July 21
Two days later, Roy examined the wooden ladder in the hay loft of the barn with a doubtful expression.
"No wonder you were nervous about climbing this thing," he said. "It looks like it's about to disintegrate."
"It's not that bad," Riza protested. "I've been using it to climb up into the loft since I was six. Or at least, I used to until Papa got the metal one a few years ago." They both glanced over at the sturdy metal ladder they'd used to climb from the ground floor to the little loft, and Roy smiled.
"Yeah, well neither of us are six anymore," he said, and gave the wooden ladder a thoughtful kick. "And the metal one would be too heavy to drag up here…"
"You don't think this one will bear our weight?" Riza asked. Roy just shrugged.
"Only one way to find out," he said. Without further debate, he stepped onto the bottom rung.
"Wait, what are you doing? Shouldn't I go first?" she objected, putting a hand on his sleeve. "I'm lighter."
"You're crazy if you think I'd let you risk your neck while I sit here and watch," he replied. "Besides, if it'll hold me, then we'll know it can hold you. Just hold the bottom steady, won't you?" She bit her lip, but couldn't think of a counter argument. Finally she nodded and braced her arms on the smooth, worn sides of the ladder.
Roy moved slowly, carefully testing each creaky rung before resting his full weight on it. After what felt like hours (though it was really only about two minutes), he balanced at the top and gingerly pushed at the trapdoor above him. As it swung open, he was surprised to realize that the room beyond it was flooded in light. Clambering gracelessly through, he turned around to secure the top of the ladder so that Riza could follow him up.
"All right, be careful," he admonished her. But she was already halfway up the ladder, her excitement clear on her normally stoic features.
"Oh," she gasped as she cleared the final step, looking around her. "I didn't think there'd be so…much."
They stood side by side and surveyed the towers of boxes and old furniture around them. Dust motes drifted lazily in the sunbeams that spilled in from the wide windows, liberally wreathed in cobwebs, on either side of the attic. The windows were unexpected, but very welcome, as Roy didn't see any other source of light—it seemed the attic space was not wired for electricity. Rising slowly, he took a tentative step towards the closest window, Riza hot on his heels.
"Not a project for the faint of heart, I guess. So where should we start?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Let's get these windows open a crack, first," she said, stifling a cough. "It's a bit stuffy in here."
Roy gave her a boost up onto an old armoire so she could get at the window latch, and caught her neatly when she jumped down again a moment later. As warm as it already was in the attic, they both appreciated the faint breeze from the open windows. It alleviated at least a portion of the close, suffocating feel of the air around them, and the children found themselves once again staring in awe at the sheer number of things packed into the space.
"How'd he even get all this up here?" Roy wondered aloud. "I always thought the place looked like it was one good gust of wind away from a cave in. But with all this stuff up here, I can't believe it hasn't collapsed in on itself already." Riza chuckled.
"The floorboards down below might be a bit dodgy, but the foundation is solid. And the support beams are all still sound. It's sturdier than it looks," she said. Roy glanced at her with a sly quirk of his lips.
"It sure is," he said. She didn't seem to grasp his double meaning, though, as she simply brushed her dusty hands off on her thighs and looked around.
"Let's try over here, first," she said, indicating the end nearest the trap door they'd crawled in through.
"All right. Maybe we should split up," he suggested. "I'll start on this side, and you can start with those. Call out if you find anything interesting." He was hoping that the boxes closest to the trapdoor would be the ones she was looking for, and he wanted her to be the first one to look through them.
Several minutes passed in relative silence as the children shifted boxes, rummaged their contents, and sneezed from the small clouds of dust their movements disturbed. And then Roy made a small curious noise in the back of his throat.
"What've you got?" Riza asked, leaning back so she could see him around a large trunk.
"Big box of glass Christmas ornaments. Pretty ones, too, all wrapped in tissue and newspaper," he explained, holding one up so she could see it. "What about you? Anything good yet?"
"I just found a crate full of books…they all seem to be novels I've never heard of before," she mused, glancing at the titles of the ones she held in each hand. "Wonder why they're up here?"
"Not sensei's taste, maybe?" Roy replied, looking around with interest. Riza had flipped one of them open and was skimming quickly through a few pages. But after a moment she blushed and closed it quickly.
"No, I think not," she said in a rather pinched voice. Roy raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. "Romance," she said shortly, dropping the books back in the crate and shifting it aside. Her blush deepened as Roy snickered.
"My aunt's employees sometimes read those romance novels. The girls refer to them as 'bodice-rippers.' All heaving bosoms and lingering kisses with next to no plot. Total drivel, in my opinion."
"Omigod," Riza managed to say. Her face was now bright red, and buried in her hands. "I can't believe…why can't I go back and un-read what I just read?"
"Aw, can't be that bad," Roy teased. "Was someone running a feverish hand along the milky expanse of someone's thigh? Or laving silken skin with a hot velvet tongue?"
"Not helping!" Riza choked, half laughing but still clearly embarrassed.
"What were the character's names? The names are always my favorite part," Roy said, calmly closing yet another box of Christmas decorations and reaching for a third. "They always have to be something totally outrageous."
"Solange and Darius," she sputtered. "What the hell kind of name is Solange, anyway?" Roy laughed.
"Oh, those are good ones! I will never understand how people read those without laughing the whole time at the dumb names," he said, shaking his head. "I mean, the plots are bad enough, but—oh, hey, check this out!" He held up an unwrapped teacup, a pale ivory thing with delicate blue and green flowers along the edge. Riza forgot her embarrassment for a moment.
"China? I wonder if it's their wedding pattern," she said, creeping closer so that she could take the teacup from Roy. "Pretty," she murmured, turning it over in her hands.
"Yeah, it must be…there're plates in here too," Roy confirmed, shifting the tissue-wrapped bundles. "You wanna take any of it with us when we go? A teacup, maybe?"
"No, that's all right. I'd only be scared to use any of it in case I broke it or something. But it's nice to know that it's up here," she replied, replacing the teacup in Roy's outstretched hand. He re-wrapped it and gently placed it in the box with the others, and Riza carefully pried open another box in her section.
"I suppose we should try and hurry it up a bit," Roy said, swiping a hand over his damp brow.
"Yes. It'll only get warmer the longer we're here," she agreed, with a cursory glance at the contents of her box.
"Mm. This one has more china in it, and those three are all just Christmas decorations," he said, rising to his feet and brushing his pants off. "I'm heading this way next."
"Right. Oh!" she gasped. Roy stopped and turned back towards her.
"Find something?" But she'd frozen, kneeling in front of an old steamer trunk with her hands still resting on the lid she'd just opened. "Riza?"
"This dress," she murmured reverently. "I remember this dress." She looked up at last, her eyes bright, and smiled at him. "I—I've found some of her clothes." Roy picked his way back across the room and crouched down alongside her.
"Jackpot," he breathed. "What's that one?"
Roy watched as Riza ran her hands slowly over the old, familiar fabrics and recalled the happier times in which they'd been worn by a loving mother and doting wife. He listened quietly as she fumbled out half remembered stories of picking strawberries in the garden with her mother where she wore this dress, or about summer picnics at the lake when her mother had worn this hat and possibly these very ribbons in her hair. He smiled even as his own heart ached for the various small memories he'd never have with his own long deceased parents.
Wistfully, Roy rubbed the back of his hand across a pale yellow satiny sleeve and wondered whether Riza's mother had smiled when she'd worn this dress for the first time, gazing into her mirror while her five year old daughter looked on in awe, spinning so that the skirt billowed out around her and made her look like some sort of beautiful, exotic flower to the child's eyes.
"I'm sorry," Riza said in a small voice. Roy jerked himself out of his melancholy thoughts and looked up at her.
"Whatever for?" he asked, surprised.
"Rambling on like this. Boring you with silly, childish stories," she murmured, looking away.
"You aren't boring me. And they aren't silly," he said softly. "I think it's wonderful that you remember those things so clearly. It's…I think it's nice." His throat suddenly felt a little tight, and his voice sounded strange even to his own ears. "I'm…I guess I'm just a little jealous," he admitted. Riza glanced shyly back at him, twining her slender fingers in the lacey handkerchief she held.
"I don't mean to rub it in," she said softly. Roy swallowed hard.
"I know you don't. You aren't. I mean, I'm not gonna lie: I do wish I had memories of my folks like you do of your mom. But it's not bad for you to talk about it. It's not," he insisted when she shook her head. "Just because I don't have a boxful of my parent's things somewhere to look at doesn't mean I'm not happy that you do." Riza studied his face for a long moment.
"I'm still sorry," she said at last. "For bringing it up, if nothing else. We should probably go back, now," she said, still twisting the fragment of lace in her hands.
Roy simply smiled, with only the slightest trace of sorrow in his eyes.
"You know, I keep thinking about something my aunt once said to one of her girls…'Happiness is not a zero-sum game.' You shouldn't be upset at someone else's happiness just because you don't have the thing that made them happy for yourself. Being jealous of their happiness is just pointless, because their happiness in no way prevents you from being happy. At least, that's what I always thought that she meant. If that even makes sense?"
"No, it does," Riza said thoughtfully. She'd stopped the nervous movements of her hands. "You're trying to tell me I shouldn't feel sorry because I have happy memories attached to these things, right?" He smiled crookedly.
"Yep. So stop feeling guilty. Aunt Chris would probably wallop me for making you feel bad if she knew," he said.
"Your aunt sounds like an interesting woman," Riza ventured with another shy smile.
"Oh, you have no idea," Roy snorted, shaking his head. "Point is, I AM glad we found all this stuff, even if it's not something I have of my own. So please don't feel bad on my account. Did you really want to go, or was there anything you wanted to keep looking for?"
"Um…there were some photographs I'd like to find, but we can look for those another time if you'd rather?" she asked uncertainly.
"Well, it is getting warmer…let's try two more boxes each then, and we'll try again another day if we don't find them this time. Sound good?" Riza's face cleared somewhat, and she nodded.
"Which one should we try next?" she asked, carefully folding the dresses back into the trunk. Roy eyed a heavy black box beside them that looked to be made of some sort of metallic alloy.
"How about this one? Looks like it was made to last, anyway. Good place to keep something fragile like pictures, right?"
The lid came off the box with a rusty squeal, revealing neat stacks of papers.
"Hm. Legal papers, I guess," Roy said, turning over a few. "Yeah, look. Here's your birth certificate. And this one must be your parent's marriage record."
"I wonder why he put them up here?" Riza wondered aloud. "Aren't those the sorts of things you should keep in a secure place?"
"Maybe they're duplicates?" Roy suggested. "Anyway, at least you know they're here, now, in case you need them later.
"Maybe I should take some of this with me," she murmured.
"Or maybe we should get a more secure ladder so you can come up here at a moment's notice and grab them if you need," Roy suggested. "I can ask sensei some stuff about transmuting wood in our next lesson…and then I could make it out of some of the wood out back, if you want." Riza smiled at him.
"That would be great, thank you."
After that, they found a box of what seemed to be old camera equipment, another with (empty) picture frames stacked haphazardly inside, and another small trunk with a frothy white dress inside. Roy thought it looked familiar, and let out a soft "ah" of understanding when Riza pulled out her locket to compare the dress to her mother's wedding photo.
"How are these clothes not full of moth holes and what not?" he asked, gingerly touching the delicate fabric of the wedding gown.
"Because of the cedar. Moths hate it," she explained, pointing to a shingle of the fragrant reddish wood that had been hidden in the folds of the tulle skirt. "I wonder if I should put more of it in here?"
In the end, they didn't find the photos she'd been hoping to find, but they left the attic with a small bundle of official-looking documents and a silver picture frame Riza said she wanted for her room, as well as a delicate looking lace handkerchief with her mother's initials embroidered in one corner. And in spite of the slightly heavy turn their conversation had taken before, both Riza and Roy were looking forward to future explorations of the attic space.
And when Roy sat at his desk later that evening, he thought of Riza's bright eyes and soft, dreamy smile, and reached for his notebook with a hopeful fluttering in his stomach.
"No way to know for sure unless I ask, right?" he whispered.
"I know this might seem like an odd question, auntie, but I've been wondering lately: do you have anything that used to belong to my mom or dad? Letters or photos or little mementos? You see, Riza and I have been exploring the attic…"
A.N. So...I meant for this to be more fluffy than the previous chapter, but the 'loss of parent(s)' angst will keep worming its way in. Sorry to be so heavy, but I do have my reasons. Please let me know what you think anyway!
Oh, and side note-my first encounter with a "bodice-ripper" romance novel was when I was about 14. It was my grandma's, and it was one of those horribly cheesy ones with the Fabio-esque-shirtless-man-with-a-six-pack holding a swooning woman-in-some-sort-of-period-dress on the cover, and the heroine's name really was Solange. Why I remember that, I can't even begin to imagine, especially considering how long ago that was...not enough brain-bleach in the world, I suppose ;)
xoxo Janie