David Bell - The Hiding Place

“You know,” she said, “Ray was the golden boy too when we met. Football player and all of that. Everybody’s friend, everybody’s drinking buddy. Lots of girls wanted him, but I got him…”

Her voice trailed off, even though there seemed to be more to say. Janet leaned forward.

“And?”

“Michael and his father have a lot in common,” she said, her eyes still distant. “Sometimes I worry about how much they have in common.”

A pull-down ladder at the end of the hallway provided access to the attic. Janet hadn’t been up there for a few months. Every so often, a wave of nostalgia and regret washed over her-took hold of her really-and at those times she comforted herself by looking at old photos of Justin and her mother. It eased her mind knowing the mementos were stored just above her, like a savings account she only occasionally withdrew from.

Janet always worried she wouldn’t be able to pull the ladder down by herself. She came home from Rose’s feeling more tired than usual. The past few days’ events-the encounter with the man on the quad, the trip to Rose’s house-had left her drained, and she resisted the urge to crawl straight into bed with the TV for company. She needed a pick-me-up, a little lift, so she gave the short pull string two good tugs and brought the ladder down with a groaning, whining protest. She unfolded the wooded contraption, breathing in dust, and hoped-like she always did when she stepped onto it-that it would still hold her weight. I’ll never reach Memory Lane if I break my neck on the way…

She started to climb. More than simple, painful nostalgia drove Janet forward. A sharp purpose guided her to the attic-she wanted to look at pictures of Justin and her mother and even her father as a young man and determine if a resemblance really existed between them and the man from the porch. She needed to study those pictures, to contemplate them. She couldn’t trust her memory to do the work for her anymore. Her memory-her heart-wanted it to be true so bad she couldn’t rely on it.

The ladder shook and squeaked beneath her weight, but it held. A lone bulb on a cord illuminated the slanting roof, the thick tufts of insulation. Janet always feared bats and mice and bugs. She once heard a story about a woman in Dove Point who’d found a rattlesnake nesting in her attic. But that couldn’t be true, could it? The obvious irrationality of the story aside, Janet shivered despite the heat in the enclosed, musty space. Quickly, she told herself. Quickly.

Janet knew where the box was kept. She remembered the days and weeks after her brother’s funeral, waking during the night to the sound of creaking footsteps in the attic. Terrified, she’d pull the covers to her head, thinking the same man who had killed her brother had come into the house looking for her.

But it wasn’t a stranger. It was her mother. Eventually, Janet screwed up the nerve to investigate and she found the ladder to the attic pulled down. And she heard the sobs echoing in the unfinished empty space. Her mother crying over mementos of her murdered child. Photos, clothes, crayon drawings. When she was old enough, Janet made the trek up those stairs too-always when her parents weren’t home-and relived her brother’s short life through the contents of that one box.

She turned to the right, to the corner of the attic where the box always sat. She didn’t see it right away. She couldn’t imagine anyone else in the family had been up in the attic moving things around, certainly not her dad. Would Ashleigh go through these things? Janet pushed some boxes aside, felt a layer of dust against her skin. A small lump of panic rose in her throat, almost as though she had swallowed the very dust she was kicking up as she moved around the attic. The box was always in that corner. Always. Before her mom died it had been there, and after her mom died it remained.

Janet moved around the room, her actions becoming more frantic and panicked the longer she looked. It couldn’t be gone because it held everything. Everything that was left-

She made a circuit of the room, opening every box. Then she did it again, and by the time she finished the second go-round she was crying. She wiped the tears away, felt them mix with the gritty dust that coated her face.

“No,” she said. “No.”

She must have missed it, must have passed it by as she tried not to lose control of her emotions. But something told her that wasn’t the case. She knew it was gone, gone, gone.

Janet stood still in the middle of the attic, the roof support beams just above her head. A bright spark of anger and frustration ignited in her gut. She left the attic, back down the rickety stairs, not worrying at all on the descent if the ladder would hold her weight or not. When she hit the bottom she went right down the stairs again to the first floor, where she heard the TV playing, the usual late-afternoon news drone that her father couldn’t seem to get enough of.

Sure enough, she found him in his chair, his eyes a little glassy from the tranquilizing nature of the TV set. He didn’t bother to look up when she came into the room. He kept his eyes on the screen as if Janet wasn’t there.

“Dad?”

He still didn’t respond.

Janet reached down for the remote and turned the TV off.

“Hey.”

“Dad, I need you to listen to me. I need to ask you something.”

“What’s wrong?”

“There was a box in the attic, a box of things from Mom and Justin.”

“I don’t-”

“You know goddamn well what box I’m talking about,” she said. “It’s been there forever. I know you like to pretend you don’t know about things like that, but I know you know what I’m talking about. I’m not the only one who used to hear Mom go up there at night and cry. I know you remember that.”

Her dad looked away, back to the blank TV screen.

“Dad, that box is gone. What happened to it?”

“It’s dark up there.”

“Dad, there are only three of us in this house. I know I didn’t move it and I know Ashleigh didn’t. So I’m asking you.”

He remained silent for a long time. Janet decided to wait it out, to stare him down and not give him a chance to turn away or say something off the subject. She just waited.

It took a long time, but her dad finally spoke.

“It’s gone,” he said.

Janet didn’t process the word. She waited another beat, then said, “Gone? Do you mean it’s missing?”

“I mean it’s gone,” he said. “I threw it away.”

Whatever anger Janet felt when she entered the room left as soon as her father’s words registered in her brain. In place of the anger, an emptiness grew, spreading through the inside of her body like expanding warm air, filling her and driving everything else away. She felt hollow.

“Why…?”

He finally looked at her.

“It’s time to move on,” he said. “It’s been time to move on for a while, but now it’s really time. As long as that stuff sat up there, as long as we could go up and look at those things whenever we wanted to, then we couldn’t go on. So I made the decision to get rid of it.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make.”

“When you moved out and grew up, it was okay to have it there. I thought it was good for you to have your own life. But when you moved back in, you started going up there again.” He shook his head. “And now all this stuff this week. It’s not good for any one of us.”

“That’s what we had left of your wife and son.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, his voice flat and without emotion, he said, “It’s over, Janet. It really is.”

He reached for the remote and turned the TV back on.