The door in grandma’s attic

When I was a kid, I loved visiting my grandma. But that door in the attic always terrified me.

She was a typical little old lady. Her reading glasses hung casually on her nose, the corners of her mouth always cinched up into a grin.

Her endless surplus of sweet treats and tendency to spoil was quite a contrast to what I was used to getting at home. Sure, my grandma’s fashion sense often made me the butt of jokes on the playground, but her cookies and kind nature could warm the heart of an avalanche.

But, late at night, while I lay on that old cot and squeezed my eyes tightly against the dark, that door would call to me. From the attic, the voices would drift down to me. Through the cracks in the floorboards. Through drafty doorways.

Like a paper airplane, it would waft, drift, and float until nose-diving into my earhole.

“ Sam, come open this door!”

No matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut, sleep wouldn’t come, but the voice would. Eventually, I would succumb to a nothingness slumber. No dreams. No nightmares. Just me waking from a sleep I didn’t remember falling into. And the door would be silent.

Until the next night when it would call to me again.

“ Sam, come open this damn door,” it would say more forcefully. If I’m being honest, the aggression just made me want to melt deeper into my bed. I wasn’t used to being talked to in such a way. I wasn’t used to the tones of an angry man’s voice.

My mother had left my father when I was still a baby. I didn’t know the story any more than I knew him — which is to say, not at all. And my grandfather had left my mother’s life on similar terms. The father figures in my life were mostly those I watched on TV. And a teacher here or there.

And weird Mr. Brunson, who lived next to my grandma with his eyes too close together and his tendency to shift his fake teeth around in his mouth while you talked to him. I didn’t speak to him much.

And then, one day, he was gone, too. He must have gone out for milk and cigarettes, the neighborhood women would joke as they sat on my grandma’s porch sipping lemonade so tart it would turn your face inside out. I assumed old age had taken him, and the ladies didn’t want to scare me.

But, each night, their voices would call me from behind the creepy door in Grandma’s attic. The voices of all the men I’d ever known or should have known or might have known.

They would call down, “Sam, come open this door.”

And, “you’re one of us, Sam.”

And so, one night around my 15th birthday, when my favorite hobby was doing the opposite of what I was told, I made my way up those creaky old stairs to the attic and stood in front of the door.

“ Let us out, Sam.” A voice pleaded with me — weird Mr. Brunson with his too-close eyes, liver spots, and teeth that never knew where to rest.

And I was compelled. I’m unsure if it was defiance, camaraderie, or just a simple choice, but I opened the creepy door and grandma’s attic. And there they all were.

The plumber from last Sunday. My second-grade teacher Mr. Shorts — no, really, that was his name. “Jack from across the street,” my mom called him. And there, in the back, resting in too comfortable leather lay-z-boys, my father and grandfather.

“ Well, son, it’s good to see you,” they said in tandem.

The room they inhabited was more defiant than I was. It stretched far beyond the limits of the rickety old bones of grandma’s house. In fact, it stretched on for further than I could see. And in every direction, men.

Plumbers, taxi drivers, train conductors, doctors, all nature of men in all nature of dress and occupation. All staring in my direction. All with wide-eyed at first, gleeful, and then terrified.

“ I thought we had longer, Sam,” I heard my mother’s voice say from behind me before pushing me through the old creepy doorway in grandma’s attic. “You’ll find yourself in good company here,” she said before slamming the door shut.

And now every day is the same. We don’t age. We never get sick. We never suffer any of life’s experiences, and life never suffers us.

Cookies under the door for breakfast, brownies for lunch, cake for dinner. Every day is the same as the last.

All of us prisoners in grandma’s attic. The sweetest jail imaginable.