The Carriage House (23 page)

Chapter 29

O
n 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 into 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

W
illiam 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.

And so she was silent as they returned from exile to the house on Little Lane. If William couldn’t remember that this was his home, she would be lost. The only thing he said for the duration of the ride was, “What have the neighbors been saying about it?” and Adelia answered, “Who cares about the damn neighbors?” When they pulled into the driveway and got out of the car, Adelia allowed Diana to walk beside William. Diana had worked so hard. So much was riding on this for her as well. Adelia watched them walking together, and it was almost too much. Such an arc they had traveled. When Diana was younger, Adelia had enjoyed imagining the exceptional woman she would become. She had enjoyed watching William report the news of Diana’s recent victories with that unabashed triumph in his eyes. Both of them had changed. Diana’s success with the carriage house had revived her spirits, but Adelia suspected that it was a fragile recovery; Diana looked as though someone had slapped her when Elizabeth announced that Arthur had come for Isabelle. Adelia doubted that she could withstand another major disappointment, and William was so unwieldy beside her, glancing back so often toward Adelia with that cross look on his face, that Adelia worried he would fail to rise to the occasion. When they came around the side of the house and the new building rose into view, Diana and William stopped. Adelia caught up with them and searched William’s face. He gazed at it coolly, his expression unchanged.

“So there it is,” he said at last.

“It’s the same, isn’t it?” Diana asked. Her words hovered in the air.

“The design is similar,” William replied. They moved closer to the house. Adelia and Diana hung back and allowed him to approach on his own. He raised one finger to the paint. He tested the wall with his weight. He looked up the corner of the house to the roof, then backed up to them. “It’s well designed, Diana,” he said. “It’s fine. But it’s not the same.” He glanced at Adelia, knowing she would be angry, but still bullheaded in his conviction. “It’s not what you want to hear, but the truth is that it’s not the same. It’s a house made with different wood. Thomas Hardy said the spirit of the building is in the stones, and he drafted enough cathedral renovations to know what he was talking about. It’s true. This is a different house than the one my grandfather built. The paint is different, the shingles and the windowpanes. I can’t feel the same about it.”

“Oh, William, just wait before you say that,” Adelia said, taking his arm and clutching it. “Just wait before you say such a terrible thing.” She led him inside, and she could feel herself gripping too hard, wanting to hurt him so that he would feel the importance of this moment. They pushed through the door; Diana followed. There, inside the empty space of the house that Diana had built, Adelia pointed out the ways that Diana had tried. “See, William, the doorknobs are the same,” she said, pointing out the little prismatic knobs. “They were saved from the fire.” A flatness had settled over Diana’s face, and Adelia could feel herself growing frantic. “And the floor panels, William, do you see them? Those are the same. That is the same cement your grandfather poured.” William looked down at his beach shoes. Where was her William? It was essential that he arrive here from whatever distance he had retreated to. She took his arm again. “Come here, William.” She dragged him over to the wall and pulled a chair from the card table in the corner. “Stand on this.” He obeyed simply because it was the easiest thing to do. “Look up, do you see that beam? It’s the same cedar. Touch it.” William reached up. It was the movement that he made when he tossed a tennis ball to serve, one arm reached high, his face tilted up with a slight frown. He touched the beam. He stood like that a long time without saying anything, and then Adelia realized there were tears streaming down his face. Diana could see it, too, and she leaned hard against the wall.

“It’s fine, Dad, don’t worry,” Diana said. “We tried, but it’s okay.”

“No, William,” Adelia said, “it is not okay! William Adair, what is the matter with you?” It was not okay at all that he would not even try to remember himself in this place. “Your daughter has built this house for you, and it’s the same as your damn carriage house, and what could possibly be the matter now?”

“Don’t worry, Adelia,” Diana said. “It’s fine. I promise, it’s fine.”

“I’d like to go inside,” William said, getting down from his chair clumsily, like an old, defeated man. “I’d like to go inside for a minute.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, William!” Adelia cried, but he was heading out the door toward the house, and Diana seemed rooted in place, so Adelia followed him. “For Christ’s sake, she built that house for you!” she said. He kept moving. “She saved those beams from the original. The cement panels are exactly the same; she lugged them over one by one, your daughter did, for you.”

He slid open the screen door. Inside, he sat down on a stool at the kitchen island and put his head in his hands. “I could smell it,” he said.

Adelia stopped in her tracks. “What did you say?”

“I could smell the cedar,” he said. “The way it used to smell. When we were kids and we played in there, when my brother was alive, when the house was ours.”

“You smelled it.” Adelia moved to his side. She touched his shoulder and he looked up at her.

“The doctor said it was impossible,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe, but things change.”

“I swear to you, Adelia. I swear I smelled it. It smelled like it used to when we played up there in the fall. Like long-gone summers were trapped in the loft, bottled by cedar. I swear to you that I smelled that.”

“You really did?” she asked.

“I swear on my life,” he repeated, looking directly at her.

“Swear it on my life,” she told him.

“I do,” he said. And then he pulled her closer, and her fingertips were on his collarbone, and she could feel the warmth of his face against her own.