She usually didn’t go into the Elliot’s room. With Eliza and Meredith she trespassed boldly–marching in like she had every right–dusting behind the blinds, shaking out the sheets, pairing their socks, vacuuming their closets. Sweeping through their bedrooms like an army inspector. And how they loathed her for it! They howled and they hollered about privacy and boundaries and nosy mothers.

She took no notice. She just hummed and told them she was “doing the cleaning.” She liked knowing that her daughters had nothing they could hide from her, nothing they could stash away that she couldn’t find.

But she usually didn’t go into Elliot’s room. Except for maybe once a week to deliver clean laundry.

His room was the smallest one, at the far end of the hallway. He kept his blinds closed in the summer. It was dark in there. He had an old cherry oak desk pushed into one corner. Stacks of fat books, maps of oceans and mountain ranges, a ceramic piggy bank clanking with quarters. He kept it fairly clean though, for a boy his age. And she didn’t like to go inside. She wasn’t sure why, but she usually felt like things worked best when she just left him well alone.

That was until she found the angels. They were pinned neatly around his headboard, littering his tabletop. Paints and brushes, jam jars filled with murky water. She was dropping off a load of fresh sheets, and there they were. Blushing lightly, swathed in color, wide eyes peering up at her from crinkled papers all around the room. Peering up from the past–a strange resurrection. Her hands were shaking, and her breath caught in her throat. She should have known that boy was up to something. The way he hid away every day. Well, now she knew where he was going. She dropped the sheets, and went straight to the attic. She started cleaning.

She shouldn’t have to feel tense like this. Shouldn’t have to wonder at every turn if the boy would turn up, if he were watching her. But somehow she knew he would find her. She was stacking the last box up with paintings when she heard his footsteps. Her skin prickled. She could feel him in the room. She heaved up the box, turned around nice and slow, letting a deceptive calm wash over her features.

There he was. Dark-haired and deliberate. Small for his age, always frowning. Her hand could fit easily around his wrists. But oh he was frowning, and his dark eyes were squinting at her. He was stopped in the doorway, a look of stunned indignation, like she was invading some sacred haven, some treasured hideaway. Didn’t he know this attic belonged to her? She could hear the words before he said them. Hear their accusatory slant.

“What are you doing?” he asked. An innocent question. But oh how he policed her.

“Just cleaning.” She smiled. Began to hum. Brushed it off.

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s a mess up here Elliot, that’s why!” She didn’t mean to sound so defensive.

“But where,” his eyes darted to the corner where the angels used to sit, then to the box of paintings in her arms, “where are you taking those?”

She began stepping forward, she wanted to skirt around him, proceed to the truck without all this questioning. She wanted the angels to disappear.

“I’m taking a whole load of stuff to Salvation Army.”

She was almost to the door. He was the only thing in her way.

“You can’t take those!”

Now she was getting angry. “Of course I can take them Elliot. They’re mine!”

She could see him start to panic. See how he started to rage. She knew he didn’t understand– had no idea.

“They aren’t yours, mom!” His voice was high and harsh. “You can’t just throw them away like that… they’re mine!”

“I don’t think you understand dear,” she lifted a painting out of the box. “They are mine.” Her fingers tapped at the corner of the painting. Elliot squinted carefully.

She was pointing to a set of initials, etched faintly in the corner: ALB. Elliot shook his head, he still didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t. He would never think, never guess. Never in a million years.

“My name,” she said quietly.

And then there it was–the slow and heavy dawning, the light bulb going off. Elliot’s face fell. ALB, Abigail Larson Blythe. “Yours,” he repeated.

“That’s right…And I don’t appreciate you just coming up here and taking my stuff.”

The summer days felt endless, they blazed up and melted together-sticky and uncomfortable. Elliot hated everything about them. There was too much daylight, too much time, too much of that muggy Southern heat, and far too many bugs. The bushes shook with the constant low buzzing of the jar flies and Elliot always cringed as he scooted past them, averting his gaze from their long wax-paper wings and bulging black eyeballs.

Summer meant too many hours feeling cooped up. Too much time listening to Eliza and Meredith argue over who had the cuter cut-offs or who went to the better pool party, and mom humming idly all the while as she chopped up zucchini–like they weren’t making any racket at all. Too much of Him drinking on the porch, slamming screen doors, starting up the truck with long noisy sputters and driving off for hours at a time.

Elliot much preferred the refuge of Fall. The slight chill in the air, the back-to-school scuttle, the fresh notebooks and clean classrooms. The crispness, the quiet–far from his hot, leaning house. Far from Meredith and Eliza who went to Jackson Creek Junior High now. Far from his mother’s zucchini, or the constant dull buzzing of the vacuum (like the jar flies). She was always cleaning, always humming. And most of all, far from Him.

But the sad truth, Elliot discovered, was that summer was an inevitable, unavoidable season–and he simply had to learn to suck it up and bear it. When he couldn’t escape to a quiet classroom, when he couldn’t find refuge in fall–he found it in the attic.

Father told him not to go up there once. He said the floorboards were weak. He said they weren’t strong enough to support some snot-nosed little boy stomping all over them. But what did He know? He just didn’t want Elliot to find all the old boxes stuffed with those nasty magazines of his. Well, he’d found them. And a lot more. They were lodged in between piles of yellowing bank records and the tottering heap of Grandma Lois’s furniture. Elliot made a hobby of unearthing these ancient family relics–he picked through the mess carefully, counting each item as a mini discovery.

When Elliot was young he had visions of painted angels–like the ones he found on dusty canvases in the attic. Most of them were unfinished; roughly sketched lines with dabs of color only in their cheeks and wings. His mother was the artist. The angels had been her hobby at one time–her escape. They had perfectly folded wings, gentle hands, and white flowing robes like smoke billowing around their naked feet. Sometimes there were no wings. Just a warm glow, healthy flushed white skin stretched over slight and elegant frames that stood suspended like magic in midair.

Elliot was surprised when he discovered his mother had made them. He found them there in the attic, tucked away like a treasure hidden and forgotten and thought: Michelangelo! Da Vinci! Raphael!

Then he noticed etched faintly in the corners of each of them 3 delicate letters: ALB–Abigail Larson Blythe. No Michelangelo. Just mom.

Mom who used to paint angels until life got in the way. Until the kids came and so did the late nights and the endless chauffeuring and the meetings and the dishes and the doctor’s appointments. After that the angels were stacked up together and stowed away with grandma Lois’s old furniture and boxes of family records. They were unfinished projects, unfit to hang on any wall or in any gallery. Stacked away and forgotten.

But Elliot found them; he traced their rough outlines with his fingers, and made them his own. Elliot found them when he went to the attic to hide.