Going into his room had always felt a little weird to her, like some kind of invasion of his personal space, but the longer they lived together, the more OK it seemed to her. Part of being in a family. One of the good parts.
She stepped inside. Glanced around.
Rumpled bedsheets on his bed. A half-read copy of Pascal’s Pensees on the end table beside it, rock-climbing gear thrown on the floor under the window. Ansel Adams prints of Half Dome and El Capitan, two of the places he’d climbed, hung on the wall.
Two photos sat on his dresser. One of the family: Mom, Patrick, and her on the Staten Island Ferry-her mother bald from chemo. The other picture was of him in the Appalachian Mountains when he was a wilderness guide in college. He had a ponytail in the picture, and she’d gotten a ton of mileage out of that.
Scattered around the room were five heavy-duty cardboard moving boxes.
She popped open the one next to the closet and found it half full of dog-eared criminology textbooks and back issues of the Journal of Environmental Psychology and the Journal of Forensic Sciences, and a clutter of office supplies just thrown on top-pens, scissors, paper clips, pencil holders, USB cords, rubber bands-a pair of dress shoes, and some crumpled-up dress shirts. How he could be so meticulous in his FBI life and such a slob in his single-guy-at-home life had always been a mystery to her.
There was still room in the box, though, and she knew they didn’t have a ton of extra moving boxes around so she opened the closet and saw that, apart from a couple pairs of running shoes, and an old backpack, the floor was empty.
But there was a shelf near the ceiling and some camping stuff sticking over the edge.
She dragged a folding chair to the closet, stepped up, and yanked down a first aid kit and daypack.
Only after she’d pulled down the sleeping bag did she see the shoe box shoved against the wall. Between her and the box lay an ocean of thick dust-which was way, way disgusting since the human body sheds over two million dead skin cells every hour and nearly 65 percent of dust found in homes is from human skin.
Ew.
Gingerly, she managed to retrieve the box without touching the layer of human remains. Then she stepped off the chair, closed her eyes, and blew the dead skin off the box.
Eyes open again, she realized it was an old Keds shoe box, which was a little weird since Patrick never had kids and the box wasn’t big enough to hold his shoes.
There was stuff in it, but by the weight she could tell it wasn’t a pair of shoes. She took one of Patrick’s shirts from his dresser and wiped off the box.
And noticed her name written in black magic marker on the end.
But it wasn’t Patrick’s handwriting, it was her mother’s.
30
Tessa sat on the bed, the shoe box on her lap.
Popped it open.
And found a small stack of postcards, two ticket stubs from a Twins game, three genuine arrowheads, a couple dozen letters stuffed back into their opened envelopes, a bunch of photos, a brochure from the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, a few pictures that Tessa had drawn when she was a kid with big lopsided hearts and crayoned words that read, “I love you Mommy!!”
And turtle drawings.
Eight turtle pictures.
She’d always liked to draw turtles when she was a kid, probably because they were easy-just make a big circle, then add four feet and a smaller circle on top for the head. Bam. A turtle. When she was a kid, they’d seemed like masterpieces.
But now she could see how dorky they were.
Still, when she was a little girl, her mom had always found room for them on the fridge. Always.
And when Tessa saw the turtle pictures, she knew what kind of collection this was-the one special collection everyone has of the stuff no one else would ever understand. Stupid little things that wouldn’t even bring you a dime at a garage sale, but that you’d go back into a burning building to save.
Tessa had a box like this too, under her bed.
But as she flipped through her mother’s memory box, which she named it on the spot, her heart seemed to snag on something inside of her chest.
Why didn’t Patrick ever give this to you? He knows how much Mom meant to you. Why would he keep this from you?
Maybe he’d forgotten about it, pushed it way back there one day and it just slipped his mind.
But maybe not.
Feeling somewhat betrayed, Tessa filed through the box’s contents more carefully, taking the items out one at a time and placing them on the bed.
She found a tangled-up kite string and wondered why her mom had kept it. Then she pulled out a shell that she remembered finding during a trip to Lake Superior when she was ten. As she set the shell on the bed, she noticed what lay on the bottom of her mom’s memory box.
Her fingers trembled.
A pregnancy test.
And the little plus sign was still visible, even after seventeen years.
She picked it up.
When your mom first looked at this, you were already growing inside her.
It was an obvious truth, totally obvious, but in that moment, to Tessa, it seemed profound.
She was holding the first proof her mother ever had that she was going to have a child, a daughter that she would name Tessa Bernice Ellis-Tessa, derived from St. Teresa of Avila, a mystic who was one of her favorite writers, and Bernice, the name of her mom’s grandmother.
As Tessa stared at the plus sign, she thought of what it would have been like for her mom to look at this-still in college, not married, the guy she’d been seeing a total loser. A man who never became a part of his daughter’s life, never even visited her.
Not even once.
Tessa felt the old anger, the old hatred, the old loneliness rising again.
Even when she was a kid, she’d realized that nearly all of her friends had a dad around somewhere. Even in families where their parents were separated or divorced, the dad would show up occasionally-in the summer maybe for a couple weeks, or on Tuesday nights, or for a couple weekends each month. Sure, not always, but unless he was dead, he was usually a part of their life.
So when she was about six or seven, she’d asked her mother if her dad was dead.
At first her mom wouldn’t tell her, but Tessa wore her down until finally she’d said, “I don’t know, Tess. I haven’t seen him since the day I told him I was going to have a baby.” Then she’d held Tessa close-she still remembered that-and her mother had added, “But just because your daddy isn’t here doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. I get to love you double, from both of us.”
But Tessa had pulled away. “But why did he go away, Mommy? How come he doesn’t come back?”
Her mom had hesitated at first, then said, “What matters is that I love you and I’m never going to go away. I promise.”
But then her mom did go away, not on purpose, but even when she was dying, she hadn’t told Tessa any more about her dad.
Tessa figured that her mom had probably kept the truth about her biological father’s identity hidden because she didn’t want her to grow up hating him.
Well, if that was the plan, it hadn’t worked.
Enough with that.
She put the pregnancy test down and looked into the shoe box again, and found a neatly folded-up magazine ad for some kind of real estate company. It’d been ripped out of whatever magazine it was from and half of it was missing, but the part that was there had a picture of a blonde-haired girl, maybe four or five years old, trying on what were probably supposed to be her mom’s high heel shoes and necklace. Part of the text of the ad was gone, but the words “homes are not just” were still there. That was it, “homes are not just”… something.
But what caught Tessa’s attention wasn’t so much the text but the jewelry box that lay on a dresser behind the girl in the photo.