Leonardo Dicaprio Cheers

Chapter 5 — The Attic Breathes

The storm that night never truly ended; it only learned to whisper. Rain slid through the gutters in soft streams, and every drip found a note that blended into a single low hum. Thomas lay awake listening to it until he could no longer tell if the sound came from outside or inside the walls.

By dawn the hum had shifted pitch, deeper, slower—breathing. He dressed quietly and stepped out to the shed. The earth where he had buried the box had sunk in, the dirt dark and loose. When he brushed it aside, the lid of the box was already open, though he remembered tying it shut. The marble inside was faintly lit from within, its cloudy swirl turning in time with that subterranean pulse.

Thomas picked it up. The vibration passed from the glass into his fingertips and up his arm. Then, very softly, he heard Margaret’s voice—far off but clear—speaking his name.

He dropped the marble. The hum stopped. The world, for one long second, held its breath.

Margaret had been in the parlor when it happened. The air shivered around her like the skin of a drum. She felt the vibration through the floorboards and pressed her palm to the wallpaper. The pattern of faded leaves rippled beneath her hand, warm and faintly alive.

A memory rose—not hers: rain on a tin roof, a woman’s laughter, the smell of soap and wet hair. The sensation was gone before she could name it, leaving her dizzy and full of loss.

When she stepped back, her reflection in the window lingered a heartbeat too long.

Josephine spent the morning drawing at the kitchen table. The hum reached her like a tune remembered from a dream. Without thinking she began to hum with it, the pencil moving in circles across the paper. When she looked down, the page showed three figures standing in the attic, hands joined, faces turned toward the window.

The whisper brushed her ear. Keep singing.

She obeyed. The house seemed to join in, rafters and pipes resonating until the sound was everywhere, inside and out. The window panes quivered; dust lifted from the floor in small, graceful spirals.

Thomas burst through the back door, the marble still glowing in his hand.
“Margaret!” he called.

His wife appeared at the foot of the stairs, one hand gripping the banister. “It’s in the walls,” she said quietly, and he realized she could hear it too.

From above them came the slow creak of the attic door opening on its own. A draft swept down the staircase carrying the smell of cedar and rain. Josephine’s humming floated from the kitchen, perfectly in rhythm with the sound above.

They looked at each other, fear and recognition mingling in their eyes. The hum swelled, becoming a melody neither of them knew yet both somehow remembered. It was the same lullaby the radio had played, the same broken tune that had circled the roof.

Thomas started up the stairs. Margaret followed.

The attic was bright with dust and light. Josephine stood in the center of the room, her eyes half closed, her voice blending with the hum. Around her, the air moved like water, slow and deliberate. The marble in Thomas’s hand pulsed once, twice, then dissolved into warmth that spread up his arm.

Margaret reached for her daughter, but when her fingers brushed the child’s shoulder the sound collapsed into silence. For a heartbeat none of them breathed.

Then, in that stillness, each saw the others standing somewhere they shouldn’t be:
Thomas at the window, though he stood by the ladder;
Margaret by the trunk in the corner, though she was in front of Josephine;
and Josephine, reflected threefold in the dusty glass of the vent, older in one reflection, younger in another.

The silence bent the air. The boards underfoot sighed.

A soft voice—no louder than a breath—murmured from everywhere at once:
This is how it remembers.

The attic exhaled, scattering dust like snow. The hum did not return. Only the faint echo of rain against the roof remained, steady as a heartbeat learning to rest.