The Last Word, Afterall

Maggie Corrigan planned to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday alone. She’d given her hovering staff the day off, sent them to hover elsewhere, just so she could be alone. She’d assured them she wouldn’t fall down the stairs, or climb a ladder and fall, breaking her hip again or venture too close to the balcony off her bedroom. She sent them protesting their way down the drive and off together to commiserate over the vagaries of old women.

Even still, she was surrounded by people. Oh, not the flesh and blood sort of relatives (whom she’d always wondered were relatively what?) or the ghostly sort, although she knew for a fact that several of those lingered close. She’d banished them for the day as well. No, today she was hemmed in by and almost suffocating from, a century of memories.

No decent person should live long enough to be this weighed down by mere memories, she thought, grumbling at herself as she slowly, carefully, climbed the stairs to the third floor. She hadn’t been allowed access to the attic since she’d broken her hip some twenty years before, but today, by golly, she was going up to the attic. She might regret it tomorrow, but then, at least, tomorrow’s twinges or aches could be attributed to something other than pure old age. Besides, she had to know if it was still there.

After climbing the last narrow flight of stairs up to the attic, three floors above her lavender and lace suite below, she paused in the doorway, looking at the accumulation of lives stored in the rambling attic.

Dust motes danced in the air currents created by her arrival. Faint morning sunlight left the paintings, chests, toys and boxes all faintly colorless. A shadowed sepia landscape of marriages and mirages, births won and battles lost that stretched before her like a fog enshrouded blue road curling off into the distant mountains.

Gaining the window’s edge, she sat, gingerly, in the brocade rocking chair that had mysteriously disappeared from below stairs. Always one of her favorites, she now relaxed into it, feeling how the chair cushioned her frail (fashionably slim) body, wrapping itself around her in the first genuine hug she’d felt in years.

“I missed you too, old chair. I rocked Jimmy and Francis, Eleanor and Micah in you, I did. I held the wee one who went to her grave nameless. Now you, too, are relegated to uselessness here in the attic. We are much the same, you and I."

She laughed softly. "The family would think me dotty to be up here talking to a rocking chair. Bah! What do they know about much of anything!”

Maggie reached for the cigarette box lying on the table next to the chair. Cigarette boxes, no longer being in fashion (a shame, really) were lucky to find themselves relegated to the attic rather than being tossed with all the other things people deemed too old, raggedy, ancient, or clutter-some to have around. This one, the lid decorated with a decoupage-d country photograph of the road up to the main house, had been her man Thornton’s favorite box. After he’d passed, she’d taken to keeping her cigarettes in there until the family insisted and nagged until she’d had to quit simply because no one would get them for her, and she had no way to get them for herself. Then it became the repository for special things. It sat, layered in dust, exactly where she’d placed it the last time she’d been in the attic. Hidden in plain sight, as Poe would say, she thought to herself. And, it had worked.

Her hands rested, loosely clasped atop the box in her lap. She still had fine, long, perfectly manicured nails. Despite her granddaughter’s insistence that old ladies, (ahem! mature women of a certain age, thank you very much) did not wear bright red nail polish, but wore instead, pale pinks or clear polish, this was one battle she’d won.

Her mind flicked back through the years, much like peering through the zoopraxiscope she’d seen when she was seven at the World's Columbian Exposition. She'd been in Chicago for that birthday in 1893. The images changed with each flicker back to when she first wore a shade close to her current red. What was it? Oh yes; she’d called it Poison Ivy Red.

She remembered how it had looked against the letter she’d received from her first intended informing her that he’d decided to join the war effort, and asking her to wait for him. She remembered how she felt, knowing he hadn’t had the courage to tell her this in person. The image of how the letter looked clenched in her hand with the poison ivy fingernails cutting into her pale skin caused the flickering to pause for a breath. Images flickered forward now to her hands, red nails shaking, as they held the telegram his mother showed her. That was the last time she’d worn that particular shade of red. Too much like what she’d imagined his blood looked like soaking into the snow poisoning the German landscape. Closing her eyes, shutting that memory back into the shadows, she opened the box on her lap.

Maggie smiled; her face a topographical map of fine roadways traveled, her eyes, tearing now, as they hadn’t a moment earlier. Her Will. They hadn’t found it after all, although they had searched all the intelligent and logical places. Her will that had kept the family strong even as it had turned in on itself. Her will, strong and enduring enough to trim bleeder branches. Her will banded in brass-bound love. They had never understood that. They never had, and wouldn’t now, she was certain. Abandoned fiction, the scribblings of an impossibly old lady, not even worth a moment's glance. Yet those few pale lilac pages, witnessed, signed and dated would be her final and unassailable word.

Afternoon shadows shifted, illuminating the bowed silvered head of Maggie Corrigan, bright defiantly red nails holding her will in her lap.



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