"Tomorrow," Nathan said. "I'll bring everything I have."
Chapter 5: What Sarah Left in the Box
The box lived at the bottom of Emma's wardrobe, under a stack of folded jumpers, and she fetched it the way people fetch things from deep water: slowly, with both hands, not looking at Nathan while she did it.
It was a keepsake box of painted tin, roses on the lid, the kind of thing sold in gift shops at the coast. Sarah had kept it under her bed at the cottage in Cannon Beach, and after the funeral Emma had carried it back to Portland in the front seat of her car, with the seatbelt around it, because she could not put it in the boot with the black dresses and the casserole dishes. She had opened it exactly twice since January. Once for the photograph, which Leo had found first. Once for insurance papers, which were not in it.
"I should have gone through it properly," she said, setting it on the kitchen table of her small flat. Leo was at Saturday art club for two precious hours, a thing Emma had arranged with the grim determination of a woman who knows a conversation is coming that a seven-year-old should not have to hold up. "I kept telling myself when I was stronger. Apparently I am not going to be stronger. So we'll do it now."
Nathan had brought what she asked for: a framed photograph and a manila envelope of his own — photographs of Daniel, a dozen of them. He had not looked at all of them. He had told himself it was efficiency. Sitting in Emma's kitchen, with spring light coming through a window full of seedlings in yoghurt pots, he understood it had not been efficiency at all.
"Before we open it," Emma said, "you should know what Sarah was. Because the box will make her sound sad in one direction. She wasn't. She was the funniest person I have ever known. She illustrated children's books — freelance. Pirates, mostly, in the end. She could draw a pirate who was lonely." Her mouth did something complicated. "She was proud, though. When she got ill she would not let the social worker telephone me until she couldn't hold the phone. That is who kept this box. Not a tragic heroine. My sister."
"Tell me if I get it wrong, then," Nathan said. "I don't want a version. I had seven years of a version."
Emma nodded, once, and lifted the lid.
The photograph envelope was on top, empty now, its flap torn. Written on it in the quick blue slant Nathan had seen on the back of the beach photograph: For Leo, when he asks. Not before he asks.
Underneath, folded small, was a hospital bracelet, the plastic kind, gone cloudy with age. COLLINS, SARAH. And under that, on a card in a nurse's hand: Baby boy, 6 lb 11 oz. A name had been written on the card in the same blue ink, and then written again more firmly, as if she had been practising believing it: Leo Daniel Collins.
Nathan's breath went somewhere and did not come back on schedule.
"She named him for Daniel," Emma said quietly. "I thought it was just a name she'd always liked. She even told me that. She lied to me in a hospital, with her son in her arms, because she thought the truth had sailed away out of reach. I have had four months of being angry about it in the wrong directions, and I would like to stop."
"She never knew me," Nathan said. "She had nothing to lie about to me."
"That is not a comfort."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
"What did she tell him?" Nathan asked. "Day to day. When he asked at the table, at bedtime. A boy like that asks."
"She told him his dad was in the remembering place, and that remembering was a kind of address. You could send things there. Drawings. News." Emma's hand moved, helplessly, across the table, straightening a box that was already straight. "Every boat he drew for two years went in an envelope, did you know that? She posted them to the cottage. To herself. They came back through her own letterbox and she put them on the fridge and told him the harbourmaster had written back to say the fleet was coming along nicely. She lied to him beautifully, Captain. That is the thing nobody warns you about a good mother. She will lie like a rug to keep the weather off her child, and the lies will be the warmest room in the house."
"And now he has to live in the cold one," Nathan said.
"Now he has to live in the true one. We just have to make it warm. That's the job."
Next came a birth certificate, a certified copy, much folded. Leo Daniel Collins, born in late winter, in a hospital at Seaside. Mother: Sarah Jane Collins. Father: the line was blank — a clean, ruled, official emptiness that seemed, in that small kitchen, louder than anything else in the box. Nathan found he had put his hand flat on the table, as if the table were a deck.
"He asked about that line," Emma said. "Last year, at school, they made family trees. Sarah went in and helped him draw a boat instead of a tree. She told him some families are orchards and some are harbours. He drew Daniel as the harbourmaster. He has never seen the harbourmaster. He just decided he must have a kind face and a boat."
There was more, and it was ordinary, and the ordinariness was the hardest of it. A shell with a chip in it. A child's first tooth, in a twist of tissue, labelled in pencil. A postcard of Astoria, unsigned, showing a boatyard in winter, and Nathan's hands stopped being entirely steady, because Daniel had wintered in Astoria the last year of his life, and postcards had been his joke and his apology all through their boyhood: never a letter, just a view of wherever he was, with an arrow and a scrawled x where he reckoned he was standing.
"He sent her postcards with nothing on them," he said.
"She kept them like love letters." Emma's voice cracked, finally, and she let it. "Which I suppose they were."
Nathan turned the Astoria postcard over in his fingers. Nothing. That was the whole of it: on the front a boatyard in winter, on the back an arrow and an x in pencil gone soft with handling, and no words at all, because Daniel had always believed that where he was standing was the message. He had one exactly like it at home, from the same winter, stuck to his fridge door with a magnet shaped like a chilli pepper, where it had faded in the light of a kitchen he barely cooked in. He had walked past it ten thousand times. He had made coffee under it and eaten standing up under it and never once read it for what it was: a man standing in a winter boatyard, marking the spot, sending the spot home to the two people he loved, in lieu of himself. Nathan set the card down very gently, picture side up, the arrow pointing at the ceiling, as if it were asleep and might still, somehow, be dreaming of the way back.
At the bottom of the box, beneath the whole paper trail of a hidden life, was an envelope of thick cream paper, addressed in the blue hand, unsealed, unstamped, never sent.
For the Reed family.
Emma did not touch it. Nathan did not touch it. It sat between them on the kitchen table while the kettle boiled and clicked off and neither of them moved.
"She wrote it the autumn before she died," Emma said at last. "She told me she had written 'the letter', and that if anything happened to her I was to give Leo the box when he asked, and burn the letter. Those were her instructions. Burn the letter." She looked up at him, her eyes red and completely steady. "I have decided I am not going to do what my sister told me. She was dying and frightened, and she made a plan that left her son asking strangers at a fair. Whatever is in that envelope, it belongs to Leo first, and to your family second, and to Sarah's fear not at all."
"Then we don't open it like this," Nathan said. "Not over a kitchen table with the clock running to art club. Leo should hear there's a letter. He should be asked. He's been managed enough."
Emma stared at him. Then she did something that rearranged the whole tired architecture of her face: she almost, almost smiled.