Three Story House: A Novel Read Free Page A

it in the back so it would hold. “You’ll meet him someday,” she’d said, “and he’ll love you enough to make up for not being here now.” And then, as if knowing what she’d said wasn’t even close to enough, she added, “You have his eyes.”
    Her lungs burned. She let go of the eel grass, bursting the surface of the water, and gasped for air. When she looked around, she saw squiggles of confetti as her body adjusted to the sudden intake of oxygen and the bright sunlight above the water.
    “Girls,” Elyse’s mother called, walking toward them. “We’re ready to eat.”
    “Triplins,” Jim shouted after her. “Like cousins and triplets.”
    “I don’t understand,” Elyse was saying, while waving impatiently at her mother. “You never told me what color the stairs were. Isn’t everything yellow?”
    “There are no stairs,” Lizzie said, grinning at her cousin. “It’s a one-story house.”
    They dunked Isobel together, their laughter echoing across the surface of the bay. Lizzie knew that for third-grade show-and-tell in the fall, what she’d bring would be a bottle of bay water, a nickname for the three of them, and their own secret whoomp dance.

November 2011: Los Angeles
    Y ou could move here,” Isobel said.
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Lizzie said after flipping the switch that turned off the knee bender. The machine, designed to gently flex her knee after surgery, didn’t make a lot of noise, but the absence of the motor’s whir made every word they said sound as if it were an echo.
    “But you don’t live here. You really don’t live anywhere.” Her cousin, in mid-transition from morning gym class to afternoon run, lay down on the floor next to the pull-out couch and stretched.
    “It wouldn’t make sense. In a few months I could be back with the team, or playing in the European leagues, or—”
    “Move into my extra bedroom and get a job teaching or coaching at one of the fine educational institutions here.”
    “You sound like my mother. The next thing I know you’ll be sending me links to job applications and saying what a shame it is that I spent all those years getting a degree I don’t use.”
    “The difference is you’re talking to me.”
    “My mother and I talk.”
    Isobel laughed. “No pretenses needed with me. I like having you around, even if you are incapacitated.” Isobel stretched her arms toward the wall and then pointed her toes, making it appear as if she were being pulled at both ends. “Besides, you need a home, and living here will give you the chance to accumulate more stuff than will fit in a duffle bag.”
    “I’ll be around a good bit for the next few months.” Lizzie needed to walk, test out how well her leg was healing. Getting up would stop the conversation from becoming about her mother. Although at least she and Isobel were in the same spot, neither one of them on friendly terms with their mothers. She massaged her knee and then maneuvered herself to the edge of the bed. Isobel, anticipating her next move, reached under the couch and pulled out the crutches. The motion set off the dancing Santa Claus on the mantle, and the canned sound of “Jingle Bell Rock” filled their half of the duplex.
    The song ended and Isobel picked up the tune and continued singing as she helped Lizzie onto her crutches. At practice a few weeks earlier she’d torn her ACL and now, a few days after surgery and a month before Christmas, Lizzie found herself convalescing at her cousin’s house. Such a Jane Austen way of explaining the situation, but how else to describe being propped up by half a dozen pillows on the pullout couch as a machine bent and unbent her leg to the prescribed post-surgery degree? No other word would do.
    “It’s the right time,” Isobel sang as she let go of Lizzie’s crutches.
    Sighing, Lizzie started to do cautious laps around the small living room while Isobel shadowed her, anticipating any hesitations in balance. “Coaching