Boxes and Cake

My name is Cassie Byrne, I'm thirty-five years old, and I'm standing in a storage annex that smells like dust and old paper, watching my wife tape a box shut.

I'll back up. Margot Klein, thirty-five, is my wife. Has been for twelve years now. We met in college when we were both twenty-two, dated a year, got married at twenty-three, and nobody thought that was too young except Margot's mother, who was wrong but loud about it. Next week Margot starts a new job as head archivist at a university four hours away. We agreed, back in June, that this marriage had run its course and we'd do the mature thing. Separate. Clean break. Adults about it.

So here we are on a humid Saturday in September, packing the last of our shared stuff into the annex where Margot works, because the movers come Tuesday and our apartment is already half bare. Very mature. Extremely adult. I'm fine.

"Did you label the one with the mixing bowls?" Margot calls across the rows of metal shelving. Her voice bounces off the fluorescent lights.

"KITCHEN. Big letters. You can't miss it!"

"Thank you!" She tears off another strip of tape with her teeth, which she has done for as long as I've known her, and which has always annoyed me in a way I never got around to fixing. You'd think after twelve years I'd have mentioned it. You'd think a lot of things.

The annex is this long low room behind the main archive building, all metal shelving and cardboard and that faint papery smell that Margot claims she can't even notice anymore. She's been here nine years. Nine years of dead professors' correspondence and somebody's collection of seed catalogs from the 1930s. And now she's leaving it, and taking most of our furniture with her, and I'm staying in the apartment because the lease is in my name. We shook hands on it, basically. That's how dry the whole conversation was. Can you imagine? Twelve years and we divided up a couch like we were splitting a lunch bill.

I go back to my box. It's full of kitchen gadgets, the weird drawer stuff, the avocado slicer Margot bought at a flea market and used exactly twice, the corn holders shaped like little pigs, the garlic press that never worked but that neither of us would throw out because it was a housewarming gift from her aunt, who is not anyone I'm related to, just to be clear about that. I wrap the garlic press in newspaper. My hands are doing this on their own, honestly. The rest of me is somewhere else.

Then I hit the spatula.

It's a cheap blue silicone spatula, the kind that costs four dollars, and it has a burnt spot on the handle from the time I left it on the stove in our first apartment. Margot made fun of me for a month about that. There's a yellow sticky note stuck to it, in her handwriting, that neat little print she uses for filing labels. It says: loved this spatula.

That's all it says. Loved this spatula.

Why would she write that? Who writes a note about a spatula? It's not like the box was going somewhere without her, it's going to my apartment, she knows I'll see it. Unless... okay, I don't know what unless. I stood there holding a four-dollar spatula with a note on it and felt something in my chest do a weird little drop, like an elevator between floors. I couldn't even name it. That's a strange thing to admit, right? Thirty-five years old, married half my adult life, and I couldn't put a word to a feeling.

I put the spatula in the box. I did not throw the note away. I'm telling you that now because it matters later, or I think it does. I smoothed it flat and set it on top of the pig corn holders like it was something worth keeping.

"Cassie?" Margot's voice, closer now. I hadn't heard her come around the shelves.

"Hm?"

"I'm out of tape. I'm going to run to the office, there's a roll in my desk drawer." She's holding her keys, and her hair is stuck to the back of her neck from the humidity, and she looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with boxes. "Back in ten minutes. Don't lift anything heavy by yourself, you always do that and then complain."

"I have never once complained."

"You complained Tuesday. About the book boxes. You said, and I quote, my arms are noodles."

"That was a joke!"

"It was a complaint shaped like a joke," she says, and she almost smiles, and then she doesn't, and she goes. Her footsteps echo off down the row and out the side door, and then it's just me and the hum of the lights and about forty boxes with our whole life sorted into categories.

I kept packing. Or I meant to. I wrapped the avocado slicer, I wrapped the pig corn holders, I labeled a box BOOKS that was mostly not books. And then I straightened up to stretch my back, and that's when I saw it.

There's a gap behind one of the shelving units, back in the far corner where the lights don't reach as well, and shoved into that gap is a single cardboard box. It's been there a while, I could tell, because there's a fine layer of dust on it and a dead spider next to it that I chose not to think about. And on the top, in that same neat print, in black marker, are the words: WEDDING - DO NOT OPEN.

Margot's handwriting.

You have to understand, we thought the wedding stuff was gone. Most of it, anyway. When we moved from the first apartment to this one, six years ago, there was a whole bin of wedding things, the cake topper and the guest book and the dried flowers and God knows what, and somewhere in that move the bin vanished. We both assumed the other one had tossed it. I remember we even laughed about it, actually, sat on the floor of the new place eating takeout and laughing about how neither of us had wanted to be the one to throw out the cake topper so apparently the universe did it for us. Ha ha. Very funny. Six years ago.

So what is that box doing behind a shelf in her office annex, labeled in her handwriting, hidden where I would never, in nine years of visiting her at work, have any reason to look?

Do not open. She wrote do not open. On a box she hid in a room I almost never entered.

And here's the part where I tell you what I did, and you can judge me. I stood there for a good minute, telling myself all the sensible things. It's her box. It's private. Whatever's in it, she kept it hidden for a reason and the polite thing, the mature thing, the adult thing, is to leave it exactly where it is and never mention it, the way we have politely not mentioned a hundred other things this summer.

Then I heard the side door bang somewhere in the building. Ten minutes, she said. Maybe less, if the tape was sitting right there on her desk.

I dragged the box out from behind the shelf.

* * *

It wasn't even taped shut. That got me first. A box marked DO NOT OPEN, hidden for six years, and the flaps were just folded over each other like she'd been in there recently, or like she'd never been able to make herself seal it in the first place. I don't know which is worse, honestly.

I opened it anyway. Of course I opened it. You would have too, don't lie to yourself.

Inside: packing paper, that old crinkly kind, and under it a smaller box, a real nice one, with a lid. And a folded program from the ceremony, gone soft at the creases like it had been handled. And a little paper bag from a bakery we both loved that closed four years ago, folded flat and kept. Who keeps a folded paper bag from a bakery that doesn't even exist anymore?

I lifted the smaller box out and took the lid off, and there they were.

Two ceramic women. Side by side on a little base, holding hands, one in a tiny painted suit and one in a tiny painted dress, and the one in the suit has a ring painted on her finger, one little silver dot. Our topper. The one from the top of our cake, twelve years ago, when Margot was twenty-three and I was twenty-three and her mother stood in the second row with her arms crossed the whole ceremony. I remember the cake. I remember the topper fell over during the drive home and Margot caught it before it hit the floor and said "not on my watch," and I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

We thought this was gone. Six years gone.

I sat down on one of the packing boxes we hadn't filled yet, right there on the concrete floor of the annex, and I held two ceramic women in my hands and I did not know what I was feeling. Again. That's twice in one week I couldn't name a feeling, and I coach people for a living, I'm supposed to be good at identifying what's going on under the surface. For other people, anyway.

The thing that got me wasn't even that she kept it. It was the do not open. She wrote that in marker, in her neat little print, like a warning to herself more than to anybody else. Like she knew someday she'd find herself alone in a room with it and need a sign.

And she hid it from me. Not from the world. From me. She moved it from apartment to apartment, or she moved it here at some point, either way she carried it, and she never said a word. Meanwhile I've been spending September telling myself the separation was mutual and clean and adult and we both agreed in June like we were picking a date to renew a gym membership.

I heard the side door bang again.

Okay. Here's where I admit my next move was not my best. I did not put the topper back. I did not close the box. I just sat there on the empty box holding it, like a person caught in the act, which is exactly what I was, and when Margot's footsteps came down the row I didn't even try to hide.

She stopped at the end of the aisle. She had a roll of tape in one hand. She saw the box, open, behind me, and she saw what was in my hands, and she went completely still. Not shocked-still. Something else. Like a person standing very quiet hoping a thing will undo itself.

"You opened it," she said.

"You hid it," I said. Which was fair, and also not the point, and I knew it wasn't the point even as I said it.

"That was... that wasn't for you to find.