Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 4: Then

"This room will make the perfect nursery, don't you think?" Owen's voice was full of familiar hope as we lugged an enormous writing desk over the threshold of the smallest bedroom in our new house.

"Someday, yes," I said, using the bottom of my T-shirt to wipe the sweat from my face.

With only a week until our wedding, we'd been too preoccupied with planning to remember to hire movers. Since we didn't have any friends in the area to help us out that weekend, it ended up being just the two of us doing all the loading and unloading. Owen and I were both in acceptable shape by anyone's standards, but we came to realize within hours we'd severely overestimated our stamina.

By early afternoon, I was exhausted and in no mood to discuss having a kid. Specifically, I was in no mood to discuss me having a kid. I was the one who was going to have to be pregnant for almost a year and then push a watermelon-sized living thing from the most sensitive part of my body.

"Someday?" Owen raised his eyebrows teasingly. "I'm starving. Can we talk about this later?" It wasn't that I didn't want to have kids ever. Mostly, it was that I wasn't sure I could be a good parent.

Patricia and Charles Merritt hadn't exactly been the best role models, in life or in death.

Owen knew parenthood was a sensitive topic for me, so he let it go. "Sure. Want me to drop off the moving truck and pick us up some lunch?" His eyes twinkled as he poked my exposed belly. "You look like you could use a sandwich. I saw a little market downtown that looked like it probably sells them."

"Don't touch me - I'm so sweaty and gross," I laughed and batted his hand away, letting my T-shirt fall back into place. "That was more of an intersection than a downtown. But yeah, a turkey sandwich sounds divine. With bacon, please!" I ushered him down the creaky, split staircase.

The split staircase was one of my favorite quirky design elements of this house. After descending ten stairs from the second floor, you reached a landing. If you went to the left, the staircase wrapped around into the kitchen, which extended the width of the back of the house. To the right, four stairs headed down into the front entryway.

Owen trotted down the latter set of stairs and out the open front door. He called over his shoulder, "I'll touch you when I get back!" A moment later, I heard the moving truck start up and pull out of the driveway.

I was left alone in the front entryway among piles of boxes and duffel bags stuffed with loose articles of clothing that we'd forgotten to pack until the last minute. The smells of my old apartment still emanated from the fabric of the duffel bags, a mix of mall-kiosk body lotion and creative ambition from my time at RISD.

But the mild scent was almost immediately overcome by the house's own aroma. It clung to the dust particles that were suspended, as if dazed, in the streak of sunlight streaming through the window above the front door. I breathed in deeply, as if I might be able to detect a lingering perfume, a whiff of heartbreak, or some other hint of the lives that had come and gone through that door.

There was something, but it evaporated before I could name it.

I gazed around at my belongings, all gathered together with Owen's and ready to be sorted into this new space that would become ours. Any tasks related to seriously unpacking seemed too daunting to begin before Owen returned with lunch.

I picked up a shoebox perched on the bottom step. Across its cardboard lid, the word BUREAU was scrawled in Owen's recognizable, left-handed writing. His letters were always slightly smeared from where the side of his dominant hand dragged across them as he wrote.

Most of our furniture was still out on the front lawn, but we'd lugged a "highboy" style chest of drawers upstairs to the master bedroom earlier in the day. I assumed that was the BUREAU for which this shoebox of things was intended. As I started up the staircase, I thumbed the shoebox's lid open and absentmindedly reached inside.