“That I won’t,” he said. “I’ll stay right here in this house till the job is done.” He trod one foot on the worn floorboards, to make it clear. She rewarded him with a watery smile, as brilliant as a Cornish rainbow.
She’s caught you hook, line, and sinker, said Claudia, but she sounded pleased as punch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
By the time the other sister, Louisa, came by to view the attic, Tom had gotten much of the obvious rubbish cleared and carted out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind. Most of it was simply trash, and he didn’t have to think about tossing it. He filled nine or ten large trash sacks with old yellowing newspapers. These went to a recycling center. There was a certain satisfaction to sifting through so much mess; a microversion of what he did for a living, he supposed, sorting through records: checking facts and backgrounds, skimming through court proceedings and unearthing hidden bank accounts. He liked seeking out the shreds of order hidden inside of chaos.
Michelle had called her husband Joe, who seemed to know every man, woman, and child in every corner of the city of Worcester. Joe was a useful person, seemingly unflappable. By five that first afternoon a twenty-yard dumpster had pulled into the old woman’s driveway. Tom used the clean-up job as an excuse to send the chatty younger sister away—“I can’t do my work with someone looking on, cannit?” and figured out a simple, methodical sorting system. He had to work fast or he’d never be done.
He made five piles: one of errant and absolute rubbish; one to recycle (torn envelopes, old newspapers, magazines and circulars; broken plastic objects, empty cans of fizzy drinks and so on); one that might be given away to charity; one pile of potentially valuable objects; and one very small pile for himself. This last, of course, was only at Michelle’s stubborn insistence. There was nothing in the attic room—or in any room in the crowded little house, come to that—of remotest interest to Tom. He thought instead of his mum, and his few mates back home who might like some sort of souvenir of his strange American adventure. One man he knew collected carved wooden ducks. All right. As long as the duck was not a precious or well-made object—Tom was determined to carry away nothing of any real financial value—he could take it home. There were two such ducks buried under a mound of clutter on the windowsill. One was signed, with lifelike eyes. The other was clumsier, the body more squat. Tom took the unsigned piece and set it aside.
Even though he’d made a decent dent in the mess, the sister Louisa seemed initially gobsmacked by the ruinous attic. Her jaw hung open. Tom remembered now that this had once been Louisa’s bedroom, after the death of the Swedish grandfather. That would make it even worse for her.
Michelle had done her best to prepare her sister for what lay inside the attic room on Ararat. Louisa’s own room! More secrets, more bad news. It was a conversation Michelle found that she both dreaded and relished—which she believed was not unusual among family members. You hated breaking the awful news, and at the same time you could hardly wait to tell the only other person in the world to whom it could ever really matter. Michelle had phoned her sister in the late afternoon—after Louisa’s daily after-work glass of wine, but before supper, she hoped—and asked Louisa when was the last time she’d gone all the way upstairs and looked around their mother’s house.
“I went all the time,” said Louisa, bristling. “Why do you ask?”
“All the time—really?”
“Why?” insisted Louisa. “Don’t tell me you found another brother hidden up there.”
Michelle forced a smile. Then she realized Louisa couldn’t see whether she was smiling or frowning over the phone. “I mean, even the attic?”
There was a silence at the other end. “Why would I go into the attic?” asked Louisa. “There was nothing left up there. —Was there?”
“Well, yes, there were some things,” said Michelle.
“Please tell me it’s a pile of gold, and not another long-lost relative,” said Louisa.
“Ha ha. No. It’s just—some—items,” said Michelle.
“What kind of items?” Louisa asked. “Anything worth anything? I hope?”
“No. I just think you might want to see it for yourself,” said Michelle. “Don’t freak out, please. It’s no big deal. Just stay calm—”
“I’m coming straight there,” said Louisa, and hung up.
So there they were together, that same afternoon up in the airless attic, the two sisters staring around as if they’d landed on another planet.
“I just don’t believe it,” muttered Louisa. “Jesus H.”
“I didn’t believe it either,” answered Michelle. “Not at first.”
“Maybe some stranger snuck in and filled it with crap.” To Tom’s relief, Louisa didn’t look his way when she said this.
“Mom was full of surprises,” said Michelle, which set them both off into gales of laughter. Seemed like these Americans were always either crying or laughing.
“Yeah, well, she sure as hell surprised us enough,” said Louisa, but she didn’t look as cuffed as usual. She wasn’t frowning, her face didn’t have its usual taut, severe expression. Bemused, more like. Almost filled with wonder. She reached out one finger and tapped the chipped handle of a broken cup.
“Tell me,” she said, “why anyone on earth would keep this.”
“Just in case?” said Michelle. She was bent over some low bookshelves, reading book titles.
“In case of what?”
Michelle shrugged. She looked at the broken cup.
“Tell me what would make this object useful,” said Louisa. “The apocalypse?” But her tone was more teasing than mad.
It was like a scene from a children’s fairy tale. An enchanted castle turned to sludge. The two sisters slowly made their way around the attic shoulder to shoulder, mouths open. Now and again they would stop, point at some random object. It made Tom feel as if he were intruding on an intimate moment, something he was never intended to be part of.
Tom kept out of their way, melting back into a corner without a sound. He had long ago learned how to make himself invisible; though he was not nearly as adept at it as his granddad, it was a skill that came in handy. He’d let the sisters sort things out for themselves. It had been their mother, after all. He went and hid for a while in their morsel of a backyard, till it seemed safe to reappear.
This latest discovery of the wreck in the attic, instead of throwing Louisa into a deeper funk, as she might have expected, came as almost a comfort. It felt as if she’d discovered that her mother had a secret depth, a gift for painting, or some other hidden quality. And it made Louisa feel remarkably lucky. The only thing she ever collected was paper bags, for recycling. She’d grown so used to thinking of everything about herself as not exactly right, maybe even downright bad—a wicked pissah, as folks in Wormtown would say. Now in comparison to her own mom, Louisa felt not wicked at all, but surprisingly normal. She looked in the mirror and didn’t hate the amused face she saw there.
She wore her hair pulled tightly back in a bright-yellow hairband. Once in a while she just had to have some dab of color somewhere. Art hated anything showy, anything that stood out too much, but still. She tried to take in the enormity of the mess around her. Wait till Art gets a load of this, Louisa thought, snorting.
She picked her way slowly through the towers in the attic, holding her breath in the hot, dry air, she and Michelle studying the piles of things like visitors going through a museum in another country. Her poor mother had saved—well, apparently, she had tried to save everything.
She appeared never to have thrown anything away, no matter how pathetic or used or broken. Old makeup cases, scented candles, bottles of shampoo. Balls of pastel yarn, plastic bags bristling with knitting needles—Louisa had never once seen her mother knit—piles of skimpy hand towels, most of them seasonal: decorated with bunnies, pumpkins, embroidered Christmas trees. A vast number of small stuffed animals. Little boxes cached inside of more boxes. One wrong move could send the whole attic, maybe the
whole house toppling down. It made every mess Louisa had ever made in her whole messy life seem like nothing. And this, Michelle informed her, was after they’d already gone and cleared out the worst of it.
Michelle was chewing on her cuticles, a nervous habit she’d had as a child. Louisa batted at her hand to make her stop.
“I wonder if it bothered Mom, keeping all this hidden from us,” said Michelle. “It would have bothered me. It would haunt me, knowing I had this much stuff packed away in my house.”
“Well, Mom kept some secrets,” Louisa said. “Makes you wonder what else we didn’t know.”
“Maybe she was a bank robber,” offered Michelle wanly.
“Maybe she was a ninja.”
“Maybe she worked for the FBI. Or the CIA!” suggested Michelle.
“Maybe she was an astronaut,” laughed Louisa. “A race-car driver. A Russian spy.”
“Maybe she was bonkers,” said Michelle, sobering up. Louisa stopped laughing too.
Both sisters mused on that in silence for a moment.
“More likely she threw spare clothes in here for storage, and the next thing you know, it turns into—” Tom lifted his arm to indicate.
The two sisters examined him with identical expressions. It was clear that they’d forgotten he was in the house. Tom made himself recede from view again, and they went on talking around him.
“Do you think maybe she really was crazy?” Michelle asked Louisa, her brow furrowing. “I mean, do you think she might have been mentally ill? Her mom did commit suicide, you know. So there’s that.”
“Mom was perfectly sane,” said Louisa. Louisa was the expert. She had the degree in psychology and social work. Her word, at least in these matters, was law. “I don’t think you can call someone crazy just because they are—you know. Eccentric.”
“Right,” put in Tom, despite himself. He meant to keep quiet. People back at home had called Claudia eccentric too—only that wasn’t the word they used. They called her barmy, and close, and deep, and addled, and other insulting words no emmet would understand. Maybe this woman, Alma, had thought she’d been rescuing these strange objects from oblivion.
Claudia had rescued every living thing in sight. Foxes and rabbits and squirrels and mice—wild things mostly. She saved wounded domestics, too, including dogs and blind cats and once a pair of goats. After Claudia died, Tom vowed never to keep another living creature in his house. It took months to release the wild ones back where they belonged, and to place every rescue with some other caretaker—the last to go was a cantankerous three-legged hare named Heller.
That was why Cain slew Abel and not the other way around, Tom thought. Because the animal lovers were mad and gentle, and the people who loved flowers and trees couldn’t be trusted in the end. They’d shoot you if you stepped on their precious delphiniums. Tom knew this well enough. He often preferred plants to animals and people, himself.
Michelle shook out a rumpled bedsheet, releasing a cloud of dust into the air. All three of them went into sneezing fits at once. The oddest thing was, they all sneezed the same exact way—making a high-toned, small, sharp, clearly articulated “A-choo!” at the end of the sneeze. Could such a small, peculiar thing be genetic? It was the first sign that all three were actually biologically connected. Louisa looked surprised, Michelle appeared delighted, and Tom felt something close to alarm.
Like it or no, these people were his people. “Whithersoever thou goest . . .” as the Bible said. They were tangled with each other far down the blood line, bound together by people long dead and gone, glued by fine-tuned DNA enzymes, thinner than the hairs on a fiddle bow, soldering them. Claudia had felt herself connected to every living thing on the face of the earth, including lowly dung beetles and worms. Her generosity knew no bounds. But Tom was not like his great beloved. This reminder of connection made him uneasy, as if someone had stuck Sellotape all over him, had trapped and bound him somehow. It made him want to yank himself free and bolt.
His time in America was running out soon, thank God. A handful of days, and he’d have done his part. And not a moment too soon, either. Michelle was becoming attached. She had an adhesive personality, Tom thought. That was in her nature, as solitude and silence was his. She stuck to her husband like a shadow to a post; she hovered over her teenage daughter; she kept coming round and round the mother’s house to stay tied to those apron strings as well. If she had been a stray dog or cat, always needing to be petted, Tom would have said she had been weaned too soon. But some people were like that, naturally; human burrs. Once, long ago, he’d had a girlfriend like that. Just one. He shook free of that as soon as possible. But you could tell Michelle’s husband Joe thrived on it, both the attention and the feeling of being needed. Lots of men did.
Michelle laid claim to a slew of items up in the attic—junk you couldn’t have given away in the mangiest charity shop. She filled bags and bags with this wonky stuff. Lamps and souvenirs and who-knows-what. The more sensible older sister Louisa wanted nothing but one small shoebox of keepsakes—but it was the teenager, Sierra, who kept coming back to sort and organize things, day after day.
All kinds of crazy little things delighted her. Sierra exclaimed over tiny glass bottles with cork stoppers thinner than her fingernails. She gathered up her grandmother’s greeting cards, wrapping paper, bookmarks, and buttons and bore them away to do who knew what with the treasures. She was very polite, always asking Tom’s permission first, unwilling to claim so much as a paperclip without his explicit say-so. Once she found a set of four hand-painted lunch plates—at least they looked hand painted. Bright colors, oddly familiar style. “Is this too much?” she asked him.
“Four small plates? Hardly. Nothing’s too much,” Tom said. “Just take it. Take it all.”
He’d be glad if she carted the whole house away, one plate at a time if she liked. Even so, the youngster was the only one who didn’t actually get on Tom’s nerves. She was organized, patient, and a hard worker. It was Sierra who made them all form a human chain so they could hand things down the stairs and out the door to the skip the most efficient way possible. Sierra knew how to hold her tongue. Michelle would perch on a box in the cramped quarters of the attic and chatter till his head spun. He’d never known anyone who had so many words inside them. Louisa mostly kept to the other parts of the house, but her presence, to someone as solitary as Tom, was like the smell of burning paper. He sensed her acrid fuming even when she was on a different level of the house.
All these Americans wandered in and out of each other’s space in a way he found extraordinary, and distressing. Tom longed for his solitude. He was lonely for his loneliness. He missed the wood stairs leading down to the empty strand at dawn, the roar of water scraping against sand. Neighbors didn’t pay aimless calls on each other in his part of Cornwall—or anyhow he’d trained them not to pay such calls on him. But these people here were ineducable. Neighbors and friends dropped by all the time, seemingly for no reason at all. Even the mailman came inside to pay a social visit. He stood in the middle of the tiny living room twirling his blue cap in his hands. Mailbag over his shoulder. When he spoke of the late Alma Johansson there were actual tears in his eyes.
Only Sierra set to work as soon as she came into the house. She settled her school things down in a corner by the door and set to the task at hand. For a teenager, she was curiously focused. Most young people were an aimless and sociable lot, always staring at their gadgets. And she generally kept a cool head. One evening, just toward twilight, Sierra cantered down from the attic and said, “There’s something flying around up there. Maybe a bird. It’s flying funny.”
“What do you mean, funny?” said Michelle. She and Louisa were paging through some picture albums.
“It sailed over my head,” the girl said. “Twice.” She imitated the fluttering movement with her hand.
“Sounds like a bat,” said Tom.
“A bat!” The two grown women shrieked the word at the same ti
me and headed for the front door. Tom had never seen either one move that fast. Michelle called, “Come on, Sierra! Right now!”
“Most bats are harmless as mice,” said Tom.
“I want to see it,” said Sierra.
“Oh my God,” said Louisa, half laughing, half sobbing. She was pulling at the doorknob.
“Sierra, come on!” shrilled her mother.
“I want to see the bat,” Sierra repeated.
“You two go outside,” said Tom, pushing them out of the house. They bolted out quick enough, glancing nervously over their shoulders, as if they expected the thing to come swooping after them.
Tom and Sierra headed up the stairs.
“You’re not going to kill it, are you?” said Sierra. “Please don’t murder it! Bats are protected. We learned about them in science class.” As if they’d be any less precious if she hadn’t learned about them.
“We’re not killing anything,” Tom said. He wished he felt half as sure as he sounded.
“Maybe we can catch it with a towel,” Sierra suggested. “I heard of someone doing that.”
She ran lightly ahead to fetch it. Tom wished he had his fishing hat on. The one thing he couldn’t stand was the idea of a bat flying into his hair. Then he remembered he didn’t have hair anymore, none left to speak of. One less thing to worry about. Sierra looked around the attic, interested, not at all panicked. Tom eased a window all the way open.
The bat was swooping through the high spaces of the room. It looked all right, not sick at any rate. There was always something unearthly about the creature’s grace.
“Looks more like swimming than flying,” said Sierra.
Yes, he thought. And now what? “Okay,” Tom said, reaching for the towel. “I’ll take these two corners, and you’ll take the others, and we’ll make a sort of net.”
“You’re sure we’re not going to hurt it?” she asked.
“Dead sure,” he lied. What next? he thought. His da could have coaxed the bat out of the room just by talking to it. Tom lacked those skills. But the longer he stewed about it, the harder it would get.
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