The Trunk

The smell of the trunk is becoming familiar to me again. The yellow-hued smell of memories, the dusty smell of something old. Most people call it mothballs, and think it’s unpleasant, but I like the scent. It’s musty, yes, but sort of sweet, too, and sad. Not suffocating, most of the time. It just reminds me that the trunk has been around for a while, and knows some things.

The trunk has sat in our living room for years. No one really knows where it came from. It has just always been there, tucked unceremoniously behind a bookshelf. I used to sit behind it for hide and seek, that old smell surrounding me. The trunk has always been my friend, even when I forgot about it. Even when I went a long time without pulling it out and sitting next to its open lid, peering over the edge like someone looking at waves over the edge of a boat.

Dragging it from its corner now makes me realize how weak I am these days. It never used to feel heavy, but now I struggle with it. The rusted brass knobs and locks that cover it seem to weigh it down more than they should, and the peeling leather sides lend me no grip. My feet and fingers scrabble as it scrapes over the hardwood. The sound echoes through the empty house.

Mom says it’s ugly. She doesn’t like when anyone takes it out, so I only do it

when no one is home. Something about calling something so ancient feels wrong, though, like disrespecting your elders. The trunk doesn’t look ugly to me, anyway. But I try not to contradict mom these days.

My fingers hook under the crack where the lid meets the base, fingernails trying to gain enough purchase to keep the lid from crashing back down the moment I lift it. That happened once, and my fingernail was bruised black and purple. My brother gave me a bandaid and a gummy worm and told me it was going to be alright while I sobbed.

I flinch at the memory.

I used to think that the trunk was lonely all by itself in its corner. That was before I ever opened it and realized that under its own wrinkled face there were a hundred others – photographs that had accumulated there for years. Some, taken by mom, others just runoff from distant relatives. I think the trunk loves them all quietly, like I do. Like I have learned to. It is suffused with people and all their stories. Every brass knob is rusted with them. As something that was probably built the same time as the Titanic, it has spent a long time collecting.

The lid opens more obligingly than usual and the yellow-tinged smell of dust and measured decay greets me. I trace my hand over the first layer of photographs – albums and scratchbooks, all bound up in pretty blue covers. A few embarrassing, gap-toothed school pictures are scattered throughout. I take one and turn it over, not wanting to look at the face. The trunk gapes at me in a sympathetic grimace.

I flip open the nearest album and my mother’s youthful smile shines up at me. It coaxes the corners of my own mouth up. Her whole face is lit from something deep inside, her blue eyes sparkling in a way I have not seen in a long time. The next page holds a similar picture – they all do, in fact. I know because I have touched these pages a hundred times, brushing my fingers over that long-gone smile. I wish I could bring that joyful girl back. I close the book and shift it back into symmetry with the others.

Under the skin of these memories are the bones, and I make myself dig for them now. Diving past the sharp, distracting corners of polaroids, I finally feel soft paper. Then the wires of a notebook. Out it comes, pale and wrinkled like some strange deep-sea fish. The once-red cover has faded to a fleshy pink and time has made the once pretty calligraphy smudged. It’s just a thin journal, and only half filled, so I decide to read what little it might contain to pass the time until mom gets home. I don’t want to try to go to sleep in an empty house.

There are dozens of collections just like this one at the bottom of the trunk. So many, in fact, that I once wondered if it was magical. A bottomless amalgamation of all the not-very-important stories that my family has written down. Diaries and poems and genealogies all go down there to die, or maybe survive.

My mother isn’t a writer. Neither were her parents. Neither am I. Maybe a distant cousin or two thinks they are, but in general I have never considered us to be a pen-and-paper family. We don’t even really tell stories at parties or weddings. But we all like to read well enough, I guess. And we like to remember things. And since every one of us knows how to use a pen, or a computer, the trunk is inevitably filled with novels-worth of memories in various handwritings.

I haven’t read most of them. There are just too many, of course. Some of them just seem too private, though. These were the lives and recollections of people I barely even knew – old Italian women who immigrated to the United States, great-great uncles who worked two jobs to support their families. Things like the gratitude journal my grandmother kept all her life. What could she have possibly been grateful for on days that terrible things happened? I want to know, but my hands feel clumsy when I hold those pages. Like the trunk, they seem imbued with years of something yellow-tinted and intangible.

There are some things, I think, that can’t be touched. That I don’t deserve to read – that I’m not ready to read.

So I stick to the light writings. I devoured a collection of love letters my grandparents sent to each other. Some of my cousin’s poetry suffered the same fate. It wasn’t very good, but I was just a kid and I enjoyed it. Mostly, though, I have stuck to the photos. I don’t often go past that surface level, where all the images shine like polished sea glass. I like seeing the smiles that have somehow leaked out of our lives. Even the black and white photos of my ancestors have some smiles, making the action seem like some ancient part of history, or a little fantasy I made up. They’re hypnotizing. I once cradled a picture of my aunt for an hour, just examining the brightness of her brown eyes. There was something so incredible about it.

Sometimes I remember how amazing human beings are. How joyful they can be.

But the words of unskilled writers like my relatives don’t tend to shine like those glossy polaroids. They’re boring, or obscure, or too smudged to even be legible. I have struggled through a few of them, trying to understand the fragmented cursive and run-on sentences and muddled memories. They haven’t meant much to me. I wondered, after reading them, why we kept these, anyway. Why did anyone care enough to put them in this trunk full of things that I love so much?

But I keep coming back. I keep coming back because under the shiny photographs, and under the dull manuscripts, there’s more. I know there’s more.

My knee knocks against the trunk as I shift to sit more comfortably and its lid nods in approval. I lean against it, feeling odd comfort in the way the various knobs and handles press into my back, take a breath, and open the cover of the notebook.

The cursive grows familiar as I go through it, and soon enough it’s easy to read. I skim the boring parts where the narrator talks about his various visits to art museums in London and Paris, or when he goes into romanticized rants about the beautiful parks and rivers. I like when he talks about his homesickness, and missing his sweetheart. He never mentions his name, and I don’t recognize the handwriting, so I don’t know how he’s related to me or why his diary ended up in the trunk. I finish the whole thing quickly, and put it carefully aside.

It doesn’t say much in twenty pages. But it’s in the collection anyway. It is treasured up with all the rest, with that vague hope that someday, somehow, they’ll add up to something.

It is beginning to get dark outside, and the air feels thicker than it did half an hour ago. I stare at the ceiling for a moment, then dig under the photos again. My fingers search, feeling every corner and spine, the bones sometimes smooth and sometimes sharp. I pull up a calendar and a box of wedding invitations before finally settling on a little book my mother wrote when she was a young girl. Even the stick figures grin at me, and I trace their fading lines absently on each page. Then I put it away again.

With the next volume the minutes start to pass lethargically, like they almost always do when I get this far. The street lamps turn on and the bird song begins to slow until there are no sounds outside except for the distant hum of cars. I get up to close the window, just to give my legs a break. Just to try to calm my heart. A small sea of papers have collected around the trunk, with a clear spot where I was sitting. What a mess I’ll have to clean up before mom gets home. When is she getting home?

I want her to come back. But I want to be alone, too. I go back to peering at the waves.

My eyes skim over the words of a short memoir, the glossy pages slipping out from under my gaze like it can’t gain traction. I give up after a few pages and set it aside, too. It feels too quiet. The room feels heavy. There are no lights on but this one. I move closer to the trunk, like it will keep me safe from the dark. And since I’m there, by its side, I just keep pulling out more and more old bones. I read some of them, and some I just toss into the little moat that has formed around me.

I want to be able to say that this search is aimless, but I know it isn’t. In my heart, or some bottomless place inside me, I know what I’m looking for. I’ve known it for a while now. I have known since I started sitting by the trunk whenever I was alone, a few months ago. And like I know that my cousin’s bad poetry and my aunt’s brown eyes and my mother’s smile are all in there, I know the thing I’m looking for is, also.

Mom knows it, too. Sometimes she just sits and states at the closed trunk, even though she says it’s ugly. Her eyes are somewhere I can’t reach them. Her whole face is pulled down in a way I can’t understand. She watches the trunk like she can see right through its peeling walls, and I watch her, and even when we are right next to each other there is no way for us to touch. There is an ocean between us that we haven’t even found yet, let alone tried to cross.

Mom would take us to the beach when we were little, and while he ran straight into the water I would stay back, watching the waves in fear and awe. The water went out so far, and I knew that if you ever got lost out there you would never be able to find your way back. I used to think I was scared of the ocean. Now I think I’m scared of not even knowing where it is.

I hold a book against my chest, trying to not think. I have never gotten this far before. The papers have never swelled this high around me. It is like my own little fortress, where I am all alone.

And the words seep into my head no matter how hard I try to stop them. I’m so lonely.

I plunge my hand back into the trunk and the bones scrape my skin again. There is a roaring in my ears like the sound of a conch shell. Like the kind of current you can’t hear from the shore. You have to go out deep.

My brother stepped on a conch shell once. His foot was bleeding, and I remember thinking he was scared. I can’t remember if the sky was blue, or if the sand was hot under my skin, or if mom was there or what day it was or how old I had been.

I remember the conch. I remember my brother’s blood. I remember thinking he was scared.

My hand brushes against a rough sheet of paper and the bottom of the trunk. I’ve never felt the bottom of the trunk before. It is just wood. And the paper is just paper, just another book. But I know it’s the one I’ve been looking for while also trying to make myself forget about it. I know it’s the one mom stares at. I know it’s the one the trunk has been keeping safe for us until we’re ready.

I know it’s the one they found in my brother’s car. I still remember that car, with its leather seats and air conditioning that smelled like spoiled milk and sand in every crevice. He had been so proud of it. I don’t know where the car is now, or anything else that they had taken from it that night, but I know that the notebook is here. I know we buried it here because how can you ever throw it away? How can you ever not wonder?

But how can you ever look at it, either? How can you ever hold it, or look at his handwriting, or read it?

I’m not ready. I’m not ready to do any of those things. I pull my arm out and the whole trunk shakes. I’m not ready yet.

The papers around me flow slowly back into the bottom, my hands practically moving of their own accord to replace them. The lid closes with a soft thud like a promise. A promise to treasure when I can’t. A promise to remember when I won’t. A promise to hold on while I’m drowning in an ocean I can’t even find.

I hold onto those old brass knobs and that promise until I hear the front door open. She’s quiet, as always, like she’s afraid to disturb the silence of our house. She must know that I’m not asleep yet. She must know how hard sleeping is.

I get up and push the trunk back, using all the force in my legs just to move it. It screeches against the floor as though in protest of the silence. I’m grateful for its scream. Finally, it slides back behind the bookshelf and I straighten, my heart thudding. I’ll get stronger.

I hear mom call my name and I go to find her. I think about her smiles. I think about the things in the depths of the trunk. I think about the ocean between us.

And I make a promise to find it.