Page 9 of The Lost Hours
My feet landed on paper as I slid them over the side of the bed. With a groan, I reached down and picked up the letter that I’d read at least a dozen times, my disappointment having now morphed into full-out anger. I relished the emotion; it was the only emotion I’d felt in a very long time.
Holding the crumpled paper in front of me, I read it again, curious to see if maybe reading it in the light of day after a night’s sleep might change the way I felt.
Dear Ms. Mills,
It has come to my attention that you have been trying to contact my grandmother, Mrs. Lillian Harrington-Ross, in the hopes of talking with her about your late grandmother, Annabelle O’Hare Mercer.
Unfortunately, my grandmother is now very frail and bedridden, and she is not receiving visitors. On your behalf I did ask her about your grandmother and it took several moments for her to even recollect that she had once known her.
I’m afraid that even if my grandmother were healthy enough to meet with you, she wouldn’t be able to answer any of your questions at all.
My deepest condolences on your loss.
Regards,
William T. Gibbons
My gaze traveled from the letter to the newspaper on the bedstand. I hadn’t yet canceled my grandfather’s subscription and I found myself reading it from cover to cover as if to make up for my own lack of involvement. It was folded open to the front page of the people section—written the same day as William Gibbons’ letter—where a large photograph taken at a charity horse event was the main feature. The photograph focused on an older woman, looking neither frail or bedridden—her only seeming nod to her age being a beautiful ebony cane—and a younger man flanking a young girl tricked out in equestrian garb and holding aloft a gold trophy.
The caption read:
Mrs. Lillian Harrington-Ross of Asphodel Meadows Plantation and her grandson, Dr. Tucker Gibbons, award the winner’s cup to Katharine Kobylt of Milledgeville at the Twin Oaks Charity event.
I slapped the letter on top of the newspaper, welcoming the new wave of anger. I’d still only skimmed through the scrapbook pages, not completely understanding why I hesitated to read them thoroughly. But I’d seen the name Lillian Harrington on practically every page and from what I could tell, the pages spanned nearly a decade of my grandmother’s life, beginning around the age of thirteen.
And then there was the picture of the three girls sitting atop a pasture gate, grazing horses visible in the background. Their arms were thrown around one another’s shoulders, their identical expressions of joy, mirth, and friendship plastered on eager faces. I shut my eyes, having finally accepted that my anger was aimed at myself. I shifted uncomfortably on the perch of my bed, realizing that all the answers to my unasked questions were now buried along with my grandmother under the alluvial soil in Bonaventure Cemetery.
I felt something else, too—an undercurrent that wasn’t anger or disappointment. It was what I imagined I’d feel if I looked up into the sun to find all the answers and found instead only blindness. I wasn’t naive enough to assume that any answers I’d discovered would be what I wanted to hear.
Stumbling to the bathroom, my back and right knee aching with the sudden movement, I hurriedly showered and dressed, pulling my jeans out of the bottom of a pile of laundry I hadn’t yet found the energy to wash. The burst of energy I’d discovered with my newfound purpose of contacting Lillian Harrington had fizzled, then gone flat like a bottle of Coke left open too long. William T. Gibbons’ terse letter had taken care of that. My eyes stung as I pulled my hair back into an unforgiving ponytail and tried to think of anything else to get excited about beyond the arrival and departure of the Goodwill truck.
After limping down to the kitchen and rummaging through the cabinets to find large plastic garbage bags, I returned to my grandfather’s room and opened his closet. Not allowing sentiment to cloud my progress, I dumped suits, ties, slacks, and belts indiscriminately into the bags. I paused only when I came to his straw hat. I didn’t touch it, but left it on the shelf where my grandfather had last placed it, then watched as it quickly became the last item remaining, a lone survivor of a long life, my part in it no longer clear. I considered it for a moment, seeing the hat and myself as the last testaments to my grandfather’s years on this earth and couldn’t really decide which one he’d put more faith in. At least the hat had shielded his eyes from the sun. I’d only succeeded in letting him down.
Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed the hat, then closed the closet door, feeling only regret in the brittle straw in my hands as I firmly tucked the hat into the open plastic bag.
Glancing at my watch, I limped back down to the kitchen with the bags, quickly scrawling out tags for each bag and taping them to the outside. Then one by one, I dragged them to the back garden, settling them into what had once been my grandmother’s herb garden, the rocks delineating the edges now mostly gone, the remaining ones bleached by the sun and placed as sporadically as tombs in a graveyard.
Sweating and out of breath, I leaned forward with my hands on my knees and felt something digging into my thigh. I reached into my pocket and found the old-fashioned key George had given me in the envelope with the letters to Lillian. I’d forgotten about it until now, and made a mental note as I returned it to my pocket to test all the doors in the house with it.
After returning the key to my pocket, I headed toward the kitchen door, glancing up at the back of the house as I made my way down the weed-covered flagstone walk. I reached the back porch and stopped, the view of the rear of the old house suddenly flashing through my head. Retracing my steps, I stood again in the deserted garden and looked up at the back of the brick house.
The row of windows on the upper story that marked my bedroom and the bedroom shared by my grandparents appeared as they always had: neat tidy rectangles of six-on-six panes with ripples visible in the old glass.
My eyes traveled to the attic level, where three shorter windows were centered over the upper story, the two brick chimneys on either side of the roof framing the windows like parentheses. I stared at them for a long time, fighting against the encroachment of my inertia as the excitement of my new discovery pressed me forward and into the house.
I took the stairs slowly, my knee aching and urging me to sit down. But I pressed forward, feeling the key in my pants pocket and trying to imagine why my grandmother would think that pain could ever be useful.
At the far end of the upstairs hallway stood the door that led to the attic stairs. As I’d thought, the key protruded from the lock and the door was unlocked. I pulled it open, sneezing as the dust motes, disturbed from their resting place for the first time in years, drifted up to tickle my nose. I sneezed, then pulled the door open farther and made my way up the stairs.
I stood amid the old trunks and broken furniture, antique appliances and the Victorian doll house that my father had made but that my grandfather had relegated to the attic because it distracted me from focusing on horseback riding. On the opposite side of the room from the single brick chimney sat a large mahogany open armoire filled with my horse show ribbons and trophies. These had once been kept in the front parlor until my accident, after which I’d begged my grandfather to get rid of them. I hadn’t known what he’d done with them and I was still too numb to care that they hadn’t been thrown away. All I’d cared about at the time was getting them out of my sight, an unwanted reminder of the girl who had cheated death once and had been stupid enough to believe that there would never be anything else to lose.
This attic was the old stomping ground of my imagination back in the days of my childhood when I still had one and before life taught me that dreaming was only for those young enough to have not experienced too much of real life. But in all of those years of playing up here and digging in the trunks for old-fashioned dresses made of soft clingy fabrics and high-heeled shoes that were three sizes too big for me, I had never noticed that the two windows visible from the inside of the attic didn’t correspond to the three windows seen from the back garden.
I walked to the wall where the third window should have been. The walls in the attic were plastered and painted a stark white and there was nothing remarkable about this wall except for the large armoire in the middle of it. Pressing my forehead against the plaster, I peered into the small crack behind the armoire and saw the door exactly as I’d imagined it.
My first thought was to call Mr. Morton and have him save me the trouble of moving the armoire by asking him to tell me what was behind the door. But he was on his trip and he’d already made it clear that he’d told me all that he was going to. Whether his choice had been to protect me or my grandparents, I wasn’t sure.
After removing most of the larger trophies from the shelves of the armoire and stacking them on the floor, I leaned my back against the armoire and dug my heels into the old wood floors to give it a good shove, succeeding in doing nothing more than making the piece of furniture groan and my back and knee ache.
