by Louisa Hall
And so she was silent as they returned from exile to the house on Little Lane. If William couldn’t remember that this was his home, she would be lost. The only thing he said for the duration of the ride was, “What have the neighbors been saying about it?” and Adelia answered, “Who cares about the damn neighbors?” When they pulled into the driveway and got out of the car, Adelia allowed Diana to walk beside William. Diana had worked so hard. So much was riding on this for her as well. Adelia watched them walking together, and it was almost too much. Such an arc they had traveled. When Diana was younger, Adelia had enjoyed imagining the exceptional woman she would become. She had enjoyed watching William report the news of Diana’s recent victories with that unabashed triumph in his eyes. Both of them had changed. Diana’s success with the carriage house had revived her spirits, but Adelia suspected that it was a fragile recovery; Diana looked as though someone had slapped her when Elizabeth announced that Arthur had come for Isabelle. Adelia doubted that she could withstand another major disappointment, and William was so unwieldy beside her, glancing back so often toward Adelia with that cross look on his face, that Adelia worried he would fail to rise to the occasion. When they came around the side of the house and the new building rose into view, Diana and William stopped. Adelia caught up with them and searched William’s face. He gazed at it coolly, his expression unchanged.
“So there it is,” he said at last.
“It’s the same, isn’t it?” Diana asked. Her words hovered in the air.
“The design is similar,” William replied. They moved closer to the house. Adelia and Diana hung back and allowed him to approach on his own. He raised one finger to the paint. He tested the wall with his weight. He looked up the corner of the house to the roof, then backed up to them. “It’s well designed, Diana,” he said. “It’s fine. But it’s not the same.” He glanced at Adelia, knowing she would be angry, but still bullheaded in his conviction. “It’s not what you want to hear, but the truth is that it’s not the same. It’s a house made with different wood. Thomas Hardy said the spirit of the building is in the stones, and he drafted enough cathedral renovations to know what he was talking about. It’s true. This is a different house than the one my grandfather built. The paint is different, the shingles and the windowpanes. I can’t feel the same about it.”
“Oh, William, just wait before you say that,” Adelia said, taking his arm and clutching it. “Just wait before you say such a terrible thing.” She led him inside, and she could feel herself gripping too hard, wanting to hurt him so that he would feel the importance of this moment. They pushed through the door; Diana followed. There, inside the empty space of the house that Diana had built, Adelia pointed out the ways that Diana had tried. “See, William, the doorknobs are the same,” she said, pointing out the little prismatic knobs. “They were saved from the fire.” A flatness had settled over Diana’s face, and Adelia could feel herself growing frantic. “And the floor panels, William, do you see them? Those are the same. That is the same cement your grandfather poured.” William looked down at his beach shoes. Where was her William? It was essential that he arrive here from whatever distance he had retreated to. She took his arm again. “Come here, William.” She dragged him over to the wall and pulled a chair from the card table in the corner. “Stand on this.” He obeyed simply because it was the easiest thing to do. “Look up, do you see that beam? It’s the same cedar. Touch it.” William reached up. It was the movement that he made when he tossed a tennis ball to serve, one arm reached high, his face tilted up with a slight frown. He touched the beam. He stood like that a long time without saying anything, and then Adelia realized there were tears streaming down his face. Diana could see it, too, and she leaned hard against the wall.
“It’s fine, Dad, don’t worry,” Diana said. “We tried, but it’s okay.”
“No, William,” Adelia said, “it is not okay! William Adair, what is the matter with you?” It was not okay at all that he would not even try to remember himself in this place. “Your daughter has built this house for you, and it’s the same as your damn carriage house, and what could possibly be the matter now?”
“Don’t worry, Adelia,” Diana said. “It’s fine. I promise, it’s fine.”
“I’d like to go inside,” William said, getting down from his chair clumsily, like an old, defeated man. “I’d like to go inside for a minute.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, William!” Adelia cried, but he was heading out the door toward the house, and Diana seemed rooted in place, so Adelia followed him. “For Christ’s sake, she built that house for you!” she said. He kept moving. “She saved those beams from the original. The cement panels are exactly the same; she lugged them over one by one, your daughter did, for you.”
He slid open the screen door. Inside, he sat down on a stool at the kitchen island and put his head in his hands. “I could smell it,” he said.
Adelia stopped in her tracks. “What did you say?”
“I could smell the cedar,” he said. “The way it used to smell. When we were kids and we played in there, when my brother was alive, when the house was ours.”
“You smelled it.” Adelia moved to his side. She touched his shoulder and he looked up at her.
“The doctor said it was impossible,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe, but things change.”
“I swear to you, Adelia. I swear I smelled it. It smelled like it used to when we played up there in the fall. Like long-gone summers were trapped in the loft, bottled by cedar. I swear to you that I smelled that.”
“You really did?” she asked.
“I swear on my life,” he repeated, looking directly at her.
“Swear it on my life,” she told him.
“I do,” he said. And then he pulled her closer, and her fingertips were on his collarbone, and she could feel the warmth of his face against her own.
Chapter 31
Diana 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
All 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.
BEN STEINBAUER
Louisa Hall grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Haverford. After graduating from Harvard she played squash professionally and was ranked no. 2 in the country. She is completing her PhD in literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her poems have been published in journals such as The New Republic, Southwest Review, and Ellipsis. The Carriage House is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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