Birds in the Air

Chapter 2

Chapter 2The coffee has just finished brewing when the doorbell rings. It doesn’t ring, actually, it buzzes and rattles, and Emma nearly drops the carton of half and half she’s delivering to the fridge when she hears it.

“Coming, coming!” she calls as she trots down the hallway, not exactly sure why she feels she has to hurry. It’s something about the bell’s tone, demanding and impatient, as though it’s not convinced Emma is up to the task of answering the door.

The young woman standing on the front porch wears a bright yellow nurse’s smock under a pink, puffy coat. Her thick brown hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail, a few strands escaping to curl sweetly around her heart-shaped face. “Hey!” she greets Emma, the “hey” stretching out into two syllables, sounding friendly and apologetic at the same time. “I’m Lettie, from next door? I believe you just met my grandmother?”

“Um, I guess I sort of met her,” Emma says, not quite knowing how to describe her experience with the old woman. A drive-by rejection? An encounter with the unwelcome wagon? “She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to me. Was it a bad time?”

“Oh, no,” the woman says, smiling as she shakes her head. She has a raggedy edge to her voice that Emma likes. She remembers screaming into her pillow as a teenager to get the same effect. “She really doesn’t want to talk to you. Not just you, I don’t mean that. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Granny’s feeling a little, well, antisocial these days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Emma says, and then it occurs to her that maybe she should ask Lettie in. “Do you have time to visit? I just made some coffee. It wakes me up after lunch.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be a bother,” Lettie says, shivering a little. “I just wanted to tell you not to take Granny personally.” She takes a step forward and peers inside. “How’s the house coming along? I bet you’ve got a whole lot of work to do. But it’s a great old house, isn’t it? I used to play here all the time with Miss Lydia’s grandkids when I little.”

“You want to come in and look around? It’s a mess, and you might trip over some boxes, but you’re welcome.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Lettie insists even as she’s crossing the threshold. “Well, maybe just a peek. It’s been years since I’ve been inside this old place. Miss Lydia was sick for a long time before she passed, and they had her down at Pine Manor — the nursing home? Lord, I know she hated it there. She loved this house, though. Raised all her babies here and her grandbabies, too, after their mama died. Breast cancer — it was the saddest thing.”

Emma follows Lettie inside. “Don’t mind the dog,” she says, pointing to Homer, who has wandered into the study and is now sniffing at some freshly opened boxes. “He’s very sweet.”

“Oh, I’m not scared of dogs,” Lettie says. “My last boyfriend had a pit bull, and he didn’t scare me the least bit. He scared my boyfriend though.” She laughs. “That oughta tell you something right there, a man scared of his own dog. Bad sign. Very bad sign.”

She walks into Emma’s study, and Emma follows her, wondering if Lettie will want a tour of the entire house. The only presentable rooms are the kitchen and the living room. The children are making slow progress in their bedrooms; they can’t unpack a box without examining every little thing, calling out their discoveries — “I found my Transformers! But Optimus Prime’s arm fell off!” — and then abandoning their work to play until dinnertime, the rest of the box’s contents left for another day. Emma hopes she closed the door to the master bedroom, because she’s pretty sure the bed-making fairy hasn’t shown up yet this morning.

“I always loved it in here especially,” Lettie says, standing next to the fireplace and running her hand over the mantle. “Me and Dawna used to sit in that window seat and talk and talk. We were going to be, oh, fashion models and movie stars, and marry the most handsome men and build our mansions next door to each other.”

“Where’s Dawna now?”

Lettie laughs. “She’s a missionary. Furthest thing in the world from a movie star.”

Emma nods toward the kitchen. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some coffee?”

“Well, if it’s truly not a bother. I just finished up a week on the overnight shift at the hospital, so this is still kind of morning for me. I’d of come over sooner to say hey, but when I work third shift, I sleep until lunch and run Granny’s errands all afternoon, get her groceries and medicines and all that.”

They walk to the kitchen, and Lettie takes a seat at the table. She rubs the edge of a roughly woven placemat between her fingers and says, “This is pretty. Did you make it?”

Emma laughs, setting two mugs on the table and taking a seat. She’s famous in some parts for just how certifiably uncrafty she is. “I wouldn’t know how. I got those at Target.”

“I could tell you some stories about this house,” Lettie says, taking a sip of coffee. “Have you been poking around in the attic? Are the trunks still there?”

“I haven’t looked through them yet,” Emma tells her. “I’m sort of saving them.”

“For a treat?” Lettie asks.

Emma nods, pleased that Lettie understands. She’d noticed the three trunks in the corner of the attic the first time she and Owen had looked at the house and immediately began imagining what might be inside. Old Letters? Diaries? Yellowing christening gowns wrapped in tissue paper? When should she open them? Maybe the first day they moved in (she was already sure they would be moving in). Or should she wait?

Wait, she’d decided. She would wait for the right sort of day, a quiet day, a wood smoke and cedar-smelling sort of day. She would know the right day when it came, she told herself. It would announce itself to her.

“Well, I won’t tell you what’s in them,” Lettie says. “Fact is, I probably don’t remember half of it, it’s been so long. But there are a few things I’d sure like to see again. Lord, I could tell you some stories. This one time — ”

Lettie stops herself and covers her mouth. “I’m sorry — I know I’m talking a blue streak. It always happens after I’ve been on third shift. All your patients are sleeping and you don’t hardly talk to anyone all week. And Granny doesn’t talk any more, she’s so upset about Mama, so everything gets bottled up inside. You’ll have to excuse me.”

“I’ve been talking to my house lately,” Emma confesses. “I don’t have a lot of people to talk to, either, at least not until my kids get home from school.”

Lettie laughs. “I talk to my car sometimes, especially when the roads are bad going down the mountain. I like to keep its spirits up.” She takes another sip of coffee, and then gives Emma a mischievous look. “You don’t want to go up now and open one of those trunks, do you?” She raises a hand. “Now, you feel free to say no. I don’t want to talk you into anything. But there’s one I remember…”

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to look at just one,” Emma says, a little reluctantly. “I’ve gotten all the bathroom stuff unpacked and put away. That’s worth one trunk, right?”

“Oh, at the very least,” Lettie assures her. “I want to see if what I’m thinking about is still there. I bet it is — Miss Lydia was so particular about us putting everything back in its place just the way we found it.”

Emma follows Lettie up the stairs to the second floor landing. “I’m acting like I’m in charge, leading you around this way,” Lettie laughs. “You’ll have to excuse me. But I really did spend a good amount of time here.”

“That’s okay,” Emma tells her. “The house is so big, I feel like I’m still finding my way around.”

“It is big,” Lettie says, opening the attic door and looking up the stairs. “But I bet you’re just being polite and letting me boss you around. This is the sort of house you fall in love with the minute you walk inside.” She turns to Emma and raises an eyebrow. “I mean, the way you’d fall in love with a man and want to know every square inch of him.”

Emma feels herself color, but she laughs and nods her head. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“How are your kids liking school?” Lettie asks as she climbs the steps. “Did they mind moving in the middle of the year?”

“Ben, my second-grader, minds more than Sarah. Sarah was in a mean girls class this year, full of queen bees. She was sad to leave her best friend, but happy as anything to get out of that classroom.”

Lettie waits for her at the top of the steps. “When I was a kid, I use to wish girls would just be like boys, you know, using their fists to settle things. What girls do is a whole lot worse. And they’re so sneaky about it.”

“And now they use technology,” Emma informs her. “I can’t believe parents give ten-year-old girls smart phones, but they do. The girls text all sorts of awful things. In fifth grade!”

“We did the same thing with notes,” Lettie says. “A pencil’s a pretty vicious piece of technology in the wrong hands.”

Emma sighs. “I guess so.” Still, she can’t help but hope that the fifth grade girls of Sweet Anne’s Gap are a little less tech savvy and a lot kinder than the girls of Mrs. Kelly’s homeroom class.

Emma follows Lettie into the attic, which is a large space, three-quarters finished, with windows at both ends, so that the room is flooded with natural light on sunny days. When she first saw it, she immediately thought about making a playroom for the kids, but right now they need the storage space. She’s a little embarrassed for Lettie to see the dozen or so ransacked boxes where they’ve all gone searching at one time or another for a sweater or toy or pair of shoes they couldn’t find downstairs. She tells herself that it’s no big deal, just the overflow detritus of your average early 21st century American household, nothing to get excited about.

“Now, is that where the trunks are, under those blankets?” Lettie points to the south end of the attic. When Emma nods, she says, “Okay, well, I hope the keys are where they used to be.”

She leans over a stack of boxes and strains to reach behind a post. “When we were kids, the fact that you had to get the keys from their hiding place was a big part of the fun. It made opening the trunks feel mysterious, even though we knew exactly what was inside.”

“The realtor told me the keys were around here somewhere, but she didn’t know where,” Emma says, following Lettie to where the trunks are stored under the eaves. “It’s a good thing you came over. I probably never would have found them on my own.”

“Hope I didn’t spoil it for you, knowing where they were.” Lettie waves a skeleton key at Emma. “But you might have been looking forever.”

“I’ll get over it,” Emma says with a laugh. “I have to admit I’m disappointed that I’m not the first person to find the trunks. I’ve imagined them filled with secret documents from the original owners. You know, maps to where all the hidden passageways are, things like that.”

“I hate to tell you this,” Lettie says, “But the Buchanans — the people that built this house? — they didn’t own those. According to Miss Lydia, the trunks belonged to her mother, who was a McKinney. Miss Lydia just happened to inherit them after she married Bob Buchanan and moved into his family home.” Lettie cups her hand to her mouth and lowers her voice to a whisper, as if sharing a secret. “She was her mama’s favorite, don’t you know?”

Emma feels childishly disappointed. All along she’s been thinking of the trunks as a kind of gift left to her from the original Mrs. Buchanan. She’d imagined packets of letters tied with ribbon, and genteel journals, their yellowing pages filled with Mrs. Buchanan’s reminiscences and recipes for chokeberry preserves, all safely stored away for Emma to find eighty years later.

Really, she thinks, she’s got to stop watching the Hallmark channel.

Kneeling down beside the largest of the three trunks, Lettie carefully inserts the key. “There’s a trick to it, if I recall correctly.” She jiggles the key a few times, turns it, then tugs. The lock clicks open.

Lettie stands up and turns to Emma. “I’ll let you do the honors. I just hope something’s still in there. I’ll feel foolish if they’re empty.”

Emma’s surprised to feel a flutter of nerves. It’s just an old trunk, after all. What’s left inside is probably moth-eaten or mouse-nibbled beyond recognition, if in fact there’s anything left at all. She imagines the awkward moment she and Lettie are about to share as they stare at the remains of ancient newspapers and water-stained linens. Leaning down, she gingerly tugs at the side of the trunk’s lid. It doesn’t want to give immediately, and then suddenly it pops open like the top of a jack-in-the-box. Emma stumbles backward and instinctively holds her hands in front of her face.

“Oh, Lord!” Lettie exclaims, rapidly fanning her cheeks with both hands. “That about scared me to death!”

Emma is practically hyperventilating. “Good grief! I thought snakes were going to jump out at me.”

“Well, go ahead, take a look,” Lettie urges, moving a step closer. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

Edging toward the trunk, Emma lifts her head to peer over the side without having to get too close. She gasps. Two sets of glassy eyes are peering back at her.

Lettie comes up behind her. “The dolls! They’re still here. Sunny and Tuesday. That’s real human hair, by the way.”

The two dolls lie on their backs, one raven-haired, one blonde with a garish crack running down the side of her face. Their lips are parted to reveal tiny teeth yellowed with age. The dark-haired one is dressed in blue calico, the blonde in what appears to be a wedding dress, the lace ripped, the hem in tatters.

“Oh, we wore these girls out,” Lettie says. “Took ’em everywhere. Everybody else had dolls that wet their pants and cried and grew their hair, but no one had anything as wonderful as Sunny and Tuesday.”

“Sunny and Tuesday?” Emma asks as she eyes the dolls. The crack in Sunny’s face gives her a judgmental expression, one that suggests she doesn’t think much of Emma’s outfit.

“Well, Dawna named that one Sunny — ”Lettie points to the blonde — “but I thought she said Sunday. When she told me to name the other one, I didn’t want to name it Monday, but I thought Tuesday sounded nice. Granny made Tuesday’s dress. I wanted her to be like Laura, from Little House. She was always doing wild stuff and Sunny here was always giving tea parties.”

“You should take them,” Emma tells her now. She picks up Tuesday and hands her to Lettie. “I can tell they mean a lot to you.”

Lettie shakes her head. “Oh, I couldn’t. You should give them to your little girl.”

Emma opens her mouth to insist, and then decides not to, even though she suspects Sarah will take one look at these dolls and run screaming back to her Barbies. She doesn’t want to hurt Lettie’s feelings by suggesting the dolls aren’t every little girl’s dream. “Well, thanks, but if you ever change your mind…”

“I’ll let you know,” Lettie says, grinning. “I just might. Now why don’t you look and see what else is in there? I can’t remember, other than the dolls. Might just be some old yearbooks, but there could be a treasure or two.”

The dolls have been resting on a baby blue receiving blanket. Emma hands Sunny to Lettie, and then the blanket, which smells strongly of mothballs. Underneath is an assortment of yellowed front pages from the Mountain Times, which have been layered over a tissue-wrapped package. Emma looks at Lettie, to see if she knows what it is.

“No idea,” Lettie tells her. “It doesn’t look big enough for Miss Lydia’s wedding dress. Maybe it’s her lace tablecloth that she brought out for Thanksgiving.”

Emma carefully lifts the package, as though it might break into pieces if she’s rough with it. She pulls back the paper and sees that there are several layers. Carefully she removes each one until she comes to the last sheet, which is white and almost translucent, like onionskin.

“I think it’s a quilt,” Emma reports. The paper slips away to reveal the folded blanket inside. She carefully lifts it and lets it fall open. The colors are faded to grays and browns, each block of the quilt a series of carefully stitched triangles and squares.

Emma turns to Lettie. “Do you remember this?”

“I really don’t,” Lettie says, shaking her head, as though she’s surprised the trunk contains something she’s unfamiliar with. “It’s a beauty.”

“I don’t know anything about quilts,” Emma admits. “I guess this looks handmade.”

“Oh, it’s handmade for sure. Granny makes quilts, so I was raised around them. And this one’s old, too — maybe even 19th century. I don’t know about the pattern name, though. It could be an ‘Ann and Andy,’ but I’m not sure.” Lettie reaches out and runs her hand along the quilt’s border. “You could take it down to Ruth at the Sewing Room. She’d know.”

Emma carefully refolds the quilt and places it on top of the pile of tissue paper next to the trunk. She reaches back in and feels around. Is that it? The dolls, the newspapers, the quilt? Her fingers brush against the hard corner of something. A frame.

“Who’s this?” she asks, pulling out a photograph of a young girl. She squints to read the words scrawled on the lower right hand corner of the matting. “1906,” is all she can make out. She looks up at Lettie. “Maybe Lydia’s mother, or her grandmother? How would the math on that work?”

Lettie shrugs. “I guess it could be Miss Lydia’s mother. Miss Lydia was born a few years after World War I ended, I’m pretty sure. Right before the Great Depression.”

Emma examines the picture. The girl is posed sitting sideways, looking off into the distance, her coiled curls pulled back with a band. She’s wearing a simple white dress, lace-up boots, white stockings. She might be Sarah’s age, maybe a year younger. She’s pretty despite her sour expression, her mouth set in a firm line, as if she’s sitting for this picture against her will.

“A mystery,” Emma proclaims, and she lays the photograph on top of the quilt. “Two mysteries, really.”

“Take that quilt to Ruth,” Lettie insists. “The shop’s down on Trade Street, across from the old train station. She’ll know something, I bet.”

Emma closes the trunk lid, picks up the quilt and the photograph. Treasures, she thinks. She feels pleased, as though someone has left an unexpected gift at her door.

After Lettie leaves, Emma watches out the window as she walks down the road toward her grandmother’s house and wonders if they will become friends. She’s kind, Emma thinks. Then she holds out the photograph and looks at the girl, who appears on the verge of scolding someone — Emma, maybe, if she doesn’t shape up.

“What’s your story?” Emma asks the girl, who doesn’t look kind at all, but scornful and inscrutable instead, stubbornly silent behind the dusty glass.