I looked at it for a long time.
Then my hand did another thing I didn’t authorise.
It wrote two words beneath the heart, small, in the same neat printed letters I used for everything.
My Daddy.
I stopped breathing.
The words sat on the paper. They were just ink. Graphite, really, black and slightly smudged where the side of my hand had dragged across them. Two words, eight letters, a possessive and a noun. I stared at them and my chest went enormous — there was no other word for it, enormous, the whole cavity of my body suddenly too small for whatever was trying to occupy it, the ribs stretched tight around a feeling that had no proper size.
I could hear my own breathing. It had started again and it was too loud.
My hand moved.
The black pencil came down on the words hard, harder than pencil needed to be used, scribbling in fast tight strokes across the letters, back and forth, back and forth, until the shapes were buried under a dense black smear and the pencil tip was blunt and the paper had dimpled under the pressure. I kept going for longer than I needed to. I went over the smudge twice more after the words were already gone, scribbling at nothing, scribbling because stopping felt worse than continuing.
I put the pencil down.
I turned the paper face-down on the table.
***
The paper was accusing me.
I could feel it. Not in any way I could explain — it was paper, it weighed almost nothing, it had no emotional mass a rational adult would concede to — but I could feel it the way you feel a mirror in a dark room. A presence that reflected something back at you whether you looked at it or not.
I stood up.
The chair scraped. I registered the sound and moved past it, across the cabin, toward the bed. My hands were already doing the next thing before my brain had caught up, which was how the best decisions got made — the body ahead of the thinking, the thinking trailing along behind with its objections, too late.
I knelt by the bed and slid the shoebox out.
I brushed the lid clean with the heel of my hand and set it on the floor, and opened it. Everything was where I had left it nine days ago. The photos on the top. The report cards in their folded envelope. The birthday card with the cartoon cake on the front.
Clover was on the pillow behind me.
I reached back and picked her up. Her fur was smooth from where my hand had been on her all morning, which was a thing I noticed and then didn’t let myself notice further, because noticing meant pausing and pausing meant losing momentum and I was running on momentum alone now.
I put her in the box.
She looked up at me from the cardboard with her lopsided startled-by-good-fortune expression, and I folded the flaps of the lid down fast, and I heard — I imagined I heard, I did not hear — a small squeak of protest.
“Sorry, Clover.”
The lid wouldn‘t close flat. Something inside was sitting too high. I pressed the lid down with my palm and got it seated and held it there.
Tape.
I didn’t use his. That mattered. I got up and crossed to my bag and unzipped the front pocket and pulled out the small roll of black electrical tape I kept there because I always kept electrical tape, because I fixed things, because the window latch at The Timberline had taught me and every shabby room before it had taught me and my own hands were the only hands I had ever been able to rely on to fix what was broken. I tore off a strip with my teeth. Pressed it across the seam of the lid. Tore off a second. Ran it perpendicular, forming a cross. Smoothed it down with my thumb.
The box was closed.
I carried it to the table and set it beside the face-down paper and did not look at the paper. I would not look at the paper.
Nine days.
That was what I kept coming back to as I moved. Nine days of someone else‘s camp stove and someone else’s blanket and a wooden chair I had slept in the first night because accepting a bed felt like accepting a collar. Nine days of good coffee placed on the nightstand before I was awake. Nine days of his typing as a lullaby.
