Whatever was chewing inside the wall stopped when I scooted into the narrow triangle between the boxes and the roof. Cobwebs slid over my arm, and I caught a breath, the sound dying in the dark space by the wall. All of a sudden, I felt like things were crawling all over my skin—creepy little things with six or eight legs. I pictured red-eyed rats, and black bats, and other creatures you’d see on Halloween. J. Norm was so gonna owe me extra for this. But if I didn’t haul the trunk out of here now, I probably never would. Once I got out of this spot, no way I was crawling back in here again.
I sat down and wedged my feet against the trunk, bracing my hands behind me and pushing it through the tunnel. The metal corners let out a long, high whine as they scraped along. I felt them grinding deeper and deeper into the wood floor before the trunk hit a rafter and wedged solid. Hopefully, it was far enough that I could grab it from the other end and wiggle it on out.
A few minutes later and a few pulls from the other side, and the trunk came loose all at once, toppling over. Something shattered inside, and right then I felt a breeze on my shoulders, like someone was behind me breathing on the back of my neck, waiting for me to tip the box upright. I heard whispering, and a quick, high-pitched sound, like a little girl laughing. I thought about J. Norm’s story—the little red-haired girls playing on the stairs and then his dream about a fire. Maybe he’d had friends or relatives that’d died when a house burned down, and they were, like, haunting this trunk, and whoever opened it would be in trouble.
“All right,” I told myself. “You been in the attic w-a-a-ay too long. There’s probably fumes up here.”
Pieces of glass filtered down like sand in an hourglass as I turned the trunk over. One thing was for sure: This baby wasn’t full of magazines.
Something dark, like a shadow, moved in the corner of my eye. I thought about that TV show where they go to old houses and hunt for ghosts.
Then again, maybe this thing was hidden for a reason. . . .
Leaning close, I studied the latches, tried the sliders different ways, but they wouldn’t budge. There was an old-timey keyhole in the center, which probably meant the trunk was locked. No telling where a key might be, or if there even was a key. After all that work, I was out of luck.
Crossing my arms on the trunk, I sagged over it and let my forehead rest against the cool metal.
So much for my big discovery.
Chapter 11
J. Norman Alvord
The little girls came to me in a dream again. They were running on a lawn this time. I stood at the edge of a brick patio, my feet in small, brown polished-leather shoes, with socks that stretched to the height of knobby knees, meeting gray short pants. A toddler boy ran with the girls, his red hair in curls like theirs. They’d discovered a patch of dandelions near an ornate wrought-iron fence. The girls picked a few and the toddler stood very still while they held the flowers under his chin. “See if you like butter,” they cried. “See if you like butter, Johnny!”
The boy’s name was Johnny. I realized now that I knew it. I had always known it.
“He does! He does like butter! His chin’s all yella!” The girls squealed, and the little boy fingered his neck, trying to feel the change in color. “Johnny likes butter!” The girls darted off across the yard, their dandelion bouquets leading the way. “Cecile, let’s see if you like butter.”
“I don’ like no buttah.” The maid, Cecile, was sitting on a concrete bench with lion’s paws capping the legs. She held a baby, a chubby-cheeked, red-haired cherub, loosely in front of herself, dangling the baby’s tiny feet, letting the grass tickle them. Smiling, Cecile lifted her chin to accommodate the dandelion bouquets. “I don’ like no buttah, no how. No, ma’am.”
The girls squatted in the grass, craning to gain a view of her neck. The skin there was as smooth and dark as a coffee bean, glistening with a sheen of perspiration. The day was warm, the girls dressed in simple white smocks, their thin, freckled arms dangling from oval-shaped openings that left their shoulders bare.
“Yes, you do!” squealed the bolder of the two, Erin. I knew her name now. I knew it as if I had always known. Erin, the bold one, and Emma, fully an inch shorter, more timid than Erin. The twins. “You like butter!” they squealed in perfect unison, as if it were planned. They lowered the flowers to the baby’s chin. “Poobie likes butter, too!”
“I bet big bubbie like buttah.” Cecile nodded toward me, tipping her chin up, her lips pressing to one side so as to form a dimple in her cheek. “Bet he like it a lot, much as he like to eat him a biscuit.” Her gaze met mine, and she winked. “You like that dandelion buttah, Willie-boy?”
“No,” I said. I was in a foul mood, determined not to enjoy the dandelion game or any other. When the twins ran to me with their flowers, I rose onto my toes, slapped their hands away. Stretching her bouquet upward, Emma grabbed my arm. Even her slight weight caused pain, and I pushed her away hard enough that she stumbled off the patio and fell backward into the grass.
“Stop it, Willie!” Stiff armed, Erin threw her weight against me, her palms colliding with my chest. I let her bounce off and pretended to laugh at her. Stomping a foot, she plucked Emma off the ground, and they darted away, their dandelion bouquets scattered in the damp grass. With the bottom of my shoe, I ground the flowers into the soil until only dirty yellow shreds remained, and then I grabbed my arm where Emma had touched it, rubbed it because it hurt. I was aching in more places than just that one. The pain was Erin’s doing.
She’d made the racket that caused it to happen.
Yet today she could run and laugh and play the butter game. It wasn’t fair. Everything was different today. Wrong. There was a heaviness inside me, a newly cast shadow that kept me from playing with the girls every bit as much as the pain did. I was angry, afraid, ashamed, hiding a painful secret now, moving quietly through the world so as to go unnoticed. Worse yet, I knew this was only the beginning of something terrible. Something that would continue to worsen.
Together, the girls moved to the corner of the yard to pluck tiny puffs filled with dandelion parachutes.
I watched them show Johnny how to blow across them, sending the little soldiers skyward with their miniature canopies of silk.
I wanted to rip every last seed head from the yard, grind all of them into dust so that no one could play with them, so that no one could laugh, and run, and make noise.
I felt Cecile’s gaze upon me, and I turned my attention her way. Her dark eyes narrowed and her wide lips pursed. The angle of her head was thoughtful, pensive, wary. Her gaze moved to the house, sweeping upward, reflecting brick and stone and sky. On the second story, she paused and honed in, then quickly looked away.
I turned to check over my shoulder. A woman was in the window, a filmy white nightgown outlining her breasts, draping off one thin shoulder. A slip of red hair fell over her cheek, and she pushed it aside with the back of her wrist.
She looked down at me. I turned away. I let my arm fall to my side. I stopped rubbing it. I didn’t want anyone to see.
It would only cause more pain. More fighting . . .
I woke from the dream with a familiar ache.
There are some old fractures here
, a doctor had told me while reading my X-rays after a minor car accident in college. He’d been surprised to find evidence of an injury from long ago.
There’s some damage that never healed properly. Any idea why?
None
, I’d said. My mother had always been meticulous about shots and doctor visits, protective to the point of not allowing me beyond the yard fence when I was a boy. She’d never mentioned my having broken an arm when I was very small. I didn’t recall having broken an arm.
The doctor tilted his face toward the X-ray again.
Hard to believe that. This must have been quite painful.
Shaking his head, he turned off the light.
Maybe I blocked it out
, I said flippantly, and laughed it off. At the time, I had no memory of holding my arm that day in the yard while the girls played with dandelions. Strange that I remembered it so clearly now.
How is it possible to find a part of the past that was never there before?
The question haunted me as I went to the kitchen for coffee. It was warm and ready, thanks to the timer on the pot—one of those many modern conveniences for which I should have been grateful. Still, I missed the days when the sun rose to the sound of Annalee’s slippers in the kitchen and the percolator belching, draining, belching again. The mornings had a rhythm then, the sense of a life building toward something, brewing like the coffee in the percolator, giving off a tantalizing aroma.
Now the coffee brewed quickly, and the morning’s aroma was stale.
I’d never realized the difference until now, hadn’t given a conscious thought to Annalee’s morning sounds, but the memory was there nonetheless. An unexamined fragment, until this moment. It is possible, I concluded, to lose a bit of life—a moment, a sensation, a memory—for it to lie trapped like a bit of paper along the curb of a walking path. A stiff wind passes and it suddenly tumbles free, drifts past your eyes, so that you see it now.
Gazing through the window into the yard, I noticed for the first time that dandelions had sprouted near Annalee’s bird feeders. Like my memories, they seemed to have appeared overnight, but in reality, they’d been growing for a while. Beneath the surface, the roots were deep.
I heard the water running upstairs and my mind hiccuped. Someone was singing, a girl’s voice. For an instant I was lost in time, and Deborah was upstairs, dressing for church. Any moment now, Annalee would come around the corner on her way to force Roy from his bed and into the Sunday clothes he didn’t want to wear.
I turned and checked the coffeemaker. Modern, sleek, with a digital clock on the front. Deborah and Roy weren’t upstairs.
A melancholy fell over me, but then I recalled Epiphany and our mission, and life spiraled back to order. She came loping down the stairs a few minutes later, bounded through the living room and slid around the corner into the kitchen, dark hair bouncing in a ponytail of long spirals, her eyes wide and full of excitement. “You’re gonna be so glad you said I could stay last night.”
“And why would that be?” I did my best to affect the look of a curmudgeon. I couldn’t, after all, be giving off the impression that last night’s arrangements implied a repeat invitation.
“Just guess,” she chirped.
“I couldn’t begin to.”
“Oh, come on, J. Norm, be a little fun for once.” Without hesitation, she helped herself to a mug from the cabinet and poured a cup of coffee, then added sugar and milk.
“Fun?” Her enthusiasm traveled on the coffee fumes, slipping up my nose like an infectious disease. I snorted, tried to rub it away. “Fun isn’t the goal. This is a working arrangement, after all. What is
fun
about digging around in an old man’s attic?”
Opening the refrigerator again, she leaned down and looked inside, splaying her lanky legs like a colt trying to reach fresh grass. “It’s fun when you find something.” She opened and closed a drawer. “You got
anything
here for breakfast?”
“I don’t like breakfast.”
She blew out a laugh. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Shrugging, she pulled out a loaf of bread and set it on the counter. “Fine, then, I’ll just sit here and I won’t even tell you what I found last night. Just about broke my neck getting it out, but that’s okay. If you don’t wanna know, then I’ll make me a piece of toast and go watch some cartoons. Same difference to me.”
“It’s an oxymoron—same difference. Things are either the same or they’re different.”
Sighing, she pushed the bread aside. “How come you do that?” Her attention turned my way. “Argue about everything? Act hateful.”
It was a fair question, one for which I did not have a good answer. “It entertains me.”
My reply elicited a one-sided smirk. “Yeah, well, then you need to get a life.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” I waited for her to tell me what she’d found upstairs, but she returned to making toast, ignoring me completely. Finally she smacked the butter knife down so hard that it rang against the plate. “Geez, J. Norm, are you gonna ask what I found upstairs or not?”
“I supposed you’d tell me soon enough,” I answered, disproportionately triumphant.
Snorting, she leaned over her folded arms. “I found a trunk. Another one, just like the one with all the magazines in it, only smaller.” Her hands flipped through the air, the palms turning upward. “What can I say? I am goo-oo-ood.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I answered, and was out of my chair in a whistle.
In short order, we were in the second-story hall with the trunk and a toolbox. We’d lowered the trunk down the attic stairs using a rope and pulley—rather ingenious, if I do say so myself. The lock was a more complicated matter, however.
While I went to work with a screwdriver and an ice pick, Epiphany chewed a fingernail. “If it’s more magazines and junk, I’m gonna snatch somebody’s hair out.”