Chapter 13
Avalon had read up on all the best methods for removing wallpaper, all of which involved spraying and steaming and so forth. She’d dutifully watched a number of achingly tedious videos about the process, keeping her promise not to bug her parents.
And she’d given it her best shot. But none of the methods were foolproof. Only once or twice did that hideous black-and-gold wallpaper neatly peel away from the wall in little satisfying sheets, like a sunburn. The rest of it seemed to have become one with the wall.
She wound up doing alotof scraping. It was brutally hard work but jabbing a metal implement at a wall was both punishment and reward.
The reward part was burning off a little angst.
The punishment part was because she felt like a shit for being mean to Mac.
She jabbed at the wall a little harder.
Chick Pea was happily dozing in the sun in her doggie bed downstairs, after gnawing for a while on a toy with what teeth she had left. Avalon was fully aware that she could have a heap of vet bills in her future. It hadn’t mattered a damn once she saw Chick Pea. The house felt like it actually had a soul now, a furry one. And truthfully, having a pet felt like exhaling a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Mac had known that. But he also knew of her inclination to fall in love with creatures whose lives tended to be startlingly finite.
Funny that he’d been able to identify Corbin’s face even when it was rolled into a tube. Mac had clearly done some Googling, which on the one hand was normal and rather gratifying. On the other hand, there wasn’t much she could do to find out about him.
Apart from take jabs to see where it hurt.
There had been zero satisfaction in watching him go still when she hit her mark, though. She might as well have jabbed herself.
She had to hand it to him, though:Tools Monthlywas actually pretty damn funny. Funny because it was true.
And Mac had said “we.” When “we” go to the vet. He included his cat as a little partner in that sentence, and this struck her as almost unendurably poignant and cute.
As she worked, she’d attached her phone to one of her Bluetooth speakers and set it to shuffle. That was a mistake, because some of the songs were songs Corbin insisted she listen to, by bands so obscure that he might actually have been the only person to have ever heard of them.
She kind of just wanted to hear Erasure’s greatest hits right now.
But then, suddenly, up popped a song by one of those Corbin-curated bands she actually loved: The Antlers. “Stairs to the Attic.” It began urgently but quietly, barreling toward an anthemic climax. It was all about the unbearable lure of closed doors, about the wonder and pain of them. And how when the singer made it to the top of the stairs, all he found was a whole universe of stairs.
“Whatever you do, don’t go in the attic,” Mac had said to her.
Damned if that wasn’t a metaphor for Mac in general.
Right then and there it seemed important to drop everything and go up into the attic.
The narrow flight of stairs—good dark wood mounted on a system of heavy chain pulleys—was down the hall in a modest-sized room probably used as an office over the years. She’d dumped the bean bag chair her parents had brought along in that room.
She experimentally put all of her weight on the bottom step.
No groaning or ominous creaking ensued; the chains held her.
So she took another step. Jounced a little. Again: no ominous creaking or groaning suggested she might not want to continue.
So she scaled the next and the next and the next.
When she was near the top she stood on her toes and looped her hand around one of the handles on the square door in the ceiling and pulled.
Nothing happened. It simply didn’t give at all.
So far the Mac metaphor appeared to be holding.
She peered up at it. It was likely sealed stubbornly by a decade of old paint and dust.
She scaled another step for leverage, then looped both of her hands around the door handle and yanked. Hard. A grinding crunch almost toppled her from her perch, but she caught her balance just in time. This time her yank had yielded an intriguing wedge of darkness. Her heart gave an exultant little leap.
