Returning to the worktable, he placed it on top.
“Let me,” I said, reaching for the bag and hoping it wasn’t crawling with those large flying cockroaches they called palmetto bugs in South Carolina. As a child I’d loved surprises and discovering new things. Maybe that part of me hadn’t completely disappeared.
The old paper felt soft in my hands as I unfurled the top. Gibbes flipped on his flashlight again as I pulled apart the edges and gently leaned forward. Staring up at us were about forty or so doll miniatures of people dressed in 1950s-era clothing. Some were strapped in plane seats; others were missing limbs or had grotesque wounds on their heads or bodies; most had grass or dirt clinging to their hair, skin, and clothes. What looked like two wings, also made in a mosaic fashion with two separate materials, were intermingled with the figures, the detritus of a catastrophe I couldn’t comprehend.
Our eyes met, and I wondered whether the same lost and scared expression I saw in his eyes was reflected in my own. “What is all this?” I asked. I knew he didn’t have the answer, but saying it out loud made it somehow more real and less dreamlike. Because I could handle reality no matter how brutal. I had a harder time with dreams.
“I have no idea,” Gibbes said softly, not taking his eyes from mine. I was reminded again of how during a fire it was what you couldn’t see that killed you and not the fire. It seemed to me that all of this was the fire in the attic we’d only sensed, the poison leaking out undetected for years.
I looked out one of the dormer windows and saw the wind chime dangling from a long metal bar. The outside was hot and heavy, the sea glass still. But I could imagine it clinking together, its music like words trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t understand.
chapter 11
EDITH
APRIL 1961
Edith sat in the stifling attic and took a long drag from her cigarette before stabbing it out in the small porcelain dish with the crimson climbing vines and the large “H” painted in the middle. Calhoun wouldn’t have allowed her to smoke, much less use his precious heirloom china as an ashtray, but he wasn’t there to stop her. He’d allowed her to pack his cigarette case, and to light his cigarettes, taking one puff to get it going, but she was never allowed to have her own.
She’d started smoking the day after he’d died, the day the tremors started each time she heard a plane rumble in the sky. Each time she thought of the suitcase and the note still under her refrigerator.
While all of her friends were buying the latest in home appliances—Betsy had a new pink Frigidaire with a matching stove—Edith kept her refrigerator, its white door damaged where C.J. had banged his toys against it or run his tricycle into it with an intensity Edith hadn’t expected from a small child. She’d attributed it to the fact that he was a boy, and she, having been raised an only child with a gentle, brooding father, had no experience with little boys or children in general. Still, when she’d heard him thumping his head against his crib rails, sometimes for as long as an hour, she’d wondered. Betsy and even her doctor told her that many children did this as a soothing mechanism, finding comfort in the steady rhythm the way other children sucked their thumbs or wore a hole in a favorite blanket with constant scratching.
And it usually worked, and he’d settle down into a long sleep. But sometimes, usually after he’d heard the sound of a plane or thunder in the sky or a siren in the distance, he’d become agitated, and the head thumping would erupt into a complete and all-out tantrum.
His doctor told her that when he threw his tantrums she should leave him in a safe place and let him do it and not, under any circumstances, pick him up and coddle him, in order to avoid rewarding bad behavior. But she loved her son, and remembered that terrible night they had shared. Sometimes, when his screaming and thumping became too much for her to stand, she’d go into his room and pick him up, worried that he was remembering that night, too, and she’d cup the back of his head, his hair sticky and damp with sweat and tears, and allow him to bang his head against her. She would be left with a small bruise, a fist-size smear of blue and green right under her collarbone, but Edith hardly noticed. It wasn’t because she was overly familiar with bruises; it was more that she’d had a say in it, and therefore it was all right.