Two boxes. Everything from the apartment, all the material evidence that he’d ever had a family before coming to Paris, fit into two moving boxes. Jacob walked into the gaping mouth of the Laudners’ two-car garage and stared at the brown rectangles wrapped in packing tape.
Strange, the thumping in his chest and the way his throat ached when he swallowed. He needed to open them, to go through his mom’s things. Uncle John said it would give him closure. But he hesitated. The truth was, he didn’t want closure; he wanted to believe she was alive. He refused to give up on her. But he also knew it was important to check that everything was there. To make sure, that when they did find her, all of her things would be accounted for.
He pulled a pair of gardening shears off their hook on the wall and sliced through the tape at the top of the first box. It was filled with items wrapped in brown paper. Jacob reached in and unwrapped one—a glass. He grabbed another—a soap dish. Kitchen and bathroom items, all of it. He guessed the flat ones on the bottom were plates and the things on top were mixing bowls and drinking glasses.
When Jacob sliced through the tape on the second box, white stuffing burst from the incision. The shears had sliced too deep, into the pillow that used to be his mother’s. He pinched the hole and pulled the pillow out. Her quilt was underneath it, folded neatly on top of her clothes and a short wooden box. He caught the scent of cherry blossoms, the smell of her favorite lotion.
Resting his elbows on the sides of the box, he allowed his head to loll forward. With his eyes closed, Jacob could picture them there, sitting cross-legged on the quilt, playing crazy eights with a deck of cards so old you could tell the eight of spades from the fingerprint worn into the pattern on the back. Whatever happened to those cards?
Jacob opened his eyes. The brown corner of the wooden box peaked out from under his mother’s salmon-colored sweatshirt. Was it a jewelry box? Did his mother own a jewelry box? He’d never, ever, seen her wear jewelry. If she’d had any before his dad died, they would have sold it a long time ago. Jacob absolutely did not remember the box. He reached in and pulled the shiny wood from under the linens.
Koa wood, inlaid with a pale carving of a phoenix, the box looked much too expensive to have belonged to her. He tried to lift the lid but it was locked. The gold keyhole was small, like a diary lock.
Jacob set the wooden box aside and dug deeper for the key. The moving box was an awkward height and the cardboard buckled under his weight. He swept his hand around the bottom and tried to feel for something that might contain small items. When nothing presented itself, he found a relatively clean section of concrete and unloaded the items one by one. The glasses, the plates, even the mixing bowls he freed from their paper cocoons. Everything was there, everything he remembered from the apartment. It looked like a rummage sale spread out across the driveway.
There was no key.
It wasn’t a complete loss though. Near the bottom of the bedroom box, he’d found a framed picture of his family, the one that had hung on the bedroom wall. Smile lines creased the corners of his father’s green eyes, serenity lingered in the curve of his mother’s mouth, and Jacob was missing teeth but nothing else. This was a picture of a family that didn’t exist anymore—a family extinct.
The cold bit into him as he rewrapped and packaged the items back into the boxes. For more than an hour, Jacob worked to replace everything except for the picture and the jewelry box. He set those aside to bring inside. When he was done, he pushed the boxes into a corner of the garage and turned to leave.
Across the street, the Victorian loomed black and blue, a bruise on the horizon. The wind rattled the ivy on the fence and knocked some icicles free. They fell like knives, slicing the snow-covered yard. Dead leaves swirled behind the wrought-iron fence. For a second, just a fraction of a moment, Jacob could’ve sworn he’d seen a face staring at him through the front window. He closed the garage door and hurried inside.