Page 2 of The Attic on Queen Street
Jayne turned to face me. Instead of rebuking me, she widened her eyes as she took a closer look at me. “Have you been raiding Sophie’s closet?”
Dr.Sophie Wallen-Arasi was—against all reason—my best friend. A professor of historic preservation at the College of Charleston, she was mismatched tie-dye to my crisp linen suits with matching handbags, Birkenstocks to my Louboutins, and real Christmas greenery versus hassle-free plastic garlands, because she liked to make things more difficult than they should be. I liked to think that we complemented each other, rounding off any sharp edges of our personalities. She’d guided me through the extensive and never-ending renovations on my historic house, which I’d unwillingly inherited—along with a dog, General Lee, and Mrs.Houlihan the housekeeper. All the while, I had kept up a running commentary about her bizarre clothing choices in the hope that one day she might actually look in a mirror and fix things.
I looked down at my baggy sweatpants and moth-eaten cardigan sweater with an unidentified food stain on the sleeve, and felt my eyes well with tears. I’d found them in a dark corner of the closet where Jack had dropped and forgotten them. Besides our children, they were the only things of his he’d left behind.
As if to stave off more tears, Jayne held up the bag and mug with a hopeful smile. “I brought you doughnuts from Glazed. And made youcoffee just the way you like it.” She moved closer so I could feel the steam from the coffee. “Since Mrs.Houlihan is still on vacation, I helped myself.”
My mouth would usually have started watering at the mere mention of my favorite doughnut shop, but all I could muster was a soft grumble in my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.
I took the mug while she set the bag on the dining room table and eyed the shriveled oranges and the dead pine boughs regurgitating brown needles on the glossy wood surface. The centerpiece relic was from a Christmas dinner fund-raiser the night of the big snow when Jack had nearly been buried alive. A sudden flash of anger pushed away a little of my despondency. I accepted that I had perhaps broken our trust agreement by venturing out on my own. But I also couldn’t stop thinking that if Jack had just stayed in bed to recover from the flu like he’d been told, he wouldn’t have been in the snow-covered cemetery that night or fallen into a collapsed grave.
“It’s almost the end of January, Melanie. Would you like me to help you take down the Christmas decorations?”
She indicated the drooping Christmas tree in the corner. The sad ornaments huddled at the bottom, where they’d slid off of bare branches next to puckered oranges in various stages of decay like victims of a massacre in which indifference had been the only weapon.
I shrugged. “Sure.” Ignoring the doughnuts, I took a sip of coffee, barely tasting it. I wrapped my fingers around the mug, appreciating its warmth, but paused as I raised it to my lips for a second sip. “Why are you here? Sarah and JJ are with Jack today.”
Jayne sighed. “Besides the fact that I shouldn’t need a reason to visit my sister or to bring sustenance since Mrs.Houlihan is away, I am bringing a message.”
“A message?” I didn’t bother to hide the hopefulness in my voice; one of the best things about having a sister was the absence of the need for pretense.
She gave me a consoling smile. “From Rebecca. She and Marc would like to meet with you and Jack about the filming. She considered askingyou herself, but with Marc and Jack involved, she figured she’d need me as a go-between. She mentioned it’s hard to clean blood off of these antique rugs.”
I raised my eyebrows. Rebecca was our distant cousin as well as Jack’s onetime girlfriend and my sometime nemesis. She’d married Marc Longo, whose main talent appeared to be using his far-reaching influence to ruin Jack’s writing career.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “No. That’s not going to happen. We don’t need the money anymore, not since we found the rubies in the cemetery.” I didn’t addthe night Jack was nearly killedbecause I didn’t need to. Everyone remembered that night not only because of Jack’s near-death experience but also because Marc got dragged feetfirst into a mausoleum and his hair turned solid white.
I continued. “Our lawyers have already been in touch with the film production company with a generous cash-settlement offer to get them to change filming locations. We had to remind them that we were forced into agreeing only because we were trying to avoid a lawsuit after Nola’s car accident with Marc and that creepy producer, Harvey Beckner. But now, because of the rubies, we’re not that desperate. There is absolutely nothing Marc can say to make us change our minds.”
“Marc is aware. But Rebecca says there’s more to it. She suggested meeting at your office at a time that works for both you and Jack.”
“Both of us?” I didn’t care how pitiful my voice sounded or how my firm insistence on not having a film crew anywhere near my house had been quickly replaced with thoughts of what I would wear to the meeting if Jack was there and how I should probably wash my hair. “He agreed?”
“He hasn’t agreed yet. They thought it best that you ask him and then let them know.”
My excitement dimmed. “Oh. I’ll try. That’s the only thing I can promise. Although I think we’d have a better chance of another big snow in Charleston than of Jack agreeing to sit down with me, not to mention with Marc and Rebecca.”
“All right. I’ll let Rebecca know.” She squatted and picked up twoof the oranges, the spiked cloves that I had so painstakingly applied in precise rows now looking more like crooked pimples on shrunken heads. “Why don’t I start clearing away all of the rotten fruit and dried greenery? It’s a fire hazard, you know.”
I didn’t answer, distracted by the sound of Nola’s guitar coming from her room. My stepdaughter had inherited her musical ability from her late mother and had already found success writing jingles for commercials, as well as a few hit songs for pop heartthrob Jimmy Gordon.
Breaking a dry spell that had run in tandem with Jack’s own during our recent crisis involving three restless Revolutionary War–era spirits and the upcoming filming scheduled to begin after the holidays, her parents’ current woes had apparently added fuel to her creative fire. The melancholy strains of her guitar were now a constant soundtrack to my life.
It didn’t help that the lyrics were as dismal as the melodies, but Nola’s music was important to her, so I didn’t ask her to stop, although I had started shoving earplugs in my ears after I heard the first words to her latest effort: “My shriveled heart, all black and cold, yet still it beats, until I’m old...” I had to keep reminding myself that Nola had chosen to stay with me when Jack moved out, a show of affection and solidarity I appreciated, although she insisted she wasn’t choosing sides. But after listening to her music, I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d stayed as a way to punish me for being so completely stupid where her father was concerned.
I heard Nola’s bedroom door open and the sound of three sets of paws, one set slower than the others, scampering down the hallway toward the steps. Even General Lee had deserted my bed and now chose to sleep in Nola’s room in a canine form of reproach. Although I kept reminding myself that I didn’t like dogs, his desertion hurt almost as much as Jack’s.
As Jayne retreated to the kitchen to retrieve a garbage bag, I shuffled into the foyer to watch Nola descend the stairs, each step causing dead pine needles to cascade to the floor from the banister garland. The plastic pomegranates and other contraband that I had snuck in behindSophie’s historically authentic eye remained full and ripe amid the desiccated wreckage of the garland. I wanted to take a picture to prove to Sophie that I’d been right about how plastic had a place among my Christmas decor, but even that righteous victory felt hollow.
Nola’s long dark hair fell forward as she devoted all of her concentration to her seemingly physically attached phone, her thumbs flying over the screen as she descended the stairs with the three dogs running circles around her ankles.
“Could you at least hold the banister with one hand? That’s really not safe.”
She continued her descent as if she hadn’t heard me, her thumbs pausing only when she reached the bottom. She looked up at me with Jack’s piercing blue eyes—all three of my children were clones of their father, as if their mothers had merely been holding cells between conception and birth—and smiled her father’s smile, which always caught me off guard. “Did you say something? I was texting Lindsey and Alston about seeing a movie later.”
I opened my mouth to repeat myself, but then thought better of it. If I’d learned anything about handling teenage girls in the three years since Nola had come to live with us, it was that choosing which battles to fight was the difference between domestic tranquility and living with a ticking time bomb. Nola was generally easygoing, except when someone mentioned her lack of a driver’s license, questioned her devotion to being vegan, or asked her where she wanted to go for college.
Instead I bent to scratch three sets of fluffy ears. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” I was rewarded with soft licks from little pink tongues, the show of affection bringing tears of gratitude to my eyes. Not that they were any substitute for Jack, but at this point I’d take it.
