by Anthology
“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 1970’s. 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, y
ou 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?”
“You? Oh, no, you were fine. I was just concerned about the men up in the attic with us today. You know who they are—they look like us, but they aren’t us.”
…And Grandma Naomi is gone again.
“Uh, Grandma? I don’t remember seeing any men in the attic today.”
“Of course you don’t. They’re clever. They wouldn’t want you to see them. They’re very good at hiding, after all. They’re best, though, when they hide in plain sight.”
“Mom,” Allen said, “You’re scaring Rachel. There weren’t any men in the attic. I stopped by, too. I would have seen them if they were really there.”
Rachel took a bite of her pie, but suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore. Between the diary pages, the mysterious key, and her grandma’s crazy talk, it was a bit much for her. “Maybe you’re thinking of a different day, Grandma,” Rachel offered. “I don’t remember seeing them, but I guess that doesn’t mean they weren’t here. I did step out from the attic for a few moments.”
“Yes, dear, that must be it,” Naomi said, again closing the door on the topic.
Somehow, though, Rachel suspected the conversation was far from over.
***
Sleep was elusive. Just as the lack of blinds on her mother’s window allowed sunlight to stream in unfettered in the morning, it also allowed in the bold moonlight at night. And if it wasn’t a full moon, it was close. As Rachel lay in bed, she thought that she should appreciate this chance to really view the night sky; back home in Indianapolis, the light pollution virtually hid the stars from view. But right now, she really just wanted to sleep.
After several minutes of wrestling with the brightness, Rachel finally went to the closet and found a quilt to drape over the window. But as soon as the quilt went over the window’s opening, Rachel realized that not all the light in the room had been due to the moon. On the corner of the dresser, where Rachel had emptied her pockets from earlier in the day, the key from the attic was shining like a beacon in the darkness.
“What the…?” Rachel asked the empty room around her. But there were no answers here. All she had was the strange key and the diary pages.
Acting on a sudden impulse, Rachel opened the dresser and withdrew the aged papers. She didn’t know why she thought there might be something new, but she shuffled through the pages again, examining them in the light cast by the key. And when she lined up the pages on her bed, her hunch was proven correct: what had appeared to be mere smudges on the blank pages came together to spell out a phrase. Perhaps it had been harder to see before because the pages weren’t fully dried; or perhaps the pages only showed their secret in the eerie glow of the key. Either way, the hidden message created a new mystery:
“I’ll bury it in the second hole.”
The second hole? What did that mean? Rachel sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to figure it out, but her mind couldn’t put the puzzle together. Even if she had all the pieces, which she was sure she didn’t, Rachel acknowledged to herself that there might not even be much to the mystery before her.
And was this really something Rachel should be digging into? Didn’t Grandma Naomi say every family had their secrets? Was this a secret that should stay hidden?
Before she knew what she was doing, Rachel had changed back into her T-shirt and jeans from earlier in the day and was slipping on a pair of tennis shoes. The diary pages went into her back pocket, along with her cell phone, but she kept the key in her hand to light her way.
The house was dark and Rachel was afraid the light from the key would wake her grandmother, but when she passed her grandmother’s bedroom on the first floor, the door was closed. She kept her hand over the key to dampen the light. For whatever reason, Rachel felt herself being led out of the house and into the back yard.
When she turned left out of the garage door, she found herself face to face with Uncle Allen.
***
“What—what are you doing out here?” Rachel asked.
“I might ask you the same thing young lady,” Allen said. “But since you asked, I ran out of gas on my way home. I knew there was a spare can in the barn here, so I was heading over that way when I saw a light coming from your mom’s—I mean, your bedroom.”
“So? Girl can read a book if she wants, right?”
“Is that what you’re doing out here? Reading?”
Rachel put her head down. “No.”
“All right. Let’s hear it. I saw how you were looking at me at supper. Rather, how you were avoiding me. What’s up? Did you find something in the attic? My fifth-grade report card? Worse yet, my fifth-grade school picture?” Allen chuckled.
Rachel opened her hand to reveal the key. “I found this.”
“Whoa.”
“Grandma said it was yours. She said you played with it all the time when you were a kid.”
Rachel saw the look in Allen’s eyes go from confusion to recognition. “Yeah. I mean, it’s been almost fifty years, but I do remember this. I didn’t play with toy guns and action figures when I was a kid. I played with this key. But it’s one of those memories that comes and goes—in fact, for a long time, I thought I might have imagined this. I don’t remember it ever glowing, though.”
“Well, that wasn’t all. I also found some diary pages written by Grandpa,” Rachel said, pulling the pages out of her pocket. She handed them over and used the key to help Allen read the pages for himself.
“Okay, but this doesn’t tell me why you’re outside at midnight,” Allen said.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. She was beginning to wonder about that herself. “Maybe I let my mind get carried away with everything, but with the key and the diary pages, along with everything Grandma Naomi is saying…”
“Rachel. You know she’s lost it, right?”
“Well…”
“No, Rachel. She’s been my mother longer than she’s been your grandmother. I’ve seen her descent, and it’s a sad thing to see, but she isn’t anything like she was when I was a little boy,” Allen said, scratching his beard. “And the things she says…You know, you get a moment like what we had at supper tonight where she remembers who we are and remembers what really happened in her life. But then something happens. I wish I knew what it was, but she changes. Her memories become fiction. It isn’t even that she goes back to her youth—her mind just goes someplace else and the words that come out of her mouth…” He shrugged. “You just can’t trust anything she says.”
“Even what she said about you being stillborn?”
“Even that. I’ve never heard that before. Don’t you think I would have heard that some time in the last fifty-three years?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“But these diary pages are interesting. My dad always refused to talk to me about when I was born. Maybe there are some answers in the rest of his diary. If it even exists,” he said, thumbing through the pages again.
“Do you have any idea what the secret message means?” Rachel prompted, showing Allen the message hidden in the smudges.
Allen considered. “Hmm…in the second hole.”
“Yeah, I don’t have any idea what it means, either,” Rachel confessed, her shoulders slumping.
Allen looked up
with a wry grin. “I didn’t say I don’t know what it means. I actually think I may know exactly what it means.”
Rachel stopped. “You do?”
“Yeah. At least, I hope it means what I think it means. If it doesn’t, it could be pretty unpleasant.”
“What do you mean?”
Allen looked around, then turned toward the woods behind the house. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”
***
As they plunged into the wooded area, Rachel was extremely grateful for the glowing key. The strange object illuminated the entire area under the canopy, showing Rachel and her uncle where they could place their steps in the blackness of night. Even with a nearly full moon, navigating in the woods would have been tricky without some sort of flashlight.
“Where are we going?” Rachel asked. For some reason she felt compelled to keep her voice at a whisper.
“The only place I know of with two holes,” Uncle Allen called back, apparently not concerned about making noise.
Rachel kept her mouth shut as she followed Allen the rest of the way. The two of them had to dodge low-hanging tree limbs and weave in and out of thick brush and undergrowth. Eventually they stood before a small wooden building, its boards rotting. It had been built for a purpose, and when it had outlived its usefulness, it was forgotten.
“The outhouse.”
Rachel was dumbfounded. “Seriously?”
Allen chuckled as he lifted a few boards that had fallen across the long-forgotten door. “I guess you don’t remember much about your Grandpa Henry, but he always had a bit of a sense of humor. And I imagine he never expected anyone would come looking for anything in the ol’ outhouse, so this may have been the best place to put something he wanted to keep hidden.”
Rachel caught a glimpse of Allen’s face under the moonlight. He was grinning, as if he hadn’t had this much fun in years.
“Okay. I guess. But what about this ‘second hole’?”
“I guess you never used the outhouse, did you?” Allen asked, not waiting for an answer. “Dad built this well before I was even a glimmer in his eye. And for whatever reason, he built it with two toilets. We used to call an outhouse like this a ‘two-holer.’”