Chapter 4: The Attic

I reached across the table and turned the tablet face down.

Jenna's voice stopped halfway through a word.

"Hey," Josh said. "Careful. That's company property."

I went back upstairs and sat on my bed with my phone in my lap until I heard all three cars leave.

Josh drove Jenna to get her nails done. My mother went to the dental office. My father went to school.

Nobody asked what I was doing that day.

When the house was empty, I pulled down the attic ladder in the upstairs hall.

My grandmother told me something once, the last Thanksgiving before she died.

She'd had two glasses of wine. Everyone else was watching football.

She took my hand under the table and signed with the four words she knew.

Then she said out loud, "They told your mother you could have talked. Did you know that, honey?"

I hadn't known.

My mother came in with the pie and my grandmother let go of my hand.

She died that spring. I never asked her again.

The attic was hot and smelled like cedar and mouse.

The boxes were labeled in my mother's handwriting.

JENNA BABY CLOTHES. JENNA SCHOOL. JENNA HEARING. JENNA DANCE.

There were a dozen boxes with Jenna's name on them.

The one with mine was in the back, under the Christmas wreaths.

It just said A.

Inside were my report cards, and my retainer in its case, and my old picture board.

It was a sheet of laminated cardboard with Velcro squares. A cartoon cup. A cartoon toilet. A cartoon girl crying, which meant hurt.

There was no picture for angry. Nobody thought I'd need it.

Under the board was a drawing in crayon.

Two girls with the same brown hair, holding hands by hooking their pinky fingers.

One had two blue blobs on her ears. Her hearing aids.

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