"Annie." There was a pause, then a rustle of breath. "It's me."

She had been putting off cleaning the attic, but the reason she was back in town was specifically to deal with the house. Already the week was half over and she had not much to show for it except for an appointment with a local real estate broker. She hadn't completely decided on selling the place, but she knew she couldn't live here. It wasn't that her life was somewhere else now -- she could drop everything and move back if she wanted. She just had to get rid of the ghosts first.

She'd spent a couple days wandering through the rooms, picking up objects here and there and setting them down again. Each one resonated with her mother's -- what? Spirit? There were mementos of her father, too, but she could only see them through the filter of her mother's preservation of them, as if she couldn't get at the thing itself, only the meaning that had been attached to it by someone else.

At the library she had found an article about winnowing the possessions that accumulated over a person's lifetime. Following its advice, she prepared a number of boxes, each labeled with thick black marker on broad masking tape: KEEP, TRASH, DONATE, RECYCLE, NO CLUE. Anastasia thought that last box was dangerous -- the temptation was too great to throw everything in there. Wrap the whole house up and label it: NO CLUE. But making another box had helped her feel that she was making progress, while postponing the moment when she would have to put them to use.

Finally she tugged down the stairs to the third floor and began to climb. As a child she'd never been allowed to go up there herself. She tried to picture the clutter waiting up there, coated with dust, and hoped to find no cobwebs or vegetation growing in the damp. When she pulled the string hanging from the rafters the light revealed a neater space than she had imagined, with furniture arranged on one side and boxes stacked on the other. Of course, her mother wouldn't have thrown things up here willy-nilly. Victoria Bayley had been the kind of woman who always knew exactly where everything was, even if she hadn't used it for years. Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad after all, she thought. But when she opened the first box and looked inside, she froze.

"It is August 23, 2001. Although I don't know when it is you'll be listening to this. It's been a long time, it's been ... I'm so sorry, it's been so many years."

It was full of neat plastic cases, each containing a cassette tape. Anastasia knew instantly what they were: her father's recorded letters from her childhood. She had vivid memories of the thrill of finding one of the padded envelopes in the mail, calling to her brother Benedict -- he'd know just from the inflection of her voice what it was. She'd take the portable tape player up to her room and shut the door to listen. "Annie," the first side was always labeled, the initial "A" printed on the sticker, the rest in her father's handwriting. Ben would stalk around outside her door, but she'd have taken the precaution of stuffing clothes around the cracks so he could hear nothing. With the volume turned low and her ear next to the speaker, she'd press play. And thirty minutes later Ben would be banging on the door, which she'd open, casual as could be, with the tape already flipped and wound to the beginning of the B side.

Then she'd take her turn keeping vigil outside his door, with the sound of her father's voice still echoing in her ears, turning over the things he'd said in her mind. When Ben emerged, they would go together to add the tape to the archive. They had an inviolable understanding, that neither of them would ever listen to the other's side of the tape, but they had evolved an elaborate ritual to ensure that it could never happen. It was like in the movies, where you needed two people turning two keys at the same second to launch a nuclear missile, only to the two of them this was much more serious. When they had been young their father had spent almost as much time abroad as he had at home. Ben used to joke that he traveled so much he had to be someone important -- a secret agent, even -- and she only corrected him some of the time. Then one trip he never came back from at all. Instead of a small padded envelope the last tape had come in a box with his other belongings and a condolence letter.

Anastasia picked up the tape on top, flipped open the case. "Annie," it said on side A, as always. She slid the tape out and flipped it over. "Annie," it said on the other side, the "A" printed and the rest handwritten. She turned it over and over again, but it was still the same.

"Annie, I have so much I want to tell you ..."

She was sitting on the hardwood floor in the living room. The voice coming out of the large, room-filling speakers wasn't right. It sounded eerie. She jabbed at the stop button and accidentally hit fast forward. She cursed under her breath, stopped the tape, backed it up to the beginning, and popped it out of the stereo.

The portable player was where it always had been. She made it up to the second floor and down the hall to her room in no time at all. Anastasia closed the door. The bed seemed so small now, still covered by the sky blue bedspread with its white puffy clouds. Ben's bed was the same -- the two were a set -- only his covers had wide stripes in maroon and navy blue.

She pressed the button with a clunk and felt the familiar flutter in her stomach as she heard the soft squeak of the leader winding past the head. Then came the voice again, "Annie ..."

Something about the way he had said her name made it uniquely hers, as if no one else truly owned that sound: Annie. You could hear both N's in the word even though her proper name had only one. When the last tape had come and she realized she would never again hear him say it, on that day she had completely disowned the name. She recalled the moment with complete clarity. Her mother had been calling her to dinner, her "Annie!" becoming increasingly irritated, sounding increasingly alien. She had come down the stairs, hand on the bannister, her head held high and perfectly level, perfectly regal. "My name," she informed her family as she slid into her seat, "is Anastasia."

"... so much I want to tell you ..."

That was his refrain, the way he opened every one of his missives. What would follow there was no way of knowing. Sometimes he told her about famous places he had visited, things he had seen. Other times it was a seemingly ordinary event he had witnessed, but in the telling he always imbued it with an air of the magical. She had a sense that he wandered through the world seeing small miracles happening all around him. Like this one time when he had been in Austria, he told her of this couple he had seen walking hand in hand. They had stopped at a street corner and lingered for few seconds before they slipped slowly away from each other. The woman had blown the man a kiss and he had snatched it out of the air and cradled it to his heart like a delicate flower, like an orchid. "I think they love each other very much. Don't you, Annie?" her father's voice had asked her conspiratorially. It was their shared secret -- though it was never alluded to outside of that one time with her ear bent to the tape player, it was theirs nonetheless.

"In fact, I've told you so many stories over the years. I never stopped, Annie, even if I didn't record them anymore. I wish I could have sent them to you, even just one more time, to explain, but believe me I couldn't. I can't, still. But there has been one story that I've been thinking of for years. I hope you'll hear this one day -- I know you will.

"I was in Philadelphia, years ago. It was November, 1987. I saw you there. You looked so different ... grown up, of course, but more than that. I nearly didn't recognize you. You were wearing a tan coat and your hair was brushed straight hanging over it -- where did your curls go? You were with a man, walking down the street, until you came to the corner and he was going one way, you the other. He blew you a kiss and you caught it, and held it to your heart. Like in Vienna, wasn't it? I was sure it was you, in that brief moment. But I don't think you loved him, did you Annie?"

She knew exactly the moment he was describing, and who the other man had been. It was Rob, and he had a wonderful voice, deep like an old radio announcer's. She didn't love him yet, but she thought she could learn to. She could play the role well enough for the time being. But though his voice was amazing, he said all the wrong things. She'd wanted so badly for him to be the one, when it ended it wasn't the relationship that she mourned, but the hope that she had harbored and finally had to let go.

"You know, when it happened, all those many years ago, it was so fast. I never had a chance to tell your mother, didn't get to say goodbye to you and Ben. But I told myself it was only Christopher Bayley who died that day. Only a name I had carried for a while, though it had been a long while. And if I was lucky, the idea of him would live on. When I saw you that day I knew that something of me, of what we once shared, still survived. But what happened to you, Annie? Were you buried, too, when that name died? And who was it who took your place? She wasn't very happy, I thought, though she wanted to be. The Annie I remember knew how to be happy."

She stopped the tape. He wouldn't stop saying that name, though it didn't sound like her anymore. It was the name of that girl who had been so excited to bring in the mail each day. She had lived in this house, and expected treasures to be delivered to its doorstep. That girl grew up, she wanted to answer, she had moved away and grown out of those silly fantasies like all girls do. Only she had done it all at once, in the space of her descent of the staircase to dinner. She had left her dreams behind because she didn't want anyone to be able to take them away.

She went downstairs and found her purse, took out the card of the real estate agent and dialed the number. "Yes hello, is this Marla? It's Annie, Annie Bayley, we spoke -- yes. That's the one. I just wanted to call and cancel our appointment for tomorrow. No, there's no problem, I've just decided not to put it on the market after all. I know. Certainly I will. If I have a change of heart you'll be the first to know. Thank you, thank you for all your help."