The Package in the Attic

It was the day after the funeral and Mum was exhausted. Grandma's illness had not been a short or a kind one. The cancer that she had beaten twice before had returned, and this time it had triumphed - a slow, ugly triumph that left Grandma totally dependent on her family as she wasted away. Today I gave Dad strict instructions to look after Mum and see that she got the rest she needed. After a token protest, she seemed grateful to stay in bed.

I couldn’t remember her taking my grandfather’s death years earlier this hard, but though she spoke little of his role in her childhood whilst he was alive, and none at all after he died, the impression was that of a cold and distant man. My own relationship with him had been virtually non-existent; I remembered only a gaunt old man sunk into his armchair, seemingly absorbed in his newspaper or the television, with the occasional snide comment to the air about useless women who produced nothing but daughters.

With Mum looked after, I felt aimless. There was no sea of relatives to reminisce with. Mum had been Grandma's only daughter, as I was hers. I drifted around the house for an hour or so, and then made the sudden decision to go to Grandma's house and start organising her belongings. I called to Dad that I was leaving, grabbed my keys and jumped in my car. Grandma's house wasn't far, and before long I pulled up in front of the two storey Tudor that she had lived in for as long as I could remember. It had become a much more pleasant place after my grandfather's death, with an absence of the oppression that seemed to coalesce around him like a malignant miasma. But though Grandma had seemed lighter and freer, there was always some indefinable sadness to her, and multiple times in the pauses of conversation, she would seem on the brink of saying something, and then catch herself and start talking lightly about some inconsequential topic.

Inside, the scent of sickness and death, overlaid by the tang of cleaning products, lingered still. The ground floor had become Grandma's sick room, her hospice. The hospital bed was visible through the loungeroom door as I passed, with the flat clinical white sheets in stark contrast to the brightly knitted rug thrown over them. I walked past the kitchen and up the stairs, and then found myself climbing up the pull-down ladder to the attic. Emerging into the attic, I flicked a switch and a naked bulb sprang to life, illuminating a random collection of furniture and boxes. I wondered how long it had been since Grandma had come up here. Certainly my arthritic grandfather wouldn’t have been here for many years, even before his death.

Some time later, my progress was slow. I'd discovered a box of my mother's childhood keepsakes, tenderly saved and packed away by Grandma, and became lost in a sentimental journey as I sifted through them. There were photos of Grandma with my mother; a beautiful young woman with dark hair, cuddling her chubby baby. I was beginning to feel stiff from sitting so long on the cold, hard attic floor. I stood up, stretched, and, deciding to find something I could do whilst standing, wandered over to the furniture stored in the far section of the attic.

Side tables, an old wardrobe, a standing mirror and chairs all jostled for space, but the desk was what drew my attention. It was an older style roll-top desk which, when the dust was brushed away, showed a tentative mahogany gleam. Even neglected, it was beautiful. There were four drawers on one side, which proved empty. I tried lifting the roll-top, but it was locked. Searching for the key, I opened drawers and looked through boxes with no success. I had almost given up when a sudden memory came to me; Grandma showing me her jewellery, letting me slip the shining strands of pearls through my childish fingers, and puddle gleaming gems into my hand. And in the corner of her jewellery box, an old-fashioned key. I wasted no time getting down the ladder and to what had been Grandma’s bedroom before her move downstairs. There, in the bottom drawer of her dresser, was the wooden jewellery box. My memory had not misled me, inside was the key.

Back in the attic, I inserted the key into the lock on the roll-top and turned it. It moved stiffly, as though it had not been used in many years, but the lock clicked open, and I pushed open the roll-top to finally look inside.

I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t to find the desk empty except for a brown paper package positioned neatly in the middle of the writing area. There were unmarked stamps in one corner, and an address in my grandmother’s handwriting. As I read the address, my puzzlement grew. It was mine. But why hadn’t Grandma posted it? Or even just given it to me or Mum; she saw one of us every other week. Considering the dust on the roll-top, the package must have been here for a long time.

I sat on the attic floor and opened the package, unsealing the flaps at either end, unwrapping it carefully – as though I was sneaking a peek at something I wasn’t supposed to see, and needed to restore it afterwards. Under the paper was a plain cardboard box, which in turn contained a slim leather-bound book, with ‘Diary’ in gold-embossed letters on the front. As I lifted it, two folded slips of paper fell out, yellowed with age. Putting them aside, I began to read.

Grandma’s neat handwriting covered the pages inside, each entry carefully dated. It started off unremarkably enough; Grandma described her outings, social visits, and the like. My grandfather was rarely mentioned, and when he was it was merely to say that he had accompanied her to this event or the other, or that his business appeared to be going well. It was clear that my grandparents had moved in fairly high social circles. And it was equally clear from her words that my grandmother was a very lonely woman. As I read on, the tone of the diary began to change. It started with a name, ‘Edward’. It was an innocuous mention at first, but it appeared more and more frequently, and soon it was obvious that my grandmother had fallen in love. She must have hidden this diary from my grandfather well, because she recorded all the details of her growing relationship. She wrote of the joy of her blossoming love affair, and the comfort she found in Edward’s arms. She mused on the possibility of divorce; not common then, but not entirely unheard of either.

I turned the page and found the next entry scrawled, as if written in haste. It said only, “God help me, he knows. He gave me my letter this morning, without a word. I don’t know what he will do; God only knows what he is capable of”. The rest of the diary was blank. Disturbed, I put it down and picked up the pieces of paper that had fallen out. The first was a house plan, with a faded mark over the cellar steps. The second a letter;

Dearest Edward

I have discovered something today which changes everything. I am carrying your child. How far along I do not know, but I think perhaps two months. I do not think he could possibly have realised, but something about him has changed recently. I catch him looking at me with triumph in his eyes, and after months of not touching me, he comes to my bed every night, ‘taking what is his’ as he puts it. My darling, I am afraid. You do not know him as I do – he is a cruel man and will not take kindly to being scorned. You must take me away. I do not care where, I would live in a ditch if it meant being with you and away from him.

Yours in desperation, Anna

A chill ran through me. Grandma had never left my grandfather; her Edward had never rescued her. And what happened to the child? I fleetingly considered that it could be my mother, but her resemblance to my grandfather and his side of the family was far too marked. There was nothing more in the diary, but perhaps the house plan might hold a clue. I looked it over again, and seeing an address, I typed it into my phone’s internet search bar.

The images I found showed a rundown old house, clearly unoccupied and about an hour’s drive away. I wondered what the mark on the plan over the cellar stairs meant. A flutter of excitement grew as I considered that maybe my grandmother had hidden something there that would lead me to her child. Perhaps she had been forced to give it away, and in that old house she had concealed documents that would allow her children or grandchildren to find their previously unknown relatives. I imagined cousins and their children; a family expanding in front of my mind’s eye.

As I drove, following the directions of my phone’s electronic voice, the close-set suburban houses drifted apart and became steadily more ramshackle. When I reached the house, it looked even worse than the online photos. I wondered if it were even safe to go inside, so derelict did it appear. However, my burning curiosity drove me on, and I grabbed my torch and went inside.

The entranceway was so dust-covered that it sent me into a coughing fit. Fortunately, I did not have to penetrate far into the house to find the cellar door. It was stiff, but gave way eventually to my insistent pressure. Shining the torch before me, I walked down the stairs, testing each one as I went. They creaked alarmingly, but held under my weight and I reached the bottom unscathed, trying hard to ignore the unnerving skittering noises coming from just outside the reach of my torch’s light.

As I shone my torch onto what should have been the space under the stairs, I was surprised to find bricks instead, the mortar crumbling with age. I immediately felt uneasy; Grandma had been the typical housewife and this had to be my grandfather’s work. My previous imaginings of what I would find were suddenly disrupted, and some primitive part of my mind shouted fearfully at me to leave. But another part was unable to leave this mystery alone, and after discovering a rusty but still solid sledgehammer in the cellar, I set to the task of breaking down the wall.

It was easier than I expected, as the mortar was long past the point of holding the bricks together in any meaningful way. Once I had made a hole large enough, I shone my torch into the revealed cavity. Inside was a small wooden chest. As soon as I had cleared enough of the remaining bricks, I reached through and dragged the chest out. It was lighter than I had expected. Holding my torch steady, I took a deep breath and lifted the lid.

As I gazed in horror at the two tiny, desiccated corpses that lay inside, I understood now why Grandma had left the package addressed to me. She knew, with my insatiable curiosity and incurable impulsivity, that I would come here and find this chest. And she had wanted someone to know what had happened to her babies.

Epilogue

The gravestone was simple. It read only:

Here lie the much loved sons of Anna Mae Johnson & Edward Albert Smith

The young woman standing at the grave pressed her hand to the dirt for a moment. She whispered, “I took care of them for you, Grandma’, before standing up and walking away.