My story ends where many logically do, at the hospital, amid the caring nurses, fresh blue and yellow bruises, and the TV, which constantly talks to itself.

     It began with a doorknob. I'd found a key in my grandmother's jewelry case while rummaging through to find the real gold pieces before my other relatives had the chance. I might have cast it aside, except that I'd already scavenged one citrine ring, the birthstone we shared. With nothing better to do, the key represented mystery, and I searched for its matching lock for an hour. Possessing a teenager's dedication, I was about to give up and leave it for one of my cousins. It was then, sitting in her uncomfortable rocking chair that I remembered a section of the attic that I had never been allowed to explore as a child. She had deemed it unsafe, told me I'd surely break a leg on the rafters. The memory came to me suddenly, as though the wind had brought some faint scent of musty antiques to remind me.
     I hurried up the stairs to the attic, nearly empty now that it had been fished through, cleared out, and rationed off. In the far left corner was the door, the one I'd always assumed had led to nothingness, the same way I'd always assumed she was just "Grandma." The key fit perfectly, and oddly enough the door did not squeak as I pushed through, almost as though it had been regularly visited and oiled, though surely neither Grandma or Grandpa could have handled the stairs in the last years, at least they weren't supposed to...
     In the small space, I found two boxes. One was filled with books and plays, filed according to playwright and worn heavily at the edges. Confused, I opened the second box, which was stuffed with old photos. At first I did not know who the reoccurring woman was in all of them. Then I recognized her. She had my nose. My parents had always told me I had my grandmother's nose, but now I saw it. Without the curse of age, there she was. I flicked through one after the other: Grandma young and behind the wheel of what I assumed was her first car, Grandma on a boat with her arms intimately around a gentleman I did not recognize, who certainly wasn't Grandpa - the back was labeled Nile River. And then there were the hundreds of photos of Grandma under the lights of the stage, beautiful, glowing. The backs of those photos read "Broadway."
     I had never known. She had never shared this part of her life with me, never bared her soul. I wondered at the time how she had wound up here, in West Virginia, where she could not even see shows, revisit that part of her life. I thought she'd gotten stuck here somehow, powerless at the hands of fate.
     Now I have some idea of how her life bent and twisted. I am where she was at the end, eating bad hospital food and too sick to leave my bed. I've lived my life grandly, the way my grandmother showed me. And now, like her, I've left behind a key. One of them will find it and make the same search I did. They will know the secrets of my life.