My mother goes to garden club on Tuesday afternoons from two until five, and she has never once come home early, because the club serves lemon cake at four and my mother would cross a highway for lemon cake.
I let myself in at two-fifteen with the key under the frog.
The house on Larkspur Road is the house I grew up in. It smells of furniture polish and the lavender bags she keeps in every drawer, and the hall clock ticks a little too loud, as though it has something to prove. I stood in the hall for a minute listening to it. I felt fourteen, and guilty, and about to get caught reading her diary.
The attic hatch is in the ceiling of the upstairs landing. You pull it down with a hooked pole and a ladder unfolds out of it like a bad joke. I had been up there perhaps twice in my whole life. My mother kept the attic the way some people keep a church. Christmas decorations, tax returns, my father's army trunk, and boxes nobody was allowed to touch.
It was hot under the roof. Dust hung in the light from the one small window. I had brought a flashlight and a bottle of water and a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.
If Theo was lying, I would find nothing, and I would go back to Juniper Street and hate him cleanly for the rest of my life.
If he was telling the truth, I would find something much worse.
I started with the boxes along the eaves. Tinsel, a cracked nativity set, my school reports in an accordion file. A carrier bag of my ballet shoes, pink satin gone gray. A photograph of me at six as a flower girl at somebody's wedding, scowling in a wreath of daisies as if I had already formed opinions about the daisies. A snapshot from our engagement party at the Fox and Lantern, taken after I'd gone home with a migraine: Theo at the bar with his right hand in a bucket of ice, and behind him, half out of the frame, a boy in a blue blazer with his head tipped back and a napkin pressed to his nose. I sneezed six times. A wasp bumped against the window like it was trying to tell me something. I moved my father's trunk and found nothing under it but a mousetrap with no mouse.
It took forty minutes.
The shoebox was behind the water tank, wedged into the gap between the tank and the wall, as if somebody had wanted it close enough to reach and far enough to forget. The box was for a pair of brown walking shoes, size seven. It had been taped shut along every edge with brown parcel tape, more tape than any shoebox needs, layers of it, and on the lid in my mother's careful handwriting was a single word.
Nora.
I sat down on the boards with it in my lap. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the wasp to give up and settle on the sill.
The tape came away in long, sticky strips that stuck to my fingers and my jeans. When I lifted the lid, the smell that came out was old paper and, very faintly, something green. Cut stems. A greenhouse.
Letters. Stacked on their sides like files in a drawer, so tightly packed I had to dig my nails in to lift the first one out.
Every envelope was addressed to me at this house, in green ink, in a hand that slanted right and crowded at the ends of lines. Every one had a number written small in the top left corner. Every one was sealed. Not one had been opened.
I counted them because I couldn't do anything else. My hands needed a job. Eighty-four. The stamps changed partway through, from ours to foreign ones with birds on them, long-tailed birds in bright colors, and then near the end they changed back. The last envelope was thicker than the others. The postmark on it was from this city, from the post office on Tanner Street, dated the second of March this year.
At the very bottom of the box, under the letters, was a single folded sheet of heavy cream paper. It wasn't an envelope. It had no stamp. Someone had folded it in four and pressed it flat, and through the back of the paper I could see the shadow of a printed letterhead and a signature in black ink. I didn't open it. I didn't want any voice in my head that wasn't his.
I took out the envelope with the number one on it.
There was no postmark, just a stamp that had never been canceled, as if someone had carried it to the house rather than posted it. On the back flap, in the same green ink, he had written the date and the time.
Saturday, June 14. 6:40 a.m.
The morning of my wedding. Three hours and twenty minutes before I walked into St. Brigid's in my grandmother's veil.
My thumb was already under the flap. I don't remember deciding to open it. The paper inside was thin and lined, torn from a notebook, and the writing on it was worse than the envelope, hurried and shaking, the lines running downhill.
Bell,
By the time you read this I'll be on a plane, and your mother will be the only person in the world who knows why. Please don't be angry with her. She's doing this for you. So am I. If you have to hate somebody, hate me, it'll be easier on both of you.
Below me, the front door opened.
The hall clock ticked. A bag of something was set down on the hall table with a soft thump, and then my mother's voice came up the stairs, light and puzzled, the voice of a woman who has left garden club early for the first time in thirty years.
"Nora? Why is the attic open?"