The Carriage House (19 page)

He was the only one who stood. The rest of the audience stared at him, but he didn’t care. He applauded with more vigor. Elizabeth smiled directly at him, and it was the two of them alone. This was his daughter, who had fought for her place. This was his daughter, who was elegant and strong. In front of him, Elizabeth and the battered refrigerator. Behind his eyes, on the floor of his brain, the smoking carriage house, black against the unnaturally illuminated sky, and in front of it Isabelle in her white dress. And then there was Diana, half smiling in the way she did when he picked her up at the airport and she slung her racket bag into the back of the car. They were there, just beyond his reach. Daughters he couldn’t quite grasp. He locked his eyes on Elizabeth, triumphant before him. He tried to focus completely while she was there on the stage. For a long time, she looked back at him, and then she looked away. Her eyes flickered over the rest of the crowd, and after she had received her applause, she bent, collected her crowbar, and set to work on clearing the stage.

For a long time he refused to sit. Not even his family stood with him. He was alone. Long after no one was clapping anymore, when Elizabeth had wheeled off the dolly and two strong women in dark clothes had come out to push the refrigerator off the stage, William clapped, until the inner space was empty again and the room was blank, and he knew it was time to sit but he didn’t want the feeling to fade into the shell of a memory, like those useless cuttings of grass. Even after he sat, the recollection of having been so stirred remained with him, so he was able to tolerate the sight of a dozen unattractive women chanting in a circle around an overweight person crowned with thorns, who reached into her underpants and took out a chicken egg, then held it up to the audience as though she had done something more impressive than reverse a million years of evolution. Thus should not develop the human female, thought William, refusing to applaud when the troupe finally took their oviparous bows. He felt the presence of his family on both sides of him, women all of them. They were better than that. So much better than an unwieldy person brandishing an egg. Adelia, who had no children of her own, who had loved him fiercely as a snagged tooth. Margaux, whose face had become blurred. And somewhere between the two of them, his three girls. His girls who had somehow slipped away from him but whom he would watch for, every day, as long as he lived, hoping to glimpse them even briefly as they winged their way past.

Chapter 21

A
s soon as Diana finished the plans, she went back to Breacon to start work. She had her certification from UT, awarded after her defense of a new thesis: “Reconstruction of a Nineteenth-Century Carriage House.” Her adviser, surprised by the new direction, congratulated her on having found her voice. On the plane ride back from Austin, Diana sketched memories of the woodwork in the owl’s nest. She completed the blueprints in William’s basement office; when she was done, she took the train downtown to print them at his firm. Back at the rental house in Rock Harbor, she stayed up late in her seafoam-toned bedroom, finalizing details.

As soon as she signaled to Adelia that she was ready to begin, Adelia drove her back to Breacon, promising to secure the building permits through contacts at work. When they arrived at Little Lane, Adelia dropped her off in the driveway. “You’re not staying?” Diana asked. “I’ll stay at my house for a while,” Adelia told her. “You don’t need me here.” Then Adelia handed her a checkbook and gave her a kiss on the cheek that was so hard, Diana was certain it would leave a bruise.

While waiting for the permits to come through, she sorted through the building materials she’d salvaged from the fire, before the neighborhood association swept in to clean up the rubble. She kicked the bricks off the tarp she’d spread over them, then lifted it up like a large blue beach towel. Sixteen glass doorknobs from the cabinets along the sidewall. Seven cedar beams that had fallen during the fire and suffered minimal damage; the rest of the wood was useless, but these could be incorporated into the rebuilt structure. She knelt to smell them; first there was an ashy scent, but then she caught the ancient tabernacle smell. There was a stack of the cement slabs that had covered the floor, and the iron light fixture that used to hang from the ceiling. She passed her hands over their cool surfaces, then covered them again with the tarp. She was on her way inside to call the contractor when she saw Arthur emerging from the front door of his house, carrying a bag of trash.

She smiled as soon as she saw him. Her first instinct was to catch him before he disappeared back into the house, so she waved and shouted. He turned and smiled, the same half smile, and this time she crossed the lawn to his driveway.

“Hey there,” he said when she reached him, and she wondered whether she should be smiling less drastically. They walked out to the plastic bins on the curb. When he’d thrown out the bag, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “How’s Isabelle?”

“She’s okay,” Diana said. “She got her cast off a couple of weeks ago.”

“That’s good to hear.” He hovered before her, hands in his pockets, so close she could have touched him.

“It’s amazing how well she’s recovered. She’s a little different, I think, but I’m not sure it’s bad. She seems less prickly. A little more childish somehow, but I guess that’s not the worst that could happen. She’s postponing college for a year, to volunteer at Breckenridge.” Diana wasn’t sure why she was going on like this; there was the possibility that he had asked the question only to be polite. But she worried that if she stopped talking, he’d go back into the house, so she continued to babble. “My dad’s already talking about her reapplying to Princeton. Normally Izzy would hate that, but now she seems fine with it. She lights up when he mentions it. Which is so strange for Isabelle. Same thing with tennis. She didn’t play for years, but now they go to the courts every morning.” With this she abruptly ran out of things to say. Arthur was squinting at her in the brightness of the August sunlight. A space widened between them. Diana realized how much the Adairs had imposed on him this summer, without offering anything in return. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t need to know all this, do you.”

“It’s fine. I asked.”

“You’ve got enough to worry about. How’s your grandmother?”

“Better. She finished round three of her chemo. The doctors say it went as well as possible.”

“How’s she taking it?”

“She’s been pretty mean,” he said, smiling. “She’s a little mean already, but she’s been a real medal winner this month. I think she’s starting to feel better. This morning she thanked me, which was a minor miracle.”

“You’re good to be here with her,” Diana said. “Loyal.” The memory of his conversation with Isabelle on the night of the fire caused her to pull up short as soon as she said it. It seemed as though he was considering whether to say something, but she felt him decide against it.

“Will you stay now that she’s getting better?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s been hard to be here alone. I miss the city. The new restaurant opens in a month or so, and work is piling up.”

She had to remember that he had a life in New York. The kind of life a promising young person is supposed to possess. It was possible that he had a girlfriend whom he was hoping to return to. A girlfriend who would be modern and independent, who didn’t live with her parents, struggling to rebuild a nineteenth-century house that her sister had burned to the ground. That was the kind of girlfriend who made sense for Arthur. They’d become such different people, she and Arthur, and yet she was reluctant to let him go. She wanted to keep the small place she’d regained in his life. “You could come visit us at the beach, if you want. It’s a real family circus. You’d think it was funny.”

“It’s hard to imagine the Adairs anywhere other than Little Lane. How is everyone?”

“Oddly enough, they seem fine. Maybe better than they were. My dad hated it at first—he’s always been suspicious of vacation—but he’s settled into a routine. He plays tennis with Izzy in the mornings. He wears clothes with embroidered nautical themes. Mom’s done a rose garden, and tomato plants, and she’s filled the whole garage with potted bulbs. Dad even helps her sometimes. It’s sweet, seeing them together, weeding side by side. They planted a vegetable garden, and it’s just sprouting. He’s pretty impressed with himself.”

“That’s good,” Arthur said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be so amenable to a move.”

“To be honest, Adelia’s the one I feel for most. She’s the one who seems really out of place at the beach. She comes back here during the week to work, and when she drives back out, she prowls around in her cardigans, irritated about getting sand in her shoes.”

Arthur laughed. “And Elizabeth?”

“She joined a performance art group. Every week she destroys a different household appliance with a crowbar.”

“Every week?”

“I know, it’s crazy. But the crazier thing is, my dad loves it. He’s her biggest fan. He goes to every performance and comes home raving.”

“He was always proud of you guys.”

Diana caught her breath and looked down at his feet. He was wearing old gray sneakers, the same kind he used to wear as a kid. “Too proud, sometimes,” she said. “More proud than we deserved.” She could feel him watching her, but she was suddenly too ashamed to look up at his face.

“So why are you still here?” he asked.

“I’m rebuilding the carriage house,” she said. “I got my certification. Finally. Apparently, I’ve found my voice in renovation. I’m ‘most expressive in moments of nostalgia for the abandoned past,’ as my adviser poetically put it. It turns out I’m incapable of letting things go.” She glanced up at his face long enough to see that he was looking away, his expression so distant that it was impossible to deduce what he was thinking. She felt a lump rise in her throat. “Anyway, I finished the plans, so I’m just waiting for the permit. The contractor’s meeting me here at noon.”

“That’s great, Diana,” he said. His tone was wistful, as if coming from somewhere far away. “I can’t say I’m surprised. But that’s really impressive, and I’m happy for you.”

She watched his profile. He was squinting off into the space where the carriage house would go up. He seemed thoughtful and sad. Their childhood had fallen so far behind them, and now they were adults, standing in the same driveway, divorced from their previous selves. She remembered with sudden clarity William at the kitchen table, muttering, “He says you’ve changed so much he hardly recognized you.” After the night in the hospital, when she fell asleep on Arthur’s familiar shoulder, she had somehow imagined that the time dividing them had closed. That their lives had intersected again, if not romantically, still meaningfully. One disastrous night and she had imagined there was significance between them again. Now she felt herself sinking. “I’m not sure why I’m so stuck on it,” she murmured. “I can’t think about anything else but rebuilding that carriage house, just as it was, before we ruined it. It’s crazy. Even my dad seems to have forgotten about it now.”

“Well, it’s lucky you won’t give up on it, isn’t it?” There was an edge to his voice that seemed to surprise him. He turned abruptly to look at her, as if he wished he could catch what he’d said before it reached her. She could feel the heat of a flush creeping into her outdated face and couldn’t think of anything to say in response.

“I’m happy Isabelle’s better,” he said through the terrible silence. His words had the sound of conclusion. “I’ve been worried about her.”

Diana nodded. He had stayed with her that night in the hospital until he knew the surgery went fine and the emergency was over. He stayed for Isabelle’s sake, not hers. Only the stupidly nostalgic side of her could have imagined an intersection in the lines of their lives after all these fragmented years.

“I’ll see you, okay?” he said, touching her elbow lightly.

“Okay,” she said, and when he had disappeared into Anita’s house, she was left in the driveway with all the things she might have said years ago, before so much time had passed that saying them would be a useless mistake.

Chapter 22

A
delia’s number was 131. She had been waiting in the Permits and Licensing Department of the County Commissioner’s Office for an hour and a half for her number to be called, her eyes trained on the TV monitor that summoned the citizens of Bronwyn County to their reckoning. The bag that contained her application—thick with copies of Diana’s plans—sat on the floor between her navy ballet flats. When she first sat down, the chosen number was 61; Adelia watched as a handsome young man with a cell phone attached to his belt headed toward doorway number 8. She considered taking out the work she had brought from the office, but her mind was racing, and it was difficult not to be distracted by the progression of the numbers.

It was possible that she might lose him. He had gone off to the shore with Margaux at Adelia’s own urging, and the experience had not forced him to acknowledge how badly he wanted to return. At first, when she hatched the plan, she thought,
Let him go off with her. Let him live in the place where she lives, that place she occupies beyond human relation. He’ll want to return as soon as he’s arrived
. But he was happy at the shore, and Adelia was alone again, as she had been in the apartment in Brooklyn. But this time she had no dream of William to keep her company. In Brooklyn he’d hovered just beyond her grasp; now she’d come back to him. She’d gotten so close that she’d lain with him in his bed, her cheek on his chest, feeling the body that had eluded her so long.

The blinking number moved from 73 to 74, 74 to 75, 75 to 76. If she couldn’t bring him back, he’d be gone forever. For ten years she lived close to him, and that was nearly enough. Then she stepped across the threshold into his house, but by that point he was already leaving, following Margaux to the place Margaux had been hoping to go. The chance that she might lose him forever rattled around in Adelia’s diaphragm. She was having trouble breathing fully. She got up and walked over to the water fountain, which emitted a dribble so pathetic that her lips brushed the metal spigot as she drank. Over her bent head, the number switched from 98 to 99. Adelia tensed in expectation of some grand resetting that might happen at 100, an apocalyptic shift: 100 turned to 101. She returned to her seat. She sat down and adjusted her skirt, crossing her legs at the ankles. The hem of her skirt—navy blue and pleated—reached the middle of her knees. This was the kind of outfit she’d worn since she was twelve. And now she was in her fifties. Adelia had passed over from her youth without realizing. She’d finally gotten William, only to watch him leave. She closed her eyes and remembered him dancing with Margaux under the mosaic light of that disco ball, his eyes so soft and far away. Adelia had wondered if it was cruel of her to want to yank him back to the world that she lived in. But could she follow him there? Could she cling to him at the beach, watching while he gardened with Margaux, hovering off to one side while they danced under glimmering lights? When she opened her eyes, she looked down at her hands: she had been clutching her own palms so hard, there were eight red crescents left by her nails. Her own ferocity surprised her; determined Adelia had always held on to things too hard.

She watched the neon number move from 128 to 129, 129 to 130, 130 to 132. She blinked. What happened to 131? She waited. 133. Her lips parted; this wasn’t right. She waited again. 134. Her mouth was wide open; had they skipped her number entirely? 134 shifted to 135. Adelia Lively stood and looked around at the crowd of passive waiters; had no one else witnessed this event? An elderly man was collecting himself to appear before his maker. Quickly, mercilessly, Adelia hurried to beat him to teller number 3. She flew across the room, soundless, an avenging angel in her pleated skirt and ballet flats. From behind a sheet of glass, the teller looked up from his computer and folded his hands on the desk, awaiting her arrival. His glasses were thick and he peered vulnerably at her, moleish and overexposed, one of those people who could never survive in the wild.

“Excuse me, sir, but my number wasn’t called.” Adelia told him, taking a seat, leaning toward him.

“Oh, dear,” the mole man said. There were pictures of a red-haired woman framed behind him, evidence of a life outside the Permit and Licensing Department. “Your number wasn’t called?” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“No, I was skipped.” Even as she said it, Adelia perceived the weight of what she had said. She was skipped. She had been skipped over, never pulled up into proper adulthood. The hand that passed over young women and selected some of them to become mothers had hovered over her head and then moved on so that she lived her life alone, waiting, hoping for the hand to return.

“This is my teller,” the old man whined from behind her. “This is
my
teller.”

“Can you just wait a minute?” Adelia asked without turning around.

“Would you look at that,” said the man behind the glass plate, who was squinting at his computer. “You
were
skipped, weren’t you?”

“This is my teller!” the man insisted.

“Just wait!” Adelia said.

The mole man flinched; his little red mouth seemed far too sensitive for a fight. His allegiances were torn between the old man and Adelia. “Ma’am, if you could just step aside while I help this gentleman, then I’ll get to you right after him.”

“I will not wait any longer! My number was before his!”

“Please lower your voice.”

“I will not move,” she whispered angrily.

The teller blanched. Adelia could tell that his red-haired wife would have performed better in this circumstance; without her, the shortsighted mole man was lost aboveground. He swallowed, then appealed to the man behind Adelia. “Sir, would you mind waiting for just a minute?”

“This is my teller,” the old man said again, but he had already given up the fight.

“Fine. I’ll be with you in a minute. How can I help you?” The teller shifted his attention back to Adelia.

“I need a B-3 building permit.”

“Name?”

“Adelia Lively, Esquire. I am the owner’s legal representative.”

“ID?” She handed him her license. “You’ve filled out the application?” Yes, Adelia Lively always filled the appropriate applications. “And the plumber and electrician also filled out their sections? You can give them to me now, with copies of the plans.”

Adelia slid these through the crack beneath the teller’s glass. He flipped through the pages. “Adair Architecture,” he muttered. “Intern, Diana Adair. And who is the supervising architect?”

Adelia stared him down. “William Adair.” She refused to blink. He certainly had not agreed to supervise, but now was not the time for moral quibbling. The teller paused, agonizingly, then continued flipping through the application. He seemed satisfied. Effective Adelia, stuck on a fading idea, had hired the appropriate contractors, forged a note to attain the architect’s seal, checked with neighborhood association bylaws. The appropriate forms had most definitely been filled out.

Finally, laying aside the paperwork, the teller squinted at his computer, his mouth working. “We’re running at about a week for processing right now, assuming everything checks out fine. You should get it in the mail in a week.” A receipt printed behind him in fits and starts. Adelia stared, counting, numbers ticking away in her mind. For one week Adelia would wait in Breacon while William withdrew. One week, and then Diana would be ready to build. The contractors were waiting with their largest team. One week and two months for the house to go up. When it was almost up—not before then, she couldn’t stand too much more time in the rental house, watching William while he watched his wife—she’d go back down to collect him. Two months, and Adelia would ask for one more leave of absence from her skeptical boss, who never once imagined she would be so irresponsible this late in her illustriously competent career. One week and two months, and she’d try one last time to retrieve the man she loved from the place he’d withdrawn to and bring him back to the place where she remained.

“You should get it in a week, two at the latest,” the teller said again, eyeing the old man hovering behind her.

“What if I don’t?” Adelia asked. “I’ve been skipped in the past.”

“If you don’t receive the form, you should call this number,” he said, sliding a piece of paper through the slot in his glass pane.

Adelia took it. She stood with dignity and shouldered her purse. “You should keep better track of your numbers,” she said, then ceded her place at the glass.