by Louisa Hall
“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
She 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 fac
e, 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.
Then Diana pulled up in the rental car, and while the others unpacked, Margaux got out and joined Elizabeth in the yard to survey her temporary garden. They stood there in the crabgrass, she and her mother, for a long time. Elizabeth refused to say a word. If her mother wasn’t going to talk, she wasn’t going to, either, but then two minutes later Elizabeth said, “I forgive you, Mom.” Margaux didn’t say a fucking thing. So Elizabeth revised her opinion and said, “I don’t forgive you, Mom. I absolutely do not forgive you.”
Margaux’s eyes were fixed on the hedge of hydrangeas across the street, in the yard of their new neighbors. “No, you shouldn’t.”
Elizabeth stared at her, because that was the first real response she had gotten from Margaux since she was about twenty-six years old and had just had Caroline. Twenty-six years old! It was too young—she wanted to scream this across th
e water to the younger version of herself—but she had been such a motherless girl, and she was so excited to be loved by Mark, and she was hoping to be a proper adult. Now her mother was with her, and Elizabeth had so many questions, she didn’t know how to begin. Already Margaux’s face had been wiped blank. As though no motherly words had come out of her mouth, she started moving around the perimeter of the fence, and then she wandered around to the backyard, behind the screened-in porch, to inspect the flower bed there. Elizabeth trailed behind like a little girl, wishing she would deliver more lines.
“Mom,” she said when the silence was too much, “Mom, I feel so angry.”
Margaux bent down at the edge of the bed and pulled out a weed by the roots.
“Mom, I feel so old. It’s too soon to feel like this.”
She was talking to herself, because Margaux was entirely devoted to the task of pulling weeds. But since she was already having a solo conversation, she kept at it, realizing that there was something soothing about having a conversation with your mother, even if she’d tuned you out.
“I can’t remember what it was like to be young.” She considered her mother’s back, her dark hair pulled into a bun, and felt a frantic reaction of hollowed-out love. “Even when I was young, I felt old. You called me the tough one, remember?” Margaux didn’t turn around. She pulled another handful of weeds, shaking the soil out of their roots. “Mom, do you remember telling me that I was the tough one?” she asked again, and Margaux leaned back on her heels and looked up at Elizabeth. Her eyes widened, as if for a moment she recognized that this was her daughter whom she had lost on the way.
Elizabeth drew a quick breath, startled by the presence of her mother’s gaze, then blurted out, “You used to say that I was the tough one. As though that was my thing. But was I more than that?”
“I wanted that,” Margaux said, wiping a strand of hair away from her temple with the back of her wrist. “For you. You were so little, and I worried you’d feel lonely. I hoped you’d be tough.”
