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believed existed. He stopped trying. He took to books instead, and
sketching the girl’s face with pencils. He started writing poetry
for her, and stories about all the hidden, magical corners of
cities. He wrote about tiger trainers and actors and old men making
chocolate. He sketched the faces of the hidden city’s policemen,
mobsters, bankers, and politicians. He wrote a great many stories,
few of them any good. And one day, after another year had passed,
sixteen year old Bobby was surprised when the subway stopped
at Rue de L’illusion .
    This time, the platform was not empty, though
no one got on the subway and only Bobby got off.
    Jenny was there. She wore a yellow sundress
now. She smiled and took Bobby by the hand and led him to the
streets.
    “ You should give us taxi
drivers,” she told him. “And janitors. And I’d like to eat
something other than chocolate, you know.”
    “ I can’t do that,” he told
her. But he carried his journals and sketchpads in a
backpack.
    “ No one else can,” she told
him.
    So she sent him home, this time with a kiss
on the cheek. She said, “I’ll be here again tomorrow.”
    On the train, before it had even left the
station, Bobby started writing a story about Jenny. For next
time.

12 January
     
    There’s nothing in the attic.
    She moved in three weeks ago. She sleeps
fine. There are no strange noises, but there is one door she never
considered. In the ceiling.
    It haunts her now. When she walks through the
short hall, to bedroom or bathroom or living room, she doesn’t
always glance up but she feels the weight of it. The not knowing.
The uncertainty. The possibilities.
    There might be an antique she could pawn,
some rare Russian thimble or a Civil War era rifle or an
ivory-handled mirror. There might be evidence of a crime, the
secret books with details of shady deals, a murder weapon, a body
in a plastic bag stuffed into a trunk.
    She has friends over one night for beer and
wine and food and music. Sometime near midnight, she tells them
about the unopened attic like it’s a ghost story. What if simply
opening the attic door unleashes some demonic entity bent on
possession and sex and death? What if she finds that tattered,
dusty remnants of a jilted bride’s gown and the bride didn’t want
to be disturbed? What if a spring-loaded, rust-coated trap is set
to spring?
    No one opens the attic door that night.
    She doesn’t have a step ladder. Eventually,
after a few weeks fending off questions about spiders, squirrels,
skeletons, and lost silverware, she drags a chair beneath the attic
entrance. It’s merely a thin piece of wood. She pushes it up and
out of the way. The attic is dark, and high above her. The chair is
barely enough for her to drag herself up.
    She retrieves a flashlight first. With a
little bit of struggle, she hauls herself into the low,
slope-ceiling attic.
    It’s not really much more than a crawl space.
She shines the light into the corners, disturbing dry cobwebs,
leaving eddies of shadow in the beam’s wake. There’s no floor, only
the narrow edge of 2x4s crisscrossing a sea of pink insulation.
There are no mice, no chests, no forgotten artwork, nothing by way
of treasure. There’s one discarded tee shirt, small enough for a
child, too small for her. It’s red, but the graphic on its front is
cracked, faded, and indecipherable.
    Partly out of respect, partly cleanliness,
and yes, partly for fear, she takes the tee shirt with her when she
leaves. She climbs down without incident. The chair holds her. She
doesn’t fall. She closes up the attic and, as there’s no reason not
to, she forgets about it.
    And why not? There’s nothing in the
attic.
    But she had a dream once, as a child, that
she visited her godmother’s apartment in New York. In reality, past
the front door there had been a kitchen on the left, doors to a
bathroom and a bedroom on the right. But in the dream, another door
had been squeezed between them, opening onto a