Chapter 30: The Suitcase, Opened Freely
The suitcase came back to Clara on a morning in early spring, almost a year after the night she had carried it, terrified, through a service entrance and been told — by a man who is now a voice on the telephone from Florida, and diminishing — never to open it.
The council's evidence office released it with paperwork she read twice and signed once. Enzo's driver brought it to the cottage in the boot of the car, but it was Marta who carried it up the garden path, unhurried, in both hands, and set it down on the cottage doorstep in the sunshine, and then went back down the path again without a word, because some deliveries a woman should make to herself from there.
It was only a suitcase, in the end. Old brown leather, scuffed at the corners, its handle worn smooth, its clasps tarnished. Smaller than it was in her memory. Everything from that winter was smaller in her memory now, except Thomas, who was larger every morning and currently attempting, with total commitment, to eat his own foot on a blanket on the sitting-room floor.
Clara stood and looked at the case for a while.
Then she had it cleaned and repaired properly, at a leather shop in the neighbourhood where the owner, who asked no questions she did not want, restitched the lining — new lining, cream-coloured, with no pockets and no secrets, she specified, and he nodded as if clients said this every day — polished the leather until it glowed the deep, kind brown of a well-kept thing, and replaced one broken clasp with a bright new one that opened with a clean, ordinary click. She paid the bill herself, out of her manager's salary, and kept the receipt in the notebook.
On the first warm Sunday of the year, she repacked it.
She did it slowly, in the sitting room, with the doors of the cottage open to the garden and Thomas supervising from his blanket in a sun hat her sister had knitted to a scale suggesting a much larger baby. Into the suitcase, in its clean new lining, went the small, soft archaeology of their first year: the first sleepsuit, impossibly tiny now, washed and folded; the christening robe, borrowed and returned and borrowed back permanently by her sister's decree; a bundle of cards from people whose names would have once been above her notice and below it, all of them kept; the hospital wristband; the spare screws from the crib, still in their labelled envelope, because some jokes a family keeps.
And the letters.
There were three now, in her clear hand, in envelopes she did not seal. The long one she had written before his birth, telling Tommy about the ledger and the fourteen minutes. A second, written the night Thomas was born, which was mostly, in the way of honest documents, a list — his weight, the time, the weather, who had held him, what his father would have said, which was, she wrote, something unprintable and then something tender, in that order. And a third, written that morning, for Thomas himself to read when he was old enough to ask the questions she knew were coming, telling him who his father was and how he had tried to do right, who his godfather was and why, who a woman named Gia was and what she had chosen, and what a suitcase had once been used to hide — and what, in this house, they used it for now.
Which was, simply, keeping the things worth keeping, in the open.
"Your dad carried cases for a living and never once opened one that wasn't his to open," she told Thomas, who was listening with the deep, sceptical attention he gave all briefings. "There is a difference between a secret and a private thing, and when you are older I will explain it properly, with examples, and your godfather will argue with me about the examples, and that is how you will know we are telling the truth."
Later, Enzo knocked and waited at the blue door, as he always did now, and came in with coffee and a small, ridiculous toy that Thomas received like a treaty. He saw the suitcase open on the sitting-room floor, full of folded clothes and letters, and he stopped, understanding it the way he had learned, over a year of Tuesdays, to understand the important furniture of this cottage.
"May I?" he asked.
"You may," Clara said. "Anyone may. That is rather the point of it now. It is just a suitcase. It opens."
He crouched — a head of family, a godfather, in a cottage doorway's worth of spring light — and touched the new clasp, and clicked it open and shut once, gently, while Thomas watched with outrage that someone else was operating the interesting object.
"It is a good repair," Enzo said at last.
"It is an honest one," said Clara. "New lining. No pockets."
She closed the case then, herself, with her own hands, not because it needed closing but because she could — and because she could also, and did, open it again a moment later to tuck in the sun hat Thomas had finally defeated. Open, shut, open. Freely, in daylight, in her own front room, with the garden door wide and her son laughing at nothing in the way of babies, who understood the essential facts long before adults did, that a thing which has frightened you can be cleaned, and mended, and filled with soft things, and kept.
She set the suitcase by the door, ready for their first trip to her sister's in the summer, ordinary as luggage, which was the most extraordinary thing it had ever been. Then she picked up her son, and went out into the garden to show him the olive tree, which was thriving, against several predictions, in the Staten Island sun.
Thomas reached for a leaf with both hands and the solemn concentration he gave to all new treaties, and Clara laughed and held him steady among the branches, thinking of ledgers and letters, of doors that locked from the inside, of names written plainly in registers, of a blue door and a bright new clasp and a boy who would grow up knowing exactly where his story began, and who had loved him, from the very first page, without ever asking him to hide. Nothing in her life had been given back to her exactly as it was taken. It had been returned mended, relined, hers — and that, she decided, standing in the light with her child, was enough of a happy ending to build the rest of a life on, one honest, open day at a time.
The End