I take out my cell phone. I make sure it’s on vibrate, and then I text Aisha.

wtf???

She doesn’t respond. My blood boils.

seriously. wtf.

Nothing.

If I’m stuck here for a full day, or worse, overnight, I’m in trouble. There’s no bathroom up here, and I already have to pee, damn it. I could crawl across the floor to the box and go through it. But when I press down on the flooring below me, it creaks. I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck behind this chair.

Finally, after seventeen minutes, my phone buzzes.

Didn’t want to text you when I got out cause I figured your sound was on. Forgot to keep my eye on my phone. Trying to get you out.

I type back furiously.

Well try harder. You abandoned me!

Wtf choice did I have?

I need to pee

Well, pee. Mice probably do it.

Mice?!?

Sorry. Not good in a crisis.

Wait. Is this a crisis?

See what I mean?

I put my phone away. Clearly I’m gonna need to figure this one out myself. How do you get out of an attic without taking the stairs? The window doesn’t open, and even if did, it’s a small, round thing, and it’s pretty high up.

I hear a noise and I tense my muscles. It’s a sliding sound. And then the slide gets louder.

Shit.

He’s lowering the stairs.

He’s coming up to the attic.

Shit shit shit. How am I going to explain this? Oh hi, Pastor. I just enjoy crouching behind chairs in strangers’ attics. It’s my thing.

Slow footsteps enter the attic, and then the light comes on. I crouch down low, and from my angle I can see the pastor’s shoes and the bottom of his pants as he walks directly toward me.

I used to play this video game set in Nazi Germany where you hide from the SS guards. They march right at you, and you only see their boots and the bottom of their legs. Sometimes they stop before they get to you, and other times you hear them yell something in German and then gunfire, and you’re dead. This feels exactly like that.

Pastor Logan strides slowly to the chair, and then to the left, like he’s going around it. I close my eyes, as if that will make me invisible when he steps on me.

I brace for contact. But there is none. Then I hear some sounds coming from a speaker at ear level. He’s put on a record.

I take a silent, slow, deep breath. The song starts with a harmonica, then a steel guitar comes up, and the beat starts. Then there’s a huge rustling noise. The pastor has sat down in the chair, inches from me. There’s no way this ends well.

The pastor starts tapping his foot to the beat. It must be that album that my grandfather had put our last name on — Steve something. It’s old music. The lyrics are all about going down to Laurel to see a girl. I try to imagine the pastor being young enough to think about going somewhere to see a girl. Surely my granddad felt that way about my grandmother when they were young. It’s all so impossible to imagine, the past — when old people were young and had the pervy thoughts I have today.

A cell phone rings, and I automatically tense up. But it isn’t mine.

The pastor stands up and strolls over to the record player to stop the music. He answers the phone. I stay as still as I can and try not to breathe.

“Hello? … This is he…. How can I help you? … Well, I should be heading back that way in an hour or two…. Oh my word…. When you say emergency, what do you — … Okay…. Of course…. I’ll be happy to — okay. Good-bye.”

The pastor mutters, “Dadgummit,” and I watch as his lower legs carry him back toward the stairs. He takes a long, long time to climb down, and I find myself holding my breath longer than I need to. The stairs slowly rise up into the attic, and the trapdoor gently closes.

I exhale. Out the window, the pastor ambles to his car, the car lights flash, and he backs up and pulls onto Rimrock Road.

I text madly, Get here! Now! He’s gone!

No response. Damn it. C’mon, Aisha. C’mon.

I hurry over to the stairs and try to push the trapdoor open. It won’t budge. I check my phone again. Nothing. I call, figuring maybe she’ll hear the ring.

And then I hear a ringtone — something sort of jazzy — playing within the house, and the stairs are pulled down, and there’s Aisha at the bottom, smiling at me.

“Thank God,” I say. “He got a call and left.”

“Who do you think made the call? Give me a little credit,” she says. I’m about to climb down when she adds, “We oughtta take the stuff — the box. Clearly can’t stay here. He comes and goes too much.”

I figure, What the hell? I pass the box to her. I climb down, we close the hatch, and we run out the back door as quickly as we can.

BACK IN MY dad’s basement, Aisha explains what she had to do to get me out of there. She wanted to call Pastor Logan right away, but she didn’t have his number. My mom was on the phone with someone back in New York, so Aisha bugged my dad, who was not too happy that she actually wanted to speak to the pastor. He almost didn’t give her the number, but finally relented, telling her she was crazy for wanting to talk to some religious dude.

“I’m sorry,” she explains. “I know you must have been freaked when I left you up there.”

“I was fine,” I say, lying.

The first thing we take out of the box are a stack of letters, some opened and most not. Every single envelope looks like it’s been through a flood. In some cases, the ink has washed off entirely. In others, it’s just been smudged beyond recognition.

On one, I can just about make out a postmark with the date October 19, 1988. The place it comes from, however, I can’t decipher — only what appears to be an S or an E as the first letter. On another, the month and day are unreadable, but the year appears to be 1985. The stamp is Duke Ellington, and it’s twenty-two cents.

There seem to be about twenty of these letters. A few have opened from the moisture, but I can tell that the letters inside have never been removed or read. I take one out of an open envelope, and the ink has bled over the entire piece of stationery and dried.

“Do you think these are from your grandfather to your dad?” Aisha asks.

I don’t even have to answer, because I lift away an old, empty photo frame, and underneath, in a plastic baggie, is another opened letter. I grab it and just about tear the baggie open. Aisha takes the box and keeps digging.

The letter is short, and it’s in the same handwriting as the letter my grandfather sent to the pastor. Unlike most of the other letters, this one has no water damage. I read it out loud.

I look up at Aisha in amazement. She returns the look.

“You think my dad ever saw this?” I ask.

“He said he never heard from him again. And yet this is open,” Aisha says. Her eyes are wide. Wider than I’d expect, like she’s even more shocked by all this than I am. “You ready to get your mind blown?”

“Um,” I say. “Try me?”