The Carriage House by Louisa Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

that I could never forget it.
    The first real symptoms started this year. I sometimes go out on my walks and forget what I’ve gone out for. When I find my way back, I open the door to this house and think, “This place is meant to feel like home,” but I can’t remember why, or if it ever did. I see my children, even, and I know I’m meant to feel like their mother, but there are days when I can’t feel it. Days when I feel like a person who has somehow wandered into another family’s house. Mostly I feel stuck in a younger version of myself. I remember baking bread with my mother on the farm, and I feel so strongly that I am that child. And then a daughter of mine walks in and I can only think, “Who does that girl belong to?”
    Other days I wander around the house and think, “This place reminds me so clearly of him,” but it’s not William I’m thinking of. It’s someone I knew in a past life whose name I’ve long since forgotten, and yet I miss him in a way that makes me want to lie down on the floor and cry until the world is swept away by my tears.
    But it was William that I married. I first saw him in art history class. I remember watching him from the back. The way he laughed with his friends, the way he whispered during the slide shows. He was so handsome that I blushed when he answered questions in class. After two weeks he left his friends and sat next to me. It was only us in the row. I felt so shy I couldn’t even look at him. He asked for a pencil and I gave it to him. I’d unwrapped my lunch at my desk and felt embarrassed to be eating with him sitting so close. I was ashamed of my hard-boiled egg and the napkin I’d unfolded in my lap. The egg smelled awfully sharp. I started to wrap it up so that I could eat it later, when I was alone, but he said, “Don’t stop eating for my sake,” so I had to eat, miserable and ashamed. That I remember. He continued to sit with me all through the rest of the year. I was still shy, and I couldn’t pay attention when he was sitting so close, but I felt privileged that he chose me. I wasn’t a popular girl. My mother was getting sick, and I was too often alone. There was something strange about me. I knew I was different from the other college girls. And he was so confident. I remember how lucky I felt to be seen at his side. But I can’t remember why he married me. I didn’t even hesitate when I told him yes, I’d be his wife, of course. I couldn’t imagine it, but I didn’t hesitate. I can’t remember why. I know I felt lucky that he came to sit at my side.
    Later the wrongness seeped in. I recognized it first as the desire to be alone. Every conversation felt uncomfortable. An unnecessary engagement. A scrimmage from which I emerged a little more shaken. I couldn’t get alone enough, and the houses we lived in never felt like my own. He laughed when I tried to tell him. His careless laugh: “Margaux, you strange creature.” I’d hate him for laughing, but later I’d feel lucky again that someone like him would choose me. It’s a gift to have a place made for you by someone like him. Someone so buoyant. In exchange, I tried to fill our houses with beautiful things—the little nouns, my discoveries, that I’d kept with me since I was a girl—but he called them trinkets and laughed as though they were habits I ought to shake off. As the children grew up, they broke so many that I finally packed them up and stored them away in the attic.
    Our children were so rough. Strong girls, different from me. When they were babies, I dreamed they’d grow up quiet. There were so many stories that I wanted to tell them. I dreamed they’d play piano, imagined teaching them about the way to choose a vase for a flower arrangement. But instead they played sports. They became less comprehensible to me. Like William, they never let me go off on my own. They needed my company so much. Elizabeth laughed as he did, in the same sharp way, when I tried to