Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [29]
The attic had two gabled windows overlooking the front lawn. One was directly over my bedroom, providing a view identical to the one I saw from my dresser, but from higher elevation. I pushed an old desk against this window to create my secret office on the small square of weight-bearing floor, partitioning the space off from the rest of the room with a tall discarded bookcase placed three feet opposite the desk. For increased privacy, I braced dowel rods between the shelf and the wall on each side, hanging a shower curtain on one and Brian’s old Superman bedsheets on the other.
The attic was stifling in summer and unbearably cold in winter. I alternated a desk fan and space heater accordingly. In summers I sat in my church slip; in winters I wore long underwear. I considered the harsh conditions romantic. Writers were meant to suffer. In an age of electric light bulbs and jet printers, suffering was hard to come by.
For years, no one suspected my hideout, and even when my mother did find out, she didn’t tell me. Without ever speaking directly of the matter, we came in time to the quiet understanding that no one was to go into the attic without my permission. If she and Brian thought my behavior strange, they didn’t say.
From my window I tracked our neighbor, Mr. Matlon, who came and went from his house in the early hours of the morning. I imagined he was a spy. Also, I imagined the red blinking light of the radio tower was actually a beacon to help invisible aliens direct their course as they flew in the skies, watching over us like guardian angels. I wrote short stories and poems and began work on a novel. I cut people from magazines to use as characters in my plots. The door to the attic was my wardrobe into Narnia, my portal into the strange dreams of Wonderland.
Now I sat down at the old desk, my knees bumping against the edge of the tabletop. It had always been too short for my long legs. The items on the desk were still carefully arranged in preparation for a night’s hard work. Sheets of paper were stacked at my right. The pencils in the plastic Disneyland cup were sharpened, the pens capped. To my pleasure, the reading lamp clicked to life.
A family photograph sat on the left corner of the desk. We were on summer vacation in Austin, Texas, for one of Dad’s business trips. Though he was only in his mid-thirties, his hair was turning white. In the photo he’s standing beside Mom, who holds one-year-old Brian propped on her waist. I am between them, a spindly six-year-old in a flower-print jumper, hair a fringe of friz around my face, overbite smile proud. Dad has one hand around my mother’s waist, the other resting protectively on my shoulder. It was this protective gesture that made the photograph one of my favorites; I liked the way he spread his broad arms to encompass all three of us. He left one year later.
My parents’ separation had been abrupt and final: My father was home and then he was not. He stayed at a Motel 6 for a month, then moved into an old house in Cleveland. Brian and I spent every other weekend with him until my freshman year of high school, when he moved to Atlanta to live with his then-girlfriend, Linda. He appeared at holidays and at our high school graduations, his life tethered to ours by a thin bloodline.
As the years passed, I absorbed information about his life the way I took bad news about foreign countries: with a stirring of abstract sympathy but with no real concern. Linda got pregnant. They married; they bought a house; they divorced. Over the years he changed houses, jobs,