The Carriage House (24 page)

Chapter 31

D
iana felt nothing after they left. For a while she leaned against the wall, looking out the window at the Schmidts’ house. The house where Arthur once lived. Even this she felt nothing about. Even the fact that he had come to the beach looking for Isabelle and Elizabeth had sent him away. Twice in the course of one conversation, when Elizabeth told them in the living room, Diana was taught how far she and Arthur were from each other. Her response to even that lesson was muted. After an initial breathlessness, she felt nothing. She would spend the rest of her life feeling nothing about the fact that he was no longer hers. A wave of exhaustion swept over her, and she wanted to get off her feet. She climbed the new, sure stairs to the loft, empty now, and lay down on the fresh cedar floor. Light filtered through the window in the owl’s nest above her. She lay still, listening to the occasional faint creaking of the settling house, until she heard the sound of the door opening and footsteps on the stairs. She opened her eyes in time to see Arthur’s head rising over the rim of the loft.

He stopped when he saw her. “Sorry, Di, I didn’t know you were up here.”

She sat up. “No, it’s okay. I was just resting for a second.”

“I wanted to come over and see this one last time before I drove back to New York.” His face seemed pale in contrast to the dark circles under his eyes.

“What do you think?” she asked.

He scanned the new loft, the new owl’s nest, the new beams. Diana remembered that his shadowed eyes had made him seem serious, even as a teenager. She used to love the way his eyes narrowed around an idea, holding it close for consideration. “It’s perfect,” he said finally. “You remembered it perfectly.”

“Thanks, Arthur,” she said. “While it was going up, I imagined you seeing it. I kept thinking of your face.”

He didn’t say anything, and she regretted her effusiveness. He had come for a last look at a building that was briefly part of his life. What was it in her that grabbed for him so desperately as soon as he came close?

“Could you wait here a second?” he said, and retreated down the stairs. She had the horrible thought that he might not return, that he had told her to wait so he could escape from her excessive hope. Time lengthened. Her heart sank. When she heard the door opening again, she didn’t dare believe it was him, but the top of his head appeared, then his shoulders. He was holding a green blanket.

“Here,” he said, spreading it out on the floor. “Remember?”

She joined him on the blanket, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes, so she trained her vision on the pattern of beams that crossed the air in front of them. She hesitated to speak, feeling oddly frightened, as if to say something would be stepping out into empty space. “Elizabeth said you came to the beach house,” she said at last. “That you came to see Isabelle, and she sent you away.”

“She said I came to see Isabelle?”

Diana focused hard on the details of the owl’s nest, each scallop of each shingle.

“I came to see you. My grandmother said you were finishing the house, and you wanted me to know. I assumed . . .” He trailed off, and she waited for him to continue. “When Elizabeth told me you were doing better, I figured she was probably right. You seemed so happy when I saw you in the driveway, getting ready to start building. I thought maybe it was best if I left without dredging up what happened a decade ago.”

“It wasn’t a decade ago,” Diana said. “It isn’t even behind me. All this time I’ve stayed still while everyone else moved on with their lives. I kept thinking I’d move eventually, but I stayed still, waiting for you.”

“You didn’t, though. Look at this place. Look at what you’ve done.”

She looked around. The gambrels of the ceiling, the heft of the beams, the rectangular frames of the windows. She could draw them out in front of her. “It was our house,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to forget this,” he said. He, too, was tracing the details of the loft with his eyes. “It’s not easy, now, to come back here.”

“Let’s just stay for a minute,” Diana said.

They sat together on the green blanket, light from the owl’s nest streaming over them, then lay back, facing the dark cedar ceiling. When she closed her eyes, she could feel warmth across her eyelids; when she opened them, the side of his face was a shadow surrounded by brightness. They stayed there so long, the daylight started to ebb, and when the wide blade of it had narrowed to a single line and darkness dropped over them, they moved closer on the blanket. There was his shoulder, his elbow, his knee. The bridge of his nose and the shallow under his eye. The heavy cylindrical curve at the back of his head. These were his geometries, shapes she had nearly forgotten. The architecture of a love she lived in once. She assembled lost lines slowly, gathering his surfaces. He allowed her to approach. She could feel her fingertips on the curve of his ear, her palm on the plane of his jaw. Her heart beat in the cage of her ribs, then against the warmth of his chest. They lay together for a long time, and it was even longer before she remembered that this was a new house, in a new yard, and they would have to start over again.

Acknowledgments

A
ll my thanks go to my family, for helping me write this book and every other story I’ve written: Colby, for reading it first, and for many advisory walks around Hemphill Park; my father, for showing me the importance of books; and my mother, for teaching me to love characters of all possible types, and for never giving up on my grammar.

I am indebted to my agents, Kerry Glencorse and Susanna Lea, who have been tireless champions; to Nan Graham, who guided the book into its final form with keen editorial insight and all possible care; to Kara Watson, whose thoughtful counsel has been indispensable to the book; and to the rest of the team at Scribner for all of their generous help. Thank you, also, to Venetia Butterfield and the team at Viking UK for their invaluable support.

Many other people deserve thanks for helping me at every stage of the book: Rebecca Beegle, for all her wise council; Ivy Pochoda, for allowing me to copy her in so many ways; Jen Lame, with whom I completed my first book-length endeavors in high school; Ben Heller, for helpful conversations about what a good book should do; Gary Sernovitz, who is the kind of writer I’d like to be; Tom Darling, for showing up in Wyoming at just the right time; Philipp Meyer, for galvanizing and instructional biweekly summits; Anna Margaret Hollyman, for all her encouragement; Louisa Thomas, for exchanging stories with me since college; and Divya Srinivasan, for coming to my aid at every critical moment. Many thanks go to The Rubber Repertory, whose
Biography of Physical Sensation
inspired “A Diary of My Life in Sensation.” Every English teacher I’ve had deserves all my gratitude, but in particular Helen Vendler, who first told me that I was a writer.

Finally, I am grateful to Ben, who makes everything seem possible.

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