The Number 7 (2 page)

“Dad?” I wanted to tell him that maybe this trip was meant to be and that maybe this was the fresh start he and I needed. I was about to tell him everything I'd been holding back for a long time when a small voice interrupted from down the hall.

“Hello?”

A tall, pale woman with striking copper hair glided down the hall toward us. Long strides and fluid footsteps. I'd seen that type of movement before. She had to be a dancer. The woman's wide eyes grinned.

“I don't mean to intrude, but I'm afraid your phone's disconnected and no one answered the door,” the woman purred to Dad. “I came by to drop off my key. I'm Rosemary. I live down the hill. I've been watching over the house.”

“Of course. Sure. Nice to meet you. I'm Christian Magnusson.” He stuck out his hand and the woman took it tenderly. “We just arrived a minute ago. Can I get you something to drink? I don't know what Mom has around,” he glanced toward the cabinets.

“No, thanks,” her voice was soothing, like slow-dripping honey. “I really didn't mean to interrupt . . .” There was an extended pause as Rosemary surveyed the room. Her eyes lingered on me—almost
through
me—and she grinned even wider. I had to look away. There was something intense about her. Her eyes? Her teeth?

“It's good to get life back into the place. Be sure to open the windows tomorrow. Release all this enclosed energy,” she smiled. “Christian, it was great meeting you. I'll see you around, Louisa,” Rosemary pulled on red leather gloves to acknowledge her departure.

“I'll walk you out.” Dad followed her to the foyer.

I shivered, despite standing so close to the radiator. Had I told her my name?

Dad's old bedroom had been dusted recently. It looked as if Grandma had been expecting company—as if she'd made up the bed especially for me. It was creepy.

Dad put my bag down on a small vanity in the corner. None of the furniture seemed to quite fit. It was all just a mishmash of oddly sized Shaker antiques. Some Lilliputian, others colossal.

“The bathroom is across the hall. You have to turn the hot-water faucet twice as far as the cold, but it should work.” He opened an oversized trunk at the foot of the bed, pulled out two crocheted blankets, one green, one blue, and set them on top of my bag. The whole operation felt like a hotel check-in. Did I need to ask about a wake-up call? Or what time breakfast would be served?

“Okay,” I took a seat on the mattress, the springs squeaking even under my little weight.

“Call me if you need anything. I'll be right downstairs.” Dad began to leave. “Oh, and kiddo?” He paused in the doorway. “I love you.”

“I know. I love you too, Dad. Night.”

“Good night.” He closed the door, and I heard him descend the stairs. Then everything was still.

I skipped brushing my teeth and went straight to bed. The sooner I fell asleep, the sooner it'd be morning. The room was warm, but the bed sheets cold. I slid between them as carefully as one enters a cool pool of water. Stretching out my legs past the end of the bed, I felt like a doll in a dollhouse. I thought about Greta.
What was she doing?
No doubt sitting in bed with a cup and saucer balanced on one knee, rolling her hair in pink foam curlers. She slept in them, but I wasn't ever allowed to tell people that. With Greta, there was a lot I wasn't allowed to tell. And lately, there was a lot I didn't seem to know. Still, I wished she were here in this big house with me. I breathed heavily into my blanket and listened to the house's creaks and pangs sounding like the popping joints in an old body. An animal screeched outside, and I wondered: if I shouted out into the darkness, would it answer me back?

I woke with the sun the next morning to find Dad already awake, tossing a freshly toasted onion bagel onto a plate.

“I had to swing by the funeral parlor to sign some papers, so I stopped to pick up some breakfast on the way.”

“Sounds good,” I yawned. “Is everything okay with the . . . arrangements?” I hated having to ask. I loathed funerals.

Dad poured me a tall tumbler of orange juice. I gulped it down in one shot and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“She didn't want a funeral, so we're doing a cremation,” he remarked casually.

I wondered if he hoped I wouldn't think about it, but I did.

“Like Mom.” I chewed on a piece of bagel.

“Like Mom,” he sighed in agreement.

For a moment, I thought about the oak tree against the stone wall near Mom's plot. This late in the year, the cemetery would be ablaze with color. I closed my eyes, visualized Mom's headstone, and envisioned its inscription.

Walt Whitman, Mom's favorite. Memory 4. I'd already decided that on my eighteenth birthday I'd get it tattooed. I just didn't know where. My wrist? My ankle? Somewhere I could see it every day. I slowly exhaled.

“So what's the game plan for today?” I fingered the cuff of my pajamas, eager to think about anything else.

“I was going to have you start with the attic, and I was going to work on packing up the kitchen.”

“And I thought it couldn't get any worse,” I moaned.

But Dad was undeterred by my cynicism. He poured himself more coffee from the pot on the counter. “Later, we can take a walk around the property. We own ten acres.”

“I didn't realize
we
owned anything.
”

I watched him as he ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. He was getting grayer by the day, but it looked okay. I wasn't ignorant of the fact that my dad was handsome. I remembered how single moms reapplied red lipstick at the lunch after Mom's memorial. They munched on cucumber sandwiches, drank Sweet'N Low coffee, and talked in hushed whispers, smiling hopefully at my dad. He never noticed them, but I did.

The wind blew outside the kitchen window.

“Despite everything, this is a good house,” he said to himself, staring intently into his cup, but I, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Despite
what
, Dad? “Be sure to take a jacket; I don't think there's any heat up there.”

My grandmother's attic was a mausoleum. A lamp with a mosaic shade rested in a corner. An old, foot-powered sewing machine sat to one side. I casually opened the lid of a cardboard box and found it packed to the brim with red-and-gold glass Christmas ornaments. Loose gray puffs of rock wool insulation burst along the walls as if the house were a teddy bear splitting at the seams. I spelled “Louisa” in the dust atop an organ with yellowed keys and then blew it away. Walking to the far end of the attic, I shoved a circular dormer window with my shoulder and it fell open with a deep sigh. This house needed to breathe fresh air just as much as I did. It would be redundant to say everything in the attic was old. In a large rolltop desk stained with inkblots I found stamps from 1957 and a disintegrating typewriter ribbon. Tucked in one of the letter slots was an unstamped postcard. The picture on the front was an old photo of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I could vaguely make out the handwriting.

The postcard had never been mailed. I snapped a photo of the script with my cell phone, pocketed the card, and tried to open one of the desk drawers, but it stuck. I shook the drawer, struggling to get it to open, but the harder I tugged, the less it seemed to give. I carefully sat on the dusty floor and propped one foot beside the edge of the drawer. I wrapped both hands around the metal ring and pulled violently. The drawer slid out easily, as if it hadn't been stuck at all. A black, vintage telephone tumbled to the ground with a loud thud. It was a beautiful antique with a gold cradle and a white rotary. The frayed cord hung limply to the side.
Too bad it's missing a plug
, I thought, placing it on top of the desk.
It would have been cool to use.

Dad started playing a new record downstairs; I could faintly make out “La Vie en Rose.” Mom used to sing it to us. She was fluent in English and French because she'd grown up in Montreal. Memory 11. She'd trained at L'École supérieure de ballet du Québec. Memory 115. She was a beautiful dancer. Memory 13. When she died, my mother's parents flew in from Canada and told my dad my mother's death was his fault and that
he
—not the cancer—had taken her away from them. They cried when they said goodbye to Greta and me. Dad never talked to them again after that. And I never asked about them, although there were times I had wanted to. We weren't allowed to look back.

I hummed along to the familiar tune remembering the way Mom's tongue used to roll over her Ls and how she'd swallow her Rs. God, I missed that.

I looked around at the memories of people I never knew. I wanted to map out my grandparents' lives; I wanted to catalog these items, to discover my grandparents in every artifact. But it was too late now. Their voices—their stories—were lost forever. Before leaving the attic, I took a seat at the old, wood desk to study the old telephone once more. I inspected its base, searching for a label or logo, and found the name “Ericsson” embossed on the bottom. Twisting my finger through its rotary, I listened to it
tick, tick, tick
its way back into position. In vain, I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. No dial tone. No ringing. But there was something else, some familiar sound that I couldn't quite make out. The low hush of white noise?

I held the phone closer to my ear, cocked my head to one side, and closed my eyes to focus on the sound. What was it? A buzzing? A hum? No. It was the familiar shallowness. The steady beat. The inhale. The exhale. Someone was breathing into the other end of the phone. I launched myself from the desk in disbelief and the wheels under my chair screamed. There was no mistaking what I'd heard. I dropped and watched the black receiver swing lifelessly in the air like a heavy body from a wire noose. I steadied my shaking hand and gently replaced the telephone onto its base before darting across the room to slam the window shut. It was time to leave.

I sealed the mystery into a wooden catacomb, and tried to convince myself there was some other way to rationalize it.
Certainly
, I thought frantically,
there must be a plethora of explanations for what happened
. Still, I felt safer leaving the phone locked away like the mad woman in the attic.

I didn't tell Dad what I'd heard. I didn't really know how to explain it to him. I didn't know how to explain it to
myself
. Better to just pretend it never happened, right?

In an attempt to get some fresh air, Dad took me on a short drive outside the neighborhood. He pointed to homes with well-manicured lawns while relaying simple, one-sentence stories about people he used to know, friends who used to inhabit the old haunts. I just wanted to find dinner.

We finally pulled into Weaver's, the local grocery store, a simple mom-and-pop establishment. Their clientele was pure granola; they asked for local produce and fresh cuts of meat. They demanded organic, fair-trade, and farm-to-table. I was smitten.

Dad veered for the butcher counter. I went for the veggies.

The yams were ugly and lumpy. I turned one over in my hand, inspecting its knots and divots.

“Nice tubers, huh?”

A boy about my age stepped close to me and winked. He carried a watering can in his left hand, and picked up a butternut squash from a pile of autumn vegetables with his right. He smiled broadly at me. He was tall and slender with a round face. Handsome, with short cropped brown hair, long, curled eyelashes, and freckles. He wore a green apron with “Gabe” embroidered in white thread. He tossed the squash in the air before replacing it back in the pile, making his way to a display of hay bales and pumpkins. Blooming mums sprouted from recycled aluminum coffee cans marked $7.50 each. I followed him.