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“SHEESH, I DIDN’T REALIZE how much crap Mom had stashed up here,” Ellie muttered, as she flattened herself to the wall to make her way around one of the desks that had been thrown haphazardly up in the attic.
And she was right—there was a whole lifetime’s worth of stuff in this place, hidden away from the rest of the world. I wondered what the story was behind all of this, If there was some reason Celeste had decided to hide most of this stuff up there or if I was missing something. A whole history hiding away in the attic, where nobody could see it unless they knew where to look.
“I’m glad we could get up here,” I replied, picking up a box and moving it out of the way so I could squeeze through. “I bet there’s a lot we could use to fill out the rest of the house. Lots of interesting stuff, you know?”
“Yeah, maybe,” she agreed, but she sounded doubtful. She caught her foot on something, and it jingled loudly. “Oh, crap!”
She reached down to see what she had disturbed, and found a box of Christmas decorations there waiting for her. She laughed as she pulled out a giant, shiny star, that looked as though it had been draped in tin foil to create a special glow.
“Damn, I didn’t even know she still had any of these,” she remarked, shaking her head. “I haven’t seen them in years.”
“Is she big on Christmas?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Oh, yeah, she’s always been huge on it,” she replied. “Decking the whole place out on December first. I always had to talk her down from buying those ridiculous set-ups, you know, with the light-up reindeer for the yard and everything.”
“My mom was the same way,” I replied. “She had the entire house dripping with Christmas lights as soon as she got the chance. It’s her favorite time of year. She always gets me to come home for Christmas, no matter what I’m doing with my life.”
“Yeah, I haven’t been home for Christmas in a while,” she remarked, and, for a moment, I was sure I could hear a little wistfulness in her voice. “It’s just...never worked out.”
She ran her finger over the top of the box she had been looking through, and frowned when she came away with dust.
“Shit, it looks like she hasn’t used this in forever,” she remarked, shaking her head. “I thought she loved Christmas. Why wouldn’t she be putting the decorations up?”
“Maybe she doesn’t feel the need to, now you’re not at home anymore,” I replied, without thinking. I hadn’t meant it to come across the way it had, but her face dropped at once. She clearly hadn’t even considered it a possibility.
“I always offered to fly her out for Christmas,” she replied, chewing on her lip thoughtfully. “She always said no—I thought she just wanted to spend Christmas at home, but maybe...”
She trailed off. She didn’t have to add anything else, I could see what was on her mind right now. She was wondering if her mother had just been hoping for her to come back for those holiday seasons, not just to be flown out to spend it with her daughter.
“Maybe she got a new set,” she remarked quickly, clearly not comfortable with the possibility of what it could mean. “And she didn’t want to use the old ones.”
“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. I didn’t want to contradict her. This had thrown her for a loop. She put the star back in the box and went back to looking through some of the ones surrounding it.
I followed her lead, seeing if there was anything else that might have come in handy while worked on the house. Anything we could find here was something I didn’t have to worry about spending Celeste’s money to get in, and I wanted to save her cash anywhere I could.
Eventually, a box caught my eye. It was marked “the girls.” It looked as though it had been up here for a while, the tape starting to fray around the edges. I leaned down to open it up, and, inside, found a stack of framed pictures, thick with dust. I lifted one out and looked down at it.
It was a picture of Celeste, a man I assumed was her husband, and a little girl who had Ellie’s freckles. But it wasn’t just them—no, there was another girl there, even smaller than Ellie, perched on her father’s knee. She had a small gap between her front teeth and freckles like Ellie, with Celeste’s strong nose to match. Huh. That was odd. I hadn’t seen this girl before. Maybe she was a cousin, something like that? The family resemblance was too strong for her to just be a friend.
Or maybe another sister. I squinted down at her, and pulled out another picture from the box, this one with what looked like a younger Ellie and the other girl playing on the floor in what I recognized to be the living room downstairs. Yeah, it had to be her sister. But I’d heard nothing of a sister in all the time I had been around both Celeste and Ellie. And I hadn’t seen any pictures of her downstairs, or anything that even hinted at her being a part of the family.
“What have you got there?” Ellie called to me cheerfully, and I held up the photo.
“Some pictures of you as a kid, I think,” I replied, and she carefully made her way through the debris around her and towards me. As soon as she saw the photo I was holding, her gaze seemed to harden slightly.
“You should put that back,” she told me.
“Why? I think you look cute in it,” I replied playfully. “How old were you here? Four or five?”
“Something like that,” she replied. “Can you put it back?”
I paused and stared at her for a moment. What was she acting so uptight about? It wasn’t as though I was mocking her. Was she just feeling weird about seeing pictures of herself as a kid? Maybe too much of a reminder of everything she had missed since she had been here?
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and she took the picture and placed it back in the box, closing it up behind her.
“Nothing,” she muttered, but her tone had completely changed. She had been interested to find out everything that had been in here before, and now, she was acting like she had just seen some old horror she never wanted to think about.
“These pictures would look good on the stairs, don’t you think?” I remarked. “Your mom has a lot of them up there, these are—”
“I think it’s better those pictures stay right where they are,” she replied, her teeth gritted. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t want to talk to me. She didn’t even want to consider what I was proposing, and I had no idea what had her so freaked about it.
But I figured it wasn’t worth the effort to keep pushing if she was so upset, so I followed her lead and stepped away from the box. But my curiosity was piqued. What was it about those pictures that had her so unsettled, so annoyed?
She looked down at her watch, and, as soon as she saw the time, she frowned.
“I have to get downstairs for a work call,” she told me, and she headed to the gap where we had come into the attic and climbed down. I could tell she was seriously struggling to keep it together, and it unsettled me. What was wrong? Why was she acting like I had just dragged something unthinkable up from her past? I had just been trying to do what I thought was right, help her get these photos out.
As soon as she was gone, I pulled out a couple more. They were sweet pictures, the two little girls beaming up from inside the frame, their faces lit up with excitement and joy at being with their family. Was there really something so wrong with them?
She would feel differently, I was sure, when she saw them up. Whatever doubts she had, I was sure they would just fall away as soon as she saw how good they looked in her mom’s living room. It was clear they were family, after all—and family should never be forgotten.
