Seven Things She Took

The house had been eating her for years.

Not all at once. It was patient, the way old houses are — the way old families are. It took small bites. A habit she'd loved, gone by winter. A word she used to say, swallowed by spring. By the seventh year she could not remember the sound of her own name in her own mouth, only in his, and in his mouth it had always sounded like a leash.

She waited until the blood was dry on the kitchen floor. His blood, not hers — for once, not hers — though it was only a nosebleed, only the edge of the table where he'd stumbled after the wine, only an accident she'd watched happen from across the room without moving to help. She had stood there with a dish towel in her hands and felt nothing, and the nothing had been so loud it shook her awake.

She pulled the suitcase from behind the wall where she'd hidden it three years ago, inside the cavity she'd carved with a bread knife while he slept. She had been planning this since the night he broke the bones in her left hand — one by one, slowly, to teach her a lesson about the door — and made her set them herself because the nearest doctor was his cousin.

The suitcase opened its mouth on the bed. She packed seven things.

The knife first. Not a kitchen knife. The hunting knife she'd carried when she was fifteen and the mountains were hers and no man's hand had yet closed around her wrist and called it love. It had lived in the wall cavity with the suitcase. She had sharpened it once a month for three years on a stone she kept in her apron pocket, grinding the edge in the dark after he fell asleep, the softest sound in the house, softer than her own breathing, which she had learned to make almost silent.

The knife was not for the road.

The knife was in case he woke up before she reached it.

The bread she had baked that morning with steady hands. She had put rosemary in it, and salt, and a pinch of the ash from his mother's hearth.

The bread was for the road. The ash was for remembering.

The jar of seeds from her mother's garden. Her mother, who had not come to the wedding. Who had stood in the doorway and held this jar out with shaking hands and dry eyes and a face like a shut door. Twelve varieties. Things that grow in poor soil, in cold climates, in places where nothing should survive.

The jar was heavier than it should have been. Her mother's fingers had stayed on the glass a moment too long, the way you hold something you are handing to the sea.

Her mother had known what she was packing for.

The red coat. The one he had taken from her the first winter and hung in the back of a closet she was not allowed to open. Too bright, he said. Too much. She had found it last month while he was in town and tried it on and stood in front of the window and felt something move in her chest that she had thought he'd killed — a feeling like color, like heat, like the opposite of the grey quiet thing she had become.

She folded it tight.

The crooked finger was the fifth thing, though she could not put it in the suitcase. It went where it always went — on her left hand, bent at the angle where the bone had set wrong, the one that made her clumsy with thread and useless with a pen. She flexed it over the open case and watched it refuse to straighten and let it remind her, one last time, what gentleness looked like in this house.

The book about the woman who walked into the sea and came back with teeth. One book, because the suitcase was not sentimental. She chose the one that had taught her, at nine years old, that a woman could be devoured and come back as something the world was not prepared for. The pages were soft as skin. She had read it so many times the woman in the story felt less like a character and more like a relative — the aunt who escapes, the one the family doesn't talk about, the one who survives.

The empty space was the seventh thing.

A quarter of the suitcase, unfilled. Not because she had forgotten anything. Because she was leaving room for who she would be on the other side of the valley — the woman she had not yet met, the one with both hands working, the one who would plant twelve varieties of seed in poor soil and watch them grow.

She closed the clasps and they sounded like teeth.

The front door had no lock. It had never had one. She knew now that this was not generosity. It was contempt. They had looked at her on her wedding day — his father, his brothers, their quiet wives with their own suitcases hidden in their own walls — and decided she would never be brave enough to use it.

She wiped his blood off the kitchen floor with the dish towel. She folded the towel and placed it on the counter beside the wedding ring. She wanted him to wake and find everything in order — the bed made, the towel folded, the ring placed just so, and her gone. Not fled. Removed, the way you remove a tooth: deliberately, and with an ache that lasts.

The road went down the hill and into the valley and past the valley into mountains she did not have names for yet.

The house behind her was silent. It had expected to keep her forever.

She walked, and the suitcase knocked against her leg with every step, and the knife inside it sang against the brass clasps, and the sound was the first music she had heard in seven years.