by Karen White
To my shame, I knew I was looking for reasons to dislike her—as if I didn’t have enough—but kept coming up empty. Even more shameful was that that just made me even more put-out. I responded by avoiding her as best I could, which turned out to be easier than I’d anticipated. It had only just occurred to me that she might also be avoiding me.
“Where is Loralee? I wanted to let her and Owen know that we’re definitely on for boating this weekend.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but hesitated, his expression like that of a person who’d just bitten into something rotten. After a moment, he said, “And I’d like to extend the invitation to you, too.”
“No,” I said quickly. Then added, “Thank you. I have work to do here. Besides, I don’t like the water very much.”
He continued his cajoling, even though his expression looked like he was sucking on a lemon. “That’s because you’ve never been on the water down here in South Carolina. And we won’t go near the ocean—just stick to the creeks and marshes and possibly the river. We’ll fix you up with a life jacket and a hat and a bunch of sunscreen and all you’ll have to do is sit down and enjoy the ride.”
“I don’t like the water,” I repeated, surprised at the power the merest suggestion that I go near a body of water still had over me. I felt cold all over, as if I’d been plunged into the frigid north Atlantic, and it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning.
“Okay, I get it. Just thought I’d ask.” He sounded too relieved, enough so that I began wondering about his motives.
“And to answer your question, Loralee took Owen to the nursery to get supplies for the garden. She’s planning on re-creating it the way it was. Maybe you can give her some insight, since you probably remember it. She wants to finish with the garden before she finds a job.”
Gibbes regarded me with serious eyes before glancing down at the inventory list. He flipped through the pages, giving each one a cursory glance before handing the clipboard back to me. “Nope. Nothing here I want. It’s all yours, and you’re welcome to it.”
“Didn’t you see my value estimations next to the items? There’s a fortune in furniture and paintings in this house. Not to mention heirloom silver. We can talk to Mr. Williams and see if we can work something out. . . .”
“I told you. I’m not interested in anything in this house except for a few personal items. That’s it. I don’t need the money, and I don’t need the furniture. I don’t want any of it. It’s yours. You won it fair and square.”
I felt the blood rush to my head. “I didn’t win anything. My husband died.”
“You’re right, of course. I was out of line and I’m sorry.” He didn’t look the least bit sorry, but I let it go.
I placed the inventory list on the circular table in the entranceway. Eager to move on, I said, “I think I found the photo albums you were looking for. They’re upstairs in the hallway with the rest of the boxes marked with your name.” I hesitated just for a moment before adding, “I haven’t been up to the attic yet. There’s a window unit up there now cooling everything off. You’re welcome to go up with me now if you have time.”
I felt foolish all of a sudden, like a child afraid of the dark. But every time I approached the door I heard Deborah Fuller telling me about secretly gathering sea glass for Edith Heyward, keeping it from her husband, and seeing Edith’s face in the attic window. When I placed my hand on the doorknob I felt a little bit like Pandora, but with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe I was afraid of what I might find. Or maybe I was simply discovering the small pleasure of deliberately ignoring the little voice in my head that I knew was Cal’s goading me to do something I didn’t want to.
“You haven’t been up there yet?”
“No,” I said as I turned away toward the stairs, not wanting him to see my cheeks flush. “So we might as well get it over with now.”
We climbed the stairs, the rising warm air upstairs seeming to press into us, adding to my feeling of gloom. Gibbes glanced down the hallway at the piles of boxes with his name on them, then stopped next to me by the attic door. Stalling, I said, “I had the new AC in the attic set at sixty-eight. It’s a horrible waste of money, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going up there otherwise.”
He widened his eyes, as if to remind me that the new AC had been installed almost three days before.
I took a deep breath, concentrating on my loafers and how the tips were badly scuffed. More people die from smoke inhalation than flames. Fire can suck all of the oxygen from a room and fill it with poisonous smoke and gases before flames even reach a room. I didn’t have to wonder why that particular nugget of fire-academy wisdom had come to me at that moment.
With a confidence that was completely artificial, I turned the knob and the door swung open into the hallway. A tall, narrow flight of stairs, made of wood stained only by time, led the way up. They were steep steps, making them difficult to climb and impossible to see what lay beyond the top step.
“I should go first,” Gibbes said, putting a foot on the first step.
I bristled. I knew about Southern boys, and I needed to shove his chauvinism back where it came from. “Just because I’m a woman?”
He looked at me and it seemed as if he were trying very hard not to smile. “Well, it would be good manners. But mostly it’s because you’re wearing a skirt.” He indicated the steep steps in front of us. “I figured we’re already as well acquainted as we need to be.”
The air left my lungs in a sudden rush, meeting the blood heading toward my cheeks, and for a moment I saw stars. “Just go,” I finally managed, pointing toward the stairs.
A lopsided and decidedly boyish grin lit his face before he jogged up the steps. I grabbed hold of the banister and slowly began my ascent, taking each steep step one at a time.
The first thing I noticed were the dust motes in the shafts of light from the two dormer windows, dancing in the disturbed air like summoned spirits. Gibbes stood within the light, surveying the room around him, his hands on hips making him look like a pillaging pirate. The ceiling was high in the center, giving even a tall person like Gibbes plenty of room to walk about without banging his head on a rafter.
The ceiling and walls were unfinished—and uninsulated—which made me wince as I considered all the air-conditioned air I was paying for that was apparently seeping through the cracks and single-paned windows. The HVAC man had expressed reservations about the wisdom of running the window unit, and had suggested I come up to look, but I’d refused, explaining it was just a temporary fix anyway. It was still warm in the attic, but bearable for a short period of time.
I thought of Edith up there sweltering, wondering how she’d managed it. Even with open windows and a fan or two, it would have been broiling in the summer. Deborah had said she’d seen a light on in the attic, so there must be electricity up there, which made me think Edith must have had a dozen fans. But still, even with the wall unit blasting, it was sticky and hot, suffocating. What had been so important to her that she would spend periods of time up there? Or had it been less about what she was doing and more about escaping something?
Gibbes looked up at an ancient ceiling fixture with a chain dangling from it. He pulled the chain but nothing happened. At least the light from the windows would be enough for me to see during the daytime, but I’d need to replace the bulbs if I wanted to be able to see at night. Not that I wanted to be up there after dark. There was something in the air up there, something beyond the dust and staleness, something more oppressive than even the heat. If the house had been a living, breathing thing, I might have said I’d found the dark place at its heart. But it wasn’t, of course. It was just an old house.
There was a long wooden ledge that extended across the wall below the dormers with an ancient fifties-style kitchen chair sitting in front of it, yellow foam erupting from the turquoise vinyl seat. Woven baskets in varying sizes littered the top of the table like offerings for some unknown entity. They were set up in a delibe
rate line, a measure of tidiness not expected on a worktable. I stepped forward involuntarily, wanting to see inside the baskets but knowing already what they contained.
Milky glass of varying hues lay dully in their woven homes, listless without the wind and sun to bring them to life. They were separated by colors—varying shades of white, blue, green, brown—each as lifeless as the next. I wondered how long it had taken to collect them, imagining that it must have been years. I thought of the dedication, the purpose required to collect something as rare and precious as sea glass. My mother had had a small dish on her dressing table filled with a small handful of glass she’d collected on childhood visits to Old Orchard Beach with her cousins. They were the only reminder I had that she had once loved the ocean, and the great waves that sometimes left gifts of glass behind.
“What on earth could this be?” Gibbes walked toward the wall opposite the attic door and perpendicular to the dormer wall. Faded white sheets billowed softly from the blast of the air conditioner, undulating like ocean waves. Whatever they were concealing protruded in random bumps and lines, little fists of prisoners begging to be let out.
“Hold your breath for a moment—I’m going to yank these down.”
I realized I’d already been holding my breath, and just nodded. He reached up to the topmost corner and gave a sharp tug, the sheet releasing its hold on whatever it had been hung up on. Slowly Gibbes walked down the line, tugging the fabric from the top, until three large flat sheets had slipped down to the floor in a puddle of cotton and dust.
We both stepped back as the dust motes thickened, holding our hands over our noses and mouths. I choked on the air when I finally took a breath, nearly gasping. We waited for a moment for the dust to clear before stepping forward.
Crudely made shelves, consisting of two-by-fours and thin planks about three feet deep, covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling. They were constructed of raw wood, unstained and unadorned, crooked in places, with bent nails peeping out from various sections. I didn’t want to stand too near, afraid they might come crashing down, because despite the fact that the unit had obviously been there for a long time, it was apparent that an amateur who knew nothing about construction had made it.
As odd as the shelves were, they weren’t what drew our attention. It was the row upon row of what appeared to be large shoe boxes without lids—perhaps intended for short boots—tipped on their sides so that the openings faced out, that transfixed us.
“Dollhouses?” I was the first to speak, then regretted it. These were definitely not dollhouses—at least not like any dollhouse that I’d ever seen. Each box was a sort of tableau of a single room, but different from the other boxes, so that they didn’t all appear to come from the same house.
We peered closer, amazed at the intricate details of each little room, from the miniature furniture with tiny tubes of lipstick and a perfume bottle, to shoes with untied laces, and dressers with half-closed drawers. Tiny people with real hair and eyelashes lay in odd positions in the various boxes or, in one box, sat slumped over in an upholstered chair whose plaid fabric was faded in the way one would imagine a real chair that sat near a window might be. Right above the chair was a wall calendar with the bottom right corners curled up, the month and year emblazed in bold, black letters: May 1953.
“What in the . . . ?”
I found Gibbes staring into one of the boxes, an odd expression on his face. I moved next to him and peered inside. It was a replica of a 1950s-era bathroom, with separate hot and cold faucets—each tiny porcelain handle marked with a blue “C” or “H”—and an old-fashioned toilet. But it was the tub that was the center of attraction, and not because of the clawed feet or the chipped porcelain, but because of the figure of a woman whose top half was submerged in lifelike water, her pale blue eyes staring up at the ceiling in silent horror.
I stepped back, my gaze darting to the dozens of boxes that crowded the shelves, focusing on the miniature dolls and registering why they were strewn about in such odd poses. A man in a business suit with a pocket square in his jacket lay faceup on an oval braided rug, a puddle of red surrounding his head right behind a deep gash on his forehead. Red splotches on the wood floor in the shape of footprints led out the door.
Another was of a woman apparently asleep in her bed, the floral quilt neatly tucked under her chin, an empty vial of pills with a tiny label on the side on the nightstand. Rose-printed wallpaper above a woman bent halfway into a kitchen sink was peppered with red spray opposite a window with a clean round hole surrounded by a cracked web of glass.
“What is this?” Gibbes asked, his voice quiet, as if he didn’t want to disturb the dead.
I shook my head. None of the scenarios I’d gone over in my head of what I might find in the attic had come close to this. Nothing in my worst nightmares had come close to this. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. It’s . . . macabre.” I wanted to say sick and twisted, but I had to remind myself that Edith was Gibbes’s grandmother.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” I said, slowly backing up toward the door, unable to look away from the scenes of carnage in front of me.
“Wait. There’s something else.”
I took one more step toward the door, not completely sure I could handle seeing anything else.
On the floor to the far left, in the corner between the wall and the side of the shelves, was an oblong object about the size of a table lamp. I couldn’t tell what it was from where I stood, but I could at least be certain it wasn’t another dollhouse box.
Gibbes stooped down and picked it up, then carried it over to the table, brushing back the line of baskets with his forearm to make room.
“It’s a model airplane, but it’s missing its wings,” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice.
“Yes, it is,” he said slowly. Very carefully, he tilted the wingless plane on its side, displaying navy-colored stripes with no insignia on the tail and a gaping hole on the right side of the fuselage. “And look,” he said, pointing to the mosaiclike side where pieces alternated between transparent plastic and something that was a hard, pasty white. “There are people inside, and luggage still below.”
He considered something for a moment. Pulling out his phone, he flipped on the flashlight and returned to the corner where he’d found the plane. Squatting down to see into the dark space, he then pulled out an old brown paper bag.
Returning to the worktable, he placed it on top.
“Let me,” I said, reaching for the bag and hoping it wasn’t crawling with those large flying cockroaches they called palmetto bugs in South Carolina. As a child I’d loved surprises and discovering new things. Maybe that part of me hadn’t completely disappeared.
The old paper felt soft in my hands as I unfurled the top. Gibbes flipped on his flashlight again as I pulled apart the edges and gently leaned forward. Staring up at us were about forty or so doll miniatures of people dressed in 1950s-era clothing. Some were strapped in plane seats; others were missing limbs or had grotesque wounds on their heads or bodies; most had grass or dirt clinging to their hair, skin, and clothes. What looked like two wings, also made in a mosaic fashion with two separate materials, were intermingled with the figures, the detritus of a catastrophe I couldn’t comprehend.
Our eyes met, and I wondered whether the same lost and scared expression I saw in his eyes was reflected in my own. “What is all this?” I asked. I knew he didn’t have the answer, but saying it out loud made it somehow more real and less dreamlike. Because I could handle reality no matter how brutal. I had a harder time with dreams.
“I have no idea,” Gibbes said softly, not taking his eyes from mine. I was reminded again of how during a fire it was what you couldn’t see that killed you and not the fire. It seemed to me that all of this was the fire in the attic we’d only sensed, the poison leaking out undetected for years.
I looked out one of the dormer windows and saw the wind chime dangling from a long metal bar.
The outside was hot and heavy, the sea glass still. But I could imagine it clinking together, its music like words trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t understand.
chapter 11
EDITH
APRIL 1961
Edith sat in the stifling attic and took a long drag from her cigarette before stabbing it out in the small porcelain dish with the crimson climbing vines and the large “H” painted in the middle. Calhoun wouldn’t have allowed her to smoke, much less use his precious heirloom china as an ashtray, but he wasn’t there to stop her. He’d allowed her to pack his cigarette case, and to light his cigarettes, taking one puff to get it going, but she was never allowed to have her own.
She’d started smoking the day after he’d died, the day the tremors started each time she heard a plane rumble in the sky. Each time she thought of the suitcase and the note still under her refrigerator.
While all of her friends were buying the latest in home appliances—Betsy had a new pink Frigidaire with a matching stove—Edith kept her refrigerator, its white door damaged where C.J. had banged his toys against it or run his tricycle into it with an intensity Edith hadn’t expected from a small child. She’d attributed it to the fact that he was a boy, and she, having been raised an only child with a gentle, brooding father, had no experience with little boys or children in general. Still, when she’d heard him thumping his head against his crib rails, sometimes for as long as an hour, she’d wondered. Betsy and even her doctor told her that many children did this as a soothing mechanism, finding comfort in the steady rhythm the way other children sucked their thumbs or wore a hole in a favorite blanket with constant scratching.
And it usually worked, and he’d settle down into a long sleep. But sometimes, usually after he’d heard the sound of a plane or thunder in the sky or a siren in the distance, he’d become agitated, and the head thumping would erupt into a complete and all-out tantrum.
