Free Amber House by Kelly Moore Page B

attic, an ancient lightbulb hung from a pipe, a string dangling below it. Jackson went over, tugged the string, and, miraculously, the bulb glowed. Its feeble light revealed a graveyard of forgotten objects shoved toward the shadows at the sides of the room, mostly filling the V at the base of the slanting ceiling.
    I ran my fingers over the handle of a worn-out wicker baby carriage and thought of the infants who had ridden in it, all kin to me, all dead and buried. A headless dress dummy boasted the painfully carved waist of a corseted era. A bald china doll sat in a wooden high chair with a busted seat, her empty eyes staring out over the memory of a nursery.
    I opened a trunk. The tulle veil of a yellowed wedding gown disintegrated into dust at my touch. Beneath it, the groom’s tuxedo lay above the frills of old-styled baby clothes, a child’s sailor suit, a layer of high-topped leather shoes. A silverfish slithered away from my searching hands.
    “Yuck,” I commented involuntarily. I dropped the clothes back into place and returned them to darkness.
    Jackson snorted. “I never thought of you as squeamish.”
    Thought of me? I shrugged and said, “Silverfish. Gross.”
    “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you that one. They are gross.” And he flashed me a big smile, wide and relaxed. He seemed — happy . I realized he always seemed a little tight to me, like he was under some kind of strain. But for once, he just seemed easy.“It’s our warm, wet weather — we got a million bugs. Some you don’t see anywhere else: a beetle that only lives in the cliffs on the Chesapeake, and a spider that’s only been found along the banks of this river.”
    I shivered. “I hate spiders. I have this theory that they all come from some alien thing that fell to Earth on a meteor a billion years ago.”
    He chuckled. “A little bit arachnophobic?”
    “Nah,” I said. “I’m just scared of spiders.”
    He started to explain to me the meaning of “arachnophobia,” but then realized I was making a little joke. “Ah. Humor,” he said, smiling. “Difficult concept.”
    He kept up the small talk as we worked, cracking jokes, peppering me with questions: “What’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?” Me, the northern lights; him, a hurricane coming in across the Chesapeake. “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?” Me, Paris; him, New York — “That’s where my parents met.” “Which are better, cats or dogs?” Both of us — “Dogs.” I didn’t mention that cats reminded me too much of my mother. I found myself telling him about Jecie, and the time she’d led a cow up an exterior staircase at our school, and how they’d had to get a crane to lift the cow back to the ground because cows couldn’t walk down stairs. He put his head back and laughed at that one. “Jecie’s pretty cool,” he said, like he knew her from that one story. We talked for the better part of an hour as we pulled one box after another into the light of the single bulb to poke through their contents.
    I could tell fairly quickly that it wasn’t likely that anything up there was going to get us closer to the Captain’s fabled diamonds. Most of it was interesting to me — like that little box at the bottom of one of your mother’s drawers that contains three baby teeth and a curl of soft fine hair — comforting, connected, and kind of disgusting all at the same time. The boxes helddocuments, old clothes, broken treasures, once-loved toys — things not even the inhabitants of Amber House had deemed worth saving from the slow moldering of time. Each box wheezed out a gasp of dust and decay that settled on my skin and wafted into my lungs. After a while, it began to get to me. It seemed proof, silent and inescapable, that all the pieces of my life would one day come to this — this soft, sad, gray disintegration.
    “I can’t take much more of this,” I said, struggling with the sense of