caught something familiar against the wall to his left. It was a chest, blue in color, like what a magician might use for an escape trick, although not quite that large. CJ crossed to it and knelt down, his hand feeling for and finding the latch.
Before he’d left for Vanderbilt, he’d cleaned his room out. His father had threatened to turn it into an office the second CJ walked out the door, and CJ decided he would rather move all his possessions himself rather than risk what his father would have done with them. The entire left corner of the attic, and halfway down the left wall, housed the contents of CJ’s room, and he hadn’t seen any of it since the day be walked out the door in 1993.
The first thing he saw was his baseball glove—the one he’d used in high school and that he hadn’t taken to college. He’d spent that summer working in a new glove, tossing it against the wall, stomping on it, rubber-banding a ball in its pocket—all the abuse a ball player had to inflict to make his glove ready for the game, to make it feel like an extension of his hand.
He set it aside and reached for something else in the chest, remembering that he’d packed some of his more important possessions there. It told him something about how the seasons of life shuffle, or reset, priorities that he’d forgotten about, all of these things within just a month of leaving New York. His hand came up with a faded envelope that bore a Vanderbilt letterhead: his scholarship offer. He put that aside too, and when he shifted his weight, when the single overhead bulb cast more of its light on the contents of the battered case, he saw his senior yearbook.
Dorothy had gained the top of the stairs and stood over him, but she didn’t say anything as he pulled the yearbook out and started to flip through its pages. It didn’t take him long to find his own picture. He laughed when he saw it, and then grimaced when he studied the shirt he was wearing. With a headshake he moved past it, glancing at the odd picture here, the random message there, people who’d scribbled memories and goodbyes on the pages. He didn’t know where any of them were now.
He was about to put the yearbook back in the chest when he reached the pages between which he’d stuck his team photo. The glossy print had attached itself to one of the book’s pages and it made a slight tearing sound as he pulled it free. He couldn’t believe how thin he was in the picture. Probably all of 150 pounds. He started to put the picture back, to end this trip down memory lane and help his mom with the table, when he spotted the neat handwriting beneath a girl’s picture that had been hidden behind the baseball photo.
For a long while he studied Julie’s picture—until a shifting of body weight behind him reminded him that his mother was there. Before he closed the book, though, he read what Julie had written all those years ago. Then he closed the book, placed it back in the chest, and shut the lid.
“Where’s that table?” he asked, perhaps a bit too gruffly.
“Right there,” Dorothy said, and there was a particular tone in her voice that made CJ look at her. And right then she didn’t look like the agitated creature he’d spoken with downstairs. She looked like his mother, with perhaps a dash of melancholy. With a small smile she took him by the arm and led him across the attic.
She was right, it was a small table. It was the end table that used to sit by the couch, by the arm near the piano. It was light enough that he could carry it down by himself. But before he did that, he had to remove what looked like a few old black-and-white photos from its surface. He scooped them up and flipped through them. There were only three, and two of them were shots of himself, Graham, and Maryann when CJ was maybe four, taken by a fence at the house on Lyndale—a fence that a storm had taken a few years later.
The third picture was of a man who appeared to be about the age George would have been around the time the other pictures were taken, but it wasn’t his father.
“Who’s this?” he asked, holding