A Knot in the Grain (19 page)

“Hell,” said Annabelle, and stopped, letting her excitement cool enough for her to think about the situation. Crowbar, she thought. There was a crowbar at home—she still thought of the old house in her old town that way when she was talking only to herself, but she was careful not to say it aloud in her parents' hearing—in the garage; would it have been unpacked yet? Only one way to find out.

She didn't see it, but she got the tire iron out of the back of the car instead, hoping her parents wouldn't see her and ask what she was doing; it was mysteriously desirable for her to solve this puzzle, make this discovery by herself. No one saw her. The tire iron wasn't ideally shaped, but at least she couldn't break it, and the old wood of the house was granite-hard, and the iron's pressure left no mark.

She got it open about a hand's breadth by lunchtime. She'd lost track of time, and her mother had come halfway up the stairs to call her. Annabelle rushed out to stop her coming the rest of the way, and then stopped herself just out of sight, for she was too dusty and dishevelled (and a bit greasy from the things the tire iron picked up at the bottom of the trunk of the car) not to arouse comment. “I'm sorry. I'm just coming. Go ahead without me.”

Her mother's steps retreated, and Annabelle flew down to the bathroom to scrub off and comb her hair. “There's another reason to get you out of that attic,” her mother said, half teasing and half glad of any other reason, however minor and domestic. “It's too far to walk when you don't hear me the first time.”

“We can get an intercom,” said Annabelle. “I'm sorry. I do usually hear.”

She went back upstairs immediately after lunch, despite her mother's trying to persuade her to go outdoors: Mom always thought sunlight was good for you—working in sunlight, that is. Lying on a beach blanket was bad for you, nothing to do with holes in the ozone and skin cancer. But at the moment she
had
to go back to the attic and the wider—widening—black crack in the low-pitched roof. She quietly raided the pantry on her way, for a flashlight and candles, visible among half-unpacked boxes.

It took her most of another hour to get it open—open enough. It was a set of stairs, very narrow but steep, built against the other side of the ceiling, and probably supposed to rest on the floor when fully open. She got them down to about six inches of the floor and gave up; the huge black space revealed was plenty big enough for her to walk up … a much less attractive prospect now than the first impulse to find out what the hinged crack was about had suggested. She'd supposed there would be a secret cupboard, something she could comfortably see into from the sunlit attic; or rather she hadn't thought very clearly about it at all, just that this was an adventure, and an adventure might be fun. She looked back to Bridget's letter, still lying where she'd left it on the floor next to the armchair by the window. Flea market furniture had its virtues; you didn't feel obliged to worry about the sun fading it. She looked out at the bright afternoon and thought about the sun on her back as she stooped in their garden-to-be. Then she picked up the flashlight and turned it on. She put candles and matches in her pockets, and started up the steps.

The stairs made horrible noises, even more horrible than when she'd tried jumping on the bottom stair to try to open them fully, and she paused to hope that Mom had turned the radio back on after lunch. When she got high enough, there was the screeching sound of chafed wood that suggested that the stairs might touch the floor of the attic after all … in which case how was she ever going to get them
closed
again? A sudden crash of depression landed on her; she'd ruined her own room, the only room in the new house that she had begun to feel a little at home in; she couldn't possibly sleep up here with this great gaping maw open virtually at the foot of her bed; and she still didn't want to move downstairs. She went on up.

There was a miniature version of the attic she'd just left at the head of the stairs, a long low narrow room. But there was no dormer window here, and the roof was so low she could not stand up straight, and the floor was only about two paces wide. But she forgot her depression, because she had found something worth finding: The tiny room was fitted out as a kind of study, with a table, or table surface, let down from one slanting wall on laths, one end nailed solidly to the beam that supported its farther end. There was a stool under it.

Annabelle drew the stool out and sat slowly down on it, feeling a little guilty, as if she were doing something she knew was not allowed. It was very hot up here, but not unbearably so, and it crossed her mind that the air was surprisingly sweet and clear for an attic; but the thought did not linger because there was too much to distract her. There were shelves running along the walls on both long sides, with a break for the table, and the shelves were awkwardly deep because of the sharpness of the roof peak. They had to run out so far toward the center for there to be space on them for books that Annabelle would have to walk sideways between them—which, she thought, sitting on the stool, was going to be a good trick, since I already have to stoop because of the ceiling. But she would have to investigate, because there were books on the shelves—books and files and boxes—boxes like the one her foot struck as she stretched her legs out; her bent knees were nearly to her chin as she sat on the stool. She pulled the box toward her, and opened it.

Small indecipherable shapes. She pointed the flashlight into the box. Small dark still-indecipherable shapes. She reached in to pick one up, her fingers touched the nearest, there was a sudden tingle that ran up her hand to her elbow; and she jerked her arm back, suddenly panting for breath and hearing her blood beating in her ears. She sat, shivering, on the stool, the box at her feet, and waited till her breath and heartbeat steadied. When she looked up again, the attic was much darker than it had been, somehow; the flashlight and the light from the stairwell had seemed plenty once she'd climbed high enough to see that she'd really found something. She had willed her eyes to adjust in eagerness, not in fear. But the shadows lay differently now, and the long thin triangular hollows behind the books on the deep shelves were … too black. She couldn't raise the flashlight to shine there, because she was afraid the light would not penetrate, but rebound.

Only half acknowledging what she was doing, she dropped the lid of the box shut again, picked it up, and carried it carefully down the narrow stairs—not easy, scraping her back against one side of the opening, and the arm protecting the box on the other side. Funny, there were no cobwebs, no worry of spiders in her hair, or icky dry little corpses in sticky matted spider silk; like the smell in the attic, too fresh for such a closed-up space, a strangely polite, dull-lying dust that didn't get up her nose. She set the box next to the armchair and Bridget's letter, where the sunlight struck it; it was wooden, and in the strong daylight she could see it had marks on it, though whether they were designs or letters she could not make out.

She felt a little better now, in
her
attic, Bridget's letter like a talisman and no shadows except those hiding the unswept recesses under bed and bureau; she knew what those shadows hid. And the box looked so ordinary, old and a bit splintery at the corners, two planks wide all round, with a pair of short crosspieces on each of the long sides, including bottom and lid, the size overall of a small toolbox, or four shoeboxes stacked two and two. She found herself smiling at it, for some reason; it was not a lovely object, but it looked … friendly.

She turned to look back at the stairs. “I would really rather have you closed, you know,” she said, conversationally, aloud—and had a sudden impulse to turn back quickly and look at the box she'd brought down. She compromised, looking over her shoulder; the box was just lying there, looking as it had a moment before. She frowned at her foolishness, faced the stairs again, and, knowing it was no good but needing to make the gesture to prove it to herself, bent and seized a corner of the stairs and gave a quick heave.

They shot up into their opening so quickly she staggered and almost fell. She did let go, to catch her balance, and when she looked up, the face of the beam with the knot in it was as smooth as it had been when she had looked up at it from reading Bridget's letter. Not quite as smooth; she slid the dangling hooks back into their eyes again. She looked at the box, lying quietly and expressionlessly—why am I thinking of a box as being expressionless? she said to herself sharply—and then turned away briskly and finally, to go downstairs and out into the garden and dig. And dig and dig.

It was the best sort of distraction because there was responsibility mixed up in it. There was a lot of work still to be done on their new garden, to catch up enough this year to have some harvest at the end; and Annabelle had not merely promised to help but had effectively protested the tiny humble garden her parents had initially planned, and therefore was stuck with the result. Her mother, half pleased at the thought of fresh vegetables and half pleased at getting her daughter out of the attic on a regular basis, helped talk Dad into buying big seedlings at the nursery instead of starting from scratch with seed packets. “It's too late in the season for that,” said Mom.

“But the cost!” he moaned.

“A lot cheaper than fresh vegetables at the supermarket,” said Mom, a bit tartly. Her eyes met Annabelle's over the table, and both smiled. Dad was a terrible man for bargains that cost more in the end. For a moment, remembering similar past discussions, mother and daughter were in their former secure places in the family pattern, knowing where they were and why and toward what end. Or maybe only Annabelle felt the shock of a comfortable familiarity that was no longer familiar.

But some of the seedlings were still waiting to go in; after all that, Dad had bought more than they had made space for. “We'll hire you out as Rototiller Girl and earn spare cash for a thousand uses,” said her father, several rows behind her, weeding in what Annabelle privately felt was a rather leisurely manner.

“How about a little red convertible for my seventeenth birthday?” said Annabelle.

“Dream on,” said her father.

“How about a junker to drive to my new school this fall?” said Annabelle.

Her father was silent, and Annabelle knew she'd got it wrong. For a moment then it was almost as if the world had fallen silent too; no birds sang, and she couldn't even hear the river. Annabelle was sorry, she'd spoken without thinking, but they both knew where the unthought impulse had come from: She had gone to her old school for the last two years carpooling with some of the kids who were old enough to drive and had cars; Bill had his mother's two days a week, and Polly had one in every-other-week shares with her sister, and Sam had one almost all the time. It was too awful, thinking of having to face the humiliation of riding on a big yellow school bus with a lot of little kids as a junior in high school when she hadn't done so since she was a little kid herself.

“We'll see,” her father said, surprising her. That meant maybe, and in this case it meant a pretty good maybe, because he'd know not to get her hopes up about something like this.

It was two days later she got another letter from Bill—it had only been four days since the last one—very full of himself, very full of good-guy claims of how much he missed her—“Oh, God!” she said, flinging the letter down on the floor beside her armchair. “I wish you'd get together with Sue and get it over with!” She buried her head in her hands, her loneliness an almost physical presence, listening to the silence, the silence of solitude—she lifted her head again—
too
silent. Where were the birds?

She was imagining things, of course; the birds were still singing, she could hear them again, and the sound of the wind in the apple trees. I mean, she thought, I am still hearing them. I just stopped listening for a moment, I was thinking too much about being miserable. Maybe I could stop thinking about being miserable. I'll go dig in the garden some more. The new seedlings all look happy, everything's coming up beautifully fast now, including the weeds.

A week later she got another letter from Bill, and in the same mail a letter from Susan. It had happened very suddenly, they each said in their individual ways, it had happened—in fact—the day after Bill had written last, at a party he had written about planning to go to although it wouldn't be the same without Annabelle. It was as if he and Susan had seen each other for the first time.… They hoped she didn't mind too much.

That evening, at supper—she hadn't told her parents about Bill; she didn't mind too much, except that she minded about everything to do with moving, and she wanted the relief to be stronger than the awful stomach-upset sense of
change
when she told them—Dad said, “I've found a junker for you.” Annabelle looked up, momentarily puzzled.

“A car. You can't have forgotten already,” he went on. “I asked at the garage, a day or so after you mentioned it in the garden. They've got a ten-year-old Ford that one of the mechanics' sons' girlfriends just took through high school herself and is getting a new car to go to college in. They say you don't want to drive it across country, but the mechanic's son has kept it running okay, and there's nothing wrong with it except age. Sound okay?”

Annabelle felt her face breaking into a smile, and the rest of her caught up with it almost at once. “It sounds terrific. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“You bet, Rototiller Girl.”

She'd shoved the box she'd taken down from the attic-over-the-attic into the back of her closet. (Her closet, the same shape as the rest of the room, had wonderfully deep low corner-backs, suitable for old camping gear, unfinished projects from years ago that she couldn't face throwing out or dealing with, unsorted heaps of shoes, belts, gloves, sweatshirts with spodges of paint on them from helping paint the old house two years ago when they first put it on the market, and other things that she could find an excuse for not unpacking tidily into drawers in her official bedroom downstairs, like mysterious wooden boxes.) She'd tried setting it against the wall across from her armchair, but it was such a … presence. She could at least pretend to ignore it when it was behind the closet door, somewhere it couldn't constantly draw her eyes.