Authors: Colleen L Donnelly
“Good.” He looked relieved. “We could still have the wedding as planned. It’s five months away. That’s enough time to pick up where we left off.”
His eyes were large, full of a strained gaiety, a fragile relief that was propelling him forward, trying to catch me in its wake. I wanted to stop him, tell him to hold on, not to do this to me, but I couldn’t. I sat there and listened, watched him take my life and run with it. He was a boy and I was a kite. I was flying upward attached to a string he controlled. It was making me dizzy to feel the wind carry me and then be yanked downward, pulling me back into line where he wanted me to be.
“Hey, Trevor!” My door flew open and Paul Junior bounded across the room. His eyes were on his friend; he didn’t even look at me.
“Paul!” Trevor was off the sofa, grasping Paul Junior’s hand in a sweeping handshake, the two like brothers, doing everything except hugging each other.
“Come on over to the house. There’s a ballgame on. This old place doesn’t have television or radio. It’s zombie-land.” This time Paul Junior caught my gaze. Not caught it, really, more like wrested it from me and wrangled it to the ground with a “gotcha” sort of triumph.
Trevor looked down at me, his eyes telling me I should come too, now that things were okay again.
“I kind of hoped…” I began. I’d kind of hoped he’d crawl into the attic with me and explore Julianne’s treasures. I’d saved them when he’d called my parents to say he was coming.
“This is the Reds game, isn’t it?” Trevor turned to Paul Junior.
“Three games to seven already,” Paul Junior said in man talk.
“It’s okay. You go on, I’ll catch up with you,” I said to Trevor, holding back tears.
He leaned over and kissed me, then hurried out the door with my brother, the string yanking me suddenly, making me nauseous as he ran, forgetting I was attached to him. He was tugging me from Julianne’s house, from her Bible and her postcards, from simple things like holding hands when we told my family we were getting married, from shopping together even after we were married someday. I grabbed the line and gave it a yank to see if I could bring him back. But the string snapped and I floated free while he ran farther away with my brother. I grasped around me and thought I would fall, but I didn’t. The air in Julianne’s house buoyed me until I settled down, back to her sofa and out of Trevor’s reach.
Chapter 10
“A man brings from his storehouse
things old and new.”
I told no one of the attic treasures I’d found, not even Trevor during his brief visit, even though I had intended to. It was supposed to have been a bonding time, a time for him to see me in a new way and realize the importance of what I was doing. But he hadn’t come for excavations or sharing. He’d come to feel optimistic about us again, hopeful I’d give in so things could return to his kind of normal. I smiled on the outside while he visited. I smiled for him, smiled for my parents, and even smiled to placate my brother. But I cried when he left, sad that he was so happy over what was nothing more than a weak pretense on my part, and sadder yet because I missed him so. Missed him on the inside, in the places where he’d never, ever, been and where I feared he never would be.
The day after he left I climbed into the attic alone, thinking of my great-grandmother and the discontent she and I surely shared. I dragged up an electric cord with a light at one end and laid it on the floorboards, directing it toward her shelves. I sat cross-legged and began with the playbills. I blew the dust from the top one and read each word, each name, each title throughout the whole stack. They were from several different theatres. Not small-bit places but ones that must have been remarkable in their day. As I laid the bills side by side, I searched for their common denominator, the thread that had meant something to Julianne. Most were dramas:
The Woman and the Sea
,
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
,
Romeo and Juliet
. Love interest tales, a murder or two, and tragedies. I checked names again. Who were the actors and who were the actresses? It was like a puzzle, a process of elimination until I narrowed it down. Finally I found it. Oliver William Carmichael and Bridgett J. Haynes, the stars in key roles in the playbills she kept. Oliver was in every play, Bridgett in most. I stared at their names like I stared at the family photos on my parents’ wall. I knew nothing about them, and they divulged nothing in return. I stacked the playbills back together and returned them to the shelf.
Next I dusted off the fan. I eyed it from every direction before I pulled it open. Gently I unraveled its kinks, unbent its folds, and let it spread before me like a peacock’s tail. It was beautiful. More gorgeous than a farm wife would own. Delicate lace ran across the top, rimming pink satiny fabric on which was the scene of a woman lounging near a stream, a swan floating nearby. I fell into the scene, sharing her tranquility, wishing it were mine and praying it was my great-grandmother’s.
I refolded the fan and picked up the stack of postcards to gaze at the top one of the man and woman beneath the trellis of flowers. I dusted away the layer of dirt that had covered them for years and turned the card over, holding my breath, looking to see who had sent it, who had received it, and what they had said.
“My dearest, I remember when…”
Lines had been drawn through the names, obscuring forever the sender and the receiver, only the beginning of the sentiment intact. I looked at the next card and the next, a series of cards of fondness and holidays, best wishes and kindness.
Who?
I wondered.
And why? Why had she crossed out most of the words?
Disappointed, I set them aside and moved on to the funeral notice, picking it up gently, dusting it off to see the name. Oliver William Carmichael. I gasped. He died in January of 1917.
The stage and the world will never be the same. He gave life and meaning to one-dimensional characters trapped on a page, and heart and love to those of us trapped in our own lives.
The dried flowers strewn across the shelf below caught my eye. Were they from him? From his funeral? Was Julianne nothing more than a woman who despised her marriage and found excitement from an actor? Or with an actor for two short weeks? Or maybe a woman who’d found escape in the situations portrayed on the stage?
I let his funeral notice drop to my lap. I didn’t think so. I couldn’t believe she was a woman who’d gone away for a brief fling. It was too prosaic, and I was convinced she was a more complex persona than that. I wouldn’t let Julianne be ordinary enough to throw herself or her life away on a meaningless affair. Whatever her motivation for leaving, I wanted it to have purpose.
As I reached for the small tray of items, I heard a noise downstairs. I stopped and prayed it wasn’t Paul Junior. I turned off my light and slid silently to the trap door that hung open. I listened. Soft footsteps made their way up the stairs. Definitely not Paul Junior, but their quietness made me even more afraid. Wishing I’d closed the trap door behind me, I waited and listened, holding my breath as I mentally mapped each advancing step.
The feet stopped at the top of the stairs. I willed them to go to Julianne’s room so I could either slip down out of the attic or pull the trap door shut and hide. But they didn’t. They turned my direction and came into the empty room.
I pulled my head back from the opening and waited. A shadow crept across the floor and then a man came into view.
“Are you up there, Annabelle?” The voice was soft, and when he looked up his blue eyes penetrated the darkness where I crouched hidden.
“Kyle?” I stretched my head over the edge.
He looked embarrassed as he nodded.
“How did you… Why are you…” I didn’t know what to ask.
“You’ve done more to the house.”
I slid closer to the edge and looked down at him. “Yes, I have. But why are you…”
“Did you find something up there?” he asked.
I didn’t know whether to answer him or not. I had no idea why he cared, and besides, what if he told Paul Junior what I was doing, so they could both make fun of me? I gazed down at him into eyes that told me he wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t the type of person Paul Junior chose for a friend. Trevor was. A deep loneliness wrenched my heart as in my mind I could hear Trevor and my brother laughing. I looked down at Kyle. He wasn’t like them. He truly wanted to know what I’d found. Tears came to my eyes. Why hadn’t it been Trevor who’d asked this instead of a neighbor man?
“I found some papers,” I answered, trying to keep the hurt from my voice. “But I don’t know why it would matter to you.”
“Can I come up?”
I hesitated. I pulled back from the opening and used my sleeves to wipe the tears from my eyes.
“I don’t have to,” he said from below. “I just thought you might like some company.”
No one else wanted to share Julianne with me. Everyone else was either afraid, angry, or indifferent. I leaned forward just enough to see his blue eyes as he gazed upward.
“You really want to see what’s up here?” I asked.
He nodded. I nodded in return and unrolled the ladder, my thoughts a jumble. “If you’re careful it will hold you,” I said as steadily as I could.
“I don’t need it.” And as if he weighed nothing Kyle stretched up and latched onto the edge of the trap door’s frame and pulled himself through the hole. Landing lightly beside me, he crouched and rested on his knees. I turned on the light and we looked at each other and then around the room. A long moment of awkward silence took over as Kyle knelt beside me. Julianne’s private alcove was like my heart, secrets hidden away for my eyes only, until this moment when I’d unexpectedly let someone else in. I suddenly felt exposed. It was Trevor who was supposed to be here beside me as I revealed these secrets, not a man I’d only casually known.
As if he sensed my rising panic Kyle settled onto the floorboards, untucking his legs from a crouched position into something more relaxed. Just looking at him I felt my tension ebb.
I moved the light aside so he had more room to maneuver. “Here’s what I’ve found.” I avoided his glance and made a vague gesture toward the shelves. I readjusted the light so it shone better on the items and then scooted aside.
He didn’t move. He didn’t touch the light and he didn’t grab at Julianne’s treasures like anyone else would have. He ran his eyes over each shelf and each item, one at a time, just like I had.
His care caused me to relax even more. “These are playbills,” I said, pointing toward them. He nodded but said nothing, so I went on, telling him the names of the theatres and a few of the plays. I omitted the names of the actor and actress I’d found. I didn’t know why Kyle was here or why I had even let him, but I didn’t want him to notice Oliver’s name on every playbill and think of Julianne the way everyone else did. I couldn’t stand for him to paint her red. If he did, he’d be painting me red too, painting me into relationships that turned me into something I wasn’t, turned me into the next generation of Crouse women who were either too loose or too rigid for real love. I didn’t want to be either.
He looked at me, his face void of judgment, only curiosity in his gaze. I moved on and showed him the fan. I held it up but he didn’t take it, so I tipped it in his direction, offering him the chance to open it and see what I’d seen inside. He took it and settled back farther on the floorboards, inspecting the fan carefully with his eyes. Then his hands drew it open, his long graceful fingers gentle, like sunlight coaxing open a flower. I watched his face instead of the fan as it unfolded, his features illuminated from within, a glow of enchantment lighting his eyes.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” I asked. It wasn’t just lovely, it was much more than that. It was alive. It spoke. I just didn’t know what it was saying. But having someone here beside me…even Kyle…made the possibility of knowing much more promising.
He closed the fan, the glow staying with him as he handed it back to me. “It’s her,” he said.
I started. “What do you mean, ‘It’s her’?”
He gazed at me and then looked around the attic enclave. “Her.”
I could hear the two of us breathing, in and out in the small space, the fan between us, Julianne around us, his thoughts amazingly like mine, but more so.
“Really her?” I asked, but I didn’t need him to answer. The woman in the small painting on the fan had hair too dark for Julianne, almost brown instead of blonde. But Kyle was right, it was still her. I could feel it. I’d felt it before but hadn’t believed it. Now I knew, and it took him to show me. Anger threaded its way into my movements as I put the fan back on the shelf. It suddenly didn’t matter so much that I had someone here who shared my intrigue with Julianne, or that they didn’t come to chide or condemn her. What mattered was that he was nearer her than I was. Kyle was more intuitive, more aware, more comfortable in this house than I had ever been.
I paused before I pointed to the postcards, wanting to decide who it was I was most upset with. My family for accepting this shame? Trevor for not being here, for never being where I needed him to be? Kyle for understanding my great-grandmother better than I did and for being everything I wanted Trevor or my family to be…or myself to be? I looked at him. That was it. This was my family’s problem, not his, and I should have been in this house years ago unraveling this shroud of shame I’d been expected to wear. I was upset at me, not Kyle.
“Here are some postcards.” I gestured loosely toward the stack, unable to look at him. He eyed the top card from where he sat. I reached over and took the pile and handed it to him. “I don’t know who wrote them.”
He lifted each card gently, looked at the back, and returned it to the stack. He handed them to me and I put them back on the shelf. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to or not, my shame at not discovering these things years ago still heavy in my mind. We were both quiet, me in my self-chastisement and him in his thoughts. I looked up and saw it then in his eyes, the thing he wasn’t going to say.
“I don’t know who wrote them,” I said again, irritating myself even more.