Three Story House: A Novel (4 page)

“It’s the house,” she said. “They’re threatening to tear it down or auction it or—”

“The house?” Lizzie asked, thinking of all the places that were important to her mother. She knew, even as she asked, that it would be her grandmother’s house, the one they’d lived in until her mother married Jim.

“Spite House.”

“Condemned,” Lizzie said, finally understanding her mother’s frantic texts. The nickname for their family homestead wasn’t one her mother often used. It came from the sign, one of those historical markers, cemented into the brick sidewalk at the base of the home’s front yard. Lizzie thought of the place as her grandmother’s or, on occasion, when describing it to friends, as Skinny House. The implications of “spite” had been lost to her for many years and even now, when she understood all too well how anger had a way of warping actions and turning them vindictive, she hesitated to call the house by that name. It was a name for outsiders. Lizzie had lived in the house, loved it, loved her grandmother, and she found the name wouldn’t form on her lips.

“Condemned,” her mother echoed.

“What happened to that couple? The ones you hired from your church to watch the place while you and Jim do this mission thing?”

“I don’t know.” Her mother sniffed and let out a ragged breath before continuing with her explanation. “I wouldn’t even have known, but Sister Henderson e-mailed Jim to tell us it was on the news. It’s awful, so awful, and they weren’t kind at all—said the house was rumored to have connections to the Nazis. The Nazis!”

“Does it?” Lizzie didn’t know much about her extended family. Maybe her grandfather who’d built the house had a secret history.

“Of course not. That’s some rumor started by one of your grandfather’s brothers because the cupola on the top looks like one of those tanks.”

Lizzie, who’d spent most of her time in the house in that cupola, had a difficult time imagining the space at it would appear from the street. “I know what the house means to you, Momma.”

“To you, also.”

She should have recognized the trap. Her mother had been using the same emotional blackmail tools on Lizzie for as far back as she could recall. If something were important to her mother, by default it became important to Lizzie. But instead of finding a way to back out of the conversation, she plunged ahead, acknowledging what the house meant to her. “It’s where my childhood lives.”

“So you’ll go?”

“I’m doing rehab here. It’s not something you can leave.”

“You could do it in Memphis. You did it before.”

Lizzie sighed. Even if it were technically true, she’d planned to stay as connected to the team as she could. The last two times she’d blown out her knee, she’d rehabbed at her mother’s house. The trouble with the life that Lizzie had set up was that she didn’t have a home. She moved into temporary apartments depending on the team’s training schedule and on which professional team she was playing for. The last decade had been one of staying in but not living in places.

Isobel came in the front door, kicked off her shoes, and curled up on the bed next to Lizzie, leaning in to hear the conversation. On the phone, her mother explained how she needed Lizzie to get to Memphis and fix what had gone wrong with the house. She talked about code enforcement and contractors and the small inheritance that her grandmother had left them when she’d died several years earlier. “Bring Isobel with you. Surely she can take a break from acting and put those skills her father taught her to good use.”

“No,” Lizzie said. “Isobel’s too busy to come with me. I’ve already put her out enough.”

“That house is as much yours as it is mine.” Her mother took a breath and continued to wheedle, telling her that she understood how she might be angry because of her leg, but that when doors were shut, God had a way of opening new ones and that it was her obligation to walk through this one. “It has to be you.”

Isobel took the phone from Lizzie’s hand and put it on speaker. “Damn,” she mouthed, as they listened to Lizzie’s mother talk through every possible avenue of guilt.

It was if her mother knew nothing about her. This disconnect between them hurt Lizzie more than she could admit. Her earliest memories collected, like beads of dew on a spider web, around the sensation of her mother’s hand on the small of her back. It had been the two of them until Lizzie was eight and she got caught up in what she had come to think of as an unprecedented season of expansion. Her stepfather brought with him not only an extensive extended family, but then in a panicked rush against her mother’s biological clock and with the aid of fertility treatments, had turned out two half-brothers, Grant and Lincoln, and two half-sisters, Reagan and Kennedy. She supposed they should have been her new team, but no matter how much she loved them all, they weren’t a team. She was too many years older, and she’d stubbornly held out when they’d all joined that church. Maybe when her siblings were grown, they could be a team, but for the time being there were too many differences. The barrier to camaraderie rarely acknowledged by Lizzie was that she didn’t know who her biological father was or why he’d left, and until she had those answers, she couldn’t commit to the blended family.

Her mother paused for breath. In the background, Lizzie heard her stepfather ask for the phone. They spoke in muffled tones to each other and after the audible sound of a door closing, her stepfather cleared his throat. “She’s left the room, Lollypop.”

“I can’t.” Lizzie looked at Isobel, who nodded and moved her hands to try to get her to say everything she thought.

“I don’t think you should,” he said. “You go there and you’ll be digging up old history and the way things are with your mom now, the way they have been since Mellie’s death.” He stopped talking for several seconds as if he had to stop himself from speaking his mind. “This next year should be all about you moving forward. That house has never done anyone in your family any favors.”

“It’s not that bad. Grandma was happy there,” Lizzie said, thinking of her rooftop sanctuary with dozens of prisms hanging in its windows. “My rehab is here and I still don’t know where I’ll land. They’re talking about a new league after the Olympics and I should be better by then.”

“I agree.” Jim started to talk to her about her leg, but then in the middle of asking her about her last flex test, he changed the subject back to the house. “If it goes, you’ll be okay, right? No regrets or anything.”

“There are always regrets.”

“I don’t even think they’ll tear it down. We’ll be back in the States this time next year and as slow as Memphis moves, I fully expect it to be exactly where it is now. But if it’s not—”

“Then it’s not,” Lizzie said, watching as her cousin’s eyes widened.

“Hello?” Jim’s voice had a tinny peal to it. “Your mother has more to say.”

“Think about it carefully,” Isobel said, trying to cover the phone’s speaker. “You could make it the very last thing you do for her.”

“I can’t do this now,” Lizzie said. She grabbed the phone back and tried to hit the mute button, while Isobel listed off the reasons that she shouldn’t be so hasty about saying no to her parents.

She wondered if anyone else’s family was as messed up as hers. As a child, there had been long stretches during which her mother and grandmother hadn’t spoken. After Lizzie’s mother married Jim, the silence lasted two years. During that time, she’d taken refuge in her grandmother’s house on Sunday mornings while Jim and her mother went to church. Although only eight at the time, Lizzie had refused to attend, and her parents, bless them, had readily accepted the compromise of allowing her to spend those worship hours with Grandma Mellie. Looking back on it, Lizzie understood that guilt had fueled their acquiescence. There wouldn’t be an oil crisis if the powers that be could figure out how to run the world’s machines on guilt. It was an endless chain reaction motivating action and reaction in families since the first mother had the first daughter. Lizzie figured that was the reason the Bible never got around to naming Eve’s girls. She heard her mother call her name. Lizzie looked down at the phone in her hand, surprised to find that her mother hadn’t hung up. As she moved her thumb to disconnect the call, her mother said, “I don’t think she’s there anymore.”

“I am,” Lizzie said, and before her mother could take over the conversation again, she said what Isobel had told her. “I’m not going forever. If I do this, then you can’t ask me for anything else. No more guilt trips about Grandma or about not seeing my siblings enough or about church. We’re done with that.”

“We’re a family—”

“That doesn’t mean what you think it does,” Lizzie said. “I’ll go, and Isobel will come and we’ll check out the damage and see what needs to be done, but that’s as far as it goes. We’ll probably hire someone and come back to California.”

“That’s all I was asking for,” her mother said.

Lizzie kept quiet a long while, listening to the sound of her mother trying to hide the fact that she was crying. “You always ask for too much. This is the end of it. The very last time.”

T
he November after Lizzie graduated from the University of Central Florida, her grandmother died. She wasn’t alone in this; throughout college, teammates had training schedules and game-day lineups disrupted by the funerals of elderly relatives. Those years were the first wave of grief. Later, when she joined the national team, a few of the women lost parents, and Lizzie saw then that the second wave of loss when it came would be more like a tsunami. But that year, when Lizzie heard her stepfather explain how her grandmother hadn’t woken up, she only felt like she’d walked into water, not been swept away by it.

The images of her grandmother played on a loop in her brain. She could see her bending low to open the oven in the kitchen of her impossible house. The light streaming from the windows cast her in shadows and made her wrinkles appear as deep crevices. Even when she stood, she remained hunched—a consequence of her fear of doctors and weak bones. She did not let the collapse of her spine change how she approached the world. Compromise, as she’d often told Lizzie, was for fools who valued being popular over being true.

Lizzie’s last visit had been an afterthought that had the appearance of thoughtfulness. She hadn’t come home specifically to help her grandmother transition from the hospital back to her house after getting a new hip, but the timing had worked out. She needed a place to crash for the two weeks she had off between training and the next tournament; when she called her mother halfway through the drive from Florida to Memphis, her mother had thought she’d let her know about the surgery and suggested that, instead of spending her time with Jim and her siblings, she could spend it with her grandmother. Lizzie pretended to have remembered about the hip replacement and agreed that she’d drive straight to the hospital and make the arrangements needed to get Mellie back to her house and started with physical therapy. Of everyone, Lizzie had the most experience with putting the body to work after surgery.

Stepping into the hospital, Lizzie walked to her grandmother’s room without anyone noticing her presence. At the floor desk, the nurse straightened up and set aside her book when she saw Lizzie approach. “We didn’t expect anyone to come tonight,” she’d said, leading her down a darkened hallway to Mellie’s room. “Happy Halloween.”

“Isn’t it early?” Lizzie asked.

The nurse gestured to a plastic jack-o-lantern filled with tootsie rolls. “Given the uncertainty of everyone’s time here, we try to make every day a holiday. So all of October is Halloween, and next month every day will be Thanksgiving.”

“I see,” Lizzie shrugged and helped herself to a candy.

“Your grandmother might be out of it—from sleep or the meds.”

Walking down the hallway, she held the candy tight in her hand and let it soften before popping it into her mouth and opening the door to her grandmother’s room. It closed with a soft click and as Lizzie’s eyes adjusted to the low-lit room, her grandmother spoke.

“The angels said it would be my little Lizzie.” Her eyes were closed.

“Are you awake?” Her grandmother’s certainty about her presence in the room confused her. She didn’t think she’d been told that Lizzie was coming.

“The light hurts,” Mellie said, letting one eye open and then groping for the remote that adjusted the angle of her bed.

Lizzie pulled the curtain past the moon and leaned over for a hug before pulling a stool to the edge of the bed. At first, she didn’t linger on her grandmother’s mention of angels. It had been enough to hear strength in her voice. Her hair needed to be dyed. The gray roots were nearly as long as the colored ends. “I missed you.”

“We have a lot of work to do.”

“That’s why I’m here. We’ll take you home tomorrow and get you set up with the therapist who’ll help you get used to the new hip and—”

“I’m not talking about that. I’ll be fine and walking straight before you know it.” Mellie leaned over, taking Lizzie’s chin in her hand, as if she were a child. “You’re not on the right path.”

“I’m doing fine,” Lizzie said, smoothing back her grandmother’s hair. “Or rather I’m doing the best I can.”

“But you aren’t. The angels showed me how broken you were. How it started with your mother and me. I’m broken too.”

“You’re fixed now,” Lizzie said, alarmed by the desperation in her grandmother’s voice.

“But I’m not. That’s why the angels let me come back, so I’d have time to fix all that I’d broken.”

As her grandmother continued to talk in nonsensical ways about angels and emotional scars, Lizzie pushed the button to summon the nurse. She tried to interrupt, to stop the flow of crazy that her grandmother spouted, but each time, Mellie silenced her with a sharp rap of her knuckles on the edge of the metal bed frame. Finally, in a burst of anger, almost yelling, Lizzie said, “But you don’t believe in that crap.”

“Nothing like almost dying to change your mind.”

“You didn’t die,” Lizzie said, not understanding how there could be degrees of mortality. She thought about the Sundays of her adolescence—the two of them shaking their heads at her mother’s piety. “The end is what you make of it,” her grandmother used to say. Lizzie had taken that to mean there was little value in believing in something other than yourself—not that she believed in even that little anymore. The nurse, smelling like cigarettes, poked her head in. Lizzie excused herself and stepped into the hall.