Three Story House: A Novel (16 page)

Near the end of the second half, Rosa May returned to Lizzie’s elbow. They watched the church team, which was made up of mostly white girls in sponsored uniforms. Their ponytails bounced high on the crowns of their heads. “You know in every other country, soccer is a sport for the poor kids. It doesn’t take much equipment—basically a ball and an empty space.”

Lizzie shrugged. “Doesn’t much matter. That’s what’s great about soccer—it’s an equalizer. You can be good if you’re big or if you’re small. Some girls bring precision and others bring passion. That’s why I love the game. It plays to everyone’s strengths. Hard to do that in basketball.”

The whistle sounded. “Tie game,” the ref said, congratulating each team before walking off the field. Out of the corner of her eye, Lizzie saw Dray move toward the ref. Rosa May tensed and the other coach, who’d been walking toward them, turned, ready to intervene if necessary.

“Wait,” Lizzie said, more to herself than to those around her. “Give her the chance.”

When she got within striking distance, Dray dropped her head like a dog losing a challenge and mumbled an apology to the referee, who smiled and clapped Dray on the back.

“How about that,” Rosa May said.

Lizzie let the girls drift toward their families and rides home. She reminded them about practice and then turned back to her own family. Elyse and Isobel were still squabbling over the phone, with Isobel threatening to write every word Elyse uttered into a screenplay and Elyse claiming that one in ten people in the world had psychopathic tendencies and that she felt quite strongly that Isobel was one of those ten percent. It made Lizzie laugh to see how much like sisters the three of them had become. The last few months had been the longest they’d ever been together.

Rosa May gathered her family and after helping to strap her children into their car seats, she turned toward Lizzie. “Call my brother.”

“Nah,” Lizzie said. “I’ve got too much going on.”

“No, that’s just it. You don’t have enough going on. Besides, it’s like you told the girls with that pep talk of yours: you gotta be brave if you want to win at life. Calling him, that’s the brave act.”

In the car, Isobel decided she wasn’t speaking to Elyse. “She’s up to something,” she told Lizzie as they loaded the balls and other practice gear into the back of Grandma Mellie’s old yellow Datsun, which served as the main transportation for all of them.

“I can hear you,” Elyse said from inside the car. “It’s not like this thing is soundproof.”

Isobel pushed her sunglasses up off her face. “You should ask her why she’s texting Landon.”

They got into the car and Lizzie started the engine and then just as quickly turned it off. The trouble with Elyse had always been that she thought she was smarter than everyone else. One of the reasons she dressed the way she did and kept her hair in that girlish style was so that she had the advantage on other people. She liked to be underestimated.

“What’s going on?” Elyse crossed her arms. “We should get home.”

Isobel, who’d taken the backseat, leaned forward and shook out her hair in a single flamboyant motion. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

“Really?!” Elyse said.

Lizzie tried not to laugh.

“We all know that’s your line from the cop show that got cancelled after three episodes,” Elyse said, putting her own sunglasses on and then pulling them off in mimicry of her cousin. “There’s a flipping gif of it floating around the Internet, where you take the glasses off and put them back on again in an endless loop.”

Isobel adopted a serious pose, her eyebrows knit together in false injury. She held it for a moment before smiling. “You two are impossible.”

They laughed together for several minutes before Lizzie finally started the car. They’d find out sooner or later what Elyse was up to. Because even if she hadn’t realized it, Isobel had spoken the truth. What they’d done by abandoning their other lives and coming to Memphis was give themselves time.

“You’ve got to give yourself time,” Phil said, watching Lizzie jog on the treadmill.

“My leg feels good. I feel ready,” Lizzie said, reaching for the buttons that would propel the machine faster and steeper.

“I say when you’re ready,” Phil said, swatting her hand away.

“Now that I’m out there with the girls, I want so badly to play. Biking and jogging and balancing on rubber balls isn’t even close to the same feeling. How can I get my body ready if I can’t even play a pick-up game with high schoolers?”

“Patience,” he said, running his hand over his recently buzzed hair. He insisted on keeping it in the same style he’d had since serving in the military. Gray hair was never meant to be in a flattop. The old people didn’t like Phil because he talked in a soft voice that none of them could hear when he worked with them on their strengthening exercises.

“But I’ve got full movement,” Lizzie said, switching her walk to a march to show him how well her knee was doing.

“You’ve got to have strength too,” he said, tapping her knees to stop any bounce in her step.

The receptionist called Phil to the front. He left Lizzie to walk for a few more minutes to warm up. “Look,” he said, backing away, “today might be the day I tell you that your knee is as good as new, but I won’t know until I put you through the paces. So let me do it. Okay?”

Lizzie nodded.

“You don’t look very happy, girlie,” the man on the treadmill next to her said. “What’d he say to you? Bad news?”

Lizzie tapped the arrow on the treadmill, sending her speed up one-tenth of a mile. She smiled at the old man next to her.

He took it as encouragement. “I got a new set of knees, and I told the therapist that I’m going to run a marathon with them.”

“Is that so?” Lizzie asked, thinking how short older people were. The man barely came up to her shoulder.

“What?” he said.

Lizzie swallowed and spoke as loud as she could. “I don’t doubt that you will.”

The man gave her a wink and then pushed his speed button twice.

What Lizzie wanted most was to be told that she could play soccer again. The surgeon had warned her against it. He said that if her knee blew a fourth time, they might not be able to fix it. She’d known girls who’d come back from their fourth or even fifth surgery and maybe they didn’t play at the national level, but they played professionally. Not that being paid to play was even an option anymore unless you wanted to go to Europe. The problem with the surgery before this last one, Lizzie decided, had been the cadaver tendon. It had seemed like the perfect fix when the surgeon suggested she consider using someone else’s tendon instead of crafting one from parts of her own body. In the end, she’d had only a year of use with that tendon before it had blown. When she thought about it, Lizzie kept hearing the captain’s voice ringing out over the practice field asking about her ACL.

The treadmill slowed and Lizzie stopped moving, letting the last rotation of the machine push her off the back end of it. She strained her eyes over the heads of the elderly in the room, trying to find Phil. Now that she’d warmed up her leg, he’d manipulate it to see if she’d regained full mobility.

“Good luck, sweetheart,” the older man called as she walked toward reception. She peered through the small glass window separating the exercise room from the waiting area. Phil was deep in conversation with what appeared to be the parents of a teenage girl who had a cast up to her hip and headphones big enough that they obscured most of her head. She considered interrupting but instead fished her phone out of her pocket and situated herself on Phil’s examination table. The tables weren’t even screened off from each other; two tables down, a woman in her mid-sixties pounded her fist against the bench in pain and protest at the bend her therapist was putting into her knee.

She read over the text messages she’d been exchanging with T. J. about their second date. Lizzie had made it with a sense of celebration in mind. She felt sure that Phil would give her the go-ahead to play, which meant she could talk to the coach about maybe working out with the team. Tentatively, she flexed the thigh muscles in her left leg and then her right. So much muscle mass had been lost in the past year. One leg was literally twice the size of the other, and there was an uncomfortable stiffness when she bent her knee. There was only so much conditioning could overcome.

She picked up the piece of plastic pipe that Phil used to massage the back of her leg where they’d taken out part of her hamstring. Last week, he’d expressed concern that the small lump of scar tissue he’d noticed on earlier visits seemed to be increasing in size. He’d given her the length of pipe and told her to do it at least three times a day. It felt like walking on marbles, but she’d been doing it. He kept bringing up the possibility of surgery, but she resisted. “Sorry, so sorry,” Phil called as he crossed the room to Lizzie. “Young girl broke her leg in three places playing roller derby. Roller derby at fourteen! Can you imagine? Anyway, I wanted to talk with them before the cast came off so we’d have some sort of plan.”

Lizzie lay flat on her back as Phil continued to talk about the girl. She kept her good leg flat, while he bent and twisted her right leg, occasionally interrupting his story to ask her to bend or flex or stretch as he took measurements. When he was done, he put a warm towel over her knee and told her to sit still. “I need to look at your chart,” he said.

He returned and leaned over the table. “It isn’t what you want to hear.”

“But it’s better, right?”

“I’m still concerned about the grinding noise and the fact that you can’t straighten your knee.”

Lizzie looked away from him. “Today’s just a bad day. I’ve been massaging it.”

“This is a whole different area. You can’t get to it with massage. I think we’re looking at scar tissue, maybe a cyclops lesion.”

Over the next thirty minutes, she learned more than she ever thought she would about the body’s reaction to being cut. It turns out that scar tissue is made up of the same material as the tissue it replaces, but an abundance of collagen means it’s knitted together in a way that makes it inflexible. Some people never get scar tissue and others, especially those who’ve been immobile, had painful buildups of the material that interfered with motion. “This is what I get,” she said.

“I know you’re opposed to more surgery, so let’s see what happens if you keep working, massaging the area as you increase the muscles around it.”

“Can I play?”

“With due caution, yes.”

At home, she gathered her cousins around her and told them in a burst not only about her leg, but in an attempt to leave them with some good news, about T. J. Isobel hugged her and told her it was about time she took that code inspector for a test drive. Elyse’s face changed for a moment when she heard. It hardened in a way that made her look much older. Seeing this version of her cousin’s face made Lizzie think that not having a dream of her own had taken its toll on her.

“I’ve got to be eating or cooking to talk,” Elyse said. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a pile of ingredients.

Isobel eyed it with suspicion. “What’s that going to become? Please tell me you aren’t actually going to use that heavy cream for anything.”

“Stop worrying about your weight for once,” Lizzie said.

“It pays the bills,” Isobel said, moving her hand along her body as if she were displaying wares.

“Not right now it doesn’t,” Elyse said.

“Whoa,” Lizzie said. She wasn’t prepared for the shift in the emotion.

“See, that’s frank talk. We need more of it. Because if there are people I don’t have to be careful with, it should be the two of you.” Elyse lined up celery, carrots, and onions and began chopping. “I can maybe see how you can act and not eat, but there’s no way you can write a script and not eat. Your brain needs food.”

“Are you crying?” Lizzie asked Elyse, still shocked at how coldly she’d spoken to Isobel.

“It’s the onions.”

Isobel stood up and walked to the counter. She put her arms around Elyse. “If I stand next to you, can I claim it’s the onions too?”

“You can say what you need to,” Elyse said, waving the knife in Isobel’s direction. “Crying is cathartic and whether you’re crying out of relief or joy, I’d say what we all need is a good cry and a bowl of soup.”

“What are you two crying about anyway?” Lizzie asked, and even as she said it a sob rose up in her throat and made the words come out muddled.

“I don’t cry,” Isobel said. “I mean, sure I get teary eyed watching movies on the plane, or listening to any torch song on the radio. What I don’t do is cry over my own life.”

“You’re fooling yourself,” Elyse said. “All those little tears stand in for the big ones you don’t have time for.”

In a moment the three of them were crying—each one only vaguely aware of what the other two were crying about.

“Isn’t there some superstition about getting tears into the soup pot?” Isobel finally asked, sniffling and wiping her eyes and nose on the edge of her shirt.

Elyse dumped the vegetables into the Dutch oven and added a splash of oil. Then she blew her nose on a paper towel and dried her eyes. “I think it has to do with salt. A salty soup means the cook is in love.”

“That pot is definitely going to have too much salt in it,” Isobel said.

“You should find a way to move on with your life,” Lizzie said.

“I’m not ready for that. I can’t even talk about it,” Elyse said. “All I know for sure is that I can’t be in Boston right now. My sister keeps calling and asking me about being a bridesmaid and wants to know what I think about flowers and appetizers. But I can’t do any of it. So I’m here because, as my parents are so fond of saying, the only way to forget your own problems is to get involved in helping someone else overcome theirs.”

By the time the soup was ready, the women had cried themselves out. When she heard T. J.’s knock on the back door, Lizzie thought about how the beauty of a rainstorm was that it made the whole world a little bit cleaner and occasionally gave way for a brief moment to a rainbow.

Second Story