by, delay removing the chain until I can make it down the stairs.”
The girl’s gaze met mine again, and she winked. “I got your back, J. Norm.”
I did not correct her, as she seemed determined to persist in the ridiculous nickname. I supposed I was becoming accustomed to it.
After the long climb up the stairs, then through the door at the end of the second-story hall and up the attic stairs, I proceeded with my search for Mother’s photo albums. There was an old steamer trunk in which she kept family mementos when I was a child. With any luck, I could spot it among the offal of stored items. The idea that I could perhaps find information about Frances, and that she might still be alive, had fired my imagination. A direct link to the past could answer so many questions. Frances was present in my most remote memories, the ones close to the time of the seven chairs, perhaps slightly after.
The upper deck was unusually warm when I reached it, April sunlight flooding through dormer windows high in the eaves, illuminating stacks of boxes, crates, a rocking horse, a dress dummy, a wooden room divider purchased in Saudi, a clay water pot from Kathmandu, a drugstore Santa Claus that Annalee had dragged home after the season, half price. He stood in the corner now, his red paint gone from the white plastic, giving him the look of a snowman about to be whisked into oblivion by a ray of sunshine.
He just needs a little touch-up , Annalee said cheerfully in my mind. She never tossed out anything. To her, the items here were precious receptacles in which the days of our lives remained stored, frozen in time. It was because of Annalee that the boxes from my parents hadn’t been sent to the trash during our many years here. Someday you’ll want these things, Norman , she’d said.
I’d insisted that I wasn’t a sentimental person.
As it turned out, both of us were correct.
It seemed strange that, if my mother’s photo albums were here, Annalee had never rescued them from the attic. In later years, she’d developed an interest in genealogy and scrapbooking. She’d spent many an hour poring through old files and photos. My mother was also a preservationist, given to keeping scrapbooks, never one to leave family heirlooms and photos without a notation on the back. Yet I’d never seen Annalee with any of my mother’s private things. That seemed odd, now that I considered it.
A sweat broke over me as I worked, and the air in the attic turned stifling. I relocated closer to the stairway, sifting through things piled atop what remained of an old bedroom suite with trundle beds. I remembered moving them up the attic stairs. Roy and I had done it together. At seventeen, he was six-foot-three, having inherited the tall, slim stature of Annalee’s father. He’d outgrown the boyish furniture and the child-size bed. Annalee’s parents were moving into a nursing home, and she wanted to redo Roy’s room with their furniture. The room was never finished. Roy never slept in it. Everything that belonged to him lay carefully boxed, where it had been since the spring of his senior year. Rather than a high school graduation party that April, we arranged a funeral.
I stood in the corner for a moment, looked at the bed, and thought of Roy. There was a stack of boxes under the eaves—model rockets and cars. Annalee had placed them beneath the Christmas tree year after year. She’d thought that Roy and I would build them together, but the models remained in their containers by mutual agreement. Roy wasn’t one to stay in the house and I wasn’t one to be home. Occasionally, when I was around, I found Deborah working with the models. She was more inclined toward quiet, solitary pastimes. She had a scientific mind, even when she was young.
It occurred to me now to wonder whether my mother’s trunk could be in this part of the attic, behind Roy’s furniture. That would explain Annalee’s never having encountered it while doing her
The girl’s gaze met mine again, and she winked. “I got your back, J. Norm.”
I did not correct her, as she seemed determined to persist in the ridiculous nickname. I supposed I was becoming accustomed to it.
After the long climb up the stairs, then through the door at the end of the second-story hall and up the attic stairs, I proceeded with my search for Mother’s photo albums. There was an old steamer trunk in which she kept family mementos when I was a child. With any luck, I could spot it among the offal of stored items. The idea that I could perhaps find information about Frances, and that she might still be alive, had fired my imagination. A direct link to the past could answer so many questions. Frances was present in my most remote memories, the ones close to the time of the seven chairs, perhaps slightly after.
The upper deck was unusually warm when I reached it, April sunlight flooding through dormer windows high in the eaves, illuminating stacks of boxes, crates, a rocking horse, a dress dummy, a wooden room divider purchased in Saudi, a clay water pot from Kathmandu, a drugstore Santa Claus that Annalee had dragged home after the season, half price. He stood in the corner now, his red paint gone from the white plastic, giving him the look of a snowman about to be whisked into oblivion by a ray of sunshine.
He just needs a little touch-up , Annalee said cheerfully in my mind. She never tossed out anything. To her, the items here were precious receptacles in which the days of our lives remained stored, frozen in time. It was because of Annalee that the boxes from my parents hadn’t been sent to the trash during our many years here. Someday you’ll want these things, Norman , she’d said.
I’d insisted that I wasn’t a sentimental person.
As it turned out, both of us were correct.
It seemed strange that, if my mother’s photo albums were here, Annalee had never rescued them from the attic. In later years, she’d developed an interest in genealogy and scrapbooking. She’d spent many an hour poring through old files and photos. My mother was also a preservationist, given to keeping scrapbooks, never one to leave family heirlooms and photos without a notation on the back. Yet I’d never seen Annalee with any of my mother’s private things. That seemed odd, now that I considered it.
A sweat broke over me as I worked, and the air in the attic turned stifling. I relocated closer to the stairway, sifting through things piled atop what remained of an old bedroom suite with trundle beds. I remembered moving them up the attic stairs. Roy and I had done it together. At seventeen, he was six-foot-three, having inherited the tall, slim stature of Annalee’s father. He’d outgrown the boyish furniture and the child-size bed. Annalee’s parents were moving into a nursing home, and she wanted to redo Roy’s room with their furniture. The room was never finished. Roy never slept in it. Everything that belonged to him lay carefully boxed, where it had been since the spring of his senior year. Rather than a high school graduation party that April, we arranged a funeral.
I stood in the corner for a moment, looked at the bed, and thought of Roy. There was a stack of boxes under the eaves—model rockets and cars. Annalee had placed them beneath the Christmas tree year after year. She’d thought that Roy and I would build them together, but the models remained in their containers by mutual agreement. Roy wasn’t one to stay in the house and I wasn’t one to be home. Occasionally, when I was around, I found Deborah working with the models. She was more inclined toward quiet, solitary pastimes. She had a scientific mind, even when she was young.
It occurred to me now to wonder whether my mother’s trunk could be in this part of the attic, behind Roy’s furniture. That would explain Annalee’s never having encountered it while doing her
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