The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  Our children were so rough. Strong girls, different from me. When they were babies, I dreamed they’d grow up quiet. There were so many stories that I wanted to tell them. I dreamed they’d play piano, imagined teaching them about the way to choose a vase for a flower arrangement. But instead they played sports. They became less comprehensible to me. Like William, they never let me go off on my own. They needed my company so much. Elizabeth laughed as he did, in the same sharp way, when I tried to explain the importance of my trinkets. For her sake I was happy she resembled him, and hoped it would last. Diana was different. She listened to my stories with that solemn expression. But her body was strong, like his. By the time Izzy was born, Diana was so tall and athletic, I couldn’t imagine she was mine. The house was so noisy by then.

  Here is a memory: two years ago, maybe more, Diana running through the house with her tennis bag across her back. She knocked my collection of small glass horses off the bookshelf. All seven of them shattered. A family of glass horses. When I was alone—when William was at work and the girls were at school and I could finally breathe—I would look at them and wonder that they could remain perfect when everything else had fallen off-kilter somehow. After Diana broke them, I ran to kneel beside them, crying. It was the only time I had cried in front of the children. Then Elizabeth didn’t laugh. She came in from the dining room and knelt with me, trying to pick up the pieces. Their shattered glass bones. But I didn’t want her to touch them. I slapped her hands away and only later, when I stood and turned, I saw that she was holding Diana, both of them down on their knees. I knew I shouldn’t have cried. It was unmotherly. They were only things. But I was hurt, and they were both strong girls. They were his daughters; I knew they’d be fine. I went upstairs and buried the shards of my horses in a silver box. As I did, I could feel their worry spreading through the house, and I pitied them, but I didn’t come down for dinner. They were unusually quiet all night. Diana slid a card beneath my door before she went to sleep.

  What a terrible thing to remember. I should have gone to her and made her know I’d survive. I should have reassured her that the horses were only glass. They weren’t real; she hadn’t ruined anything. I don’t know why I didn’t. It wasn’t right to leave them there downstairs, to wait until their father came home. But something was wrong with me. It was already there, biding its time, secretive as an egg, eaten alone.

  I want to be strong for my girls. I won’t tell them I’m sick till Diana’s finished with school. My mother waited that long for me; I can do the same for Diana. But I won’t be able to wait for Isabelle. One day soon the disease will have a life of its own.

  Already I feel myself slipping away, and here is a secret I’d like to remember: in truth it’s not too bad. I’m scared, but only in the way you are before you dive beneath a wave. Once you’ve dived, there’s nothing but cool darkness and the tumbling into something that was part of you from before you were born.

  • • •

  At the end of the entry, Louise closed the notebook. She wanted to read more but forced herself to stop, one hand on its cover. The room she was sitting in was silent. More silent than any empty room in any empty house she’d ever wandered through before. She listened to herself breathing, the sound of it magnified. She was completely alone. So often when she was sitting in the empty houses of her employers, she found herself in conversation with some invisible person: Bradley, mostly, but her mother also, and old friends from school. She complained to these people about her boredom in Breacon, and about the insufferable routines of the people she loathed. But at some point while she was reading, her crowd of listeners had exited. Even Margaux was gone. Louise was alone, and although this was slightly disturbing, she understood that she was no longer bored. The painting on the easel looked different in this light, clearer somehow, and in the end Bradley Barlow didn’t matter at all. Margaux’s notebook described a kind of world that a person such as Bradley couldn’t dream of. The world of a person as she slowly forgot, as the characters around her exited the stage. As her whole life narrowed to the edge of a single pellucid moment. Bradley was too stupid to imagine such a thing. He’d never be this lonely, but that was his loss. Some people never look back long enough to know there’s nothing there anymore.

  Chapter 4

  On Saturday night, after the Horrifying Woman brought William back from the hospital and put him to bed in his room, her first move was to call an emergency summit. The sisters gathered around the kitchen table promptly, good peons that they were. Adelia pulled out the legal pad on which she had outlined her strategy, then cleared her throat to make an announcement: she would be moving in to help take care of William as he convalesced. A silence ensued. Something resembling excitement stirred in Isabelle’s stomach. The silence widened, delicious and hovering, but before anyone could fill it, Adelia jumped in again to specify that she would, of course, be staying in the guest room. This superfluous detail only caused Isabelle to imagine Adelia hiking up her J. Crew skirt and climbing aboard their father with a determined look in her eyes. In reality, there had never been any evidence of shenanigans between William and the Horrifying Woman. Plus, the idea of them having an affair was the least of Izzy’s concerns.

  The problem was the finality of the thing. For years the Horrifying Woman had approached, moving closer and closer to the inner room of the Adair family, left vacant by Margaux so many years ago. Izzy harbored the suspicion that once the room was occupied by a woman as staunch as Adelia, there would be no going back. Margaux couldn’t return, and the house would never be what it was when Izzy was small and the family was complete.

  Izzy looked across the table at her sisters to see if they registered the threat. This had been coming for years, but only Isabelle had been home to measure its approach. Elizabeth and Diana were already gone by the time Margaux was diagnosed. They were consumed by their own dilemmas. Only Izzy was left at home. Only Izzy was expected, without actually being asked, to think of Adelia as a second mother. Neither of her sisters had faced the daily chore of having dinner with William and Adelia, while Margaux ate leftovers upstairs, staring at the empty spaces on her canvases. By the time Isabelle got to high school, William and Adelia were sharing driving duties, which left Isabelle with no option but to initiate flirtation with her art teacher so that he, rather than Adelia, could drive her home from school. Fortunately, Izzy turned sixteen shortly after commencing the ordeal with Mr. Knapp, so she was able to terminate their relationship before things got out of hand. Thus, her fellow students were denied further grounds for gossip, and Adelia was denied cause for an awkward lecture on the value of innocence, delivered after manifold prerequisites such as “I know I’m not your mother and I have no right to tell you this.” Unfortunately, the incident with Mr. Knapp made it uncomfortable for Isabelle to spend time in the art room. Free periods became wastelands dedicated mainly to avoiding contact with other kids her age. She blamed Adelia for this.

  Throughout all these developments, Diana and Elizabeth were gone. They missed Margaux’s still-present absence. They weren’t privy to William acting like a bereft husband, Adelia consoling him, both of them treating Margaux like a benign Mrs. Rochester locked away in her painting studio. They never caught the neighbors watching through their blinds for Adelia’s car in the driveway, or pretending to water their prefabricated gardens while spying on the Fallen Adairs. They missed the bond between Adelia and William as it deepened through early-morning jogs, skirmishes with neighborhood association foes, and regular takeout dinners at the kitchen table, to which Margaux was always invited but never attended.

  Izzy moved around the edges of these scenes. Much as William and Adelia tried to include her, she had no place in the new family eating at that table. She envied them their homey happiness, but she wasn’t ready to abandon the dream of her old family. Only after Adelia made the Big Push to include Izzy in their fight for the carriage house did Izzy comprehend how little sh
e wanted to join them in their tribal allegiances, around which the rest of the world dropped away. Then her sadness was replaced with scorn, which was subsequently replaced with the desire to get as far away as possible from Little Lane.

  Her sisters had been spared all this. Once, Izzy called Elizabeth in L.A. to ask if she could move there to escape the Horrifying Woman. Elizabeth, dripping with self-pity as always, said, “At least with Adelia you have some sort of mother. Mom was just absent most of the time.”

  When Elizabeth came back to Breacon after the divorce, Izzy expected her to express some kind of indignation at how comfortable Adelia had made herself in their house. But Elizabeth was so wrapped up in her narcissistic disappointment that she could barely put one foot in front of the other, let alone examine the situation on Little Lane with any sort of clarity. In fact, Adelia fawned over her so excessively that Elizabeth seemed to be growing attached to the Horrifying Woman. It was Adelia, after all, who encouraged William to invest in Elizabeth’s yoga studio, who treated the whole dumb scheme as if teaching yoga were not a hideous cliché for a washed-up actress and young divorcée. Three times a week, Adelia attended Elizabeth’s yoga classes, staking out a place in the center of the front row so she could glare at herself in the mirror. Once Izzy accompanied Adelia to a Wednesday-evening class, just to see what it was like. When the class began, it was clear that the entire world had dropped away from Adelia. Between Adelia and her reflection, a battle to the death had commenced that devoured all the air in the room. There was something startling, even frightening, about her focus as she bent her leg back into dancer’s pose. Watching her, you had the sense that she would never find her way back into the world. Afterward, in the changing room, Izzy overheard two girls whispering. “That horrifying woman was at it again,” one said, giggling, and Izzy immediately knew she was referring to Adelia. She felt an unavoidable stab of pity for ragged Adelia, but the phrase stuck. Back at the front desk, Adelia was telling Elizabeth that she had both Charisma and Charm. Elizabeth was acting bashful, Adelia was repeating herself, and Izzy thought, That Horrifying Woman! She loves us so much, she’d eat us alive, then howl at the moon in her loneliness.

  Izzy’s sisters were unperturbed by such images. Elizabeth was grateful for Adelia’s confidence, and when Diana came to visit, she was too tattered to notice. She was like a dragon on its last legs, once fierce but now so sad and bedraggled that you wished it would lift its head and incinerate the whole damn town. For years Izzy had hoped that her older sisters would return and confront the degenerating state of affairs, but she had at last grasped the fact that they were too far gone to help. Now, as Adelia made her final approach, they were as absent as they’d been when they were living on opposite sides of the country.

  When Adelia called the summit and announced that she would be moving into the guest room, neither Diana nor Elizabeth refused. “You’re much too kind,” Elizabeth told her, and Diana wondered if they should change the sheets on the bed. Isabelle turned away from her sisters toward the ghost of her own face in the window glass. She could only marvel at Adelia’s tactical prowess. It was such a tidy little invasion. She had been baby-stepping her way into the family home for years, so that now, when the royal heirs were distracted by other concerns, she had only to open the door and walk in. Izzy swallowed. They had reached the end of the line.

  “Mom should be here,” Izzy said. Diana winced, and Isabelle immediately regretted having taken the opportunity to strike.

  “I’ve already spoken to her,” Adelia said. “In the garden this morning. We agreed that this was the best.” She blinked so hard, Isabelle thought she could hear the click of her eyelids hitting each other.

  The sisters consulted their consciences. Isabelle waited and watched. What would Margaux think about Adelia moving in? Of all of them, Isabelle was least likely to know. She was only ten when their mother was diagnosed, and even before that, most of her memories consisted of Margaux brushing past, always just leaving. Only her flowers remained. Sometimes Izzy would open her history textbook in school and find one stalk of delphinium pressed between the pages. On good nights, when she went to sleep, she found a bouquet on her bedside table, ferns and white stephanotis and anemones with deep blue centers. These she took in place of the other things a mother is supposed to give. If she asked for more—if she pressed her mother for an opinion, for comfort, for guidance—she was forced to remember again the expression of vague politeness that fell across Margaux’s face. If she were to go to her now and say, “Adelia’s in love with Dad,” Margaux would force herself to look up from her painting and smile courteously. “That’s nice . . .” she might say, then trail off.

  But despite all this, it was hard for Izzy to believe that Margaux couldn’t remember that she, not Adelia, was William’s wife and her children’s mother. It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten how to dress herself for the day. Her memory of the fundamental facts was strong. It was more like she’d forgotten how she was supposed to feel. She knew each of her daughters by proper name, but she couldn’t remember how she was meant to relate to them. It was an illness, of course. It was no one’s fault. But it was difficult for Isabelle not to be hurt by the nature of her mother’s forgetting. They probably did have a talk in the garden, Adelia and Margaux, the least likely allies in the land. Adelia probably proposed her solution as if she were proposing it to her own reflection in the yoga studio mirror. And Margaux probably agreed, her mind already twisting toward the sweet autumn clematis, newly trellised on the eastern wall of the house.

  “What about Louise?” Elizabeth asked. “Couldn’t Louise help out?”

  “She’s busy with your mother,” Adelia said.

  “Well, I can help as much as possible,” Elizabeth continued, which was kind of her considering that William was paying nearly half of the mortgage on the “cottage” on Wimberlyn Street that Elizabeth insisted on buying when she moved the grandkids back from L.A. “The girls are off from school, and I’m working full-time, but I’ll steal away as much as I can.”

  “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  “I can help, too,” Diana said. “I’m not going back to Texas.”

  Everyone turned to look at her.

  “I don’t need to go back. I’m not in school, anyway.”

  “What are you talking about?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I dropped out. Last fall.” For some reason, she chose to focus on Isabelle while she made the announcement. Isabelle looked away. This was Diana, whose matches Izzy used to watch in awe, twisting a visitor’s badge between two fingers, sitting courtside while the cameras flashed. Then Diana never flinched; her court face was stony. Now her lower lip was quivering with the difficulty of admitting this most recent failure. “I had my final defense in November, and I didn’t show up. My project wasn’t finished.”

  “What have you been doing since then?” Adelia asked.

  “House-sitting,” Diana said, getting control of her trembling lip. She became oddly expressionless. “Trying to finish my thesis design. I was almost there, and then I lost my blueprints. I left them on the bus, I think, and it’s been hard to find the energy to start over from scratch. I told them I needed some time.” She stopped talking, aware that she hadn’t fully explained herself, and no one came to her aid. Isabelle would have liked to—she was searching for things she could say that would help Diana glide past this incident with the least possible friction—but the strangeness of her sister’s paralysis silenced her. “I’m almost there,” Diana said. “And my adviser said once I’ve finished, I can come back and re-enroll and defend at any point.”

  “I didn’t think it worked like that,” Adelia said. She was as compulsively honest as an X-ray.

  “Within a year,” Diana murmured.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you. I was hoping to finish soon.”

  Adeli
a consulted her legal pad. Isabelle looked out, past her sisters’ profiles, toward the blackness of the night that was smacking against the windowpane. She could see moths flocking around the outdoor lights above the patio. She didn’t want to look at Di. She didn’t want to look at Elizabeth. She wanted to fly through the glass and hover over the garden, her wings whirring in the thick darkness.

  “Well,” Adelia said. “It’s sweet of you to offer. We could use your help around the house while your father’s recovering.”

  Thus with a single “we”—what sleights of tongue are used in the most sweeping invasions—negotiations were completed, and the groundwork was laid for the Horrifying Woman’s relocation to Little Lane. The second item on Adelia’s agenda was to make a declaration of war. “Anita Schmidt is not going to win this fight,” she said, flipping the page on her pad. “We can’t underestimate how much the stress of the carriage house situation has affected your father. His grandfather designed that house. It was part of his childhood. This whole thing with the neighborhood association has been an attack on everything he holds dear. Do you understand? Your father has been fighting for his life ever since Anita Schmidt discovered that subdivision mistake. She essentially, if not legally, kidnapped the carriage house. That was one thing. But for the neighborhood association to deny that the building is historical is quite another. For them to sign a petition demanding its demolition. It undermines your father’s sense of self. His sense of his family’s history. You girls may not understand why he values it so much, but he does, and it would mean the world to him if you rallied to save it in his name.”