by Hugh Howey
And there it was. Her grandma was combining fact, fiction, and history. She may have recognized and greeted her granddaughter by the correct name, but she was also somewhere in her own past, and apparently reliving some political thriller at the same time.
Just then Uncle Allen popped his head out of the side door of the garage, saving Rachel from an uncomfortable situation. “Supper is ready. Glad to see you, Rachel.”
After allowing herself another sideways glance at her grandmother, Rachel grabbed the handle of her suitcase and headed toward the garage. As she passed by Uncle Allen, she made eye contact with him for a brief moment. And in that split second, she saw something… strange. Allen had always been so jovial and vibrant. Even in the face of his mother’s illnesses and maladies, he’d always kept up appearances. He’d always put on a brave face.
But this time… his eyes told a different story.
Uncle Allen was afraid.
* * *
After a late meal and then getting Grandma Naomi settled into her chair to watch The Tonight Show (the “Johnny Carson show,” Naomi insisted), Rachel and Uncle Allen reconnected over a small makeshift brush fire near the driveway. The bright colors of Grandma Naomi’s flowers were subdued and dim under the curtain of darkness, and the night sky was like oil covering the landscape.
A few stories from her uncle brought laughs from Rachel, but eventually the stories wore out and the laughter did as well. Rachel sat in silence for a few moments, gazing up at the stars, light years away.
“I miss her,” she said.
Silence followed from the other side of the fire. Finally, after a few moments, Uncle Allen replied.
“Yeah. I know, kid. I miss her, too. Growing up, it seemed at times like she was the only one who really got me,” he said. “Like Mom and Dad loved me, but kept their distance a little. Your mom was the best sister I could’ve asked for. Your other aunts were just too old by the time I came around.”
Rachel felt a slight chill in the air, but being with Uncle Allen was warming her soul. She nodded toward the starry expanse. “You think she’s looking down on us? That there’s someone out there that cares what happens down here?”
Allen cocked his head and took in the Milky Way and the countless stars that shone down. “Up there? I don’t know. I do know I’ll never forget her. In that way, maybe your mother will keep on living, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
With nothing else to be said, Rachel stood, walked around the fire, sat down next to Uncle Allen, and put her head on his shoulder, both of them remembering her mother.
* * *
The next morning, Rachel woke to light streaming in the windows of her mother’s childhood room. The house had been built long before mini-blinds had been invented, and the bedrooms had been vacated before window shades would become the norm in homes across the country. The sun illuminated the entire room, chasing away any darkness still lingering.
Unable to sleep any longer, Rachel slid out of bed and dragged herself down the stairs, only to find Grandma Naomi already up and baking. The scent of sugar and cinnamon filled the small kitchen. Rachel pulled a chair out from the table and sat, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“Good morning, Melissa!” Naomi said, turning around. Her face showed a brief moment of confusion. Rachel waited a moment before responding, to see if Grandma would realize her mistake. She didn’t.
“Good morning, Grandma. I’m Rachel. Melissa is my mom, but she couldn’t be here today,” Rachel said, a small tear beginning a slow slide down her cheek. One of the worst parts in coming to her grandmother’s house was reliving the painful memories of Mom. It’d been three years, but Rachel wondered nearly every day what would have happened if her mom had only gotten that mammogram earlier. What if she had gotten to the doctor even just a few months earlier? Would she still be here?
But her mother was gone, and now Rachel felt compelled to help take care of Grandma Naomi, to take her mom’s spot in the family rotation.
“Of course you are. I said Rachel, didn’t I?” Naomi didn’t wait for an answer, probably because she already knew her mistake. “What do you say we get up in that attic after the rolls come out of the oven? I haven’t been up there in probably ten years.”
Just then the timer went off, and Rachel hopped up, grabbed an oven mitt, and took the steaming sweet rolls from the oven. As she set them on the counter to cool, she glanced out the window above the kitchen sink to see if Uncle Allen’s truck was there. Gone. Rachel was alone with her grandmother. Well, no time like the present to clear out years of dust and memories from a hundred-year-old house.
“Yeah, Grandma. Sounds good. First though, let’s eat.”
* * *
The attic was foreboding on many levels, and the neglect was tangible. Spider webs and dust covered everything. Boxes were stacked to the joists along the walls, and dated Christmas decorations were scattered haphazardly around.
As Rachel began to inspect the boxes, she noticed many were damp. The leaky roof had affected Grandma’s attic after all. Books that had been boxed up, perhaps in the hopes of storing them on a bookshelf again at some point, were now ruined, their pages warped and wilted by the constant moisture coming in from above.
“Grandma, these books are no good,” Rachel called out across the large attic space. She’d situated the elderly matriarch in a folding chair as soon as they’d come up to the attic.
“What do you mean, dear? Those books were perfectly fine when I boxed them up last week.”
Not again.
Rachel grabbed a book and made her way back to her grandmother, maneuvering carefully around a stack of cardboard cutouts that appeared to be from Naomi’s days as a Sunday School teacher at the local Methodist Church.
“Grandma, look at this book,” Rachel said, handing her a paperback copy of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.
“Oh, yes, this was your grandfather’s favorite. All the suspense and the beings from another world. Too much for my taste,” Naomi said. “But it’s all wet. What did you do to it?”
Rachel sighed. Perhaps she would have to take on this task without Grandma’s consent. It wasn’t like she was going to remember what Rachel did or didn’t do anyway. She took the book back.
“The attic is too moist for books,” Rachel said. “They’re all this way, Grandma.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t need to keep damaged books. You just take care of them, Rachel. I’ll stay here and look through these boxes.” In front of Naomi’s folding chair were a couple of small boxes.
“What’s in there?”
“Oh, just a few of the kids’ favorite toys. As they outgrew them, I’d put them away up here. I always meant to give them back to them, but they’ve all gone now. Gone or moved away,” Naomi said.
“Not all of them, Grandma,” Rachel reminded her. “Uncle Allen still lives down the road. Remember? He comes by every day to check up on you.”
Naomi’s eyes clouded for a nanosecond and then cleared. “Oh, yes. You’re right, honey.”
Peering into the box on Naomi’s lap, Rachel saw many familiar shapes: a toy gun, a teddy bear, a baby doll. Each had special meaning for her mother, her uncle, or one of her aunts. She wondered which items belonged to her own mother when she was growing up in this very house—what special toy her mom had loved and cherished until it was a forgotten object, a mere memory of carefree days.
Then something caught her eye. Reaching down, Rachel plucked a key from the box. It didn’t appear old—in fact, it still shined as if it were brand-new. Impossible—Grandma Naomi herself had said she hadn’t been in the attic in years. But Grandma isn’t exactly a reliable witness. Rachel had to admit that although Grandma Naomi believed herself to be truthful, her mind could jump not only between decades but between fact and fiction.
“What’s this?”
“That’s Allen’s toy key. I remember he held on to that key until he turned seven years old. Each and every day, you�
�d walk into a room and find him holding and playing with that thing. Never really knew where it came from—one day he was just holding it. I suppose today I might’ve gotten turned into the Department of Child and Family Services for letting him play with keys,” Naomi said, with a smirk on her face.
“Maybe,” Rachel said, twirling the key before her eyes. The small key wasn’t aluminum or silver or any metal she recognized; it had an iridescent sheen to it, appearing slightly different from every angle. She’d never seen anything like it.
Grandma Naomi made a motion to put the box down, so Rachel volunteered to find a place for it, and to organize its contents and find homes for the various toys. She absentmindedly stuck the key in her pocket as she moved the box over to the other side of the attic.
“You girls up here?” Uncle Allen called up from the base of the stairs.
“Come on up,” Naomi answered.
“Nah. I don’t need to see any of that old stuff. Don’t want to get stuck doing your job anyway. Just wanted to swing by and check on you two.”
“We’re doing okay,” Rachel answered. She toyed with the key in her pocket, but for some reason resisted the urge to show it to Allen.
“All right, then. I gotta get back to it. I’ll come by later for dinner,” Allen said, his voice trailing off as he headed back down the stairs and out of the house.
“I do hope that boy is careful. I’d hate for him to run into our visitors from yesterday. They said they’d be back, you know,” Grandma Naomi said. Rachel peered over the boxes to find Grandma going through a basket full of Good Housekeeping magazines from the mid-eighties.
Rachel worked by herself for the next few minutes before peeking back to check on her grandmother’s progress. Grandma’s head was down, a magazine drooping on her lap. Asleep. At least, Rachel hoped she was asleep. She crept over and double-checked that Grandma was still breathing, then headed back to her work—pitching junk and saving memories.
Another box of books: trash.
A box of greeting cards: mostly trash. Rachel salvaged a few she knew Grandma Naomi would want and tossed the rest into the wastebasket.
Digging out a box labeled “Dates,” Rachel found a complete set of wall calendars from the 1970s. She just shook her head and moved on to a box she’d found virtually hidden, stuffed in the back corner. This box wasn’t cardboard like the others, but was instead a wooden crate made up of small slats. Hardly watertight, so Rachel was tempted to chuck the entire mess before she even perused it, but something caught her eye.
Inside the box was a stack of small lined pieces of notebook paper that appeared to have been ripped out of a journal or diary. The top page was labeled Oct. 19, 1959.
Rachel probably wouldn’t have given it another thought except for one thing: it was the day Uncle Allen was born.
Bending down and folding herself into a seated position, Rachel carefully extracted the loose sheets of paper, noting that some had been damaged by the moisture. The pages were brittle where they weren’t damp. Peeling them apart, Rachel set them down on the wooden floorboards.
The pages ran to the end of the year—definitely pages from a diary—but unfortunately, they were all blank except for the first one. And even that page was a mess of seemingly random words interrupted by water stains. Rachel took her cell phone out of her pocket, and selected the flashlight app. Immediately the attic lit up, casting shadows all around. Rachel pointed the light at the page below.
Dec. 19, 1959
The baby (unintelligible) 8 lbs., 5 oz. (unintelligible) healthy. (unintelligible) concerned.
Visitors (unintelligible) hospital. Never (unintelligible). I refused (unintelligible). Naomi wasn’t so (unintelligible). Just concerned about (unintelligible). They will be (unintelligible) threats, but (unintelligible) ready.
Rachel was confused. It definitely wasn’t Grandma Naomi’s handwriting; it had a more masculine tilt to it, and Rachel had seen her grandmother’s handwriting dozens of times on birthday and Christmas cards over the years. It must be her grandfather’s journal.
She looked at the rest of the pages, confirming they were all blank. And apart from the occasional smudge, they were. There was only that one page that had been used. Given the date and the baby’s measurements, it was clearly about her uncle’s birth. But what was this about threats?
Should she go to Uncle Allen and ask him? Would Grandma Naomi remember the events of fifty years ago?
Rachel rifled through the rest of the box but found no other papers or important documents. So she snuck down the attic stairs and put the diary pages in the dresser drawer in her bedroom. She’d think about it more later, perhaps that night as she went to bed.
As Rachel re-entered the attic, Grandma Naomi was waking back up.
“Oh, hello,” Naomi said, looking around her, confused by her surroundings. “Are you here to take me to the hospital?”
“No, Grandma,” Rachel said. “Let’s head back downstairs. I imagine you could use a trip to the powder room.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right,” Naomi said. “I feel like I’ve been up here for hours, but that’s impossible. I was just watching M*A*S*H with Henry. Speaking of… I wonder where Henry is.”
Rachel didn’t want to fight that battle right now, so she just went along with it. “I think he may have gone out with Allen to work in the fields.”
“Oh, yes. What a good boy, that Allen. Always staying home to help take care of me. I do hope we get him back one of these days.”
* * *
After a nap, Grandma Naomi was in a better state of mind. A late-afternoon rain shower forced Allen to call it a day early, and so the three relatives found themselves eating pork chops around the table just before the prime time TV schedule got going.
“How was your day?” Naomi asked Allen.
“Fine. Had a little trouble with the sprayer out in the field past Wither’s Corner, but I got it sorted out,” Allen said between bites.
Rachel sat at the table, finding herself staring at her food because she couldn’t bring herself to look Uncle Allen in the eye. Finally, she worked up the courage to ask an apparently innocuous question.
“Uncle Allen, what was life like when you were young? I mean… I don’t have my mom to ask about her childhood anymore, so I guess you’re the next best thing.”
Her mind was stuck on the pages of the diary she’d found from earlier in the afternoon. What was so special about Uncle Allen’s birth? Why did Grandpa Henry—or whoever—write about it and then tear those pages out of his diary? Where was the rest of the diary, from before that day? She’d scoured the attic the rest of the afternoon after helping Grandma Naomi into bed, but to no avail.
“Life? Like here on the farm?” Allen asked. “Boy, I don’t know. Pretty standard, I imagine. Dad always had work for us to do. Your mom always tried to get out of working outside, though. She was usually working with Mom here in the kitchen.”
“Oh, yes,” Grandma Naomi piped up. “Your mother was the best cook to ever work in this kitchen. I’d like to say I taught her everything she knew, but that just wouldn’t be true. She came up with some wonderful recipes I’d never dreamt of.”
It was great to hear her grandma talk about her mother—and better still to hear her talk in a coherent manner—but Rachel’s mind was racing about her Uncle Allen. She tried to shift the focus back to him.
“What did you do for births back when you had children, Grandma?” Rachel asked. “You don’t hear much about women having babies at home these days, but you had all of your kids at home, right?”
“I did. Even my last, my boy Allen right here,” she said, reaching over to pat Allen on the arm. “It wasn’t easy, but there’s nothing like it. I couldn’t imagine going to a strange hospital room when you have everything you know and love at your own home. Wouldn’t you rather have a baby in a familiar place than some cold, sterile room?”
Rachel knew exactly where she would like to have kids one day, and
it wasn’t at home, but she wasn’t about to tell Grandma Naomi that. She simply nodded, shoving a forkful of pork into her mouth.
“Did you have any problems then?”
“Me? No, can’t say I did. All my kids were healthy,” Naomi said, but then furrowed her brow. “Well, there were a few problems with Allen. But I was so exhausted after I had him that by the time I felt better, he was completely better as well.”
“Really?” Allen said, stopping his meal mid-bite. “I never knew that. What was wrong?”
“Oh, wow. It’s hard for me to remember. Henry was always better with those things. We were actually going to name you Henry, Jr., but we changed our minds after you came along. What was wrong? Something about your lungs. Doctors didn’t share as much back then. They did have to show me you were breathing when you were first born,” Naomi said. “I thought you were dead at first. A stillbirth.”
While Naomi worked on cutting her pork chop, Rachel and Allen looked at each other. Neither one had heard any of this before.
“Mom, you never told me any of that before,” Uncle Allen said.
“Family’s got to have some secrets,” Grandma Naomi said curtly, signaling to both her son and granddaughter that she was done with this particular line of questioning.
The rest of the meal was spent talking about the weather forecast and how the crops were doing. But by the time Grandma Naomi was serving up a slice of rhubarb pie for dessert, any hint of her earlier clarity and lucidity had vanished.
“Rachel, my dear, you were careful today in the attic, weren’t you?”
“Of course I was, Grandma. You saw what I threw out and what I didn’t,” Rachel answered. She worried for a moment Naomi knew about the diary pages she had squirreled away in her mom’s childhood bedroom. “Did I do something wrong?”