The Carriage House (20 page)

Chapter 23

A
fter a week Arthur still hadn’t come by. He was there, next door, but he stayed hidden in the squat house with its orange shutters. There was that to worry about, as well as the fact that William still refused to talk about the building plan. But the permit came through, and Diana’s second meeting with the contractor went well enough that she was able to relegate these facts to the edge of her mind, clearing a space for the carriage house to rise up in its completed form. The contractor assured her that he would be able to use the salvaged beams, the glass doorknobs, and the slabs of cement. She asked that the new wood be cedar; he agreed. They turned to her blueprint, and her heart stopped while he inspected it, as she waited for the flaws that he would find. “We can start on the foundation tomorrow,” he said. She held the cool, smooth cylinder of the rolled blueprint in her palm while she accompanied him back out to his truck.

In the evening, she walked to the grocery store under oaks and maples heavy with late-summer foliage. She bought herself milk and cereal, and supplies to make spaghetti for dinner. As she walked home, the plastic bag bumped against her calf. Her thoughts were collected, organized around the lines of the new structure, until she passed the Schmidts’ house. She thought of knocking on the door. She could ask him to have dinner with her. She could make him spaghetti, and they could share a bottle of wine. Then she reminded herself to be less of a child. Their lives had progressed. It was enough that she remembered how to draw, and that she had made a blueprint that would eventually come to life before her eyes. She kept walking, and the bag bumped, and the air was thick with the smell of fading summer.

While she ate her pasta, she leafed through a coffee table book of great architecture, taken from a shelf in her father’s basement office. Afterward, she washed her dishes and put them in the sink. She took the book up to bed with her. It was difficult to fall asleep. The air was hot, and even when she opened the windows, it was as though the branches of the trees were sweeping hotter air into the room. She kicked off her covers and lay there, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the bullfrogs croaking from the pond. Since she’d started the new plans, she hadn’t struggled as much with falling asleep. She had allowed herself to concoct elaborate fantasies as she drowsed off: building a great structure, regaining Arthur’s affection, resuming her old sureness. But tonight her mind was spare. The part of her that had been filled with dreams was empty, replaced by a hollow sensation. She set her mind to imagining the inside of the carriage house before it burned. She visualized the pointed angle of the roof and the pattern of cedar beams that crossed the air, cutting it into bordered triangles. She smelled its old wood, felt the round coolness of the glass doorknobs in her palm. At some point, she fell asleep to the sound of the bullfrogs and the swaying arms of the trees.

In the morning, she woke up early but it had already gotten hot. In her pajamas, she sat at her desk and unrolled the blueprint again. She checked each detail. When she was satisfied once more with its mathematical precisions, she changed into shorts and a striped T-shirt. Adelia had bought her leather sandals at a store in Rock Harbor; she slid these on her feet. She considered herself in the mirror while she brushed her hair. She was tan, and she knew she looked better than she had when she first came home in June. Somehow, in the rush to finish her plans, she’d forgotten about her own figure. Now she was surprised to notice it in the mirror: her arms seemed stronger and more capable. She shrugged, watching her shoulders rise and fall with easy mechanical motion. So this was the form she would fill. She bent and splashed water on her face, then pulled her hair back into a ponytail. At the kitchen table, she studied the architecture book while she ate her cereal. When she was done, she rinsed her bowl out in the sink, then walked over to the Schmidts’.

When she rang the doorbell first, no one came. She rang again. When the door opened inward, it was Anita who appeared. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, and her thin hair was cropped close to her head. There were circles under her eyes. Diana remembered that she hadn’t checked how early it was.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Schmidt,” Diana said.

“It’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”

“I was hoping to speak to Arthur.”

“He left,” she said. Behind her, the shades in the living room were drawn, and the furniture looked gloomy. “He went to Poughkeepsie to check on a distributor.”

“I see,” Diana heard herself saying.

“I believe it was a brewery. After that he’s going back to the city. He can’t stay here forever.” Diana focused on Mrs. Schmidt’s feet, her toes gnarled around the thong of her fuzzy pink flip-flops. She could feel Mrs. Schmidt considering her. “He waited
longer than I thought he’d wait,” the old woman continued. “He was worried about your sister. The one who burned the house down. But she’s fine, and I’m fine, too, so he left this morning.”

“Ah,” Diana said. She didn’t move.

“How is that sister of yours who burned the house down?”

“She’s better, thanks.”

“That one I admire. When I saw it burning, I told Arthur, ‘I’ll bet it was that little one. That little one’s got guts.’”

“She’s been through a lot,” Diana said.

“But she’s a fighter. I’ve always admired a fighter. Your father, prick though he may be, is also a fighter.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Tell him to come back soon.”

“I will.” Diana tried to smile. “I should go now, Mrs. Schmidt.”

“Go, then.”

Diana walked down the flagstone path to the driveway, then abruptly turned back. “Mrs. Schmidt,” she called. The old woman was still there, watching Diana’s retreat from the shelter of her large pink robe. “Will you tell Arthur that the house will be finished next month?”

“You’re building it again?” Mrs. Schmidt asked. She looked surprised by the news.

“We’re starting today.”

“On your property?”

“Yes. Just as it was.”

Mrs. Schmidt folded both pink arms over her chest. She surveyed Diana, chin tilted up.

“Will you tell him, please, that I won’t give up on it?” Diana said.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks,” Diana said, but Mrs. Schmidt was already shutting the door.

Chapter 24

A
fter Labor Day, only William, Isabelle, and Margaux stayed at the beach. Elizabeth drove up on Wednesday evenings to practice with her theater group, but she went back to Breacon after dinner. When she brought the girls to visit on weekends, they were preoccupied with school friends and spiral binders and seemed eager to get back to the suburbs. House by house, the town of Rock Harbor emptied. The tennis pro from the Grubby Tub went back to Montclair; even the Russian maids returned to their sources of origin. Once again, Louise was left behind while the rest of the world moved on. She wandered around the downtown area, a person forgotten. As September progressed, the leaves started to change, but they did so less dramatically than the leaves in Breacon had. Fall in Rock Harbor was less of a seasonal shift than it was a general draining out. Sand swept up from the beach and spread itself across the streets. The Grubby Tub became a ghost bar. Louise watched her tan fading a little bit each day and was filled with a muted version of despair that manifested itself as a constant desire to drive to CVS, where she wandered among fluorescent aisles searching for a perfect product. She purchased a vast array of lip glosses; none of them suited her. On September 26, she received a text message from Bradley that read simply: “I am a married man.” She didn’t reply.

In general, Louise felt less sad than far away. She had been wandering around the world since she graduated from high school and went to work in London for a year that turned into a decade. By this point, Louise had gotten very far from her point of origin. Occasionally, when she and Margaux walked through the empty grocery store, pretending to look for something, Louise missed her mother in Melbourne. Sometimes she sat on the back porch while William and Margaux gardened together, and she wondered if her own mother and father were wordlessly sharing toast at the kitchen table where Louise was once a little girl. There was a silent physical closeness between William and Margaux that reminded Louise of the kitchen in Melbourne with its cabbagey smell and the tea towels printed with lemons, and there was a defeatedness to William’s posture when he allowed the screen door to bang shut behind him that made her think of her own father coming home from work.

Outside of these singular moments, Louise could barely remember what it was like to wake up next to a person, let alone the smell of the kitchen in Melbourne, or the precise print of those tea towels. In late September, Arlene threatened to come down for a weekend visit, but Louise evaded her. The idea of drinking shots with Arlene while attempting to attract pathetically lonely men so that afterward hilarious stories could be told had somehow, somewhere along the way, become nauseating to Louise.

On October 4, Adelia showed up at the rental house. William waited for her on the front porch without making any movement to meet her. After she lugged her suitcase up the stairs to the porch, they stood close together, as though deciding whether to kiss or shake hands. William offered to take her bag, but Adelia shooed him away. Inside, Izzy was eating a microwave pizza and barely looked up from her magazine to acknowledge Adelia’s entrance. Later that afternoon, William and Izzy ate their dinner early in order to go out for a nighttime tennis game under the lights, so at dinnertime Adelia made herself a salad and ate it alone at the kitchen table. Louise avoided her. There was something unsettling about her distress, as if it might be contagious. Still, Louise kept an ear out for any unusual activity through her cracked bedroom door. Adelia set up camp in the downstairs bedroom; in the morning, it was evident she was going to stay.

After this unmomentous arrival, Louise and Adelia started sitting together on the back porch, watching Margaux and William garden. To sit with a woman like Adelia, watching William through the shadow of the screen, feeling Adelia’s late-life loss, was enough to send you into perambulations through the aisles of CVS for the rest of eternity. In CVS, the endlessness of helpful products soothed Louise. There were solutions for everything: for calluses and corns, blocked sinuses and acid reflux, acne and rosacea, overthick eyebrows and ingrown hairs. There were other regulars at the Rock Harbor CVS, most of them with obvious problems, and Louise allowed herself to wonder about their stories while she perused the spectrum of scented candles. She browsed the anti-inflammatories and felt relieved to know that there were whole aisles set aside for the achievement of physical numbness.

After her trips to CVS, she returned to the Adair house temporarily immune to the depression that came with witnessing a family’s collapse. Her desire to write the great Australian-American novel of the century began to fade, but that was fine. She was only twenty-seven years old. There was plenty of time. For now there was some comfort in wandering silently in an emptied town, watching Adelia watch William, surprising herself with the depths of her own melancholy. There was also comfort in escaping into Margaux’s journals. To open their pages reminded Louise of a closet she used to love sitting in as a child. She could have huddled in that closet forever, feeling the weight of empty coats draping her shoulders. There was a long fur coat that her mother had inherited from her mum, which fell over Louise’s shoulders so heavily that she felt as if she’d wriggled into the emptied body of a bear. There were rustling windbreakers, the smell of cured leather, and rubber galoshes that Louise could fit her bare feet into and imagine she was waiting out a terrible flood. She held her breath in that closet while her parents fought and made up outside, or her brother played with his friends, or the dog whined in his loneliness. And when she opened the door and walked out into the bald light of the outside world—no one having noticed how long she was gone—there was always the same disappointment at having to reveal herself once again. When she read Margaux’s journals, she experienced the same feeling of sitting in another person’s long fur coat. She saved them for late at night, when the rest of the family was sleeping and she had the kitchen to herself, so that she could disappear most easily into the closet of Margaux’s words.

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.