After entering the bedroom closet and climbing the final flight of stairs, I lifted the wooded door off its hinges and entered the secret place of my childhood dreams. Inside my grandparents’s attic, a world of the distant past lay before me defined in a way I could not understand. A metal football game with small tin players, a stuffed sock monkey, a wooden rocker loaded with pale-skinned dolls with half-cocked eyes, a Royal typewriter, a model airplane, a trunk. The dust had not moved in many years, since my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease and my grandmother’s hips made it difficult for her to walk. Now it filled the air and glistened in the sunlight of an early Saturday morning through the cracks in the window blinds. If only she hadn’t fallen again. If only he could remember how to take care of himself. If only my wife could become pregnant. Then, if fate smiled, could I forget my problems, our problems, and start my own family.

             Thirty years before, I had come to the attic with my cousin. We often played in the room, not because of a spectacular view or because no one knew where we had gone, but because as eight-year old boys, we were told not to go into the attic. Grandpa had placed boxes over rotting floorboards camouflaging them against our childish games. In a way, this made it all the more exciting. Walking or skipping along the rotting floors meant possibly falling into the guest bedroom beneath. I had fallen through the ceiling once before in the attic of my other grandfather’s house. Bits of plaster fell to the floor and my legs dangled overhead. I wasn’t scared, and I remember thinking how I could explain my protruding legs, repair the ceiling, and avoid a beating.

             My cousin and I would come to the attic to avoid the grownups and play our knot games. He’d tie me up and time me to see how long it would take me to escape. Then it would be my turn to tie him up. We had no idea of the games grownups played with the same ropes.

             I checked inside the rocker for my old rope. Grandpa had returned it to the garage 20 or 30 years ago, and I was sure he wondered why the boys had it in the attic again. No, the rope was no longer in the rocker, and my cousin was dead. He had died of an intestinal problem, unrelated to the rope games, when I was in college. They didn’t tell me he had died until a week later. When I complained, my mother said she knew I was too busy to come for the funeral.

             I would have been there.

             The old house would have to be sold. The attic would have to be cleaned. The rocker, the football game, the monkey, the dolls, would have to be sold or trashed. Although they were memories, they were somebody else’s memories. To me, they were junk. As for the old trunk…. I went over and lifted a corner. It was too heavy for me to carry it downstairs and needed to be emptied.

             I spun the trunk around, saw a rusted, old Yale lock protecting its contents, and gave the old dear a twist. The lock didn’t falter, but the trunk hinge crumbled. I brushed away the splinters and lifted the hood. Papers. No doubt, these were the "important papers," as my father would call them. Old life insurance that had expired, tax records, mortgage for the house.

             Under a copy of Life Magazine with Ernest Hemingway on the cover featuring Death in the Afternoon, a thick, legal-sized envelope caught my eye. No longer yellow, it had turned a hazy white with yellow outlines where other "important papers" sat atop it. Too heavy to be old tax filings, I unwound the brittle string to remove the thick document.

             It was a type-written manuscript. On the cover it read:

WHEN A WOMAN LIES

JOHN DEAN PAGE

             It was my grandfather’s name, and I flipped through the paper to skim the pages. There were 667 double-spaced pages, produced by, I was sure, the old Royal typewriter that sat next to the sock monkey. What I wasn’t so sure of was why a man who never said much and spent most of his life as a maintenance man had written anything.

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