PART VI
THE ATTIC
SANDRA
Martin loved the attic. Don’t ask me why. Until he insisted on exploring the house bottom to top, I’d probably been up there twice in the whole time I lived in Coral River: once, to unload the dump of stuff my dad saddled me with after he died; and once to check for a dead animal after the whole house went rank with a bad smell. (It was a raccoon and I found it after two days of searching, in the old laundry chute; it had crawled halfway up the wall before getting stuck. The plumber had to draw it out with one of those steel wires they use for breaking up matted hair in the drain.)
If you’d asked me—if you asked me, still—I would have said attics are like the spleen of a house. Ignored, forgotten, useless.
But six months after Martin and I first shared that watermelon, we went exploring. It had been snowing for days—that was a bad winter. Even in the ten seconds he stood inside the door, stamping ice from his boots and shaking it from his beard, a half inch of snow gathered on the kitchen floor and afterward melted all over the linoleum. He hadn’t been inside twenty minutes when they announced on TV that the road back to town was closed.
“I guess I’ll have to spend the night,” he said, putting his arms around me. Cheeky bastard. Like there was any doubt.
We were deep into a bottle of cognac (Martell, 1950) when he said it: “I want to see where you live, Sandy.”
“You’ve been here plenty of times,” I said. “Besides, I never get to see where you live.”
He ignored that. “I’ve seen the kitchen. I’ve seen the den. I’ve seen your bedroom.” He leaned forward and put his hands over mine—warm hands, but raw from the weather and the cold and rough from long-ago summers spent hauling lobsters at a wharf in Maine, calluses that had never gone away. Funny how the past gets down into the skin.
It was so cold in the attic we could see our breath hanging like miniature ghosts. Martin went back downstairs for a second bottle of cognac and a blanket, and we sat together on the hardwood floor, between the boxes, inhaling the smell of wood and damp and cold.
“Close your eyes,” Martin said. “Listen.”
“To what?” I said. There was nothing: no sound at all. Even the house was still, wrapped in its drifts like a fat old baby in a blanket.
“The snow,” he said.
I opened my eyes. “You can’t hear snow.”
“You can,” he said. He still had his eyes closed. He looked like a different person when he wasn’t smiling. Older. Tired. A stranger. “Shhh.”
I closed my eyes again, just to humor him.
But the weird thing is after a minute or two, I thought I could hear it. Not sound, but the opposite of sound. It was the slow accumulation of silence, the sticky, heavy drift of nothing, like watching shadows grow and turn to dark, or like this time I was a kid and saw a solar eclipse, watched a black disk float over the sun and saw all the light get swallowed up in an instant. Now I was hearing all the sounds of the world get swallowed up.
When I opened my eyes, Martin was smiling again. “The sound of snow,” he said.
After that, it became like our thing. Even when he wasn’t around, I used to go up there sometimes, because it reminded me of him. I even started to get used to the smell, like an old person’s laundry basket, and the spiders spinning silently in their corners. Cissy would have liked it in the attic.
Alice told me later she used to hang around in the attic, too. She had a whole rig up there, a desk and everything. First she was pretending to write because it gave her an excuse to keep away from her husband, and he was too lazy and usually too drunk, so she says, to climb the stairs. But then, after a while, she started really writing, and she churned out The Raven Heliotrope, three hundred pages in two years.
It was peaceful up there.
Then, a week before the big wham-o blam-o, brains on the wall, the roof collapsed. It had been another frigid turd of a winter, and for months the snow, fine as sifted flour, had been piling up quietly, so I hardly noticed.
I wasn’t home. I’d gone looking for Martin. It had been a rough winter on me. We’d been at it, me and Martin; I got canned from my job for no good reason; and on top of everything else, I got the news from my doctor: cancer. A knot on my lung, tight as a web, lit up like a Christmas tree on the scan.
I needed to tell Martin. I called him at home, which was forbidden, and I’ll never forget what it felt like when she picked up the phone: like standing out in the cold and seeing warm lights off in the distance and knowing you’d never make it.
“Hello?” she said, half laughing; and I heard his voice, too, in the background, like he’d just finished telling a joke. There were other voices too, overlapping, and a song playing in the background. Something with a violin.
I knew where he lived. He was careful but not careful enough, and it was no big secret. He knew I wouldn’t show up there unannounced, but that’s just what I did. I drove all the way to Buffalo through the funnel of snow and parked right in front of his house, which was bigger than I’d imagined and prettier, like a big cupcake covered in white icing. I could see him moving in the living room, passing out drinks to his guests. And I could see her, too: blond and small as an insect, touching his face, his arm; rearranging the chairs, opening the window to let out the smoke; and every time she moved it was like she was saying, I belong here. I belong here.
At the last second I lost my nerve so I just sat there. I had a bottle of Smirnoff to keep me warm, and I sat until it was finished and the guests had all gone home, spilling out into the darkness and cold, still laughing, waving scarves like people in old movies leaving on a ship. Martin and his wife stood waving at the door, transformed by the warm light behind them into a single shape.