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“UH, SORRY ABOUT THIS,” I told Nate as I offered him a hand to help him up into the attic. I had come up first, in the hopes of clearing some space so we could actually move around in here without having to practically stand on top of one another, but I could see now we weren’t going to get so lucky.
“Holy shit,” he muttered as he climbed up and peered around. The entire place was packed, with so much shit I could hardly make sense of all of it. Boxes of clothes, books, old toys from my childhood, scattered belongings I could half-remember my mom bringing home one year or another were stacked up everywhere we looked, every one of them coated in a fine layer of dust. Most of it was clustered around the entrance, as though Mom had just been tossing stuff up here without looking for any space for it.
I didn’t know how long it had been since she had actually dared to venture up to this place, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, either. She had clearly just been using this as some unseen storage for everything she didn’t want to deal with right now, and it showed. I grimaced as I looked around, worried Nate was going to start judging us for the level of chaos we were living in.
“Sorry about the state of it,” I apologized hurriedly. “I know how bad it looks, but I promise it’s not really...”
I trailed off. What was I going to say to him? It wasn’t really as bad as it looked? I couldn’t lie to him, it was a downright mess in here, and there was no getting away from it. I didn’t even know where we could find all the wires he had come up here for in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some ancient artifacts buried here somewhere, ones civilization had lost centuries ago.
“No, it’s okay,” Nate replied, as he picked his way carefully though the piles of crap that had accumulated in this place. I knew how bad it looked. I knew what a mess it seemed.
“It’s not,” I sighed. As I looked around, I wondered how long it was going to take us to get this place looking anything close to the way it was meant to. It felt like every time I figured out a way to get this place looking better, I found another corner that would need even more work to get it up to standard.
“It’s pretty big in here,” he remarked. “Could be another bedroom.”
“If my mom hadn’t filled it with every bit of crap she’s ever accumulated,” I replied. “Look at this stuff—I think there’s things here from when I was a kid.”
“I think it’s cute,” he replied, as he picked up a small, pink stuffed unicorn and held it out to me. “This used to be yours?”
“I didn’t even know she still had that,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Shit, it feels like it’s been forever since I saw her.”
“Her?”
“Annie,” I replied, matter-of-factly. “That’s what she’s called.”
“Well, Annie could use a wash,” he remarked. “Or ten. Looks like she’s been up here a while.”
“I thought Mom got rid of a bunch of my stuff when I went to college,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I didn’t know she kept it all up here. It doesn’t make sense.”
“She’s just sentimental,” he remarked, shrugging. “Not that big of a deal. I think it’s sweet she’s hung on to your stuff. Shows she doesn’t want to forget that time in your life.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I murmured as I took Annie from him and looked into her slightly cracked glass eyes. She had been my favorite when I was a kid, and I could remember promising her I was never going to let her go.
I put her down and started picking my way across the room, trying to find the wiring we had come up here to look for. I didn’t know where to find it, but I didn’t want our voyage to this place to be in vain.
“Oh, shit, is that an old record player?” he asked, and I turned to see what he was looking at—Mom's old stereo, the one with the built-in record player, was sitting beside him, as he lifted the lid to look inside.
“Yeah, I think so,” I replied. “I don’t think it even works anymore, though. It’s been years since I saw her use it.”
“We should get it out of here,” he remarked. “I bet I could get it working again.”
“I never understood why she needed to have it,” I sighed. “I had my Walkman and then my iPod—I always offered to get her set up with something similar, but she never wanted it. She always preferred to play her records.”
“Yeah, that’s because nothing sounds as good through headphones as it does on vinyl,” he replied.
“You sound just like her!”
“I love records too,” he explained. “I have a whole collection in storage back home. And a player, kind of like this one.”
“What are you, sixty?” I teased him.
“No, but my dad always used to play me music from his record collection,” he explained, smiling fondly. “I know it’s not for everyone, but it reminds me of him. We used to have a lot of fun together, just hanging out and talking music in his garage...”
He trailed off. Whatever this was, it seemed heavy for him to talk about.
“Is your dad...are you two still close?” I asked. He smiled, a little sadly.
“He passed a while ago,” he explained as he carefully replaced the top of the record player and turned back to me. “He’s not around anymore. I still feel like we’re close, but he’s not with us.”
I frowned, wishing I hadn’t brought it up. I didn’t want him to deal with those memories. I knew how hard they could be.
“I get that,” I replied softly. “My dad—he passed when I was pretty young. There are still some pictures of him around the house, but I never felt as though I had a really good connection with him, not the way I wanted to.
“Funny how it works out like that, right?” he remarked. “You have this person inside of you, they make up half of who you are, but you can’t even talk to them. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible.”
“It doesn’t,” I echoed him, and I found a lump in my throat I hadn’t expected. I tried not to think about my dad too much, because it was too painful. I had hardly gotten a chance to know him before he passed—I had only been about six years old, and I had been so young I had never thought I would lose either of my parents. Even back then, it had taken a long time for it to sink in, that he was really gone, that this was really over. It wasn’t until I started middle school, looked around at all the girls my age who were being dropped off to school by their adoring dads, and I realized I would never have the same thing.
Plus, Mom—Mom, who had already lost so much in her life—never wanted to talk about him. It seemed too heavy for her, and I didn’t want to be the one who stirred up those memories again. She deserved rest, and I refused to be the one who took it away from her. I loved her too much to hurt her in such a way, and I was sure she wanted nothing more than to move on and stop lingering over his memory. She had the picture of him propped up next to her bed, and she saw it every time she woke up; she already spent enough time thinking about him as it was.
“But, yeah, I always loved records because of him,” he continued, straightening up and working his way back through the attic again. “I should get some sent up here. We could put them on this player, have some music while we work.”
“We can already have that,” I pointed out. He grinned.
“Yeah, but some real music,” he replied.
“Oh, hell, you’re not one of those snobs, are you?” I laughed.
“I am, I’m afraid,” he replied. “Sorry to break it to you this way.”
I felt some of the weight lift from my shoulders. Sometimes, when I thought about my dad, it got to be too much for me to handle, but he seemed to know how to cut through it. He had been through the same thing, it seemed, and he understood all too well exactly how much it hurt.
As we continued to go through the attic, I changed the subject.
“What about you mom?” I asked
“What about her?” he asked.
“Is she still around?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s still here,” he replied, and he sounded a little concerned about delving into it more than that.
“What’s she doing now?”
“Right this second?” he replied, pausing and lifting his gaze as though pondering the question. “She’s probably playing cards with her friends. And drinking her second White Russian of the day.”
“Sounds like my kind of woman,” I replied. “She does that a lot?”
“Only every day or so,” he replied with a playful eyeroll. “My dad was pretty well-off, so he left her enough to live on for the rest of her life. She took that as all the reason she needed to just spend her life doing what she wanted.”
“Does she miss him?” I wondered aloud, then realized how harsh a question like that must have sounded. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Yeah, she does,” he replied, shaking his head. “I don’t think she would ever say it out loud, though. She’s not so good at that part.”
I fell silent, not wanting to come out with something else needlessly heavy to dump on his shoulders. I was sure he was having a hard enough time as it was, dealing with the memory of his father being raised by the record player, without me giving him the third degree about it.
We tried to feel our way through the rest of the attic to find what we had been looking for, but it was no good. I didn’t even know where I was supposed to start. We pulled paper from the walls to see if there was anything of use underneath it, but we couldn’t find a thing. Eventually, I sighed and tossed my hands in the air.
“I don’t think we’re going to get lucky,” I admitted to him finally. I didn’t want to let him down, but there didn’t seem to be a way through this mess.
“Yeah, we need to get a professional up here,” he agreed. “And maybe someone to have a look at everything up here. There’s some really interesting stuff, it could be worth something.”
“If Mom’ll ever agree to part with it,” I replied, doubtfully. She had kept all of this stuff for a reason, and she’d have a problem with letting any of it go.
“Well, maybe we can start with the record player,” he remarked. “Something easy. We can do it up for her, get it downstairs—I can play some of my records on it, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
In my mind’s eye, I could see the two of us dancing in the living room to some slow jam. I had no idea what he was going to bring, but I hoped it was something at least slightly romantic.
“It’s mostly heavy metal stuff, my dad’s old tunes,” he explained, and the image blinked out of my head at once. Okay, yeah. Maybe I was starting to get a little ahead of myself.
Or maybe not. He brushed past me as he moved to the other side of the attic, his hands briefly on my waist as he pushed by me, and I shivered against him. Did he feel that? I hoped not. I could feel the spot where he had put his hands as though his touch was burned into me, and I did my best to ignore how delicious it felt.
And how much I wanted to feel it again.
