“Please,” Martin said, and something moved downstairs.
“Shit,” I mouthed, going completely still.
Clock tick. Clock tick. Footsteps. Had I left the lights on in Mrs. Gold’s room? I couldn’t remember. If Roz wasn’t looking, she might not see Sophie’s blue light from downstairs. Somehow, I knew she didn’t want us in here.
I couldn’t help glancing behind me, and then my shoulders clenched. The door had swung almost all the way shut.
Which wasn’t so strange, was it? How far had we even opened it?
Footsteps. Clock tick. Clock tick. Clock tick. Clock tick. When I turned back to Martin, he was on his hands and knees, scuttling for the closet.
“Martin, no,” I hissed. Then I was on my knees too, hurrying after him. When I drew up alongside him, our heads just inside the closet, he looked my way and grinned, tentatively.
“Sssh,” he whispered.
“What do you think you’ll find in there?”
The grin slid from his face. “Him.” With a nod, he pulled the square of wood off the opening. Then he swore and dropped it. His right hand rose to his mouth, and I saw the sliver sticking out of the bottom of his thumb like a porcupine quill.
Taking his wrist, I leaned over, trying to see. In that murky, useless light, the wood seemed to have stabbed straight through the webbing into his palm. It almost looked like a new ridge forming along his lifeline. “Hold still,” I murmured, grabbed the splinter as low down as I could, and yanked.
Martin sucked in breath, staring at his hand. “Did you get it all?”
“Come where it’s light and I’ll see.”
“No.” He pulled his hand from me, and without another word crawled through the opening. For one moment, as his butt hovered in front of me and his torso disappeared, I had to stifle another urge to drag him out, splinters be damned. Then he was through. For a few seconds, I heard only his breathing, saw only his bare feet through the hole. The rest of him was in shadow.
“Miriam, get in here,” he said.
In I went. I had to shove Martin forward to get through, and I did so harder than I had to. He made no protest. I tried lifting my knees instead of sliding them to keep the splinters off. When I straightened, I was surprised to find most of the space in front of us bathed in moonlight.
“What window is that?” I whispered.
“Must be on the side.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“How much time have you spent on the side?”
None, in truth. No one did. The space between my grandfather’s house and the ancient gray wooden fence that bordered his property had been overrun by spiders even when our mom was young. I’d glimpsed an old bike back there once, completely draped in webs like furniture in a dead man’s room.
“Probably a billion spiders in here, too, you know,” I said.
But Martin wasn’t paying attention, and neither was I, really. We were too busy staring. All around us, stacked from floor to four-foot ceiling all the way down the length of the half-finished space, cardboard boxes had been stacked, sometimes atop each other, sometimes atop old white suitcases or trunks with their key-coverings dangling like the tongues on strangled things. With his shoulder, Martin nudged one of the nearest stacks, which tipped dangerously but slid back a bit. Reaching underneath a lid flap, Martin stuck his hand in the bottom-most box. I bit my cheek and held still and marveled, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes, at my brother’s behavior. When he pulled out a Playboy, I started to laugh, and stopped because of the look on Martin’s face.
He held the magazine open and flat across both hands, looking terrified to drop it, almost in awe of it, as though it were a Torah scroll. It would be a long time, I thought, before Martin started dating.
“You said you wanted to see grandpa’s stuff,” I couldn’t resist teasing.
“This wasn’t his.”
Now I did laugh. “Maybe it was Mrs. Gold’s.”
I slid the magazine off his hands, and that seemed to relieve him, some. The page to which it had fallen open showed a long, brown-haired woman with strangely pointed feet poised naked atop a stone backyard well, as though she’d just climbed out of it. The woman wasn’t smiling, and I didn’t like the picture at all. I closed the magazine and laid it face down on the floor.
Edging forward, Martin began to reach randomly into other boxes. I did the same. Mostly, though, I watched my brother. The moonlight seemed to pour over him in layers, coating him, so that with each passing moment he grew paler. Other than Martin’s scuttling as he moved down the row on his knees, I heard nothing, not even the clock. That should have been a comfort. But the silence in that not-quite-room was worse.
To distract myself, I began to run my fingers over the boxes on my right. Their cardboard skin had sticky damp patches, bulged outward in places but sank into itself in others. From one box, I drew an unpleasantly damp, battered, black rectangular case I thought might be for pens, but when I opened it, I found four pearls strung on a broken chain, pressed deep into their own impressions in the velvet lining like little eyes in sockets. My real grandmother’s, I realized. Roz liked showier jewelry. I’d never met my mother’s mother. She’d died three months before Martin was born. Dad had liked her a lot. I was still gazing at the pearls when air gushed across me, pouring over my skin like ice.
Martin grunted, and I caught his wrist. We crouched and waited for the torrent to sigh itself out. Eventually, it did. Martin started to speak, and I tightened my grasp and shut him up.
Just at the end, as the gush had died . . .
“Martin,” I whispered.
“It’s the air-conditioning, Miriam. See?”
“Martin, did you hear it?”
“Duh. Look at—”
“Martin. The vents.”
He wasn’t listening, didn’t understand. Dazed, I let him disengage, watched him crab-walk to the next stack of boxes and begin digging. I almost started screaming at him. If I did, I now knew, the sound would pour out of the walls above our bed, and from the circular space above Mrs. Gold’s window, and from Sophie’s closet. Because these vents didn’t connect to the guest room where our parents were, like we’d always thought. They connected the upstairs rooms and this room. And so the murmuring we’d always heard—that we’d heard as recently as twenty minutes ago—hadn’t come from our parents at all. It had come from right—
“Jackpot,” Martin muttered.
Ahead, wedged between the last boxes and the wall, something stirred. Flapped. Plastic. Maybe.
“Martin . . . ”
“Hi, Grandpa.”
I spun so fast I almost knocked him over, banging my arms instead on the plaque he was wiping free of mold and dust with the sleeve of his pajamas. Frozen air roared over us again, as though I’d rattled a cage and woken the house itself. Up ahead, whatever it was flapped some more.
“Watch out,” Martin snapped. He wasn’t worried about me, of course. He didn’t want anything happening to the plaque.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
Wordlessly, he held up his treasure. Black granite, with words engraved in it, clearly legible despite the fuzzy smear of grime across the surface. To the Big Judge, who takes care of his own. A muldoon, and no mistake. From his friends, the Knights of Labor.
“The Knights of Labor?”
“He knew everyone,” Martin said. “They all loved him. The whole city.”
This was who my grandfather was to my brother, I realized. Someone as smart and weird and defiant and solitary as he was, except that our grandfather had somehow figured out people enough to wind up a judge, a civil rights activist, a bloated and beloved public figure. Slowly, like a snake stirring, another shudder slipped down my back.
“What’s a muldoon?”
“Says right here, stupid.” Martin nodded at the plaque. “He took care of his own.”
“We should go, Martin. Now.”
“What are you talking a
bout?”
As the house unleashed another frigid breath, he tucked the plaque lovingly against his chest and moved deeper into the attic. The plastic at the end of the row was rippling now, flattening itself. It reminded me of an octopus I’d seen in the Baltimore Aquarium once, completely changing shape to slip between two rocks.
“There,” I barked suddenly, as the air expired. “Hear it?”
But Martin was busy wedging open box lids, prying out cufflinks in little boxes, a ceremonial silver shovel marking some sort of groundbreaking, a photograph of grandpa with Earl Weaver and two grinning grounds crew guys in the Orioles dugout. The last thing he pulled out before I moved was a book. Old, blue binding, stiff and jacketless. Martin flipped through it once, mumbled, “Hebrew,” and dumped it behind him. Embossed on the cover, staring straight up at the ceiling over my brother’s head, I saw a single, lidless eye.
Martin kept going, almost to the end now. The plastic had gone still, the air-conditioning and the murmurs that rode it temporarily silent. I almost left him there. If I’d been sure he’d follow—as, on almost any other occasion, he would have—that’s exactly what I’d have done. Instead, I edged forward myself, my hand stretching for the book. As much to get that eye hidden again as from any curiosity, I picked the thing up and opened it. Something in the binding snapped, and a single page slipped free and fluttered away like a dried butterfly I’d let loose.
“Ayin Harah,” I read slowly, sounding out the Hebrew letters on the title page. But it wasn’t the words that set me shuddering again, if only because I wasn’t positive what they implied; I knew they meant “Evil Eye.” But our Aunt Pauline had told us that was a protective thing, mostly. Instead, my gaze locked on my great-grandmother’s signature, lurking like a blue spider in the top left-hand corner of the inside cover. Then my head lifted, and I was staring at the box from which the book had come.
Not my grandfather’s stuff in there. Not my grandmother’s, or Roz’s, either. That box—and maybe that one alone—was hers.
I have no explanation for what happened next. I knew better. That is, I knew, already. Thought I did. I didn’t want to be in the attic even one second longer, and I was scared, not curious. I crept forward and stuck my hand between the flaps anyway.
For a moment, I thought the box was empty. My hand kept sliding deeper, all the way to my elbow before I touched fabric and closed my fist over it. Beneath whatever I’d grabbed was plastic, wrapped around some kind of heavy fabric. The plastic rustled and stuck slightly to my hand like an anemone’s tentacles, though everything in that box was completely dry. I pulled, and the boxes balanced atop the one I’d reached into tipped back and bumped against the wall of the attic, and my hands came out, holding the thing I’d grasped, which fell open as it touched the air.
“Grandpa with two presidents, look,” Martin said from down the row, waving a picture frame without lifting his head from whatever box he was looting.
Cradled in my palms lay what could have been a matzoh covering, maybe for holding the afikomen at a seder. When I spread out the folds, though, I found dark, rust-colored circular stains in the white fabric. Again I thought of the seder, the ritual of dipping a finger in wine and then touching it to a plate or napkin as everyone chanted plagues God had inflicted upon the Egyptians. In modern Hagadahs, the ritual is explained as a symbol of Jewish regret that the Egyptian people had to bear the brunt of their ruler’s refusal to free the slaves. But none of the actual ceremonial instructions say that. They just order us to chant the words. Dam. Tzfar de’ah. Kinim. Arbeh.
Inside the fold where matzoh might have been tucked, I found only a gritty, black residue. It could have been dust from the attic, or split spider sacs, or tiny dead things. But it smelled, faintly, on my fingers. An old and rotten smell, with just a hint of something else. Something worse.
Not worse. Familiar. I had no idea what it was. But Sophie had smelled like this.
“Martin, please,” I heard myself say. But he wasn’t listening. Instead, he was leaning almost into the last box in the row. The plastic jammed against the wall had gone utterly still. At any moment, I expected it to hump up like a wave and crash down on my brother’s back. I didn’t even realize my hands had slipped back inside Sophie’s box until I touched wrapping again.
Gasping, I dragged my hands away, but my fingers had curled, and the plastic and the heavy fabric it swaddled came up clutched between them.
A dress, I thought, panicking, shoving backward. From her closet. I stared at the lump of fabric, draped now half out of the box, the plastic covering rising slightly in the stirring air.
Except it wasn’t a dress. It was two dresses, plainly visible now through the plastic. One was gauzy and pink, barely there, with wispy flowers stitched up the sleeves. The other, white and heavy, had folded itself inside the pink one, the long sleeves encircling the waist. Long, black smears spread across the back of the white dress, like finger-marks, from fingers dipped in Sophie’s residue . . .
I don’t think I had any idea, at first, that I’d started shouting. I was too busy scuttling backwards on my hands, banging against boxes on either side as I scrambled for the opening behind us. The air-conditioning triggered, blasting me with its breath, which didn’t stink, just froze the hairs to the skin of my arms and legs. Martin had leapt to his feet, banging his head against the attic ceiling, and now he was waving his hands, trying to quiet me. But the sight of him panicked me more. The dresses on the ground between us shivered, almost rolled over, and the plastic behind him rippled madly, popping and straining against the weight that held it, all but free. My hand touched down on the Playboy, and I imagined the well-woman climbing out of the magazine on her pointy feet and finally fell hard half out of the attic opening, screaming now, banging my spine on the wood and bruising it badly.
Then there were hands on my shoulder, hard and horny and orange-ish, yanking me out of the hole and dragging me across the floor. Yellow eyes flashing fury, Roz leaned past me and ducked her head through the hole, screeching at Martin to get out. Then she stalked away, snarling “Out” and “Come on.”
Never had I known her to be this angry. I’d also never been happier to see her pinched, glaring, unhappy face, the color of an overripe orange thanks to the liquid tan she poured all over herself before her daily mah-jongg games at the club where she sometimes took us swimming. Flipping over and standing, I hurried after her, the rattle of the ridiculous twin rows of bracelets that ran halfway up her arms sweet and welcome in my ears as the tolling of a dinner bell. I waited at the lip of the closet until Martin’s head appeared, then fled Sophie’s room.
A few seconds later, my brother emerged, the Knights of Labor plaque clutched against his chest, glaring bloody murder at me. But Roz took him by the shoulders, guided him back to his bed in my mother’s old room, and sat him down. I followed, and fell onto my own bed. For a minute, maybe more, she stood above us and glowed even more than usual, as though she might burst into flame. Then, for the first time in all my experience of her, she crossed her legs and sat down between our beds on the filthy floor.
“Oh, kids,” she sighed. “What were you doing in there?”
“Where are Mom and Dad?” Martin demanded. The shrillness in his tone made me cringe even farther back against the white wall behind me. Pushing with me feet, I dug myself under the covers and lay my head on my pillow.
“Out,” Roz said, in the same weary voice. “They’re on a walk. They’ve been cooped up here, same as the rest of us, for an entire week.”
“Cooped up?” Martin’s voice rose still more, and even Roz’s leathery face registered surprise. “As in, sitting shiva? Paying tribute to Grandpa?”
After a long pause, she nodded. “Exactly that, Martin.”
From the other room, I swore I could hear the sound of plastic sliding over threadbare carpet. My eyes darted to the doorway, the lit landing, the streaks of soap in the mirror, the floor.
“How’d they die?” I
blurted.
Roz’s lizard eyes darted back and forth between Martin and me. “What’s with you two tonight?”
“Mrs. Gold and Sophie. Please, please, please. Grandma.” I didn’t often call her that. She scowled even harder.
“What are you babbling about?” Martin said to me. “Roz, Miriam’s been really—”
“Badly, Miriam” Roz said, and Martin went quiet. “They died badly.”
Despite what she’d said, her words had a surprising, almost comforting effect on me. “Please tell me.”
“Your parents wouldn’t want me to.”
“Please.”
Settling back, Roz eyed me, then the vent overhead. I kept glancing into the hall. But I didn’t hear anything now. And after a while, I only watched her. She crossed her arms over her knees, and her bracelets clanked.
“It was an accident. A horrible accident. It really was. You have to understand . . . you have no idea how awful those days were. May you never have such days.”
“What was so awful?” Martin asked. There was still a trace of petulance in his tone. But Roz’s attitude appeared to be having the same weirdly soothing effect on him as on me.
She shrugged. “In the pink room, you’ve got my mother. Only she’s not my mother anymore. She’s this sweet, stupid, chattering houseplant.”
I gaped. Martin did, too, and Roz laughed, kind of, without humor or joy.
“Every single day, usually more than once, she shit all over the bed. The rest of the time, she sat there and babbled mostly nice things about cookies or owls or whatever. Places she’d never been. People she may have known, but I didn’t. She never mentioned me, or my father, or my brother, or anything about our lives. It was like she’d led some completely different life, without me in it.”
Roz held her knees a while. Finally, she went on. “And in the blue room, there was Sophie, who remembered everything. How it had felt to walk to the market, or lecture a roomful of professors about the Kabbalah or whatever other weird stuff she knew. How it had been to live completely by herself, with her books, in her own world, the way she had for twenty-two years after your great-grandfather died. Best years of her life, I think. And then, just like that, her bones gave out on her. She couldn’t move well. Couldn’t drive. She couldn’t really see. She broke her hip twice. When your grandpa brought her here, she was so angry, kids. So angry. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to be dependent. It made her mean. That’s pretty much your choices, I think. Getting old—getting that old, anyway—makes you mean, or sick, or stupid, or lonely. Take your pick. Only you don’t get to pick. And sometimes, you get all four.”
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 35
