Our Crooked Hearts(11)

There, I had it. The feeling of my younger self lying between my parents. Eyes tracing a water stain on the ceiling, feet shoved beneath my dad’s warm legs. My head propped on my mother’s shoulder. The memory almost hurt.

Was it even real? Gingerly I pushed open the door, crossed the threshold, and lay back on the bed. There, on the ceiling, the water stain.

I scrambled to the floor. Their bedroom looked like a college dorm shared by roommates with nothing in common. My dad’s side was friendly, full of the kind of clutter you couldn’t tidy: dog-eared books of poetry, cube-thick fantasy novels, a framed photo of me and Hank with blue Popsicle mouths. Hers was sparer. There was a spindly glass-fronted bookcase stocked with memoirs and biographies, an empty bedside table. An aggressively vivacious fern sprawled beneath the window, a clipping from Aunt Fee’s garden.

I moved to the photos that marched along the master bathroom’s vanity top. Here were my parents looking impossibly young on their wedding day, next to school pictures of my brother and me randomly stuck at thirteen and eleven. At the end of the row was a photo of Mom and Aunt Fee, taken when they were in high school. I picked it up.

The old paper had warped, bowing against the glass on one side. The camera’s papery flash sheened over the fearsome curve of my aunt’s brows, my mom’s oxblood nails, the broken-heart necklaces glinting from their throats. They had poison-apple mouths and bad eyeliner, and this look on their faces like they knew they were the only girls in the world.

I was at least as old as they were in this picture, but still it made me feel like a child, forever locked out of their two-person circle. I started to set it down, but something made me pause. Scrubbing my shirt over the dusty glass, I peered closer.

It was their necklaces. Old-school cracked BFF hearts on chintzy chains, made of the same bendable metal used to cast diary keys. The hearts weren’t broken halves, like I’d assumed. They were cut into thirds. My mom wore a jagged rim and Fee the middle piece, serrated on both sides. Someone must’ve had the other edge.

Still chewing on that thought, I moved to the closet. I ran an eye over my mother’s tightly packed clothes, and sifted crinkled receipts and faded cookie fortunes out of the change tray. Stuck into the closet’s doorframe was a photo booth strip of my mom as a child, squeezed in beside the dissolute mug of my long-gone granddad. He was rocking tinted newscaster glasses and too much visible chest hair, she a brick of bangs and no front teeth. Along the side of the strip ran the words TOPS OFF AND BOTTOMS UP AT SHENANIGANS BAR.

I kept going, but I had no idea what I was looking for. A journal that explained everything? More broken glass, more blood? There was a box of papers on an upper shelf, but it was all bone dry: birth certificates, tax forms, marriage license. I stared a while at the signatures on that last one, trying to imagine my parents—twenty and twenty-four, an unborn Hank already dreaming behind my mother’s navel—standing shoulder to shoulder at the registry office.

There were small mysteries here. Tantalizing, but with meanings impossible to discern. In the bottom of a hideous backpack purse of flaking fake leather I found a sandwich baggie full of feathers, most of them brown or gray or mottled but a few the hot bright colors of Hi-C. I slid a tube of Rum Raisin from the pocket of an ancient pair of overalls and found the lipstick had been removed, replaced with an evil-looking clatter of needles and pins.

Beneath a shoe box holding a pair of high-heeled boots was a copy of Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, an age-thinned receipt stuck into it like a bookmark. I pulled it out. A quarter century ago my mother bought CoverGirl eye shadow and a pack of Bubblicious at a Walgreens on Halsted Avenue, then wrote an address on the receipt in blue pen. A friend’s apartment, probably, or a coffee shop. Something that meant a little bit back then and nothing now.

And yet. The thing was so carefully preserved, pressed like a flower in the pages of a book. I took a photo of the scrawled address before returning the receipt to its place.

I was setting the closet back to rights when I paused. In front of me was a soft wall of hanging clothes, black on black on the occasional blue. Following a rootless instinct I thrust my arms into their center like a diver, pushing hangers aside until I could see the closet wall.

Embedded into it was a safe the size of a cutting board.

I froze, more surprised by my hunch paying off than by the safe’s existence. Then I ran out of the room and across the hall, to my dad’s home office. I flipped over his chunky keyboard, freeing a scatter of everything bagel crumbs, and took a photo of the Post-it Notes stuck to its underside, scribbled with years’ worth of passwords.

Back in front of the wall safe, I scanned the list: combinations of family birthdays, jersey numbers, strings of letters that seemed random but were probably mnemonics. Cutting out the passwords that wouldn’t fit left me with a reasonable handful.

I cracked the lock on my third attempt. Dry-mouthed, ears chugging in the quiet, I opened the safe.

Inside it was an object the size and shape of a trade paperback, made entirely of gold.

I’d heard of people keeping their money in gold bars, but this seemed too big for that. And it was too beautiful to just be currency. It looked like something you’d find at a museum or an antique store, under glass.

When I lifted the object it felt hollow, but there was no seam I could see. Its surface was just a little warmer than my skin. Gently I tilted it from side to side, then shook it, taking in its burnished top, its expensive heft, the way its sides broke the light into a prismatic gleam. What was it for?