Time Windows (2 page)

"You'll be able to give up jogging, Helen. Just work out while you cook!"

"Where was the fire, Dad?" asked Miranda. "How did it start?"

"I don't know much about it," Philip said, running his hand over the dark tangles of Miranda's hair. "It was in the attic—and shortly afterward, the family living here moved back to Boston. I think that's what the agent said."

"Was anyone hurt?" Miranda asked.

"No—it only blackened a corner of the attic. Not much damage at all. You'll see."

"Yeah, but why hasn't anyone lived here since?"

"I'm not sure, Mandy," Philip responded.

Helen carried in a box and pulled out cups, a pan, instant coffee, canned milk, and spoons. She glanced over her shoulder at Philip. "Didn't the agent say that the last family to live here couldn't sell the house because of the terms of some will? They inherited it and had to pass it on to their children. But the children who finally inherited it weren't bound by the will and didn't have any qualms about selling the place. That's how we were able to get it."

Miranda walked around the room, looking in cupboards while her mother put the coffee water on to boil. The kitchen was easily as big as their living room in New York. She liked the high ceiling, the brick fireplace, the hugeness of the space. She tried to picture it after they all got busy with paint and window cleaner and hung bright curtains at the windows. She could see the three of them sitting at the table in this kitchen on Sunday mornings, reading the paper. She knew they would be happy here.

While her parents drank their coffee in the kitchen, Miranda wandered back through the pantry to explore the other rooms. Despite the fact that the house was unlived-in, it had a friendly, welcoming feeling. All the rooms had high ceilings. There were built-in cupboards in the dining room and built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. Miranda stood in the center of each room and tried to imagine the space filled with their own furniture, china, and books. As in the kitchen, she could see her family living here happily. Good vibes, Nicole would say.

In the room at the back of the house Miranda stood before the bay window and looked out on the overgrown backyard. She decided she would stand in this window while she practiced her flute—once her father tamed the knee-high grass and planted flowers.

Miranda circled back into the hallway and found a tiny bathroom with a sharply sloping ceiling tucked under the stairs. She headed back into the front hall to climb the stairs to the bedrooms. But just as she was starting up, she glanced out the open front door and saw the moving truck lumbering into the driveway.

"Here come the movers," she called, running back into the kitchen.

"Right on time, too," said her father, setting down his mug. He unlocked the back door. Miranda followed him out into the overgrown garden. She fingered the shiny leaves on a vine tendril that draped itself over her shoulder as she watched the men lift their familiar, furniture out of the truck and set it among the weeds.

"This your bed, honey?" The deep voice belonged to one of the two burly men who moved toward her, holding her bed aloft.

"Yes," she said. "But I haven't seen the bedrooms yet. I don't know where you should put it."

"Go ask, then, kiddo," said the other, shifting the heavy frame. "Think this is made of feathers?"

Miranda hurried over to her father, who was consulting with Helen and the driver of the van about the best way to move the long oak bookcases into the house. "Dad," interrupted Miranda. "Where is my bedroom?"

"Go pick one, Mandy. There are four—but Mither and I have already reserved the biggest one!"

Miranda raced back into the front hall and leaped up the stairs two at a time. She found herself in another large, square hall with five closed doors. The one directly ahead opened into a bathroom, where, under a small window, the bathtub squatted on great clawed feet. Back in the hall, she tried the other doors. The first opened into a huge square room with two built-in closets. Probably the master bedroom, already reserved. She closed the door and moved on. There was one large corner room and two smaller rooms. She chose the corner room because it had a window seat and a big tree outside the window. The remaining rooms, she knew, were to be her mother's and father's offices. In a house this size, Miranda wouldn't have to pick her way around the piles of important papers and books that had littered the tiny rooms of their New York apartment.

Miranda scrutinized her new bedroom. The walls were covered with a tattered wallpaper patterned with different models of old-fashioned airplanes. She narrowed her eyes and transformed the room: white paint on the walls, her blue tassled rug on the floor, new curtains at the wide windows. She imagined spending the winter reading in her window seat. It could be made very cozy with a bright cushion for the wooden bench.

She stepped into the hall again just as the two heavy-set movers appeared at the top of the stairs lugging her bed. "In here," she said, motioning them to set the bed along the wall next to the window seat.

Soon the house rang with voices as the Brownes directed the moving men and with the solid thuds of furniture being placed in its new home.

When the truck was unloaded and had driven down the hill, Helen and Philip moved wearily through the rooms, checking that everything had survived the journey intact. Miranda trailed behind, feeling the strangeness. "A stranger's house," she murmured. It smelled so different, so old, as if a lot of things had happened there. Living room, dining room, family room ("library," Philip called it), kitchen—all so much bigger than the apartment they'd just left. Their voices echoed off the bare walls and the furniture seemed to float in the great rooms.

"Once the carpets are unrolled and curtains hung at the windows, you won't hear the echoes anymore and the furniture will settle in," Helen assured Miranda. But Miranda shrugged off the reassurances. She
liked
the echoes.

 

They ate a picnic supper of cold sandwiches and fruit at the kitchen table. Then Helen and Philip started unpacking boxes. Miranda unpacked the blender and food processor, then headed up to her new room to arrange her books. At the top of the stairs, she stopped.

The attic. She had not seen the attic yet. She opened the narrow door and set one foot on the first step. At that moment the warm evening air grew unbearably dense. She couldn't breathe. Miranda jerked back into the hall, gasping. She gulped in the hallway air, which seemed breezy and fresh in comparison. She groped along the wall for the light switch, flicked it on, and stared up the long flight of narrow steps.

"Stale air," she muttered, starting up. A second door at the top stood slightly ajar, its latch hanging loosely, torn from the wood. Miranda reached the top and pushed that door open. The attic before her was large and dark. One corner was blackened. Charred fragments of ashy wallpaper littered the floor.

Cobwebs hung all around the room, draped across a few odds and ends of furniture that had been left by the previous owners. Old picture frames leaned in one corner. A child's school desk stood under the eaves. Long, low bookcases lined the wall beneath the windows. Miranda blew dust off one windowsill and struggled to raise the window. With creaks and scrapes and flying dust it jerked upward, letting the fresh evening air surge in like a cleansing shower. Now she saw, back in a far corner of the attic room, a large box—no, not a box ... Gingerly Miranda stepped through the dust and cobwebs and examined the wooden structure. It was a dollhouse.

So tall it nearly reached Miranda's chest and about four feet wide, the house sat squarely in the dust-filled corner. It seemed vaguely familiar to Miranda and she walked around it, puzzled, trying to place it. She crouched down behind it and realized she was looking into a scale model of her new bedroom, window seat and all. Of course the dollhouse seemed familiar—it was a replica of her own new house, right down to the tiny bricks in the chimney and the molded front porch railings! Who had made it? Why hadn't they taken it away when they moved? The little empty rooms looked very much like the large ones Miranda had found when she walked into their house for the first time that afternoon.

Although the dollhouse walls were papered in unfamiliar patterns, the house was identical to the life-sized one. Miranda found it charming. She longed to see it in daylight; the single bulb lighting the attic by night was insufficient, and no moonlight shone in through the windows. The overhead bulb cast long shadows across the big, bare room, shrouding the dollhouse in darkness. Miranda raised herself onto her knees to look into the dollhouse attic. It, too, was dusty, dark, and bare, and on the dollhouse attic floor someone had written WATER in thick black crayon.

She raised her eyes and peered through the dollhouse attic windows out into the real attic. Across the room she saw a large dressmaker's dummy standing in one corner. She hadn't noticed that before; it looked like the one her grandmother kept in the sewing room to try on clothes as she made them on her sewing machine.

"Mandy!" Helen's voice floated up the attic stairs. "I thought you were unpacking!"

Miranda jumped up and ran to the top of the stairs. "Come up and see what I've found! There's a fantastic old dollhouse! And there's loads of old stuff, and a dressmaker's dummy like Grandma's—" She wheeled around, gesturing toward the windows as her mother and father started up the stairs. Then suddenly she stopped cold. The dressmaker's dummy was gone.

 

"What a lovely old dollhouse," exclaimed Helen with pleasure as she inspected the structure. "It's really a work of art. We'll have to bring it down and clean it up. You can keep it in your room, if you want. Or maybe it should go downstairs in the family room."

"The
library
," Philip teased.

Miranda forced herself to turn away from the empty corner where the dummy had stood only seconds before. She stared at her parents.

"You guys?"

"Hmm?" Helen knelt behind the dollhouse.

"I thought I saw a dressmaker's dummy over there. Like Grandma's."

Helen poked her head up and smiled quizzically at Miranda. "Where?"

"Right over there." She hesitated. "It
was
there. I, uh, at least I
thought
it was there." She pointed to the corner. "But now it isn't."

"No," agreed Philip. And Helen shrugged.

"You probably just saw shadows—they played a trick on you. It's really too dark up here to see much of anything." She ducked back behind the house. "But look at the tiny floorboards, Phil! They're amazing!"

Miranda moved to the stairs, suddenly feeling cold in the stuffy room. "I'm going down." She glanced back once to see if the dressmaker's dummy had reappeared.

It had not.

 

Hours later, her books unpacked and her clothes arranged in her dresser drawers, Miranda slid into her familiar bed in the new, unfamiliar bedroom. She sighed. It had been a long and tiring day. And it
was
dark in the attic, too dark to see properly.

She lay awake for a long time. The room was very quiet. The silence bothered her. She was used to traffic passing by the apartment all night: the sirens of ambulances, the clatter of trucks, the constant hum of cars whooshing by on the freeway. The stillness of the Garnet summer night hurt her ears. Then, in the bushes outside, a whole chorus of chirps and chortles began—crickets and tree frogs, her father had told her—and their songs disturbed her even more than the silence had. Tossing and turning, Miranda thought back over the events of the long day. One last thought echoed in her mind for a suspended moment before she drifted off to sleep: What happened to the dressmaker's dummy?

Miranda dreamed about biking around the new town and awoke with this plan in mind. Full of energy, she jumped out of bed, threw on a T-shirt and a faded pair of blue track shorts, and raced down the stairs. Exploring the neighborhood would be great here. Biking had not been much fun in the city because of all the traffic. As she sat down with her parents at the kitchen table, she imagined herself soaring along country lanes with the wind in her face.

"Have some cereal," said Philip, passing her the box. "Then we've got to get to work."

"Work!"

Helen raised her eyebrows. "You know, like pitching in and unloading the car and dusting and vacuuming and pulling weeds—"

"I get it, Mither." She spooned cereal into her mouth, her shoulders drooping considerably. Housework was the thing she hated most. But by the look in her parents' eyes this morning, she knew there would be no getting out of work today until everything was done. "Where do I start?"

 

Several hours later, Miranda sat back on her heels and brushed her dark hair off her forehead. She admired her new bedroom. All her clothes and books had found new places last night, but now the rest was settled in as well. Games in the bookcase—Clue and Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. A chess set arranged on the window seat—her father was still promising to teach her to play. Her flute lay on the desk. Lambchop, her ragged stuffed lamb—a relic of babyhood—sat in his place of honor on her pillow. Miranda smiled at him, satisfied with her morning's work.

Helen poked her head into the room. "Good job, Mandy. It's a great room. I love the window seat. We'll have to go into town and look for a big cushion." Her arms were full of boxes. "Help me get the rest of this stuff?"

"What stuff?"

"Things I want put up in the attic—there's a pile in the hall."

Miranda came to see. "Mither, you are a pack rat!" She hoisted an old record player and a sleeping bag into her arms and staggered up to the attic after her mother.

Helen paused beside the windows, scraping away dirt with a fingernail. "Thanks. Just drop it all there. And would you run downstairs and ask Dad for some window cleaner and a pile of newspapers?"

"Newspapers?"

"Best thing for polishing glass. It doesn't leave streaks."

Miranda ran down the stairs again, returning with a bucket of ammonia water, some old rags, and the newspaper. They set to work scrubbing the windowpanes.