The Carriage House (16 page)

Chapter 16

W
hen the first ball of fire broke the windowpane and bounced four times across the floor, Diana watched it as if it were an exotic bird. It was intensely bright, the orb of bluish heat at its center dripping with gold. The second one bounced outside the open door, then rolled into the entryway, where it kept to itself, a lonely little blaze. Watching it, she smiled. It was the strangest, most beautiful thing she had seen in a long time. Only when the third ball hit the window frame and bounced back out, landing in a pile of shrubbery and erupting into flame, did Diana become more practical. She thought of running into the Schmidts’ house for water, then stopped. Judging from the speed at which the shrubbery was going up in flames, she wouldn’t have time for that. She remembered that you were supposed to throw blankets over fire. She’d have to climb up the old stairs to the loft, assuming those blankets were still up there. She should probably run for help. It was an ancient building, condemned by the district. But it was also her father’s carriage house, the carriage house she shared with Arthur, and she was running up the stairs before she had time to hesitate. She nearly broke an ankle when one of the old planks gave out beneath her feet, but she had hold of the loft’s floor by then, and she found firm enough footing on the next stair to scramble up. The blankets were heaped there, so inviting that she almost wanted to lie down in them, wrapped in their old scent, allowing the smoke to billow up around her in plumes.

By the time she had an armful of blankets, at least a dozen more balls of fire had been launched into or around the carriage house, and flame from the first one was licking the wall in a ribbon of bright tongues. There was one at the base of the stairs, too, but the crown of fire around it was small enough that Diana started her backward descent. Only when she reached back with her foot and felt nothing but air—the bottom half of the stairs had collapsed entirely—did she understand that she would have to jump into the fire. She hung there for a minute, barefoot, strangely calm, perversely imagining that perhaps she should wait, but the wood was burning her fingers, and she knew she would let go soon except that suddenly someone reached up and took hold. She released her fingers and fell into him. He helped her outside. For a moment she thought of holding on to him, grasping this unexpected closeness while she could, but the carriage house was burning. Three jags of flame lined the door as if it were a hoop of fire in a circus trick. Inside, the floor shimmered with gold.

“Did you call 911?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “I thought someone might be in there, so I came.”

“I’ll do it,” she said, and ran inside, and when she came out again, he was still standing there, holding the blankets. She took them, went back through the flaming hoop, and threw them down, as best as she could, over the shimmering floor. Smoke billowed up around her and she retreated, coughing. Arthur took hold of her elbow. “Don’t go back in, Diana, it’s only a house.”

She pulled free of him and ran back out to the road, as though that would hurry the fire trucks, and when she did, she saw that the Jeep was gone, which was curious enough to give her a chill. When she crossed back through the yard, she passed a tennis racket with a black hole at the center of its strings and a half-full hopper. Only then did she realize that the orbs of fire had been burning tennis balls.

She joined Arthur again. “We have to go look for her,” she said.

“Who?”

“Isabelle. She took the Jeep.”

He looked down at the tennis racket in her hands. “She was drunk?”

“Yes.”

“I should have stayed with her.”

“Just come with me,” she said. He followed her back to the house. Inside, she ran up to William’s room and saw, in the darkness, Adelia lying beside him. She was wearing her white flannel nightgown; he was dressed in striped pajamas that made him look like a child. They looked like children curled together, Adelia’s head against his shoulder and her arm across his chest, his hand holding the elbow as if to lock it in place. Diana knew she should feel betrayed on her mother’s behalf, but there was something so tender about her father’s hand holding that elbow, and outside, the carriage house was burning. Diana knelt at Adelia’s side and put one hand on her shoulder.

“Adelia,” Diana whispered. Adelia peered at Diana through the darkness. “The carriage house is on fire. The fire department is coming. I’m going out to look for Isabelle.” Adelia blinked, still comprehending. “I’ll call you later. It’s going to be okay.”

The air outside smelled like smoke and June trees. The bullfrogs had gone quiet; everything was oddly hushed except for the static crackling of the fire. The dark sky behind the house had been pushed aside by an uneasy halo of peach-colored light. Arthur and Diana didn’t speak as they climbed into the car and turned down Little Lane, passing the screaming sirens on their way onto Clubhouse Road.

“Will they save it?” he asked when the screaming had faded behind them.

“No. They’ll stop the fire, but they won’t save it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. She looked at him for the first time. He was wearing the same plaid shirt, over the same gray T-shirt, that he had been wearing at dinner. His hair smelled like smoke. She remembered, now that she was seeing him, the particular line of his profile.

They drove down Clubhouse Road, under the Osage orange trees, out Buckley Street past St. Matthew’s church, to Breacon Avenue. They passed the tennis courts on their right, lined by chestnut trees. Diana watched them slide away. “Why did you go back into the house that morning you saw me in the garden with Lucy?”

She could feel him glance at her, then look away. “It’s been hard for me to see you,” he said. He was quiet for a while, and she kept her eyes on the road so that he would continue. “For me, what happened between us was real,” he said at last. “For a long time, it was hard to forget. Even now seeing you is difficult.”

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” she said. Through the open windows, the wind brushed by her. Everything was passing so quickly. Now, in the eerie light of this evening, that morning in the garden seemed impossibly distant. Even the way she’d missed him all those years seemed like an ancient artifact, something that could be talked about without too much embarrassment. “It’s hard for me, too,” she heard herself saying. “I’ve changed so much since we were together.” It would have pained her to admit this before, but she was long past that point.

“We all have,” he said. For a while they drove in silence, the car full of wind and the sound of leaves passing outside, until Arthur turned to her again.

“Where would she have gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you going?”

“To school, I guess.” By instinct, she was following their old route to high school. Through Breacon, over the bridge, west toward the city. Already she could feel the dangerous curves of Kennedy Drive in her hands. She had steered that road for years, driving with Izzy to school. In the winter, icicles as long as yardsticks dripped down the sheer rock face along the western side of the road, and in the spring, trickles of water poured through the moss that grew in its crevasses. There were three different memorials at treacherous points of its route. It curved in ways that were difficult to manage. Beside her, Arthur looked out the window. The night rushed in, lifting the scent of smoke in his hair.

“How did you know I was in there?” she asked him.

“When I was talking with Isabelle, I had a feeling you were inside. I saw the fire and I wanted to be sure.” They passed the Fishers’ horse farm on the left. Diana could see the shadowy outline of three horses close to the fence; when the car passed, the shine of their eyes shifted to follow it. They crossed the bridge that spanned a deep valley of treetops. The wire ropes at the side of the bridge were intact; there was no tangle of metal where a car had taken flight. Arthur turned in from his window. “I should have stayed out there with her. She was telling me something important, but I missed it, I think.”

“It’s not your fault. I’m her sister, and I barely know her.”

Trees passed. The cool night was untorn, and Diana began to feel that she had anticipated excessive danger. When they came to the turnoff onto Kennedy Drive, the air outside smelled of dripping water. She steered Adelia’s car around steep curves, her nerves suspended by immediate focus. The road was as it had always been, back when they were children going to school, and it was only at the last sharp jag of the road, under a ledge of stacked rock, that they saw the semicircle of blinking lights, so bright that the wreck they enclosed was invisible from the outside. Diana parked the car.

“It might be my sister,” she said to the officer who tried to block her way. He stepped aside and Diana pushed through. There, at the center, the Jeep was on its side, wedged into a tree. Behind it, the world had lost its resolution, nothing but a blur of rock and tree and electric pulsing light. The turned car looked like a statue, a piece of public art that had been there as long as the tree that had bitten so deeply into its side. One of the upturned wheels was spinning; the others were still. Diana felt Arthur beside her.

“Where’s the driver?” she asked in the general direction of the lights.

“They took her to the hospital,” someone told her. “They just left. Is she a relative?”

“My sister. Is she okay?” She tried to focus on the officer and noticed that he was clutching his hat.

“She was alive when they took her. Unconscious, but alive. They drove her to Breckenridge.”

Diana looked at Arthur. “You don’t have to come with me.”

“I want to.” His face was crossed with alternating shadows of red and blue.

He drove this time, away from the throbbing lights, along the rock face of Kennedy Drive. Diana’s head was spinning, so she put the window down, and there again was the smell of water and moss, laced with rubber and gasoline. She closed her eyes and imagined she was young again, and that Isabelle was even younger. They were driving to school with Elizabeth, protected by the surety of their childhood. When they pulled into the hospital parking lot, her head cleared. The urgency of the luminous red letters,
emergency
, focused her, and the mathematical grid of the parking lot. The useful architecture of a place devoted to injury. She could hear the jangling of keys in Arthur’s pocket as he walked alongside her. The receptionist, at her broad, clean desk, directed them to Isabelle. They had placed her in the children’s wing; she was in surgery, listed as critical; they could wait in the visitors’ room. They took the elevator together. In the waiting room, they sat in small plastic seats, red and yellow and blue, surrounded by LEGOs, stuffed animals, and battered coloring books. When she turned toward Arthur, the familiarity of his profile opened a hairline crack in her rib cage; her breath caught at the sharp sensation. “I’m going to call the house,” she told him, and left him in his little chair. When she came back, a nurse was standing with him.

“You’re her sister?” the nurse asked. Di nodded. “She’s unconscious. Her spleen ruptured in the accident. Dr. Bellamy performed a splenectomy; it went fine. He’s closing the incision now. She suffered head trauma as well, and her collarbone is broken. But there was no damage to the spine. She’s lucky for that.”

“Will she be okay?” Diana asked.

“She’s in critical condition, but she’ll stabilize after the surgery. We’ll run a CAT scan when her alcohol level is down. But there’s no paralysis. No damage to the spine. No other internal bleeding. She’s lucky.”

“When can we see her?” Arthur asked.

“Not until she’s stabilized. You can wait here. Dr. Bellamy will speak to you.”

They sat together, shoulders close. There was a basket of
Highlights
magazines in the center of the room and a crate of inflatable basketballs. “I’m exhausted,” she said. Her weariness at the dinner party had been nothing more than practice for this. This, finally, was what she’d been waiting for.

“Here,” he said. He put a child’s pillow on his shoulder.

“You’re sure?” she asked, and as soon as she felt the ridge of his shoulder against the shallows of her temple, she closed her eyes and slept.

When she woke, Adelia was sitting beside her, holding her hand. William was standing by the window with his hands clasped behind his back. He was wearing the same green sweater from dinner. In the hospital light, it looked faded and bare.

“She’s stable,” Adelia said, blinking through her glasses. “The doctor said the surgery went fine.”

Diana breathed. “What happened to the carriage house?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Adelia. She was gripping Diana’s hand so hard that Diana could feel each one of the bones in her fingers. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter at all.”

“Did Arthur leave?”

“He left after we found out that the operation went well. He stayed until then.”

“How’s Dad?” At his name, William turned from the window, and Diana saw that his face was streaked with tear tracks.

“He’s going to be fine,” Adelia said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

♦
 Book 2 
♦

I must go uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening, or never.

—Jane Austen,
Persuasion

Chapter 17

S
he had hoped the move down to the shore would be a way of starting fresh in a better climate. When Adelia announced one morning in early July that a temporary move might help, Elizabeth couldn’t have agreed more readily. There would be water, and sand, and a new set of neighbors. It seemed like it would ensure an upward turn of events. And yet the low point of the entire Summer of Tragic Accidents came on the day they left for the shore. At that point in the thirsty summer, when the kids were sticky with heat and cross at her for not having a house with a pool, Elizabeth was tired down to the center of her bones.

This summer was meant to be her
summer of recovery from divorce. After a year of numb survival, she would come alive again. By fall, she was supposed to have found a wealthy but liberal Breacon businessman who supported the arts. He would be a distinguished person with a youthful physique and lines around the eyes, maybe some white at the temples. Proud of Lucy’s precociousness, excited about taking Caroline to science fairs. In bed, before they fell asleep, he would kiss Elizabeth on the forehead and thank her for being his wife. With a man such as this, the old inklings of inspiration might stir in her. She might start considering roles. Once again she could find herself acting as she used to be able to act, throwing off her life and stepping into another one as if the passage were as easy as breathing. As though the return could never be in doubt.

But the summer of recovery had spiraled in a matter of weeks into the summer of Daddy’s stroke, then into the summer of Diana flunking architecture school, and finally, into the summer of Isabelle’s recovery from absolute psychotic break/splenectomy. Through all of these recoveries, Elizabeth was expected to be the stable one, the favorite daughter with nothing to complain of because she wasn’t teetering on the brink of collapse. It was exhausting and it was unfair.

While Isabelle was in the hospital, Elizabeth wasn’t as galled as she later became by the fact that no one brought up the carriage house, which looked like the charred carcass of a prehistoric mammoth. She allowed Isabelle two weeks of grace to heal from her surgery, during which she delivered the books that Izzy requested without once mentioning the fact that they were all disturbingly immature. Isabelle gravitated toward children’s books: the mice warriors who lived in that monastery,
The Wind in the Willows,
or
James and the Giant Peach.
Elizabeth never questioned her demands for simple sentences.
She campaigned only once to have Isabelle moved to the adult section of the hospital. After that failed, she continued to chauffeur Lucy and Caroline to see their train wreck of an aunt in the children’s wing. When Diana brought Isabelle the ridiculous marker set, Elizabeth didn’t protest about signing her enormous cast, although she resented the fact that a person who had gotten herself into a drunk-driving accident should be having her arm cast decorated in purple Magic Marker.

As long as Isabelle was wearing those hospital gowns that made her look more gaunt than usual, Elizabeth was willing to allow her an extended childhood. She looked so fragile in the bed, reading her mouse books, that Elizabeth pitied her despite the fact that she
burned down
the one and only structure that held out hope for the disappointed Adairs. Not to mention that she totaled the Jeep, which was like killing a beloved family pet. That Jeep had been with them since Elizabeth and Diana were in high school. Elizabeth was once invincible in that hunter-green Cherokee. She used to drive it to parties where she was the envy of every girl in school, wearing her French-rolled jeans and her side pony and perfume from the Body Shop. While Isabelle was in the hospital, Elizabeth was able to shunt these feelings off to the side for the sake of Izzy’s recovery. She almost never complained about the strain of balancing trips to the hospital with work in the studio and care of her kids, as well as spending time with Daddy, who was at that point taking long naps in the afternoons with the sheets pulled up to his chin as if he, too, were a child.

After a certain point, all of these sacrifices started to wear. And even though she started to orient her yoga classes around the issue of forgiveness—doing backbends and heart openers, reading mantras about letting go, and asking everyone who was lying in savasana at the end of class to offer forgiveness to one person against whom they were harboring a grudge—she herself usually spent the majority of savasana sitting on her cushion in front of the class, eyes closed, thinking about exactly what she would say to Isabelle when she got out of the hospital to let her know how very deeply she had fucked things up.

When Izzy did come home, Adelia threw her a party. It was Elizabeth, of course, who picked her up. When they walked in the front door, there was a banner hanging in the foyer that read
welcome home isabelle
, and somehow someone had induced Margaux to wear a party hat and stay put in the living room without getting up every two minutes to ask, “When are we leaving?” as though everyone in the family were late for a crucial appointment they had all managed to forget. There was Margaux in her party hat, smiling, and there was a massive sheet cake, and Lucy was blowing on that screaming party horn so furiously that Elizabeth thought she would lose her mind if someone who was not a lunatic didn’t intervene to set the world on its feet.

Adelia must have seen that she was upset, because she took Elizabeth into the laundry room and said, “Is there something on your mind?” “Yes,” Elizabeth said, “there
is
something on my mind, as a matter of fact, which is that she is not a little girl! She is almost eighteen, and she
burned down the carriage house
,
and no one has mentioned that, but it did happen, and I have not forgiven her.” Adelia, whom Elizabeth had expected to be on her side because no one had been more resolute than Adelia about the issue of the carriage house, simply said, “She’s been through a lot.” As though that solved things. As though Elizabeth hadn’t recently been through a lot herself, and as though it did not pain her to be asked to constantly act like an adult so that her sisters could act like children. So that Mark could live in L.A. pretending he was not a father. Dating a girl-child, a person who was not a mother, with whom he drank good wine and had good sex and did not feel any of the oppressions involved in responsible living. As though it weren’t difficult for Elizabeth to be grown up while all around her everyone enjoyed protracted childhoods and somehow only she—who should have been in L.A., going to auditions, because it was not yet too late for her to succeed—was supposed to be beyond that stage.
Do you mean she’s been through a lot as in she’s recently become an arsonist and a drunk driver and a totally destructive wreck?
was what Elizabeth wanted to say. Instead, she went back out to the party, where Lucy promptly blew that goddamned horn so it hit Elizabeth in the side of the face, and Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table like a captain settled into his cabin while his ship inevitably sinks. And Diana was off somewhere drawing in her journal, and Margaux was holding her untouched plate of sheet cake as though she had no idea what to do with it but didn’t mind holding on for a bit. As though she had no clue about the mishaps that had happened, which she probably didn’t, because she had opted out so thoroughly that she wasn’t even aware she had two grandchildren, let alone a pair of other daughters whom
she
should have been mothering so that her oldest daughter could enjoy what remained of her youth.

Looking at her mother holding her cake, waiting for someone to sweep in and carry it off, Elizabeth was reminded again of the early days of her childhood, when she was in the chubby phase before she blossomed, and Margaux used to say, “You’re the strong one, Elizabeth. You have toughness. I can’t imagine how you came from me.” Elizabeth always hated that, because it implied that Diana was the talented, sensitive child and Elizabeth was nothing more than a kid with some fight. Remembering that long-lost refrain, Elizabeth comprehended that she had fulfilled the prophecy. She had become the one who was holding things together while everyone around her fell apart. This made her even angrier, because it is a sacrifice to be so tough. Being the tough one often involves giving up on being gentle or prettily kind. It doesn’t make you popular. It doesn’t get you parts as a lead, and it doesn’t keep you a husband. Sitting toughly in the kitchen, while the celebrators gathered around Izzy with her cast, Elizabeth thought that this must be what veterans felt like. Having given up on their right to be gentle and then getting avoided at family parties. People never praise you for your toughness. They feign innocence and tell you to be forgiving. They say, “She’s been through a lot.” No one pats you on the back or throws you parties. They avoid the fact that it’s crucial, when the world is collapsing, to have someone around who promises she won’t go down in flames.

As a result of her feelings during the party, Elizabeth tightened. The next day in her early-morning class, she made an announcement during downward-facing dog. “We’ve spent two weeks on forgiveness,” she said, sitting on her cushion. “But today we are warriors. Today we are focusing on our strength.” All class they did nothing but warrior ones and warrior twos and sun salutations, and class went well because the truth was that every housewife in that studio had been dying all year for permission to turn their lives into a serious fight.

The lowest point came later, on the day they left for the beach. After Elizabeth had allowed herself to start dreaming about wearing a bikini and sitting on warm sand. She and Adelia packed everyone up, buckled everyone in, and remained generally responsible for getting the whole demented show on the road. In the Acura, Isabelle was sitting in the back with Lucy and Caroline, and Adelia was up front with Elizabeth. Diana was driving William, Margaux, and Louise in the rental car. They had finally put some distance between themselves and Little Lane when Lucy announced that she wanted to read her book in the car. Elizabeth told her it would make her sick, and Lucy said, clearly for the benefit of Isabelle, “FUCK SICK,” and Isabelle started laughing, and after a month and two days of being a warrior, Elizabeth spun around and said, “GROW UP, ISABELLE, YOU’RE NOT A LITTLE GIRL!”

A shadow passed over Isabelle’s face, and everyone in the car got quiet. Adelia’s expression hardened. The silence became thick. Elizabeth tried to start two conversations—one about fossils, for the benefit of Caroline, and one about tennis, for the benefit of Lucy—but both girls were somber and mute. Adelia glared out the window, unrelenting. Elizabeth switched on the radio. In the attempt to find something mature, she selected the classical music station, although she associated classical music with costume drama and found it slightly excessive. The song that filled the uneasy car was unsettling, some kind of piano piece that made you imagine a violently lonely and possibly deformed man playing his instrument alone in a dark room at the back of a large house. Still, she held on to the strains of the music as though they were the only solid things in the car, more concrete than the unknowable shifts in her family’s moods. As she listened, a sensation of panic began to rise within her. It was the same thing repeated over and over. Low and simple first, then higher and more complicated, then so elaborate that she felt the lonely pianist must have three hands. Over and over, different voices repeating the same urgent refrain, and none of them getting closer to solving the problem. Elizabeth’s heart beat in her throat. She kept the car steady as they progressed along the six-lane highway, moving away from the suburbs, passing and getting passed, but inside the car the music wrapped around itself in endless cycles, and Elizabeth felt as though every one of them in the car were drowning, unable to find the final iteration of the problem they started with. “A fugue in six voices,” the radio announcer explained after the piece had ended. Elizabeth was steering the car off the highway, following the directions she’d printed out on Little Lane. Then the music was replaced by commercials, the lonely pianist lost to the world, and Elizabeth switched the radio off. Silence resumed, vague and tumultuous even as the streets settled into quaint numbered blocks of lawn divided by hydrangea shrubs. Unbroken, it expanded into intensified uneasiness: a fugue in five silences, Elizabeth thought, and wished for the comfort of sound.

When they pulled into the driveway of the rental cottage, Isabelle very softly asked, “I should try to grow up?”

It was neither a statement nor a question. No one could answer her. Then she stepped out of the car and walked into the cottage, which incidentally was adorable, and should have made everyone happy, and which Elizabeth had spent a long time finding online. Instead of admiring it, however, everyone bent to the task of clearing out the car. After Lucy and Caroline went inside and Elizabeth’s arms were full of bright plastic beach bags and pillows and a box of children’s books, Adelia cornered her behind the car and said in the most terrifying tone Elizabeth had ever heard, “
Who do you think you are?
”

Elizabeth stared. She was at a loss
,
because she had done
nothing
but try to be strong. She had been Adelia’s only ally in this, and now Adelia had turned on her and was hissing, “
She can be whatever age she wants to be. Just leave her alone
.”

And then Adelia went off to look for Isabelle, leaving Elizabeth to clean out the car.

So that was the low point. Scooping beach toys out of the car, completely alone, while Adelia sympathized with Isabelle for reasons that Elizabeth couldn’t understand. Her children were hauntingly quiet all afternoon. They were soul-stricken in the inexplicable way that affects only children, for reasons that adults have long since forgotten how to feel, so that when she went into their room to ask how they liked it, they murmured obedient necessities, trying to reassure her, and went back to playing a secret game. Elizabeth felt useless, standing in the doorway, wondering when, in the process of this harrowing summer, her daughters had gotten so close. And then she went back outside, through the front porch with its rocking chairs, to the yard with its white picket fence where she had imagined she would spend the last weeks of the summer feeling less abandoned and angry.