thought was Danny’s room and where his desk and bookshelf used to stand. She pulled on thick work gloves and dug into the debris, hoping to find something recognizable. Ten minutes in, her fingers brushed something hard. She picked up the disk and stared at it, not believing her eyes. The outside of the pocket watch had blackened, but when she opened it, the inside wasn’t that bad off. The glass had cracked and the clock mechanism didn’t work, but Danny would love to have it, anyway. She and David bought it for him at some downtown antique shop on their vacation up to Jamestown where they took the kids gold panning in an old abandoned ghost town turned into a tourist attraction. The kids had even made candles.
The memory along with finding the pocket watch eased her heart a bit. She had something to give to Danny besides the metal frame of what might be a Ford Mustang Hot Wheel with no tires and the paint melted completely away.
She spent ten more minutes rummaging through what was left of Danny’s room before working on Oliver’s space. She didn’t find much until she made it to where his toy box had sat below his window. There, she found a treasure that brought tears to her eyes. His marble collection had survived inside a tin that had once held Hershey’s chocolate they’d bought at the chocolate factory they’d toured in the Central Valley.
Oliver would be so happy.
She lifted a half-burnt board and found two dirty but perfectly intact plastic dinosaurs. How they didn’t melt escaped her, but she’d take the little guys back to Oliver. The mound of burnt plastic ten inches away had to be the bin that held all the others. She didn’t even bother trying to pull it apart to see if anything in the middle survived. She just moved on, brushing things this way and that hoping something else caught her eye.
Even though her thighs and ankles hurt from crouching, she moved on to her bedroom, strategic in where she looked. She started where she thought the closet used to be, hoping that even if her wooden jewelry box hadn’t survived, some of her jewelry had, especially the pieces she’d put into a metal lockbox.
Metal hangers told Sierra she was in the right place. But she didn’t find anything resembling the few pieces of jewelry she owned until she started backing up toward where the bed used to be. Her foot kicked something and the metallic thump of it hitting something else made her heart pound and hope rise. She shoved debris aside to get to the blackened rectangle with the lock still intact. She hugged the box to her chest and heard several things inside rattle. She didn’t have the key to open it, but with some tools, she hoped to bust it open and find her and David’s wedding rings, along with her pair of diamond studs, and a couple other rings and a diamond heart pendant David gave her their first Christmas as a married couple.
“Find something?” the officer who dropped her off asked from the road as he stood outside his patrol car.
She stood, pulled her mask off, and found a smile. “Yes. I did.”
“It’s getting late. We’ll close the neighborhood off to visitors for the night soon. It’s time to head back. You can return tomorrow if you’d like.”
They’d closed off the neighborhood to keep looters from trying to sort through homes looking for anything that survived the fire.
Some people suck.
It wasn’t bad enough the people who used to live here lost everything; someone wanted to profit off them.
Which made her think of all the paperwork and hoops she’d had to jump through to file her insurance claim and put in for federal assistance.
It sucked that the process was so hard and convoluted.
She put the metal box into the bucket she’d brought with her that now contained her treasures, planted her hands on her knees, and pushed herself up. Her legs ached, but her heart felt lighter. She’d found what she’d come here for, and Danny and Oliver would be so happy to have a small piece of their past to hold on to when everything had been taken away, including the school they used to attend.
They couldn’t stay here much longer.
She needed to get the boys somewhere they could settle in and go back to school.
She also needed to call her mom and have the talk she’d put off because immediate