Three Story House: A Novel (23 page)

She picked up a handful of cards and instead of reading the notes on the cards and looking at the numbers in the corners, she tried sorting them based on what looked like it belonged together. Stack, stack, stack. Placing the cards quickly into piles, she kept her mind on the problem of Landon. The wedding was only a few weeks away, and she would have to face him. She’d have to face her sister and, worst of all, she’d have to stand up there as one of the bridesmaids and offer her support.

Happily ever after. Elyse knew in her brain that those words were useless. They were more than nonsense, they were dangerous. She could be practical with other people. With herself. What? She was still waiting for her happy ending. In the movies, in books, and especially in pop songs, the men always ended up with the women who loved them most. Honestly, she thought that her sister loved the idea of Landon more than Landon himself. What did they know of each other?

Her phone chirped. Looking down she saw that her cousins were on their way home. “News,” the text said. Not good or bad, but just news. Her thumb moved to the e-mail icon, and she checked for any messages in the account
[email protected]
. It remained empty. It was too needy, too obvious. What was her proof? Why should Landon choose her over Daphne?

Before Elyse had left for grad school and Landon for his Teach for America assignment, they had spent the summer together. Both were living with their parents, and neither had a real job. Instead, they volunteered at a Boys and Girls Club day camp and on their days off, she’d ride on the back of his motorcycle to her grandparents’ beach house. He’d worked for nearly two years to modify the motorcycle to allow him to ride—switching the controls to the left and working out the stability issues with his prosthetic. Elyse liked the freedom the bike gave him. That might have been their summer to fall in love, but he was at the very end of a relationship with his college sweetheart. Landon made a perfect boyfriend. His girls were usually the president of the student body or the head of the debate club. High achievers were attracted to him because he was smart and laid back. They liked that he only had one arm—it made them feel like they were better people. Lacey, the girl he’d dated throughout most of college, had political aspirations. Teach for America had been her idea for Landon, although it suited him perfectly. She’d planned on working in Washington, DC, for one of the local congressmen at the same time he’d be teaching in a low-income school in the city.

A week before Elyse and Landon were to leave on their last day off together, they ignored the weather report predicting an afternoon storm and rode out to the beach anyway. The day was like most days they spent there—they had lunch with her grandparents, built sandcastles with some of the younger cousins who were still spending their summer there, and played pinochle with Elyse’s parents before heading back to Boston. Daphne, who was sixteen that year and coming into her beauty, had begged Landon to take her around the block on his bike before they left for home. He’d done it and when he came back, he held the helmet out to Elyse and everyone had tried to get them to stay, citing the storm. They hadn’t listened.

For most of the trip, the weather cooperated beautifully, but about thirty minutes before they reached their neighborhood, the skies opened up and poured down on them. She was never sure how it happened, but Landon pulled off into a secluded park, studded with trees. He slowed the bike to a stop and pulled a yellow bloom off one of the low-hanging trees. The color was so vibrant that it glowed in the shaded light of the storm. They talked about how they hoped their new lives would go—Elyse defending her decision to pursue her master’s in hospitality and Landon talking about how he expected his Teach For America assignment with middle school children to go. They complained, as always, about their families and the expectations they were failing to live up to.

By the time they took shelter in a wooden pavilion designed for family reunions and weddings, they were drenched. She undid her hair from its ponytail and tried to wring it out. The damp fabric of her T-shirt clung to her nipples. She blushed. He shrugged out of his jacket and set it on the edge of the railing. When he leaned forward, Elyse could see the sharp bones of his shoulders through the thin fabric of his shirt.

He’d gone through a chunky, awkward phase before he’d had his growth spurt, and because of that, he was one of those men who didn’t know how handsome he was. During college, he’d grown a beard to hide his baby cheeks. Elyse thought about how soft it would be if she kissed him and then about how it would feel to have him rub his face against her skin.

After their initial burst of conversation, each found they didn’t know what to say, so instead they stared out at the sky and watched the lightning jump from cloud to cloud. He had his back to her and the translucence of his shirt felt like an invitation. She loved everything about him, even the prosthetic arm that looked real until you noticed it never moved. She put her hand on the small of his back, and then pressed herself against him.

“I don’t know how to be with you, like this,” he said without looking at her. “Xystus.”

“Xystus,” she repeated, looking over his shoulder at the thin strips of wood that made up the interior of the gazebo. How was it that they’d come to a place that the two of them had a name for?

He turned and it was exactly like she’d imagined. The look he gave her reminded her of the reflection of two mirrors—endlessly bouncing the light from one space to the next. He swept her up in his arms and kissed her softly at first and then with more urgency. “You’re everything to me,” he said. “You always have been and you always will be.”

“I love you,” she said. They kissed each other more and his hands wandered over her body, making her feel weak-kneed. The air smelled as if they were at the base of a waterfall—crisp and wet, and there was the same loud roar in the air. His hands worked at the clasp on her bra. She slid her fingers inside the waistband of his pants as he pushed up her shirt and kissed her nipples.

They fumbled with each other in a way that made her think of the first times she’d slept with a man. She became conscious of the stiffness of his prosthetic. Landon spread his hand across her chest, rubbing her nipples with his thumb and pinky. The base of his palm was calloused and the roughness felt good against her skin.

“Yes,” she said as he teased at her neck with quick bites.

She reached for the buckle on his pants and was glad when it came open quickly. She pressed her palm against his jeans, feeling how hard and long he was. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

He took his hand from her chest and pushed at the top of his pants. With his hand gone, she felt the cold chill of the day on her. She pulled his face to her breasts and leaned back. She thought of all the ways in which her life could change, now that they were together. He was sliding off her pants, his tongue working its way down her stomach when shouts of children echoed around the pavilion. The rain had stopped. They hastily covered themselves, not looking at each other as a group of boys, no older than ten, appeared on the sidewalk as if out of nowhere. All of them were on bicycles. One of them broke away from the pack and rode through a large pool of standing water that had gathered at the back edge of the pavilion. The others followed, and in a moment the boys were covered with mud, and she and Landon quickly pulled their riding gear back on and walked toward his motorcycle. Elyse held her wet T-shirt away from her body and reached for Landon’s hand. She fumbled around a bit before realizing she’d grabbed his prosthetic. Looking at him, in hopes of sharing a joke, she found that he wouldn’t meet her gaze

When Landon dropped her off at her house, she invited him in. He shook his head, not even taking off his helmet before riding away. She assumed that he felt guilty because of Lacey. The day before she left for grad school, she drove over to his house in the middle of the night and snuck into his bedroom. It wasn’t what she’d intended to do, but when she tried the back door and found it unlocked, she couldn’t help herself. She slipped into his bed and they finished what they’d started in the gazebo. Never once speaking about what might come next.

Elyse wasn’t sure what she expected. What happened was that he moved to Washington and taught in a middle school there for two years. They resumed writing pithy e-mails to each other and life moved on. She dated. She quit the hospitality program and switched to urban anthropology. He and Lacey broke up, and he spent two years in Uruguay teaching English and then a little more than a year before, when Elyse was in the middle of a messy relationship and trying to make her bed and breakfast be something more than a failure, Landon had gotten a job teaching at the same middle school as Elyse’s parents and started spending time with everyone in her family, including Daphne. What a screwed-up concept time was in the end. You could spend hours, weeks, months with a person and none of it mattered if it wasn’t the right hour at the right time. When had he and Daphne fallen in love? During family dinners that Elyse hadn’t attended because of a water leak, or during Saturday barbecues when she was busy dealing with bed bugs? She didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. What she wanted she couldn’t have.

The door opened and Isobel swept in. “It was a disaster,” she said and collapsed into one of the chairs pulled up to the table.

“Do we have to leave?”

“We’re not leaving,” Lizzie said, standing in the doorway.

“They can’t make us move,” Isobel said, “but they’re making us test for lead, asbestos, and a dozen other potentially dangerous chemicals.”

“Sounds expensive,” Elyse said, tapping the edges of the cards she’d sorted so they stood up in straight columns.”

“It is,” Lizzie said, sighing. “And if they do find anything toxic, removal is going to kill the budget.”

“At least the ants are dead,” Elyse offered.

“Put out a fire and find out there’s an earthquake,” Lizzie said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Isobel said.

“Agreed,” Lizzie said, coming up behind Elyse’s shoulder. “Solve any mysteries for me?”

Elyse shrugged and checked the e-mail on her phone again. Lizzie picked up a few of the cards from one of the stacks. She shuffled through them and then quickly put several of them in order before reaching for more from the same stack.

“How’d you do this?”

“Do what?” Elyse asked, considering another glass of wine. She turned her phone off, tired of being disappointed by the lack of a response. If her phone were off, it would take her longer to check that damn account and maybe she could break the habit.

“These all seem like they’re from the same year. It’s a whole series of entries about working at the law firm. Do you know that’s what my mom did after she got out of college? I guess she’d intended to be a lawyer before she got pregnant.”

“When was that?” Isobel asked.

“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about that stuff.”

“You’ll have to talk to her about the house,” Isobel said, “so you might as well bring up the law firm. Maybe she’ll give you enough information to make some headway on this mess.”

“I still don’t understand how you did this,” Lizzie said.

Elyse squinted her eyes at her cousin. “You have to look at the handwriting. The color of the ink, the size of the letters.”

“I guess,” Lizzie said, trying to compare the handwriting from two of the stacks.

“You might not have the gift,” Elyse said. “You’re too organized. It’s like—”

“Right,” Isobel said. “Like that experiment that shows the different ways kids and adults think. If you give people a picture of a monkey, an orange, and a banana, the adults always put the orange and the banana together. But kids—”

“Kids and some of us creative types,” Elyse said, taking back control of the conversation, “will always sort the monkey with the banana.”

Lizzie shook her head, trying to understand Elyse’s sorting method. Elyse, feeling brash, puffed out her cheeks and pretended to be a monkey eating a banana. Her mind was on Landon and those words he’d said all those years ago. In her heart, she believed he’d e-mail her secret account. She was convinced he was settling for Daphne and that if he knew how she truly felt, they could be together.

T
he bones of Spite House were covered with asbestos. After testing the ceilings and opening up the walls, the inspectors determined that the vermiculite insulation needed to be removed. The city required the cousins to be out of the house for all of this. And so in mid-July, Elyse found herself not only packing to leave for her sister’s wedding but going early. Her grandmother had invited the Triplins to spend the week before the wedding at the beach house, which would leave Benny enough time to oversee the abatement crew and give the cousins a chance for a real vacation.

Not that Elyse’s mother saw it that way. “What have you been doing this whole time?” she’d asked during a phone call earlier that week. She’d gone on complaining about having to do all of the wedding chores herself and how much they’d expected and wanted Elyse to be involved. Elyse zipped her suitcase and set it on the floor with a thump. She should cut her mother some slack. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, she hadn’t done what her mother had wanted her to. The nagging was her mother’s way of expressing disappointment and covering her confusion. The unspoken question remained: “Why did you leave?”

Through the vents, Elyse heard Isobel muttering complaints about trying to fit every piece of clothing she wanted to take into a carry-on. Lizzie went up and down the steps moving items from one room to another in a last-minute effort to prevent heirlooms from having to be thrown away. She’d developed an irrational fear that the removal process would contaminate them. Benny followed her, his tread on the steps slower. While it was Benny’s fault that Lizzie was currently in a panic, she’d been on edge every day since the hearing.

Elyse slid her laptop into her oversized purse. She waited until Lizzie was in between trips up and down the stairs and then slipped into the bathroom next to her room.
Now.
She pulled the light on, closed the lid to the toilet, locked the door, and sat down, taking her phone from her pocket. There’d finally been a response to the secret e-mail address.
About damn time,
she thought, the memory of the five anonymous love letters she’d sent burning in her consciousness. His response totaled three words: