elizabeth’s arms. “How the fuck-fishing damn-balls do we know?” she asked Elizabeth, and Elizabeth buried her face in Lucy’s neck.

  “You shouldn’t let her curse like that,” Adelia said, but Elizabeth didn’t care. She wanted her girls to be tough and she wanted them to be happy and she wanted them not to care what Adelia thought or why Isabelle looked so lost or why Diana sat so heavily in her chair. Leave them their complicated weakness. Elizabeth wanted her girls to be strong.

  “We’re going back on Monday,” Elizabeth said. “So you can go to shit-school.”

  And then Lucy was laughing, and her neck smelled like dirt, and she was heavy in Elizabeth’s arms, but Elizabeth had gotten strong from a summer of bashing things in with her crowbar, so she carried Lucy out of the kitchen to the yard, where she let her drop like a wheelbarrow onto the earth. Lucy used her hands to lead Elizabeth over to where Caroline was testing the pH of the vegetable garden soil, and the three of them sat together low and close to the solid earth for one more weekend before they went back home.

  Chapter 29

  On the first Monday of November, Diana arrived to take William back to Little Lane so he could see the finished carriage house. They asked Isabelle if she wanted to come, but she politely declined; her presence would have cast a shadow over the occasion. Awkwardly, Adelia asked Margaux if she’d like to come, but Margaux only tilted her head, perplexed. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Have I been there before?” Isabelle watched her confusion carefully.

  In the end, they took only William, leaving Isabelle to keep an eye on her mother. When the house had emptied, Isabelle went up to her room and chose a purple-and-pink-striped towel for sunbathing. It was strangely warm for November. It would be the last day of the year that she could sit out, and she wanted to cling to it. She wore her blue plastic sunglasses and alternated between her stomach and her back when the exposed side got too chilly. With cold fingers, she flipped the pages of her anatomy book, focusing on the red-purple chambers of the heart. She started close to the house, but as the sun fell, she had to move away in order to escape the growing shadow. The anatomy book gave her the comfortable sensation of having an important dream to strive after, but one that nevertheless was glossed over and distant. She switched onto her stomach and felt the press of the towel against her belly. Her shoulder blades were warm; she allowed her shins to sway from side to side. The next time she picked up the towel to move it out of the house’s shadow, she noticed Margaux puttering around in the garden, and the knowledge that she and Margaux were alone together was mildly pleasant, like sun on her skin. She turned the page to examine the spleen, which she was missing. Because of this, her immunity would always be low. People in the Renaissance blamed the spleen for vitriolic behavior. Without hers, Isabelle was not entirely human but was an altered creature who harbored no resentment or rage. She focused on its minute parts with the dispassionate eye of someone studying a disease she would never acquire. After the spleen, she moved to the liver, which was depicted in bulges of yellow and brown. In a while, she had to move her towel again. The one patch of sun remaining in the yard was a rhombus extending over Margaux’s vegetable garden. Isabelle took herself there. When she lay down, she found herself face-to-face with her mother’s pale calf. She smelled it. It had very little scent. She propped herself up on her forearms and looked at her mother, whose face was engulfed by her hat.

  “So it’s just you and me,” Isabelle said.

  Margaux sat back and looked down at her. “Why are you still here?” she asked.

  “I don’t like it on Little Lane,” Isabelle told her. “I think you can understand that.”

  Margaux watched her uneasily.

  “You know, I thought of you a lot,” Isabelle went on. “When I was by myself in that hospital room, and I felt like my chest was collapsing. You want to know what I was thinking? I was thinking that, by being there, in the hospital, I was losing an important fight. Like I was going down for the count. I kept trying to think how I could get back in the ring again, but then I thought, What if I just give up? What if I skip it altogether and pretend I was never in there to start with?” Isabelle stated these questions without expecting her mother to answer. She was used to conversing with her mother’s silences. “At first,” she continued, “the idea of it scared me, but then I got it. That’s what you did. You built a family and then you erased it. And look at you now. You seem happy enough, right? I started thinking, Maybe Mom is wiser than I understood. Maybe she’s been showing us all this time that there are choices to be made.” Margaux shook her head and resumed her weeding. There was a slight twitch under her left eye. It looked uncomfortable, but Isabelle continued prodding anyway. “I thought, What if Mom knew that we get one period of grace, and then we spend the rest of our lives wishing we could go back? So why don’t I just go back now? I’d never thought of it as a choice.”

  “So you are not going back,” Margaux said, and the vein was twitching visibly. She shook clumps of earth off the white roots of the weeds, then threw them aside. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What about your father and your mother? They won’t want to leave you here alone.”

  Isabelle looked at her. Your mother wouldn’t leave you here alone. “Are you pretending, Mom?” she asked. “I won’t tell. It can be our secret.”

  Margaux looked very odd with that vein twitching and one of her eyes slightly wider than the other. “You can’t just stay here,” she said. “They can’t just let you stay here like this.”

  Watching her, Isabelle did feel some pity, but despite her missing spleen there was also a thin line of unavoidable meanness that laced the edges of her mind. “No, I’m fairly certain that William will let me stay here for as long as we both shall live.”

  Margaux was silent again. She was focusing on a row of carrots.

  “Did you know how bad it was for me when you got sick?” Isabelle asked. Margaux didn’t say anything. “Did you know what was happening? Did you feel me getting lost?”

  “This is all very silly,” Margaux murmured, and then she started picking at the soil with a gardening tool that looked like a giant’s curved fork.

  “I don’t know if you knew,” Isabelle allowed her. “I’m really not sure. If you did, I wish you had done something to help me out. No one seemed to notice.” Margaux continued jabbing the soil with her fork. “But I just don’t know if you knew,” she sighed. She pushed her plastic sunglasses up on her head. The light was flat enough that there was no need for extra shadow. “Anyway, I’d like to stay with you for a while. I’d like some time with you. I promise I won’t be here forever. After a while I’ll go on with my life. I’d only like to stay here now.”

  The rhombus of light was shrinking around them. It seemed to be taking her mother with it, so that her cheeks were growing more drawn and she was fading int
o the shadow under her hat. “You cannot stay here with me. You have a life to live.”

  “Just for a while, Mom. We can talk about all the things you missed.”

  “I don’t know you,” said Margaux, the pitch of her voice rising. She was resorting to her most dramatic strategies.

  “Listen, Mom, it’s okay with me if you’re pretending,” Isabelle answered. “I’m not blaming you for leaving me behind. But I’d like to know now, after everything, if you just couldn’t stand to remember or if you really forgot.” Margaux stared back in silence, and in an instant the shadow clicked shut around them, so they were locked there together in an iron light, staring at each other. Margaux’s eye vein was throbbing terribly, and Isabelle thought of leaving her alone, but she wanted to know for sure now that she thought she could understand. She had gotten this far, after all. And so she and her mother watched each other. Isabelle wasn’t going anywhere. But her mother was stubborn, too. She was more stubborn than Isabelle could have guessed. She didn’t answer, so they sat there together in that locked light, and it was only after a long time that Isabelle understood Margaux wasn’t ever going to respond. She was picking up her gardening gloves and her spade and her large torturous fork. Wordlessly, she was standing and brushing the soil off of her clothes, and she was marching back inside the house, so that Isabelle was alone with her anatomy book, on her pink and purple towel, in a dark air by a dark ocean that beat its fists against the unanswering shore.

  Chapter 30

  William was quiet during the car ride home. He had resisted coming at all: the previous night, when Adelia let him know it was time, he told her in no uncertain terms that he no longer cared about the carriage house. “But you care about your daughter, and she’s worked hard on this,” Adelia told him. “Why can’t we just let it go?” he asked, and Adelia felt so desolate that she stayed awake all night. Every time she closed her eyes, she had the sense that the world around her would disappear if she didn’t remain alert, so she would open her eyes again and blink at the ceiling fan. She had fought for the carriage house. She had fought with all the strength in her reserves, because she believed in everything that it stood for. It was their habitat. To live on her own forever without knowing that habitat existed was more than Adelia could bear.