The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  The blinking number moved from 73 to 74, 74 to 75, 75 to 76. If she couldn’t bring him back, he’d be gone forever. For ten years she lived close to him, and that was nearly enough. Then she stepped across the threshold into his house, but by that point he was already leaving, following Margaux to the place Margaux had been hoping to go. The chance that she might lose him forever rattled around in Adelia’s diaphragm. She was having trouble breathing fully. She got up and walked over to the water fountain, which emitted a dribble so pathetic that her lips brushed the metal spigot as she drank. Over her bent head, the number switched from 98 to 99. Adelia tensed in expectation of some grand resetting that might happen at 100, an apocalyptic shift: 100 turned to 101. She returned to her seat. She sat down and adjusted her skirt, crossing her legs at the ankles. The hem of her skirt—navy blue and pleated—reached the middle of her knees. This was the kind of outfit she’d worn since she was twelve. And now she was in her fifties. Adelia had passed over from her youth without realizing. She’d finally gotten William, only to watch him leave. She closed her eyes and remembered him dancing with Margaux under the mosaic light of that disco ball, his eyes so soft and far away. Adelia had wondered if it was cruel of her to want to yank him back to the world that she lived in. But could she follow him there? Could she cling to him at the beach, watching while he gardened with Margaux, hovering off to one side while they danced under glimmering lights? When she opened her eyes, she looked down at her hands: she had been clutching her own palms so hard, there were eight red crescents left by her nails. Her own ferocity surprised her; determined Adelia had always held on to things too hard.

  She watched the neon number move from 128 to 129, 129 to 130, 130 to 132. She blinked. What happened to 131? She waited. 133. Her lips parted; this wasn’t right. She waited again. 134. Her mouth was wide open; had they skipped her number entirely? 134 shifted to 135. Adelia Lively stood and looked around at the crowd of passive waiters; had no one else witnessed this event? An elderly man was collecting himself to appear before his maker. Quickly, mercilessly, Adelia hurried to beat him to teller number 3. She flew across the room, soundless, an avenging angel in her pleated skirt and ballet flats. From behind a sheet of glass, the teller looked up from his computer and folded his hands on the desk, awaiting her arrival. His glasses were thick and he peered vulnerably at her, moleish and overexposed, one of those people who could never survive in the wild.

  “Excuse me, sir, but my number wasn’t called.” Adelia told him, taking a seat, leaning toward him.

  “Oh, dear,” the mole man said. There were pictures of a red-haired woman framed behind him, evidence of a life outside the Permit and Licensing Department. “Your number wasn’t called?” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “No, I was skipped.” Even as she said it, Adelia perceived the weight of what she had said. She was skipped. She had been skipped over, never pulled up into proper adulthood. The hand that passed over young women and selected some of them to become mothers had hovered over her head and then moved on so that she lived her life alone, waiting, hoping for the hand to return.

  “This is my teller,” the old man whined from behind her. “This is my teller.”

  “Can you just wait a minute?” Adelia asked without turning around.

  “Would you look at that,” said the man behind the glass plate, who was squinting at his computer. “You were skipped, weren’t you?”

  “This is my teller!” the man insisted.

  “Just wait!” Adelia said.

  The mole man flinched; his little red mouth seemed far too sensitive for a fight. His allegiances were torn between the old man and Adelia. “Ma’am, if you could just step aside while I help this gentleman, then I’ll get to you right after him.”

  “I will not wait any longer! My number was before his!”

  “Please lower your voice.”

  “I will not move,” she whispered angrily.

  The teller blanched. Adelia could tell that his red-haired wife would have performed better in this circumstance; without her, the shortsighted mole man was lost aboveground. He swallowed, then appealed to the man behind Adelia. “Sir, would you mind waiting for just a minute?”

  “This is my teller,” the old man said again, but he had already given up the fight.

  “Fine. I’ll be with you in a minute. How can I help you?” The teller shifted his attention back to Adelia.

  “I need a B-3 building permit.”

  “Name?”

  “Adelia Lively, Esquire. I am the owner’s legal representative.”

  “ID?” She handed him her license. “You’ve filled out the application?” Yes, Adelia Lively always filled the appropriate applications. “And the plumber and electrician also filled out their sections? You can give them to me now, with copies of the plans.”

  Adelia slid these through the crack beneath the teller’s glass. He flipped through the pages. “Adair Architecture,” he muttered. “Intern, Diana Adair. And who is the supervising architect?”

  Adelia stared him down. “William Adair.” She refused to blink. He certainly had not agreed to supervise, but now was not the time for moral quibbling. The teller paused, agonizingly, then continued flipping through the application. He seemed satisfied. Effective Adelia, stuck on a fading idea, had hired the appropriate contractors, forged a note to attain the architect’s seal, checked with neighborhood association bylaws. The appropriate forms had most definitely been filled out.

  Finally, laying aside the paperwork, the teller squinted at his computer, his mouth working. “We’re running at about a week for processing right now, assuming everything checks out fine. You should get it in the mail in a week.” A receipt printed behind him in fits and starts. Adelia stared, counting, numbers ticking away in her mind. For one week Adelia would wait in Breacon while William withdrew. One week, and then Diana would be ready to build. The contractors were waiting with their largest team. One week and two months for the house to go up. When it was almost up—not before then, she couldn’t stand too much more time in the rental house, watching William while he watched his wife—she’d go back down to collect him. Two months, and Adelia would ask for one more leave of absence from her skeptical boss, who never once imagined she would be so irresponsible this late in her illustriously competent career. One week and two months, and she’d try one last time to retrieve the man she loved from the place he’d withdrawn to and bring him back to the place where she remained.

  “You should get it in a week, two at the latest,” the teller said again, eyeing the old man hovering behind her.

  “What if I don’t?” Adelia asked. “I’ve been skipped in the past.”

  “If you don’t receive the form, you should call this number,” he said, sliding a piece of paper through the slot in his glass pane.

  Adelia took it. She stood with dignity and shouldered her purse. “You should keep better track of your numbers,” she said, then ceded her place at the glass.

  Chapter 23

  After a week Arthur still hadn’t come by. He was there, next door, but he stayed hidden in the squat house with its orange shutters. There was that to worry about, as well as the fact that William still refused to talk about the building plan. But the permit came through, and Diana’s second meeting with the contractor went well enough that she was able to relegate these facts to the edge of her mind, clearing a space for the carriage house to rise up in its completed form. The contractor assured her that he would be able to use the salvaged beams, the glass doorknobs, and the slabs of cement. She asked that the new wood be cedar; he agreed. They turned to her blueprint, and her heart stopped while he inspected it, as she waited for the flaws that he would find. “We can start on the foundation tomorrow,” he said. She held the cool, smooth cylinder of the rolled blueprint in her palm while she accompanied him back out to his truck.

  In the evening
, she walked to the grocery store under oaks and maples heavy with late-summer foliage. She bought herself milk and cereal, and supplies to make spaghetti for dinner. As she walked home, the plastic bag bumped against her calf. Her thoughts were collected, organized around the lines of the new structure, until she passed the Schmidts’ house. She thought of knocking on the door. She could ask him to have dinner with her. She could make him spaghetti, and they could share a bottle of wine. Then she reminded herself to be less of a child. Their lives had progressed. It was enough that she remembered how to draw, and that she had made a blueprint that would eventually come to life before her eyes. She kept walking, and the bag bumped, and the air was thick with the smell of fading summer.

  While she ate her pasta, she leafed through a coffee table book of great architecture, taken from a shelf in her father’s basement office. Afterward, she washed her dishes and put them in the sink. She took the book up to bed with her. It was difficult to fall asleep. The air was hot, and even when she opened the windows, it was as though the branches of the trees were sweeping hotter air into the room. She kicked off her covers and lay there, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the bullfrogs croaking from the pond. Since she’d started the new plans, she hadn’t struggled as much with falling asleep. She had allowed herself to concoct elaborate fantasies as she drowsed off: building a great structure, regaining Arthur’s affection, resuming her old sureness. But tonight her mind was spare. The part of her that had been filled with dreams was empty, replaced by a hollow sensation. She set her mind to imagining the inside of the carriage house before it burned. She visualized the pointed angle of the roof and the pattern of cedar beams that crossed the air, cutting it into bordered triangles. She smelled its old wood, felt the round coolness of the glass doorknobs in her palm. At some point, she fell asleep to the sound of the bullfrogs and the swaying arms of the trees.

  In the morning, she woke up early but it had already gotten hot. In her pajamas, she sat at her desk and unrolled the blueprint again. She checked each detail. When she was satisfied once more with its mathematical precisions, she changed into shorts and a striped T-shirt. Adelia had bought her leather sandals at a store in Rock Harbor; she slid these on her feet. She considered herself in the mirror while she brushed her hair. She was tan, and she knew she looked better than she had when she first came home in June. Somehow, in the rush to finish her plans, she’d forgotten about her own figure. Now she was surprised to notice it in the mirror: her arms seemed stronger and more capable. She shrugged, watching her shoulders rise and fall with easy mechanical motion. So this was the form she would fill. She bent and splashed water on her face, then pulled her hair back into a ponytail. At the kitchen table, she studied the architecture book while she ate her cereal. When she was done, she rinsed her bowl out in the sink, then walked over to the Schmidts’.

  When she rang the doorbell first, no one came. She rang again. When the door opened inward, it was Anita who appeared. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, and her thin hair was cropped close to her head. There were circles under her eyes. Diana remembered that she hadn’t checked how early it was.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Schmidt,” Diana said.

  “It’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”

  “I was hoping to speak to Arthur.”

  “He left,” she said. Behind her, the shades in the living room were drawn, and the furniture looked gloomy. “He went to Poughkeepsie to check on a distributor.”

  “I see,” Diana heard herself saying.

  “I believe it was a brewery. After that he’s going back to the city. He can’t stay here forever.” Diana focused on Mrs. Schmidt’s feet, her toes gnarled around the thong of her fuzzy pink flip-flops. She could feel Mrs. Schmidt considering her. “He waited longer than I thought he’d wait,” the old woman continued. “He was worried about your sister. The one who burned the house down. But she’s fine, and I’m fine, too, so he left this morning.”

  “Ah,” Diana said. She didn’t move.

  “How is that sister of yours who burned the house down?”

  “She’s better, thanks.”

  “That one I admire. When I saw it burning, I told Arthur, ‘I’ll bet it was that little one. That little one’s got guts.’”

  “She’s been through a lot,” Diana said.

  “But she’s a fighter. I’ve always admired a fighter. Your father, prick though he may be, is also a fighter.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Tell him to come back soon.”

  “I will.” Diana tried to smile. “I should go now, Mrs. Schmidt.”

  “Go, then.”

  Diana walked down the flagstone path to the driveway, then abruptly turned back. “Mrs. Schmidt,” she called. The old woman was still there, watching Diana’s retreat from the shelter of her large pink robe. “Will you tell Arthur that the house will be finished next month?”

  “You’re building it again?” Mrs. Schmidt asked. She looked surprised by the news.

  “We’re starting today.”

  “On your property?”

  “Yes. Just as it was.”

  Mrs. Schmidt folded both pink arms over her chest. She surveyed Diana, chin tilted up.

  “Will you tell him, please, that I won’t give up on it?” Diana said.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Thanks,” Diana said, but Mrs. Schmidt was already shutting the door.

  Chapter 24

  After Labor Day, only William, Isabelle, and Margaux stayed at the beach. Elizabeth drove up on Wednesday evenings to practice with her theater group, but she went back to Breacon after dinner. When she brought the girls to visit on weekends, they were preoccupied with school friends and spiral binders and seemed eager to get back to the suburbs. House by house, the town of Rock Harbor emptied. The tennis pro from the Grubby Tub went back to Montclair; even the Russian maids returned to their sources of origin. Once again, Louise was left behind while the rest of the world moved on. She wandered around the downtown area, a person forgotten. As September progressed, the leaves started to change, but they did so less dramatically than the leaves in Breacon had. Fall in Rock Harbor was less of a seasonal shift than it was a general draining out. Sand swept up from the beach and spread itself across the streets. The Grubby Tub became a ghost bar. Louise watched her tan fading a little bit each day and was filled with a muted version of despair that manifested itself as a constant desire to drive to CVS, where she wandered among fluorescent aisles searching for a perfect product. She purchased a vast array of lip glosses; none of them suited her. On September 26, she received a text message from Bradley that read simply: “I am a married man.” She didn’t reply.

  In general, Louise felt less sad than far away. She had been wandering around the world since she graduated from high school and went to work in London for a year that turned into a decade. By this point, Louise had gotten very far from her point of origin. Occasionally, when she and Margaux walked through the empty grocery store, pretending to look for something, Louise missed her mother in Melbourne. Sometimes she sat on the back porch while William and Margaux gardened together, and she wondered if her own mother and father were wordlessly sharing toast at the kitchen table where Louise was once a little girl. There was a silent physical closeness between William and Margaux that reminded Louise of the kitchen in Melbourne with its cabbagey smell and the tea towels printed with lemons, and there was a defeatedness to William’s posture when he allowed the screen door to bang shut behind him that made her think of her own father coming home from work.

  Outside of these singular moments, Louise could barely remember what it was like to wake up next to a person, let alone the smell of the kitchen in Melbourne, or the precise print of those tea towels. In late September, Arlene threatened to come down for a weekend visit, but Louise evaded her. The idea of drinking shots with Arlene wh
ile attempting to attract pathetically lonely men so that afterward hilarious stories could be told had somehow, somewhere along the way, become nauseating to Louise.

  On October 4, Adelia showed up at the rental house. William waited for her on the front porch without making any movement to meet her. After she lugged her suitcase up the stairs to the porch, they stood close together, as though deciding whether to kiss or shake hands. William offered to take her bag, but Adelia shooed him away. Inside, Izzy was eating a microwave pizza and barely looked up from her magazine to acknowledge Adelia’s entrance. Later that afternoon, William and Izzy ate their dinner early in order to go out for a nighttime tennis game under the lights, so at dinnertime Adelia made herself a salad and ate it alone at the kitchen table. Louise avoided her. There was something unsettling about her distress, as if it might be contagious. Still, Louise kept an ear out for any unusual activity through her cracked bedroom door. Adelia set up camp in the downstairs bedroom; in the morning, it was evident she was going to stay.

  After this unmomentous arrival, Louise and Adelia started sitting together on the back porch, watching Margaux and William garden. To sit with a woman like Adelia, watching William through the shadow of the screen, feeling Adelia’s late-life loss, was enough to send you into perambulations through the aisles of CVS for the rest of eternity. In CVS, the endlessness of helpful products soothed Louise. There were solutions for everything: for calluses and corns, blocked sinuses and acid reflux, acne and rosacea, overthick eyebrows and ingrown hairs. There were other regulars at the Rock Harbor CVS, most of them with obvious problems, and Louise allowed herself to wonder about their stories while she perused the spectrum of scented candles. She browsed the anti-inflammatories and felt relieved to know that there were whole aisles set aside for the achievement of physical numbness.

  After her trips to CVS, she returned to the Adair house temporarily immune to the depression that came with witnessing a family’s collapse. Her desire to write the great Australian-American novel of the century began to fade, but that was fine. She was only twenty-seven years old. There was plenty of time. For now there was some comfort in wandering silently in an emptied town, watching Adelia watch William, surprising herself with the depths of her own melancholy. There was also comfort in escaping into Margaux’s journals. To open their pages reminded Louise of a closet she used to love sitting in as a child. She could have huddled in that closet forever, feeling the weight of empty coats draping her shoulders. There was a long fur coat that her mother had inherited from her mum, which fell over Louise’s shoulders so heavily that she felt as if she’d wriggled into the emptied body of a bear. There were rustling windbreakers, the smell of cured leather, and rubber galoshes that Louise could fit her bare feet into and imagine she was waiting out a terrible flood. She held her breath in that closet while her parents fought and made up outside, or her brother played with his friends, or the dog whined in his loneliness. And when she opened the door and walked out into the bald light of the outside world—no one having noticed how long she was gone—there was always the same disappointment at having to reveal herself once again. When she read Margaux’s journals, she experienced the same feeling of sitting in another person’s long fur coat. She saved them for late at night, when the rest of the family was sleeping and she had the kitchen to herself, so that she could disappear most easily into the closet of Margaux’s words.