The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  Elizabeth stared. She was literally brimming with questions, and she wanted to embrace her mother, and for some reason she wanted to remind her that she didn’t show up for the high school production of Don Quixote in which Elizabeth played Dulcinea. Which was ridiculous, because Margaux didn’t show up for any plays and probably had no idea that Elizabeth was an actress. That was fine. Elizabeth had to remind herself that was fine, because toughness was a thing Margaux wanted for her, not some terrible part of her core. So Elizabeth said, “What was I like, Mom? Do you remember? Do you remember me?” All at once the idea of someone remembering what she had been like before all this, what the original version of her had been like, was very important to her. It was crucial to her, and if her mother could just remember, Elizabeth felt as though she could start all over again. All these things were spilling out of Elizabeth even as she saw that Margaux had checked out and was focused on weeding the garden. She looked up once more, but this time she seemed annoyed, as if Elizabeth were intruding and she had no idea what this chattery person was talking about. The motherly interlude had passed as quickly as that.

  Elizabeth stood up and let her weed. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and heard her mother say it again: I wanted that for you. The sweetness of it washed over her, and suddenly she smelled the ocean, the enormous soft sweep of it, and when she opened her eyes, she realized that she could see it through the gap between two houses, a shading of pale sand into blue that became deeper as it moved closer to the sky.

  Chapter 18

  William sat on the front porch and rocked, slowly. He did not like rocking chairs. They made him feel like an infant or an elderly man. And yet there were no other types of chairs on the porch. Margaux was kneeling in the front yard, coaxing a rose up a stake using brown twine. They had been living at the beach only a week and already she had made something out of the garden. Last week she mentioned roses, so William brought her eighteen cuttings from the garden emporium. They were so leafless and stark that William couldn’t imagine them coming back to life. For a week after planting the branches, Margaux kept them covered in mason jars. A garden of glass jars lining the fence, alien and lunatic, but when she removed them, the cuttings had sprouted leaf buds, hard and bright as enamel.

  At this point in William’s life, Margaux’s devotion to the garden was interesting to watch. When they were young, it had only wounded his pride. When he brought her back to the house on Little Lane, he was overflowing with pride. He was giving her the house of his childhood, the largest one on the hill. A house that had inspired his ambition, a house that made him think of pilgrims and the open sea. It was his father’s house. He wanted Margaux to enjoy it. He wanted her to cherish its every brave angle.

  He could tell from the start that she did not identify with the house. She wandered through it as though visiting a museum with strict rules about touching the exhibits. She was never a good housekeeper; she accumulated trinkets and cared for them assiduously, but she never cleaned the furniture, so that under her tenure, dust began to pile on all the old artifacts of Adair life until William finally hired a cleaning woman. Once the cleaning woman took over dusting the trinkets, Margaux focused her attentions outside. This hurt him. Almost from the moment his father died, William had looked forward to making the house his own. His and Margaux’s family home. But she gravitated outdoors. From the start, she was moving away.

  She planted peonies in the beds under the kitchen windows. Then she dug a bed around the outside crescent of the patio and filled it with irises and foxgloves. The summer she was pregnant with Elizabeth, she dug out the pond. He worried every day that she would damage the baby, but no matter how many injunctions he delivered, she returned each morning with her shovel to dig. By the time Elizabeth was born, Margaux had filled it with water, with lilies and goldfish and the copper fountain in the shape of a bullfrog.

  Once she moved out to the garden, she never moved back in. Not to eat toast in the breakfast nook, not to feel the cool marble of the dining room floor under her bare feet, not to sit by the fire under the arched ceiling of the living room, not even to care for the potted ferns that he carried into the kitchen. When she was pregnant with Isabelle, she looked up from her book and asked if they could move to another house. William dismissed the comment as one of those whims that women come up with when they’re carrying a child. How could she want to leave this house, his childhood home? After that, she was distant for a while, but he figured she’d work through whatever had gotten caught in her mind.

  Now, as he watched her from his rocking chair, William understood that Margaux never did. She never crossed back over that distance that opened when she asked if they could move. He dismissed her and she never returned. In the days after Izzy’s accident, Margaux had taken to wandering downstairs with her purse tucked under her arm to ask, with a worried look on her face, when they were going. “Are we leaving?” she’d ask whomever was closest. As though after almost twenty years, she’d picked up that conversation right where they’d left off, her question about moving unanswered. Who would have known that such a question could linger so long?

  At first, William blamed the renovation for her lack of affection. If he’d brought his young bride back to the original—before the lightning fire, when it was built out of shingles rather than new stucco, when it was so big and shadowy that, as a boy, William imagined ghosts in the unused bedrooms—she would have fallen in love with its history. But not even the hush of the original carriage house had awakened her desire to stay. William had always taken the carriage house’s magic for granted. From the moment he first walked through its old wooden doors, he understood its power. So did Adelia. But that ancient gravity was lost on Margaux. William brought her out there several times to show her the intricacies of its architecture. Once, after Diana was born, he hired a sitter, packed a cold supper and a bottle of white wine, and laid out a picnic blanket on the floor. At the hour when late-afternoon light filtered in through the owl’s nest so that dust motes tumbled in illuminated rays, he blindfolded Margaux and led her out to the carriage house. The picnic was all laid out. But when he removed the blindfold, she looked startled and lost. His heart broke. He couldn’t avoid the regret in her face. He tried to forget it while he poured the glasses of wine. He tried not to think about it while he unwrapped the ham sandwiches, while he laid out paper napkins and porcelain plates.

  She ate only a bite of her sandwich. “This place makes me so sad,” she said. “It’s never been lived in. It’s lovely, of course, but it’s been vacant from the start.”

  And then Anita Schmidt discovered that the carriage house was on her land, and that was that. No, and then Isabelle Adair burned the carriage house down to the ground, and truly, that was finally that.

  Adelia came out of the house with a glass of lemonade. Behind her, the screen door banged twice against its frame. She handed the glass to William and folded her arms. “I’m going, William,” she said. It was Sunday; she’d have to go back to work in the morning. He looked up at her and saw that she’d followed his gaze out to Margaux, kneeling in front of her roses. “You’ll be okay until Friday?” Adelia asked, still looking at Margaux.

  “Of course.” There was another silence that William knew he should fill, yet he had no idea what to say.

  “She’s already made the garden beautiful,” Adelia said.

  “She has a way with plants.”

  Adelia pursed her lips. She had been angry for some time, ever since she’d broached the subject of sending Margaux to a home. The word “home,” used in that sense, made William shudder. Homes were for stray animals and psychotics. Houses, angular and brave: those were the structures for humans to live in. To be sent to a home was something Margaux had asked for several times after her diagnosis, but William wouldn’t hear of it. His wife belonged in his house. She was so young. There were tests to be done, confirmations to be had. And even if the diagnosis
was final, William could care for his wife in her illness. When she got lost after one of her walks, he hired Louise. That was his decision. At some point Margaux stopped asking to go. Only after Izzy’s accident, when Margaux’s confusion deepened and she started perambulating the house with her purse, did Adelia bring the topic up.

  It happened a month or so after she’d moved from the guest room into his bed on the night of Izzy’s accident. They never actually slept together, but they both harbored an unspoken grudge about the fact that the change came on such a horrible night. William—and Adelia, too, he was sure—wished he could take it back. Save such a thing for a less fallen evening or never let it happen at all. And yet neither of them could summon the words to ask for belated reprieve. At night, he could feel her watching him from her side of the bed. He turned away from her. During the day, she hovered more closely, expecting something. He held her hand sometimes, drawing it close to him. A hand that had been with him his whole life. There was nothing he could say. When she asked if it was time to think about putting Margaux in a home, he snapped at her. “She’s my wife,” he said, and Adelia walked away. Two days later she returned and suggested that maybe they should all go somewhere for a while, just to get away. He was more receptive to the idea than he could have expected. The girls were happy to be closer to water, and for whatever reason Margaux had been preparing all summer for such a trip, so when they told her the car was waiting, she didn’t even ask where they were heading. When they got to the beach, William was surprised by how comfortable he found it. He could barely remember why he had always resisted his wife’s desire to leave. Adelia—Breacon Adelia, born and raised—hovered around, displaced, and while he didn’t want to hurt her, he knew she had no place in this house.

  Now Adelia stood on the front porch, a small metal suitcase in her hands, waiting for William to ask her to stay. William rocked. How can you ask a woman such as Adelia to stay in a house such as this, with its rocking chairs and its wall-to-wall carpets, with Margaux coaxing her plants?

  “I’m taking Diana with me,” Adelia said. “I’ll drive her to the airport tomorrow.”

  William winced. “She’s coming back next week?” he asked, trying not to think too hard about Diana’s belated efforts.

  “Yes. I’ll bring her with me on Friday. She gets back from Austin on Wednesday, but she set up a meeting with Wayne Contractors to go over the plans.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t let her go.”

  “Well.” Adelia said, snapping her face shut.

  They remained together on the porch in silence, until Adelia drew an audible breath. She was disappointed in him, he knew. But he was too tired to say an elaborate goodbye. He rocked back and forth.

  “Well,” she said again. “I’ve given a grocery list to Louise.” And then she moved off, her heels clicking down the front walk. At the gate she waved to Margaux, who stopped her work and lifted a gloved hand. Adelia looked back at William, one strand of her neat hair lifted up by the wind.

  “Goodbye, Adelia,” he mouthed, but she couldn’t decipher the movement of his lips, so a look of terrible confusion crossed her face. She turned and ducked into the car, and Diana hurried out of the house with her bag and the excited flush that had come over her since she started sketching again.

  “Bye, Dad,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Wish me luck on Tuesday.” She ran out to Margaux and knelt beside her. Margaux looked up; William hoped she was present enough to say goodbye to her middle child. The moment was too brief to know. Diana hugged her mother and followed Adelia out to the car, and then doors closed behind them and the car slid away, leaving William alone with his absent wife, his two remaining daughters, and the children of Elizabeth’s recent divorce.

  Margaux moved between rose plants. Her determination to draw a garden out of this soil touched him. Here, in this bare place, where trees were stunted by salt. Where houses were permitted a single story of height. Where sand swept across the street and settled into the crabgrass, where the women wore bathing suits covered by shorts when they shopped at the grocery store, flip-flops slapping their heels. He was touched by Margaux’s drive to lay down roots in front of this house when a Greyhound bus stopped four times a day across the street and angular Russian girls who worked as maids at the Sea Shell Motel embarked and disembarked, their faces pimply and blank above their polyester uniforms. When all along the street, neighbors hung American flags across their balconies and large-bellied men mowed scraggly lawns, sockless in their Docksiders.

  William rocked, and considered his wife. Her determination was touching, yes. But still, William knew that the Adairs could not rebuild in this place, where the streets were arranged in a scientific grid and the houses laid flat as the sand. Where renters came and went and there was no recollection of grandparents who stayed, no remembrance of family here before anything else was built or torn down. The Adairs could continue, of course. They could continue here as comfortably as possible, but there would be no going back to the kind of family they were when they lived in the house his grandfather built. In the end, perhaps that was for the best. Perhaps his children could feel happy here, where there could be no going back to what they were in the past.

  Chapter 19

  Rock Harbor was boring, but at least there was water, and now Louise had the novel to keep her occupied. She watched everything that occurred in the rental house with an eagle eye. She imagined her tiny bedroom was a writer’s den, and adopted a writerly schedule. She woke up at six and took a run on the empty beach, avoiding landed jellyfish the size of frying pans. From seven to nine she wrote, eating peaches until her stomach hurt. At nine she brought Margaux her breakfast, which Margaux preferred to eat alone. At the Rock Harbor house, Margaux had dropped some of her recent anxieties about getting ready to leave, falling back into the routines of her customary solitude. This was helpful, because it allowed Louise to return to her writer’s den after the breakfast delivery. At this point in the morning, she took care to leave the door open a crack for maximal spying efficiency. Next she applied a Crest Whitestrip and settled in to wait.

  The first rush of motion passed through when Elizabeth herded the girls downstairs to be fed before camp. There had been three camps so far: two weeks of tennis camp, and now a camp for aspiring marine biologists. The pre-camp rush was sometimes interesting—there was the morning when Lucy renamed her cereal options Honey Slut Cheerios and Golden Damns—but it wasn’t the children Louise was interested in. She watched Elizabeth carefully. Since the move to the shore, she seemed to have gotten things together a bit. There was less to-do about minor events. She’d joined an experimental theater group at the Rock Harbor Community Center, and she carried a pocket-sized notebook everywhere, which she filled with ideas for performance art. She sat down more; in Breacon she’d seemed allergic to chairs. Now there was less rushing past, bracelets clattering, scarves flying. The experimental theater group practiced three nights a week. During the day, Elizabeth spent hours hunting for props at local garage sales. A heap of ancient housewares—including an old rusted refrigerator—began to accumulate in the garage.

  It was a strenuously recreational universe they lived in, Elizabeth and her daughters. There was an ever renewing supply of camps, acting projects, and minutely scheduled trips to the beach. They were active, at least. They had none of the others’ inertia. Once they had gotten themselves out of the house, a hole opened in the mornings. William ate breakfast in the kitchen only if Adelia were there, and her presence had waned. She came down the first two weekends that the Adairs stayed in Rock Harbor, but she never materialized the next weekend and came for an afternoon the following Saturday. Louise took careful note of this visitation schedule. The first weekend Adelia was there, she made a big show of staying in the downstairs bedroom, but Louise caught her sneaking upstairs, guilty in her nightgown. So she was sleeping with the old dog after all. This gave Louise hope for the plot of her nov
el, but sadly, the next weekend Adelia failed to arrive, and the weekend after that she came only long enough to let Diana visit with her family and then to cart her back to Breacon to continue “work” on the nonexistent carriage house.

  Adelia’s absence was strange because she had been such a constant presence in the house on Little Lane. Why risk neighborhood scorn in Breacon, then refrain from visiting the rental house? When Adelia did show up, she was strangely tentative. On Little Lane she ordered everyone around as though directing a ten-million-dollar movie every time she cooked a rubbery chicken. She was so bossy that Louise had privately taken to calling her “Adelia Big-deal-ia.” In Rock Harbor, however, Adelia hung around the outskirts of conversations, watching William, blinking, looking lost. This new development presented a massive hurdle for the novel. How could Louise explain the undramatic dribbling off? Her tagline started to falter: lifelong friend moves in while demented mother is still living upstairs, then lifelong friend moves out, sadly, but without much dramatic ado.

  Louise found herself wishing that William would buck up a bit. He obviously loved Adelia. Once Louise witnessed him reach across the table after breakfast to hold her hand without speaking, just looking across at her and holding on as if he could sit there forever. If he wanted her so badly, why couldn’t he get her to stay? Instead, he settled into his Rock Harbor routine, showing as much spine as a jellyfish. In the mornings, when Adelia wasn’t present, he took his breakfast up to sit with Isabelle; in the afternoons, he prepared himself lunch on the screened-in porch. For hours, he watched Margaux garden. He took to going out and attempting to help, kneeling beside her on a green foam pad he purchased at the garden emporium so that his knees wouldn’t get dirty. At first Margaux packed up her things and moved inside as soon as he hitched up his khakis and knelt on his pad. He learned to keep a little distance, placing himself at some remove from Margaux’s current project. He figured out that it was better not to insist too much on his own usefulness to her garden. Soon Margaux let him kneel beside her, even occasionally instructing him in the art of trimming herbs or staking tomatoes. Afterward, William proudly hung up his pad in the garage and removed himself to the screened-in porch to gloat over his progress as a gardener.