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 do
wn 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.
But she kept imagining that she felt it there every time she came into the attic, and that every time she opened the closet door, it—it was like a faithful dog, she thought, hoping to be invited to jump up from its bed in the corner and go for a walk. And you always felt guilty, because you knew about the hopefulness. Sorry, she thought at it, no walks. You stay there. For now. Till I decide what to do with you. She had no desire to investigate the attic-over-the-attic further. Her first sight of it had made her think she would want to do just that: explore everything, take down every book, look in every file, find out who the secret belonged to, why, when, how. But she kept remembering the tingle up her arm—and the way the stairs had thrown themselves back into their gap, after all the trouble she’d had getting them down in the first place. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t as if she had discovered a secret spring; the stairs were stuck, wood tight-swelled against wood, hinges that hadn’t been asked to work in decades.
It’s like a fairy story, she thought. Girl finds magical box in attic, all things start coming right. Boring old boyfriend takes up with someone else, stops rubbing away at her, new car—well, sort of—suddenly happens against all odds. All I need now is some friends.
The silence happened again, at once, eagerly. No! she yelled—silently—and there was a quiver, as of a scolded dog, and then not only was there no silence, but there never had been any silence. Sorry, she said—silently—to the … dog-metaphor. Sorry. I know you’re … oh, hell! Am I losing my mind here? I can’t be talking to a box.
That afternoon, after she finished weeding the garden, she curled up on the porch swing and started reading The Mayor of Casterbridge. It was the only title she recognized on the living room shelves. Dad’s historical research books were all out (although not all on shelves) but not very many reading books. It wasn’t Lord of the Rings (which she had read eight times), but it was easier to get into than War and Peace had been.
The next afternoon her father took her down to the garage to see her car, a little blue boxy thing that started as soon as she turned the key, clunka clunka clunka, an absolutely reliable noise, she could tell. The sort of engine noise that not only any self-respecting dog would recognize coming up the driveway, but even parents would know was you and not some stranger. “Clunker,” she said, “and so I dub thee, to be mine own true, um, knight, or I suppose charger or palfrey or ambling pad.”
And the day after that she drove it to Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a box for her father, even though it was a Wednesday, even though family tradition said that Dunkin’ Donuts, junk food in capital letters, was only a weekend splurge—and because while her father was the only admitted addict, Annabelle and her mother always somehow got through their four each too, and the boxes came home carefully arranged with everyone’s favorites. Annabelle had gotten up early to do this, even knowing that her parents must hear Clunker starting up, assuming that they would assume that girl with new car can’t keep herself away from it, even at six-thirty in the morning in July. Mom and Dad were only barely unsticking their eyelids over their first cups of coffee by the time she got back; she could see “weekend splurge” trying to assert itself on their faces, and failing. “Well, we had doughnuts our first day in the new house,” she said. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have doughnuts our first day with a new car.”
“It’ll give us strength for standing in line at Motor Vehicles this afternoon,” Dad said, looking gloomy, but reaching for the box.
She loaded up her knapsack with library books after they returned (successfully) from the DMV and, despite the temptation to throw them in Clunker’s back seat, took the walk to the library by the river, with the sun baking down on her and her back under the canvas knapsack running with sweat. As she was unloading them onto the “return” counter, she looked up and saw the girl who’d said “hi” several weeks ago, coming out of the young adult room with another girl Annabelle didn’t recognize. Annabelle stiffened, but kept unloading, more slowly. She’d been catching up on the new stuff by authors she’d officially given up and privately missed—Peter Dickinson, Diana Wynne Jones, Margaret Mahy—and had Mistress Masham’s Repose and a couple of Lang’s fairy books besides. There were ten or twelve of them altogether. The girls glanced at the books, and the one who’d smiled smiled again, and again Annabelle couldn’t tell if it was a friendly smile or a scornful one. But she glanced up and caught Annabelle’s eye. “Hi,” said Annabelle, a little too loudly. “Hi,” said the girl, composedly, but the other girl was already half a step ahead, and the two of them went on, past Annabelle and out the door into the street.
Annabelle stood staring at her pile of books a moment, and then turned and went … not home. Back to the house she now lived in. Even Clunker sitting out front no longer cheered her. She went upstairs to her attic and began writing a letter to Bridget.
By the end of July they had peas and beans and lettuce and spinach, and basil for pesto, and dill to put on the fish they caught in the stream (Dad had asked about that at the garage, too). In August Annabelle stared at the sweet corn, willing it to grow, to not be eaten by worms and birds before the human beings got to it. She finished The Mayor of Casterbridge and began Great Expectations. Dad had disappeared into his word processor and Mom into soft sculpture orders, and unpacking was at a kind of standstill, so Annabelle had found Great Expectations at the library. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was on the shelves at home, but she didn’t want to read any more Hardy, too grim, and all that landscape, it struck too near: lots of landscape, no one to talk to. Dickens was better, there was stuff to laugh at in Dickens so the sad parts were okay, you didn’t feel like you were going to get lost in them.
Her favorite shoes lost a heel, tearing the leather badly in the process. “Oh, hell!” she said, looking at the mess. “I don’t want to give these shoes up yet!” The silence put a nose in, questioningly, and this time she let it. The next day she drove Clunker to the next town, about half an hour from their village, and the first shoe-repair store she saw said no, past mending, but that there was this fellow at the other end of town who might do it, and he did.
“Good shoes,” he said. “Worth saving. I’ll have to patch that, you know; it won’t be quite the same color leather, but you rub a lot of mink oil in and a little polish over and no one will know. Cost you, though. Lot of work.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I really like those shoes.”
The sweet corn was amazing: almost no worms, and while the birds got some of it, there was so much that it didn’t matter. The living room was still hedged with stacks of books and book boxes, but Mom had gotten out of the dining room and into her room upstairs, and although Annabelle managed to step on a needle and Dad a pin the first evening they tried using the dining room as a dining room, Mom, nothing daunted, invited two sets of neighbors over for dinner two days later. (“Where are the good place mats?” she shouted, an hour before their guests arrived. “I unpacked them weeks ago!”) The Websters were about her parents’ age, but their kids were Averil and Ted and Sylvia’s age, and lived in California and Montana, and didn’t come back East very often. The Gardners’ kids were still little, seven, nine, and eleven, and although on their best behavior, a fair amount of melted butter made its way to various in
appropriate places.
Everyone raved about the sweet corn. “I’ve never tasted anything like it, in the fifty years I’ve lived here,” said Mr. Webster, halfway through his third ear. (He ate four, before he gave up, as did most of the grown-ups.) Annabelle went out about halfway through dinner to pick more while her mother boiled more water. “Thanks,” Annabelle muttered, through her teeth, to the rows of corn, but she was speaking to a box in the attic.
When she got back in, she could hear snatches of the conversation from the dining room. “—can’t seem to do anything about it. The fellows in Albany don’t give a damn; one little tourist town more or less. They’re much more interested in the kind of mass development that could go on all around here—more New York City bedrooms, you know.”
“We’re a little far out for that, surely,” said Dad.
“Little you know,” said Mrs. Webster. “But you don’t have to care why; you do have to care that they’re going to do it.”
“Do what?” said Annabelle to her mother, over their hands busy husking corn.
“Highway,” said her mother. “Your dad’s been hearing about it—at the garage, of course—and this Mr. Webster is the head of the committee to try and stop them. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about”—this was high praise from Mom, who could tell blusterers from the real thing—“but apparently they’re not getting very far. Construction is due to start this fall.”