Painted Shut

Daniel had not been inside the house for twenty years, and the first thing he understood, standing in the hallway with the funeral still in his shoes, was that the house had been waiting. That was not a rational thought and he knew it was not a rational thought. Houses did not wait. Houses were brick and timber and the slow patience of materials, and his mother had lived in this one alone for the two decades since Daniel had left it and not come back, and the house had simply done what houses do, which is stand. But he stood in the hallway with his coat still on and the cold smell of the place rising around him — beeswax and old paper and something underneath that he had no name for and did not want one — and the word that came was *waiting*, and he could not make it go away. He had not wanted to come. His sister Petra had handled everything, the hospice and the arrangements and the long sad administration of a parent's ending, because Petra had stayed close and Daniel had not, and Daniel had moved cities and changed his number twice and built a life with a careful distance set into the centre of it like a foundation. He had loved his mother. He wanted to be clear with himself about that, standing in her hallway. He had loved her and he had phoned on the right days and he had simply, for twenty years, not been able to come back to the house, and he had never let himself ask why, because the not-asking was load-bearing, and you do not test a load-bearing thing. But the house was his now. His and Petra's, and Petra had a family and a life three hundred miles away and had said, gently, on the phone, *you're the one with time, Dan, would you go and start sorting it,* and so here he was, with the keys, with the cold smell, with the waiting. He made himself move. He walked through the downstairs rooms and they were smaller than memory had kept them, the way childhood rooms always are, and they were full of his mother — her chair, her books, the particular way she had arranged her few good plates — and he found he could bear it. It was sad in the ordinary survivable way that grief is sad. He could sort these rooms. He could box the plates and sit in the chair once and let himself cry and then get on with it. It was the upstairs that stopped him. He climbed the stairs and the house ticked and settled around him and the second floor was as the ground floor had been, smaller and sadder and bearable — until he reached the end of the landing, where the ceiling stepped up, and he saw the attic door. And his body knew the attic door before his mind did. That was the only way Daniel could describe it, then and afterward. He came around the turn of the landing and saw the low white-painted door set into the slope of the ceiling, and his heart was suddenly going hard and high in his chest, and his mouth had gone dry, and there was a cold falling sensation in him as though the floor had dropped an inch — and all of it arrived before any thought, before any memory, before he had consciously registered what he was even looking at. The body remembered. The body was afraid of that door, and the mind stood blank and ignorant behind the body's fear like a man arriving late to a room where something has already happened. Daniel made himself walk down the landing to it. Every step was a small negotiation. The attic door was a perfectly ordinary attic door, low, white, a simple iron latch, the kind of door every house of this age had — and as he got closer he saw the thing that made the back of his neck go cold, the detail his eye had not yet let his mind have. The door had been painted shut. Not painted carelessly, not stuck by years of damp. Painted shut deliberately, thoroughly — a thick seam of white gloss running the entire join between the door and its frame, several coats of it, built up over time, the work of someone who had wanted that door to be not merely closed but sealed. And the paint was on the inside of the seam as much as the outside, which meant — Daniel crouched, his knees not quite steady, and looked — which meant the sealing had been done, at least in part, from the landing side, by someone standing exactly where Daniel was crouching now, deciding that whatever was up there would stay up there. His mother. It had to have been his mother; she had lived here alone for twenty years. His mother had painted the attic shut. And here was the thing, the thing that made Daniel sit down slowly on the cold landing floor with his back against the wall and his heart still going wrong — Daniel had grown up in this house. He had lived in it for the first eighteen years of his life. And he could not remember the attic. Not the room itself, not the inside of it, not one single time he had ever climbed into it or what it had held. There was simply a blank where the attic should be in his memory of the house, a clean smooth nothing, the exact shape and texture of the white-painted seam on the door. He had spent twenty years unable to come back to this house and had never let himself ask why. He looked at the sealed door, and his body shook with a fear that had no story attached to it, and he understood that he was finally, whether he wanted to or not, going to find out.