I sat cross-legged with the box in front of me, wearing a thin, baggy old sweater—one of Eddie’s—and jeans. The sweater swamped me, but I loved it. I was barefoot but glad my arms and legs were covered, in case something brushed against me. I pulled my unruly hair into a messy ponytail and pointed the beam of the flashlight around the dark space. The attic is not a place I often go. Like the recesses of my mind, it was a part of my house that I felt reluctant to visit in case the remnants of the past opened something up inside me that was better off shut away. For me, the attic is a challenge, one I am usually happy to let Eddie deal with. But I didn’t want to trust the box to anyone else, so I took it up there myself to make sure it was safe. And while I was up there, I decided I might as well look around. The first sign of a spider, I promised myself, and I was out of there.
The space became a series of snapshots as I used the flashlight to highlight objects in turn. There were stacks of plastic boxes with layers of books and papers inside. Brown cardboard boxes with writing on them like KITCHEN. A couple of small cardboard boxes, tied with string, that said IMPORTANT, DO NOT THROW OUT.
There was a plastic McDonald’s container that looked like a house, but the size of a soccer ball, and when I pried open the roof part of it, it was full of marbles, all different colors. Why do we keep this stuff? I thought. But I admit, I didn’t want to take it downstairs and trash it. There was a memory here, too hard to discard, too easy to keep.
When we go to the beach, Evie and Esther pick up stones and give them to Eddie and me. Finding the smoothest stone, a perfectly round one, or one that looks like a face, or a dog, or the shape of a heart, all these things transmit treasure status onto these small, ordinary objects. The moment they’re picked up and admired—the longer they’re held on to—the harder they are for the girls to throw away. The stones end up in my pockets, Eddie’s pockets; and holding his hand in one of mine while rubbing the stones between my fingers in the other is the feel of the beach to me. When we get home, cardigan pockets misshapen by the weight of these stones, I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t throw them away. Eddie’s happy to put them in the garden, but I feel like that’s abandonment too. So I started having jars of stones around the house. I even bought some vases to display them. I just couldn’t put them in the attic—it would feel like an insult to the girls and our days at the beach. But we do have a lot of stones. I guess one day they’ll have to go.
We keep stuff in order to hang on to what’s important, but it’s an illusion. My pain at the thought of throwing away those stones is my pain at losing those days with my daughters. The pain of knowing that one day I will look back and they will be so far in the past that I’ll feel like a balloon that has silently unraveled itself from the hand that’s holding it, and drifted out of reach into the sky. As long as I have those stones, I can persuade myself that I still have those days. What I can’t admit is that those days are already gone. Stones or no stones, the past is as far away from us whether we’re talking about ten minutes ago or ten years. These objects are not bridges to the past, they’re bridges to memories of the past. But they are not the past.
That was how I felt before I went into the attic.
By the time I left it, I’d changed my mind.
The flashlight created a tunnel of light from me to the far side of the attic, and in truth, even then it was like reaching out to a different place and time. I saw a brown suitcase I’d taken to Greece as a teenager. Inside were the girls’ baby clothes, too sentimental to give away. But now the idea of preserved clothes felt like Miss Havisham’s stuff; it would have been better to pass them on. The suitcase had a worn-out sticker on it of Shaggy in his green T-shirt and maroon trousers, saying “Scooby-Doo, where are you?” My boyfriend at the time was a bit of a hippie. He had the same green T-shirt as Shaggy and the same haircut, and he’d smoothed that sticker onto my case, saying, “Send me postcards. This sticker is to remind you that I will be wondering where you are and what you’re doing the whole time.” I’d forgotten about that, and probably would have gone my whole life never thinking about it again if I never saw that case.
The tunnel of light fell on other things that made me smile: a proper old telephone, cream-colored with a rotating dial and heavy handset; a tennis racket with a wooden frame, must have been Eddie’s; a basketball that looked a bit gray, but with a wipe might be orange again. I decided to take it downstairs with me; Eddie could put up a hoop at the back of the house. I’m a pretty good shot, and the girls would love it.
I have so little of my mother, missed out on so much. I don’t blame Em and Henry, but I think they could have told me more, should have talked about her with me. When they took me in, they were already old and had no children. They were kind, and I was lucky that they were there for me, and later they adopted me. It was like living with sweet grandparents, and life could sometimes feel very quiet, but they treated me well, and what they did, I suppose, was try to ease my mother’s death for me by never mentioning it. They said she became ill, which I knew, and then died, but I didn’t know a person could die from a cough and a cold. When I get a cold myself these days, I worry so much that I make myself even sicker, wondering whether my children will grow up without a mother, when all I’ve got is a sore throat and a high temperature.
I realize now that it must have been something more serious, but at the time I allowed myself to believe it was as simple as that and I didn’t question it. Maybe I had more memories of her at the time, but my mother was like a fairy tale to me, and as I grew up I suppose she became what fairy tales become to all adults: an illusion, a magical story that seems to say one thing, but mean something else. There were very few bridges to my mother. I suppose that’s why the photograph was so important to me, even though she wasn’t in it.
I sighed. I knew that coming into the attic would make me think, make me remember. Wanting to remember and not wanting to remember at the same time. All of a sudden I longed to be downstairs, back in the real world, the present, the place I understood, with my daughters, whose laughter I could faintly hear, and Eddie, whom I wanted to kiss again.
I stood up and lifted the box, wondering where would be best to store it, and whether to fold it up or keep it as it was. Being short, I could have stood upright, but I instinctively ducked as I went along, placing my bare feet carefully. I would paint my toenails later, I thought. As I stepped backward, I hit my head on the light bulb. There was instant darkness except for the flashlight beam, and a tinkling sound as the glass fell around me. I automatically squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them I felt my face. I was fine. I shone the flashlight on the floor. Tiny shards of glass were scattered everywhere, over the wooden slats and yellow insulation, all around my feet—surely this was more glass than makes a single bulb! If I moved, I knew I was bound to step on it, and pictured tweezering slivers of it from my skin. I set the box down carefully, and stepped inside it: a safe zone, a glass-free area.
I opened my mouth to shout for Eddie, hoping he could hear me with his headphones on—then closed it again before I made a sound. Standing in the box had given me the most extraordinary feeling of nostalgia. My photograph was still in Eddie’s study, but I pictured it perfectly, myself as a child, grinning out over the edge of the box. And like that girl on the front of the box who was bouncing out at me from the past, here I was, the girl from the future, back inside the box of my photograph. The tiny child I had been would never have imagined that one day she would be standing in that very same box, too big to sit right inside it now, and having grown up entirely without the sweet mother she had loved so very much.