dug out one of her on her brand new, training wheel–less, five-year-old’s bike.
I might have recalled that when she died, we donated that barely used bike to charity, if I hadn’t just then spotted my old phone—not the one the police had confiscated, but the one I’d bought to replace it. We had always backed up to the Cloud, so restoring pictures had been a cinch. Not so easy? Reliving them. So I had packed away the phone, too.
Taking it in my palm now, I turned it on. Naturally, after all this time, it was dead. I nearly wept at that alone.
“We can charge it,” Edward quickly offered when he saw the tears that hung, just hung on my lower lids. “I have them on my phone, too, but I haven’t been able…” His voice cracked. Abandoning the thought, he returned to the box and lifted a photo of the three of us that had been taken by a professional photographer when Lily was one.
Blinking it into focus, I smiled. “She does not look happy here. Remember?”
“Oh yeah.” I heard his grin. “Tantrum city. Did not want her picture taken.”
“She didn’t like her hair,” I joked.
“What hair?”
“Exactly. Poor thing. It was late coming in, but the wait was worth it.” I wondered whether that gorgeous white-blond silk would have darkened at ten, as mine had. And at eleven, twelve, or thirteen? Even beyond hair, I wondered how puberty would have treated her nose, her skin, her moods.
Rather than tightening up, my chest was suddenly empty, like a huge hole had opened where the future should have been. New tears welled but didn’t spill. The purpose of this was to celebrate the life we’d had, not the one we’d lost.
My probation agreement didn’t help. There it suddenly was with its business end peering out, that big, bold COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS in the upper left hard to miss. Like the mug shot in my medicine chest, I had meant it to be a truth in this box of truths, but it hurt in a different way from the others. It was a pollutant here, celebrating death far more than life. I saw that now. This was definitely not the place it should be.
“Move it,” Edward ordered in a low voice.
Grateful for the direction, I snatched the envelope up and flipped it into the darkness where the light of the small lamp couldn’t reach—and wasn’t there satisfaction in that? For the first time, perhaps, I was separating what didn’t belong from what did. That quickly, the green velvet box was pure.
One deep breath of gardenia had me fully back, and though the hole inside me remained, it, too, seemed more pure. Needing to be with my baby again, I moved aside the shot of Lily’s wall graffiti to unearth pencil sketches I had made of her, and crayon drawings she had made of us. Under the layer of drawings were formal photos from preschool in which she looked stiff and photo-booth strips in which she looked irreverent. Edward chuckled at the last from my shoulder—but then there was Bunny! Tucked in at the side of the box, she was tiny, not much bigger than my hand, and oh-so-well-loved. There was a piece of the sleeper Lily had outgrown, but still cuddled. There was the ugly rubber rose barrette and a six-inch rendition of Sophia the First. She had loved both the barrette and Sophia, who debuted on TV less than a year before her death.
And there was a baggie. Victorious, I held it up. “First haircut,” I crowed. “I took off two inches and thought I would die.”
I stroked the hair through the plastic, then pressed it between my thumb and finger, as if holding it tightly would make it more mine. Her hair was real. It was part of her body in ways that the documents I found next—birth certificate, medical records, preschool papers—were not. But I had no sooner begun lifting them out when what I saw beneath stopped me cold.
“Her wish box,” Edward said in a hushed voice.
I panicked. Oh, I had known it was there. I had packed it in myself, deliberately placed where Lily’s things ended and my grandmother’s began, and, knowing it was safe, I had pushed it from mind. That was where it had stayed, out of mind until now.
Lily and I had made it together. Since Nana’s box was long and narrow, so was this one, but on a miniature scale, and rather than being