Work Text:
-
Foxworth Weather.
-
The attic smells different in rain.
Cathy realizes this sometime during the second winter, though winter is maybe the wrong word for it because seasons stop existing properly once you are shut away long enough. Time in the attic develops the texture of old wool left damp too many days. Everything thickens; the blankets, the dust along the baseboards. Chris’s hair at the nape of his neck where it curls slightly from sweat while he sleeps. Thoughts themselves too, probably.
Still, rain changes things.
The whole roof breathes moisture downward. Wood swelling softly around nails. The insulation inside the walls release old trapped smells when the temperature shifts — cedar, mouse droppings, mildew, dead insects inside the light fixtures. The attic had belonged to lives before theirs. That bothered Carrie once when she was younger. She used to ask questions while tracing circles into the dust on the floorboards with one finger.
Who slept here before us. Did they leave because they got old. Did they die here.
Eventually even Carrie stopped asking.
Children adapt obscenely fast to imprisonment. That may be the worst thing Cathy knows.
-
Their mother keeps arriving scented incorrectly.
At first she smelled like herself still: cold cream, face powder, cigarette smoke worked permanently into fine fabric, the sweet artificial lemon from the lotion she rubbed into her hands before bed because she hated the feeling of dry skin. Even now Cathy can remember sitting on the edge of her parents’ bed at six years old watching her mother massage lotion carefully over each finger while talking distractedly about charity luncheons or flower arrangements or women Cathy had never met and could not imagine existing beyond perfume counters and church hats.
Then gradually other smells began attaching themselves.
Alcohol, enough for it to sting.
Men’s cologne once, faint but unmistakable beneath her gardenia perfume.
Later still, the sharper scent of aerosol hairspray and winter air and unfamiliar car interiors.
Money, maybe. If money had a smell beyond paper. Beyond department store cosmetics and restaurant butter and wool coats drying near radiators.
Every time Corrine sits on the edge of the attic bed now, smoothing wrinkles unnecessarily from her skirt while promising soon soon soon, Cathy notices some new foreignness attached to her.
As though their mother has continued existing somewhere else long enough to begin chemically changing.
Chris notices too. Though he only says it once.
“She smells like downstairs.”
Carrie begins crying almost immediately, which irritates Cathy at first until she realizes Carrie thinks downstairs itself must therefore smell like betrayal now. Children make symbols out of everything: paper flowers, locked doors, perfume.
Later that night Cathy wakes sweating from a dream she cannot fully remember except for her mother’s gloved hands and the sensation of being unable to reach her through layers and layers of fabric.
Chris is awake beside the window.
“You’re grinding your teeth again,” he says quietly.
Outside rain moves through the gutters in heavy rushing waves.
Cathy presses her tongue against sore molars. Blood tasting metallic.
“Oh.”
“You should stop doing that.”
As though she hadn’t considered it.
-
Before the attic there had been ballet lessons on Thursdays.
Cathy remembers the studio mostly through smell too, just like the attic, which embarrasses her a little now because memory should probably preserve more dignified things like achievements, happiness and maternal affection uncomplicated by hindsight.
Instead: rosin warming beneath radiators, damp tights hanging in the changing room. Mrs. Belmont’s peppermint breath while correcting posture manually, fingers pressing hard and tight between shoulder blades.
And mirrors. Endless mirrors.
There had been one girl named Denise who always arrived already immaculate somehow, blonde hair sprayed into perfect stillness while Cathy’s own curls escaped pins within minutes from sweat at the temples. Denise’s mother used to bring sliced oranges in plastic containers after recitals and once, during a snowstorm rehearsal when everybody else’s rides were delayed, Cathy sat beside her under the benches eating orange wedges while Denise casually explained that poor people bought margarine because butter was expensive.
Cathy had gone home afterward and stood in the kitchen staring at the margarine tub in their refrigerator long enough that her father finally laughed and asked what on earth was wrong with her.
Nothing, Cathy said.
Then later she cried in the bathtub for reasons she could not have explained if asked directly.
Shame often arrives before a coherent language does.
Now, years later, she lies awake beside her siblings listening to mice move inside the walls and thinks suddenly, vividly, of Denise peeling the white strings carefully from each orange segment with her thumbnails before eating them.
Bodies remember class long after circumstances change. Maybe forever.
-
The twins become pale first.
Their hair lightens too from lack of sun, strange nearly-white strands appearing gradually near the temples so slowly nobody notices until one afternoon Carrie says, with all the solemnity her little body can manage, “Cory looks like a ghost.”
Cory bursts into delighted laughter.
Carrie does not.
“You do,” she insists, climbing onto the bed beside him. “Like the little painted boy at Church.”
There was, unfortunately, a devotional painting of a little boy at the Church they used to go to that freaked all of them (except Chris) out. A blond saint-child holding white lilies while staring upward with the exhausted expression of someone already aware he’ll die horribly for symbolic purposes later.
Chris rubs one hand hard over his face.
“Don’t say things like that.”
“Why?”
Because children deserve explanations for fear and almost never receive them properly.
Cathy turns away toward the vanity mirror because suddenly the room feels airless again.
Her own face startles her lately. Everybody’s does, probably, after enough isolation. The attic mirror has begun silvering darkly at the corners with age so reflections emerge fragmented around the edges, features dissolving into shadow near the glass borders.
Sometimes at night she studies herself there trying to determine whether she still resembles their mother enough to be dangerous.
Sometimes she catches Chris looking too.
Then both of them immediately find something else to do with their hands.
-
One August evening their mother arrives breathless and overheated carrying shopping bags from downstairs.
They are real shopping bags, with bright tissue paper and glossy handles.
The attic fills briefly with department store perfume and cold outdoor air leaking from her clothes.
Carrie claps excitedly at the sight of wrapped candies.
Cory grabs immediately for a toy truck.
Chris stands very still near the dresser.
Corrine kisses everybody too quickly. Lipstick tacky against cheeks. Her bracelets clatter nervously every time she moves.
“I can’t stay long,” she says while unpacking things in hurried bursts. “Your grandfather’s nurse is suspicious already and if that woman says one more thing to me about impropriety I swear to God—”
She stops and nobody responds immediately.
The attic light buzzes somewhere unseen.
Cathy watches her mother unwrap a blue dress from tissue paper, beautiful soft fabric spilling over Corrine’s lap like water.
And for one suspended second the room becomes almost normal again. A mother showing her daughter clothes, normal summer heat, candy wrappers crackling open beneath children’s fingers.
Then Chris says quietly, “Carrie’s shoes don’t fit anymore.”
Corrine stills.
Such a small sentence, entirely practical.
But it alters the room all the same.
Cathy sees it happen physically sometimes, the exact moment guilt enters their mother’s body. Her shoulders draw inward slightly. Her lips twitch downwards. One thumbnail moves automatically toward her mouth before she remembers herself and stops.
“Oh,” Corrine says.
Then again, after too long:
“Oh, darling.”
Downstairs somewhere a clock begins chiming the hour through layers of walls and floorboards.
Cathy thinks suddenly of all the meals happening beneath them every evening. Soup steaming in bowls, glassware clinking softly, napkins unfolded across laps. Human lives continuing horizontally while theirs climb nowhere.
Carrie is sucking sugar from her fingertips beside the toy truck.
Chris has gone to the window.
Rain beginning again outside.
Their mother folds and refolds the blue dress silently across her knees.
-
The summer before everything finally rots through completely, Cathy begins waking to the sound of Chris breathing.
It becomes one of the attic noises eventually, folded into the structure of things alongside rainwater inside the gutters and mice in the walls and Grandmother’s footsteps on the staircase, each tread recognizable individually now after so many years. Slow descending anger meant picnic baskets — faster meant punishment already decided upon before the door opened.
Chris breathes differently asleep depending on the season.
In winter the air in the attic dries everybody out until the twins cough constantly through the night and Cathy wakes with blood crusted faintly inside one nostril. Chris starts snoring a little when exhausted enough, quiet uneven sounds he’d deny violently if mentioned aloud. Summer changes it. Heat pressing all the oxygen flat from the room. Sweat dampening the mattress beneath their shoulders and backs. Everybody breathing through open mouths by August.
Sometimes Cathy lies awake listening to him shift beside her across the darkness and thinks about how terrible human bodies are at remaining abstract once you know them long enough.
There are too many details.
(The exact shape of Chris’s wrist bones.
The pale scar beneath his chin from falling through ice at eight years old.
How he pushes hair back repeatedly while reading, even after it’s already out of his face.
The sour medicinal smell of disinfectant that lingered in his clothes for months after the twins got sick.
The callus on the side of his middle finger from writing.)
Knowledge accumulating quietly until one day it has become intimacy without anybody remembering the precise moment the border disappeared.
-
Once, before the attic, before Foxworth Hall and the endless punishments and Corrine’s lipstick stains on wine glasses downstairs, there had been a hotel room where the air conditioning broke during a thunderstorm.
Cathy remembers this because she woke sweating beside Carrie while Chris stood barefoot near the window watching lightning move across the parking lot below in white flashes. They were traveling somewhere — North Carolina maybe. Or Richmond. Their father still alive then, singing badly along to the car radio all afternoon while Corrine smoked with the window cracked despite promising repeatedly she’d quit.
Chris had been thirteen and embarrassed by everybody.
“Come back to bed,” Cathy whispered.
“In a minute.”
Rain hammered the glass hard enough to blur the broken motel sign outside into red smears across the carpet.
She remembers the shape of his shoulders in the lightning more clearly than she remembers the trip itself.
Memory is vulgar that way. Entire years collapse while one completely useless detail survives untouched.
Later, much later, in the attic bathroom with its mildew-soft ceiling and rust around the tub drain, Cathy will remember that lightning again while Chris stands behind her rolling bandages carefully after Grandmother beat her legs with the switch for dancing.
“You should’ve let me take it,” he says quietly.
The bathroom smells like rubbing alcohol and damp towels.
“You already have bruises.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Cathy watches him in the mirror instead of answering.
There are purple shadows beneath his eyes lately. Everybody in the attic is becoming simultaneously older and stranger-looking. Malnutrition sharpening things unevenly; Chris’s face losing softness around the mouth first. Cathy’s collarbones surfacing visibly whenever she changes clothes.
He keeps winding and rewinding the bandage around his hand although there’s nothing wrong with it.
Then finally, “She likes hurting you.”
The sentence comes flatly, almost distracted.
Downstairs a vacuum cleaner drones faintly through the floorboards.
Cathy twists slightly on the closed toilet lid trying to see the welts along the backs of her thighs in the mirror. Angry raised lines already darkening.
“She likes hurting everybody.”
“No,” Chris says.
Still looking at the bandage.
“It’s different.”
-
Sometimes they almost become normal again by accident.
Those are the dangerous days.
Something keeping Grandmother downstairs, Carrie laughing so hard water comes briefly through her nose, Cory building card houses near the window while Cathy brushes out his hair afterward because it tangles constantly now from neglect and poor nutrition and because nobody has cut it properly in months.
Chris reading aloud from one of the attic books while stretched on his stomach across the rug, bare feet kicking absently in the air behind him.
Ordinary — so ordinary Cathy can almost forget they are trapped.
Then something happens always.
Silence staying for too long.
A touch held accidentally past its natural ending.
One evening during a thunderstorm the lights go out entirely and the whole attic disappears into blackness thick enough that breathing feels invasive. Carrie starts crying immediately from somewhere near the bed.
Chris finds matches in the bathroom drawer after several minutes of everybody stumbling into furniture and swearing softly.
The candlelight changes the room strangely once it catches. It makes the sloped ceiling seem lower and the shadows underneath Chris’s cheekbones deeper.
Rainwater moves heavily through the gutters overhead.
“Grandmother says lightning enters through mirrors,” Carrie says from beneath a blanket.
“That isn’t how electricity works,” Chris answers automatically.
“Well maybe God pushes it.”
“God has better things to do than electrocute attics.”
“You don’t know that.”
Cory giggles. Cathy smiles.
The candle flame gutters sideways briefly from an invisible draft.
Cathy is sitting cross-legged on the rug beside Chris close enough that their shoulders touch intermittently whenever either of them moves. Heat gathers unpleasantly beneath her nightgown in the summer humidity. Everybody sticky with sweat again.
Chris smells faintly of candle smoke and Ivory soap.
Outside thunder rolls long and low across the roof.
Then Carrie says sleepily from the bed: “You two look married.”
Silence comes, embarrassed human silence where nobody knows which part requires response first.
Cory snorts laughter immediately because he laughs at anything Carrie says.
Chris reaches automatically for the candle to adjust the wax dripping down one side. His fingers brush Cathy’s wrist in the dark.
Such a stupid tiny touch.
Still.
Something moves low in her stomach suddenly hard enough to feel almost like fear.
“You’re weird,” Cathy tells Carrie finally.
“Mhm,” she says, already half asleep again.
Chris says nothing.
For the rest of the storm he keeps his attention fixed too carefully on the candle flame.
-
After Cory dies the attic changes texture completely.
Grief alters physical space and makes air resistant somehow.
The room smells constantly now of tears and dust and the sour stale scent left behind by too many sleepless bodies occupying the same grief for weeks. Carrie stops speaking entirely, Cathy keeps hearing Cory cough before remembering.
Chris washes his hands obsessively afterward.
Again and again at the bathroom sink until the skin across his knuckles cracks from soap.
“You’re bleeding,” Cathy says one night.
He glances down vaguely as though surprised by the information.
Water continues running over his wrists.
“It’s fine.”
“You need salve on that.”
“In a minute.”
But he doesn’t move.
The bathroom mirror has silvered over almost entirely beyond the edges now. Their reflections float fragmented inside it like damaged photographs; barely comprehensible.
Chris braces both hands against the sink suddenly, head lowered.
Cathy waits.
Water runs, pipes knocking somewhere inside the walls. Carrie turning over in bed.
Finally Chris says, very quietly, “I should’ve noticed sooner.”
Cathy closes the bathroom door fully behind her.
“You couldn’t have.”
“He stopped eating.”
The sentence breaks strangely around the middle. Not from crying necessarily. Chris almost never cries visibly anymore. It’s something worse, exhaustion worn down past embarrassment.
“He was our brother.”
Cathy looks at the blood diluted pink around the sink drain. At Chris’s shoulders beneath his thin undershirt. Sharper now. Everything is sharper.
Without thinking she reaches for his hand beneath the running water.
His fingers twitch once hard against hers.
Then close.
The contact feels catastrophic immediately.
Years of accidental touches. Shared beds during thunderstorms, hands brushing over books and plates and paper flowers and damp laundry. All those tiny unnoticed permissions suddenly rearranging themselves around this one deliberate thing.
Chris stares at her.
Water overflows beyond the sink edge onto the floor tiles because neither of them remembers to turn the faucet off.
Cathy can hear her own heartbeat stupidly loud inside her ears.
Somewhere downstairs a door slams.
And because grief has already ruined everything recognizable between them anyway, because Cory is dead and Carrie cries in her sleep now and their mother smells like strangers and Foxworth Hall has consumed every normal boundary piece by piece without anybody stopping it in time—
Chris kisses her.
Awkwardly at first.
Humanly.
The angle is all wrong because he’s taller now and because both of them hesitate midway through as though expecting lightning from God maybe, or Grandmother materializing instantly from the walls like punishment itself.
Instead there is only the bathroom.
Running water, soap smell. Chris’s wet cracked hands holding hers too tightly.
His mouth trembling slightly against hers before settling.
Cathy thinks absurdly of church candles melting sideways in summer heat.
When they pull apart Chris rests his forehead briefly against hers, breathing hard.
Neither of them says anything for a long time.
There are no sentences large enough for this, anyways.
-
The train station in Virginia smells like cigarette smoke trapped permanently inside old fabric seats.
Chris notices this first. Then coffee. And wet wool. Engine grease drifting intermittently through the open platform doors whenever people enter carrying cold air with them. Carrie has fallen asleep against Cathy’s shoulder almost immediately after boarding. Exhaustion finally overtaking adrenaline. Her hair needs brushing again. There’s dirt beneath one thumbnail.
Cathy sits beside the window staring outward too intently at nothing.
She hasn’t let go of Chris’s hand since the taxi.
Not continuously — sometimes adjusting luggage or fixing Carrie’s coat or rubbing absentmindedly at the healing scars along her wrists. But always finding him again afterward beneath the seat between them, fingers searching automatically until contact resumes.
Human beings adapt obscenely fast to tenderness too.
Chris watches their joined hands resting against the worn train upholstery.
Cathy’s thumb moving faintly against his knuckle in distracted little sweeps.
Outside, rain moves silver across the platform roof.
People continue arriving burdened with ordinary lives: suitcases and newspapers and crying children dragged half-awake through the station. A man arguing with a ticket clerk about departure times while holding carnations wrapped in wet paper.
Nobody looking at them.
Nobody knowing.
The relief of this feels almost unbearable.
Chris thinks suddenly of Cory’s shoes left beside the attic bed. Small sneakers with one lace broken near the tip. Nobody had packed them. Nobody could.
Memory arrives without sequence now. Cathy laughing during thunderstorms years ago. Grandmother’s ring cutting Cathy’s face open. Carrie asleep beneath dusty blankets clutching crackers in both hands. Cory feverish and smiling vaguely at the ceiling while asking whether heaven had windows.
The train jolts slightly beneath them.
Cathy’s grip tightens instinctively.
Chris turns his hand and threads their fingers together properly.
Outside Foxworth Hall is already receding into distance impossible to measure, though Chris suspects some places remain inside the body permanently regardless of geography. Like old fractures aching before rain. Like malnutrition. And shame.
Cathy leans her head briefly against his shoulder without looking at him.
The conductor shouts something down the platform.
Steam rises past the windows in white shifting clouds.
Then finally, slowly, the train begins moving south.