Three Story House: A Novel (7 page)

“Can’t find my phone,” Lizzie lied. She opened a tan box marked “Halloween.”

“So, you haven’t talked to your mother? Or code enforcement?”

“I will.” Lizzie tried not to be defensive, to expect Isobel of all people to understand how hard it was to call her mother and have a conversation—about money, expectations and failures.

Isobel looked as if she were about to say more, but instead she mentioned cleaning up and disappeared upstairs.

“She’s not going to let you slide much longer,” Elyse said.

Lizzie let her fingers sift through the contents of the box, which contained dozens of letters and handfuls of photographs from three or four different decades. “What about you?”

“I’m a free spirit,” Elyse said, dog-earing a page in the cookbook. “Nobody cares if I disappear for weeks, or even months. Besides, it’s a place I could see myself staying.”

“Honestly?” Before Lizzie could push her cousin further on the idea, she glimpsed several Polaroids of her mother with feathered hair. Lizzie turned the box upside down and let its contents spill onto the floor. She’d seen a photograph like that once before—it was from the year her mother was pregnant with her.

Isobel reappeared with a towel wrapped around her. “I found your phone. Forty-two text messages and seventeen missed calls.”

Lizzie ignored her. Among the pictures she clutched was one of her mother taken when she must have been six or seven months pregnant.

“What are we going to do about this?” Isobel asked, putting an emphasis on the word “we” that made Lizzie think there was about to be an intervention.

“Why do we have to do anything?” Lizzie moved her thumb over her mother’s face and studied the photograph for clues about what had been happening in her life that year. Who had she spent time with? What had she been like?

“What if we wake up tomorrow and they’re bulldozing the place on top of us?” Isobel brought her hands together, as if the house had collapsed in on itself.

“That won’t happen,” Lizzie said. In the photograph, a man a little older than her mother stood to the side. He had heavy eyebrows and splotchy skin. She couldn’t tell if he was with her mother or just in the background. “Last time I talked to that secretary over there, she said to wait for them to call me.”

Isobel handed Elyse the phone. Looking up, Lizzie saw that they were reading her messages. “You can’t ignore your family,” Elyse began before changing topics. “And what about your leg? When does your trainer want you back in Los Angeles?”

Lizzie didn’t want to talk about her knee. During their last phone conversation, her trainer had kept talking about where Lizzie should be instead of where she was. The fact that he wouldn’t talk about the Olympics and cautioned her about expecting too much from her body worried her. “What about you? Why is it that you left Boston?”

“I’m on vacation,” Elyse said, looking at the photograph in Lizzie’s hand. “That your mother?”

“We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Isobel said.

Elyse had taken the picture from Lizzie. “I bet this house is full of stuff from your mom.”

Lizzie looked around the kitchen. The walls were lined with handwritten notes from her grandmother and mementos from her mother’s childhood. She thought about the other rooms in the house and the sheer amount of miscellany hidden in its nooks. The most success she’d ever had in rehab had been with her first therapist, Phil. He’d believed in her in a way no one ever else had. She thought about what her mother would owe her if she rescued the house. “I’ve been thinking about staying,” Lizzie decided. “I mean for a while. For as long as it takes.”

“To fix the house?” Isobel asked.

Lizzie didn’t meet her eyes. She wasn’t thinking only about the house.

“You can’t do this stuff on your own. Hell, I can’t even do some of it. We’re talking wiring at the very least, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the plumbing is compromised.” Isobel looked at Elyse, who passed her the photograph.

“I’ll hire someone.”

“You’ll be lonely,” Isobel said and then nudged Elyse as if to give her a line prompt.

“It has to be her idea.”

Lizzie reluctantly set the photographs aside. She’d been right to suspect her cousins of intervening. They talked over her, as if she weren’t in the room.

Isobel rubbed Lizzie’s back in slow circles. “But she won’t. You know that.”

“You have to ask us,” Elyse said.

Lizzie shook her head. She couldn’t ask them. It was too much, even for almost sisters.

“Wonder if your mother still has that T-shirt.” Elyse had a sense of when to press people and when to give them a break. “My dad talks about being at that game all the time, says the AC was out and that it must have been a hundred degrees in the arena.”

Lizzie took the photo back, staring at her mother’s green Celtics’ shirt and started to ask Elyse when she needed to go back to work, but instead of answering, Elyse again brought up her rehab plans.

“I could do it here. I’ve done it before.” And then before she could lose her nerve, she asked about Elyse’s timeline. “How long could you stay?”

Elyse looked away from her. “A day, a week, a month. I paid extra for one of those open-ended tickets.”

Isobel caught Lizzie’s eye and then shrugged; there was a sense in everything Elyse had told them about her visit that she was holding back. Before she lost her nerve, Lizzie asked Isobel about staying. “Don’t you have to get back to auditions and your property and such?”

“I don’t have to do anything. If you asked me to stay, I could,” Isobel said, stepping back from the two of them and running her fingers over the frames of the doors and the windows. “I can rent out my half of the duplex if we stick around here a while. That’ll give me some walking-around money.”

“Your trust fund all tapped out?” Lizzie teased. They’d always given Isobel a hard time about the money she’d earned from the show. Mostly because the sums, at least when they were children, had been staggering. They pictured rooms full of gold coins with Scrooge McDuck swimming through them. “It’s all tied up in real estate,” Isobel said, her voice flattening.

“I like this house,” Elyse interrupted. “It’s a little bit pissed off, like all of us.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Lizzie said, her mind already considering how much she needed them to. “The more I’m here, the more I feel like I can’t leave.”

“Come on,” Elyse said. “You can barely move around with your knee.”

Isobel, channeling their childhood, moved her index fingers in circles to indicate how crazy Lizzie was acting. “How are you going to fix a place when you can’t tell me the difference between a Phillips and a flathead.”

“What is she talking about?” Lizzie said to Elyse.

“Are you asking us to stay?” Isobel asked.

“I’m asking,” Lizzie finally said.

“Then it’s settled.” Elyse picked up Lizzie’s phone and scrolled through the contacts until she found the number for Lizzie’s parents in Russia. She pressed call and handed over the phone. Lizzie listened to the metallic ping of the ring and began a mental list of who she’d have to call next. Before her mother picked up, Lizzie put her hand over the receiver.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said to her cousins, who stood by the large windows looking over the bluff. She stretched out her leg on the empty chair next to her. Isobel blew her hot breath on the glass panes in the door, and Elyse reached over and traced out three figures connected at the hands, like a chain of paper dolls.

When code enforcement finally caught up with them, Lizzie, in between conditioning and therapy appointments, had put on one of her grandmother’s cocktail dresses and had a fox stole, complete with leathery paws and glass button eyes, draped around her shoulders. Her cousins had offered to run errands while she sorted through the items that the three of them had cleared out from several of the house’s wardrobes. Clothing, hat boxes, shoes, and the like were piled on the kitchen floor. A deep pounding at the front door startled her. Although the noise demanded her immediate attention, her leg had stiffened while she’d been on the floor and getting up proved a challenge.

Commands were shouted through the door. She couldn’t make out but a few words: police, unlawful. “I’m coming,” she called, as she leaned against the narrow hallway and limped toward the entrance. The wood of the front door groaned. Frantic to get to it before they could burst inside, Lizzie took a step on her right leg, and it buckled under her. She scooted toward the door, reaching to unlock and open it. When the door swung inward, she still sat on the floor. The fox had slid down her shoulder so that the tail tickled her collarbone.

The men looked over her head and yelled more agitated words.

“Why are you here? Who are you?” one of the officers shouted.

Lizzie backed away in surprise. The man had appeared by her side as if by teleportation. He crouched next to her. The shoulders of his uniform shirt were too wide.

“I live here,” Lizzie said. She struggled to stand. Another officer, this one large and imposing, held his arm out. When she reached for him, he grasped her by the wrist, pulling her to her feet in one quick motion. She swayed, unsteady and unsure who was in charge.

“Who are you? Do you have identification?” the small officer asked again. He reached out and put his hand on Lizzie’s shoulder. The fox fell to the floor without her moving to pick it up. With his other hand he pointed at her purse, which was hung on the banister post at the base of the staircase. She realized they were the same height. “Is that yours?”

Her knee wavered as if someone had kicked the back of it, and she felt the color drain from her face. The officer steadied her. A black man in a shiny suit pushed his way into the house. He had a clipboard and radiated authority.

“This is my grandmother’s house. It was,” Lizzie corrected herself. “I mean my mother owns it now.”

“You’re in violation,” the man in the suit said. He moved his hand across his clean-shaven head and looked down at his papers. “Didn’t you see the notices? This house is set to be sold at auction at the end of February.”

“I don’t know.” Lizzie didn’t want to lie, but she wasn’t ready to admit to having ignored the signs until she knew how much trouble she was in. “I tried calling about the power and stuff, but nobody ever calls back.”

“Our records show the certified letters we sent to the property owner were returned. Do you know anything about that?” The man rocked on his heels and made notes in block letters. He looked to be in his early thirties and had high cheekbones and full lips. Looking at him, she thought that despite his hard edge, he could be generous.

He’d realized she was staring at him, and she felt the blush of embarrassment. “No. I mean my parents are out of the country and I—”

“But you’re the current homeowner’s representative?”

“I don’t understand,” Lizzie said. She wanted to fill up the space between them with words. To explain to the man in the suit and the police officers about all the work that they’d already done on the house, to prove to them that the place shouldn’t have been condemned at all. She thought that if she could walk the men through the house, have them feel its odd sturdiness and read Isobel’s wall lists, they’d clap her on the back and tell her what a good job she’d done and what a fine daughter she was.

“Miss. Miss. Are you all right? Are you in an altered state?” The smaller officer had picked up the fox and was trying to settle it back onto her shoulders.

The man in the suit smelled improbably like the beach. He pushed past them, motioning for the larger officer to follow him. “She’s fine. Get her identification.”

“I don’t know about this, T. J.,” the larger man said, eyeing the narrow staircase. He turned to Lizzie. “You don’t have any dogs, do you?”

The man in the suit compressed his lips into a thin line. Lizzie realized that his had been the signature on the paperwork tacked to the front door.
T. J. Freeman, Code Enforcement
. “Fine. You talk to the girl and Slim Jims here can come upstairs. None of this is code. None of it. These old houses drive me crazy. Built on a wing and a prayer with secondhand wood.”

The two officers shrugged and switched places, the smaller one rolling his eyes as he followed T. J. up the stairs. Lizzie wondered what he was looking for. She grabbed her purse and motioned for the larger man to follow her, walking sideways down the hall so he wouldn’t feel crushed by the narrow space.

“Did your grandmother pass away recently?” the officer asked, surveying the open trunk, photo albums, and old greeting cards scattered next to the piles of clothing.

“No,” Lizzie said, digging through her purse for her wallet and extracting her identification. She gave him the license and tried to explain how her parents—or rather her mother, stepfather, and four younger half-siblings, were in Russia. “It’s a church thing,” she said finally, knowing how inadequate it sounded. “He’s in charge of the mission work they do over there.”

“To each their own,” the officer said. “Did you want to call someone?”

Lizzie raised her head up and looked at him. “Who?”

“Your contractor? Your lawyer? Your priest? I mean, with a house like this . . .” he trailed off.

“My grandfather built it,” Lizzie said, feeling a flush of anger at the dismissal of her and the house.

“You think about it,” the officer said, taking the driver’s license she held out to him. He looked down at the plastic card. “Florida, huh? You’re a long way from home.”

“It isn’t home,” Lizzie said. “It’s where I sometimes stay.”

“Don’t go anywhere. Not that you look like a runner,” he said, explaining that he was going to go to his car and run her information.

She took her phone from her purse and texted her cousins. Elyse sent back a frowning face, and Isobel assured her they were on their way. In the few moments she had to herself, she navigated to the city’s code enforcement website and tried to figure out how much trouble she’d gotten herself into.

The oversized cop thumped back into the house, waving Lizzie’s license in front of him as he walked through the beaded curtain. “You’re clean. No warrants, no arrests.”