The Carriage House (21 page)

Chapter 25

D
iana oversaw construction, alone on Little Lane, for the months of September and October. The speed at which the house went up was amazing to her. It was like watching a creature come alive. A conjured being composed of beams and panels and cement. At the end of the day, she walked to the grocery store for dinner makings, and after dinner she wandered through the frame of the house. It was different each evening, more complicated and complete. She started eating her dinner there, carrying a card table and a desk lamp out and sitting in the company of the frame’s even lines while clouds passed the empty space above her. One night it rained, a quick, heavy rain, and when she went out to the house afterward, the wood was so fragrant that she pressed her nose against it and closed her eyes.

On the second Friday in October, the roof went up. She watched from the patio as it become complete, shingles covering the open beams that had crisscrossed the crowns of maple trees when she sat beneath them in the afternoons. Shingle by shingle the house enclosed itself, battening down. Afterward, she brought the builders beer and thanked them for all their work. She sat with them on the lawn, strewn with fallen maple leaves, until it was time for them to clear out. Alone except for the finished house, she packed up the car to return to the beach.

When she walked in the door, Isabelle was curled i
n the overstuffed armchair, studying her anatomy book. She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Di’s back,” she said to no one in particular.

Diana kissed her little sister on the head. The book in her lap was open to a picture of the heart, with its purple and red highway system of twisting aorta, ventricle, and vena cava.

“I missed you,” Isabelle said.

“Me, too, Izzy.” There was a deep brown scar on her collarbone where the bone had snapped in half and broken the skin; Izzy reached up and touched it absently as she continued to study the anatomy book.

William was out in the backyard with Margaux, clipping tomato plants. For a minute, Diana watched them from the screened-in porch. It was funny to see her father in his gardening gloves, glancing back at his wife for advice. Margaux sat on her heels, eclipsed by her large straw hat. Occasionally she pointed, and William adjusted his efforts. They worked in such suspended harmony that Diana hesitated before interrupting them. When she did move out to join them, the screen door clattered behind her.

“You’re back,” William said.

“I am.”

“You’ve gotten some sun,” he said. “Your looks are improved.” Satisfied, he resumed weeding the flower bed.

When Diana went back inside, she found Adelia glaring into the refrigerator as though she could cause something missing to appear simply by virtue of staring hard enough.

“Adelia.”

She spun around, bumping the refrigerator shut with her angular shoulder. “You’re back, Di. How is it? How did it go?”

Diana took a deep breath. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. Relief flooded Adelia’s face. “It still needs paint and plumbing. But Adelia, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“Oh, Di! I’m so proud of you.” Adelia moved across the kitchen to hug her. Her embrace was bony and sharp. “I’m so proud of you, I could tear you apart.” Diana, grateful, pressed her palms hard against Adelia’s shoulder blades.

Chapter 26

I
sabelle playing tennis was a thing to see. Lifting the ball between her racket and her shoe, crooking her leg like a shore bird. Strolling from side to side between points, twirling the racket on her finger. Concentrating. She was tan from spending her days outside, and she had put on enough weight since the operation to look healthy again. She was very tall. It was a good thing he had married a woman with Margaux’s height. His girls were tall. Wide-shouldered, with real wingspan. Perfect for tennis. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up around her shoulders, and a Nike tennis skirt that she must have gotten at Smith’s. Shopping at Smith’s Sports on Main Street was something Isabelle never would have done in the past. She had always looked down on things that young girls like to do, such as shopping at places like Smith’s Sports. And now she was chewing gum while she bounced the ball on her strings, playing tennis with her dad and rolling up the sleeves of her T-shirt to avoid a tennis tan.

Somehow the accident had caused her to take several steps back. That was how William described it to himself. It had caused her to reconsider the speed at which she had headed off, and to move at a more appropriate pace. The shift was enormous but invisible. The only remaining evidence of the accident was the scar on her collarbone. Otherwise, she was the same girl, and yet it was as though her body were occupied with a different version of herself.

He liked this version. This was a strange thing to admit, since this version was the result of a terrible accident. But the truth was that William liked this iteration of his daughter, who enjoyed playing tennis with him, picking up the ball like she used to, with her leg effortlessly crooked. When she prepared to return his serve, she swayed low, squinting across the net, and when she moved, there was an easy fluidity that his other girls had lacked. Diana was tenacious and her vision was better than that of any kid he’d ever seen, professional or not. She set her heart on winning something and didn’t give up, at least not back then. Izzy wasn’t so determined. She would never be as good as Di, mostly because she had taken too many crucial years off. Those years could not be gotten back. They were lost. Moreover, she had none of the killer instinct that Elizabeth had inherited from him. He would have liked to see her acquire a bit of Lizzie’s grit, that glint in her eye when she was battering a kitchen appliance. But to see Isabelle’s side-to-side movement, effortless and naturally economical, was to be convinced that she had been born to play this sport. With another year of hard training, she could play at college. Not D-1, but maybe doubles at an Ivy League school, as William had done. She could follow in his footsteps, the fourth Adair, including Henry, to play tennis at an Ivy. It was different now, of course. The girls on the Princeton team were basically pros. William did not find those girls attractive. Their legs were overly muscled, and it would be a shame for Isabelle to look like that. But maybe she could play JV. It would give her a nice community. He liked to imagine her strolling over green lawns, friends by her side and a racket slung over her shoulder.

William was glad she wasn’t going to college yet. She wasn’t quite strong enough. It was a documented fact that her immunity was low because of the removed spleen, but also she emerged from the hospital fragile in ways that couldn’t be attributed just to anatomy. It was as if she were a child again, looking to her father for strength. Not that you would know it, to see her play! Powerfully, she returned the ground strokes he fed to her backhand. She was best in a pattern of ground strokes, when she wasn’t trying to win the point. Just spinning out shots like bright thread. She had the most technically perfect backswing that William had ever seen. She was admittedly slower than Diana had been. There was a long loping rhythm to her movement that wasn’t ideal. But Isabelle was Isabelle, and she was still his, if only momentarily. She was still there with him, playing tennis every morning, rolling her sleeves and calling to him over the net.

She jogged to the service line. Once, twice, three times she bounced the ball in front of her tan knee. She tossed it up, up, watching it rise above her with the slightest frown between her eyebrows. And then, all in one fluid movement, she unfurled her body, arm and racket continuous like a long silver blade, turning. It was such a lovely serve that William had to remind himself to return, and he was off balance so that only his stronger forehand kept him in the point.

“Good get, Daddy,” Isabelle called over to him when the point was over. Everything was going so well with her that William was tempted to drive her back to the club to play a match in front of Jack Weld, so that he would see how undefeated the Adairs remained. He would see Isabelle’s perfect backswing, and William would mention that she was deferring college for a year because she wanted to work in the hospital, and that he was hoping she’d apply to Princeton. But William was not so far away from the night of the accident that he was unaware of the subterranean thing that had existed on Little Lane. Though he didn’t understand it, it woke him up sometimes in the middle of the night. Then he lay beneath its shape. All he had to do was picture Isabelle’s face after the dinner party, with those shadows etched into it, her dark arms floating above her white dress, drinking that bottle of wine before telling him she’d talk to Weld about the carriage house.

To imagine that was enough to make him recoil in shame, even when he was lying in bed at night and even though he didn’t entirely understand the cause for his recoiling. He felt it with certainty. It had been there, and it was disturbing enough for him to want to stay far away from that street. He could forfeit his grudge against Jack Weld, if only for the benefit of his kids. He could just let it go. What’s done was done; none of the old territory was reclaimable. And it was enough for him that Izzy was here, playing tennis with him, her brown legs creaturely, bouncing the ball once, twice, three times before she tossed it up to the sun.

Afterward, they walked home together along the cracked sidewalk, past Pam’s Pancake House and the playground and the rows of houses that had been painted ridiculous sherbety colors. When they got home, Isabelle would make him a sandwich and they would eat together on the screened-in porch. He would not allow himself to imagine anything else, anything greater, than this right now. If it could be like this back on Little Lane, that might be different. If they could keep this closeness there, regardless of Jack Weld, despite the burned-down carriage house. But still. William reminded himself not to wish for too much, lest some of his wishes come true.

“Do you want chicken salad or tuna fish?” Izzy asked him from the kitchen.

“Surprise me,” he told her, which made her smile. He watched her opening a can of tuna, mixing it with mayonnaise and red pepper flakes so that he would feel it in his nose even if he couldn’t smell it. When the bread popped out of the toaster, she laid it on one of the sailboat plates and sliced a tomato from Margaux’s garden, deep red and shot through with purple streaks. She salted the tomato slices, glancing up at him to catch him watching her, smiling in response.

“Izzy?” he asked while her hands moved deftly over the toast. “Do you want to go back to Little Lane? Or would you rather stay here?”

Her hands paused on the counter, but she didn’t answer immediately.

“Because, you know,” he said, excitement building in him, “if we went back there, we’d be closer to Lizzie and the kids. Mom could get another helper, and you could play tennis with better people at the country club. It would be great for your game.”

She didn’t look at him, but she lifted her left hand, holding the butter knife, up to her collarbone. She rubbed her scar with her thumb. Looking down at the half-done sandwich, she shook her head. No. Watching her, William felt as thirsty as he had ever felt in his life. His hands, by his sides, twitched to hold a glass of something to drink.

“We don’t have to. We could just stay.”

She was nodding already, first at the sandwich, then at him. He wanted her to say something. “
Say
something,” he was tempted to demand. “Say something stable and strong, like a young woman who is prepared for the world.” But he held himself back, because this time with her was a gift he had not expected. Because he’d lost her once, years before he’d been prepared to let her go.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, Izzy, that’s fine. Mom and I are happy here. You can drive to the hospital. And you can study from here, and we’ll find you more people to play with.” He took a glass tumbler from the cabinet and poured himself water from the tap. Over its brim, he watched her moving between the refrigerator and the plate. She finished their sandwiches, and they sat together on the porch, facing the garden that Margaux had planted.

Margaux’s garden, rebuilt. Since they fired Louise, she hadn’t once wandered away. She stayed close. It couldn’t last, of course, but William had the feeling that here, in this rented house, the three of them could stay close. For a while William and Isabelle were quiet together, eating their sandwiches, and then she stopped with a potato chip in one hand and looked at him. “Do you mind, Daddy? If we stay?”

“Of course not, Izzy-belle.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. We’re all happier here.” And they were. He missed things only in theory. The walk to the club, the yard, the kitchen island, the Osage orange trees that he passed on his way to the train. These things he missed in theory, but in actuality, they seemed like aspects of a life he’d seen in a film. The kind of film that makes you nostalgic for places you’ve never been. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night and was engulfed by the strangeness of his new bedroom at the shore. The sound of gulls and the rustling ocean drifted in through his window, unsettling him in its foreignness. Those mornings he woke so thirsty that he stumbled to the bathroom to drink water from the tap only to find he had mistaken something else for thirst. A strangeness that sat in his mind like a boulder, too massive to be divided and composed, understandable only as a tightening in his throat that most closely resembled thirst. Then he sat on the cool porcelain edge of the tub to compose himself, the pre-dawn gloom lit by an overhead light, listening to the strange sounds of gulls.

These were the moments when he wanted to go home. After these nights it was a joy to spend time with Margaux in the garden, even if she barely spoke to him, because it was her hands that had planted the yellowwoods, when they were still wrapped in their burlap bags, in the yard on Little Lane. When William could not recall the smell of the Osage orange trees on Clubhouse Road, he felt so distant from himself that Margaux seemed close, and he sometimes reached out and touched the brim of her large straw hat and felt reassured that she was more present than most of the world.

In the end there was no need to go back to Little Lane. Its old urgencies and demands were strange to him. How could he have cared so much about a carriage house? How could he have imagined that his family’s history was more real than pictures in a textbook? It had been too much for his family to bear. Things were better here at the beach. The days passed more happily. Here, there was tennis with Isabelle in the mornings. There was the perfection of her looping backswing. There were Elizabeth’s performances, and time with Margaux in the garden. All of this was complicated, of course, by Adelia’s unexpected return. She prowled the rental house, wishing for more, casting doubt on their new routines in a way that made William want to banish her to Breacon. So that he could occupy his beach life in peace. So that she would not waste more time wishing for him to go back. Soon she would pack up the Acura, and he would miss her and be glad she was gone. Then there would be less question of leaving, less hopeless desire for long-lost pinnacles. There would be Margaux’s tough little roses and the smell of salt in the air, the surprise sometimes of the ocean through a gap between two houses. It was not too terribly little to live these days pleasantly, knowing that his girls would be fine, playing tennis in the mornings and eating lunch on the porch, remembering a world he saw once in a nearly forgotten film.