Lucinda climbed the stairs to the second floor of the house, the runner rug as worn as an animal trail up the middle of the steep old steps. Photos of herself and her father and mother hung from the stairway wall, each of them staring back at her from past lives. Lucinda and Sally on the tire swing in the backyard, pigtails flying, gap-toothed and laughing. Photos of Sally and her parents with Lucinda and her parents, picnicking, camping, sledding.
Except for Dot dusting and vacuuming the house, no one had been up the stairs in years, her father sequestered in the downstairs bedroom where he’d slept every night since her mother’s passing nearly twenty-three years ago.
On the second floor, the air was still and dead. The heat volcanic. Sweat sprouted on her forehead. The path in the rug continued down the center of the hallway.
Lucinda nearly tripped on the top stair tread. Still loose, to this day.
She looked back down the stairs.
Ten stairs.
Lucinda shuddered. She saw her mother now, heaped at the bottom of the stairs. Her father kneeling beside her, weeping as he looked up at Lucinda, aghast with fear. Those who did not believe in the soul had not been beside a body whose life had just departed. Lucinda had just been with her mother an hour earlier at bedtime, laughing in the bathroom as they’d brushed their teeth together.
That is not my mother at the bottom of the stairs, she’d thought. That was not her father, that frightened man who had already started to slip away from the living world after failing to find his friend’s wife and daughter, or the person behind their disappearance, and now would disappear more every day, retreat to a place in his mind where no one could reach him.
Lucinda wandered down the hall; her wounded face pulsed with pain.
She stood in her parents’ old bedroom.
She’d not been in it for decades.
It was as it had been. Immaculate, tidy. The dark wood floors shone as if freshly shellacked. Pristine white doilies adorned the polished dresser and nightstands. On the wall beside the bureau mirror hung a calendar from Ivers Insurance, the page revealing the image of two kittens tousling a ball of yarn. March 1989. Month of her mother’s death.
Lucinda opened the closet door. The scent of old wool irritated her nose, made it itch, yet there was none of the expected astringent odor of mothballs. Each of her mother’s winter coats hung from its own hanger, each equally spaced from the other, and bagged in a dry cleaner’s clear garment plastic. Lucinda looked at one of the dry cleaner tags. Its date just two weeks ago. Dot saw to it. Scarves and mittens, folded with meticulous precision, sat in a neat stack on a wire rack.
From the closet ceiling hung a string with a ring on the end.
Lucinda pulled it.
A collapsible attic stairway unfolded with the complaint of unused springs.
Icy air seeped down from a draft above as Lucinda climbed the stairs into the attic, shivering at the cold. She reached around in the dark, pulled a string. A lightbulb pulsed and flickered, lit the attic, her breath visible in the cold.
The wind shrieked in the eaves sounding like the cry of a wounded animal.
At the far gable end of the attic, boxes were stacked atop one another in a haphazard fashion, not the work of Dot. The jagged sharp points of rusted nails poked through the plywood roof just above her head, and a ribwork of joists with wide spans between them ran from Lucinda to the boxes. Beds of pink fiberglass insulation lay between the joists atop Sheetrock that Lucinda’s foot, Lucinda herself, could easily crash through if she put too much weight on it. She would need to tread with care.
Lucinda ducked beneath the ominous nails and picked her way down the attic, clutched the beams above her to keep her balance as she stepped over each expanse of insulation, from one joist to the next. At the boxes, she stooped, balancing herself on her heels, and read the black marker on the sides of the boxes. More of the same, eras packed away, clothes and games, tools and dishes, the indelible turned untenable. She checked each box, searched for files and for Beverly. She found neither.
She came to a box marked stuffed animals.
She took a deep breath. She opened the flaps and peered inside. There lay Boo Boo Kitty. An oddly flat cat with blue matted fur and yellow plastic eyes. Lucinda took it out and smelled it. It smelled as she remembered, an odor of milk and baby blanket. She held it to her, set it aside, and rummaged through the box to find Ducky, Stiff Piggy, Lil Lamb. The sight of each triggered a melancholic ache.
She picked up a small stuffed bear she did not recognize, flooded with shame for having forgotten what the bear had meant to her. If it were here in this box, the bear must have meant something to her at one time, yet she could not recall.
She found no Baby Beverly.
She placed the animals gently in the box and left the flaps open, not wanting to shut her stuffed animals away entirely. Stooping under the rafters, she spied a box marked toys.
In it sat a wooden hound dog with a plastic pull leash and felt ears. Snoop ’n Sniff. A xylophone. She tapped a finger on its key and a note rose high and tinny and fell away. A Chatter phone. Stacks of Mad Lib booklets. No Beverly. Lucinda’s back began to ache.
The last box was marked uniform.
Lucinda placed a palm on it, feeling her breathing catch.
She peeled back the box flaps. A millipede slithered out from the box.
Inside lay her father’s old sheriff’s uniform, a rigid khaki sheriff’s hat atop it. The shirt of the same khaki, pressed and folded crisp, badge pinned to the pocket. The uniform had defined her father. Whenever he worked at the Grain & Feed, particularly Sundays, and wore a flannel shirt and green Dickies, he’d looked odd, out of sorts, his behavior too loose, volatile. His measured voice grew boisterous, and it pitched and swung in sudden ways. It was as if the uniform had kept him contained. In control.
She held the shirt up before her. A broad-shouldered shirt that would swallow his now scarecrow body. Above the badge and shirt pocket, her father’s named stitched from stout green thread. She set the shirt beside her and lifted out the pants, made of the same smooth khaki as the shirt, with black piping running down the outer seam of each leg. A button fell from the pants pocket, one her father had likely sewn on the shirt himself after her mother had passed.
She tucked it in her coat pocket, folded the pants and shirt, and placed them in the box. Put the hat on top of them. She took a last long look and folded the box flaps shut.
She did not want to be here any longer. The house upset her. Her failing father upset her. The end of things. A closing in of his mortality, and her own. Each breath burned in her lungs, and her eyes wept, an allergic reaction to the fiberglass insulation.
Lucinda hurried to the stairs and took them two at a time.
Driving down Main Street she saw the lights were still on inside the rectory. She slowed her Wrangler down and pulled over across the street, killed the engine.
She watched the rectory. She pondered telling Kirk about the drawings, about people being in Jonah’s house. She needed to abide by the law, the process. Yet she imagined how Kirk might react to her developments. Scoff. She could just see, through the parlor window, the back of his head where he sat in the chair. He rose and left the room and returned. Likely to get a beer. He sat again.
Lucinda shivered.
The Wrangler had grown cold as an icebox.
She watched the parlor window for some time then started up the Wrangler and headed home.