He gives me a fond smile and a shrug. “One of those faces.”
I nod and point to the door as I step towards it, then I spin on my heel, hands behind my back.
“No one can see these, can they?”
“Just me,” he says, and I must look affronted because he quickly adds, “When I take them out to polish them.”
“Oh.” I purse my lips, thinking about anyone but me seeing what I put in there.
“You have to polish your thoughts. Otherwise, they get messy.”
“Of course.” I nod as though I knew that already.
“It’s a sacred honour. I don’t take it lightly.” His eyebrows lift. “I don’t pry or judge. Just polish.”
I reach for the door handle, then pause again, looking back. “Do many people bring their thoughts up here?”
He nods and I nod back, working my way around to what I’m really asking.
“Lots of people?”
“Yes.” He scratches his neck, waiting for me to just spit it out.
“Pirates, even?”
He nods again. “Yes.”
I purse my lips, thinking. “And if he wanted to, could he—I mean, they!” I clear my throat and flash him a quick smile. “Could they—or anyone, really, if they wanted to—could they ransack my thoughts? Or someone else’s?” I add at the end as though the caveat makes it less obvious.
He sniffs an amused little laugh. “They’d have to get past me first.”
I give him a smile that feels a bit like a grimace.
“I’m so sorry if this comes off rudely, but I worry that that mightn’t the feat you might imagine it to be,”
And then erupts from him a hearty chuckle. “I’m stronger than I look.”
I breathe out apologetically. “Well, sir, you’d have to be.”
John keeps laughing as he sits back down in his little chair in the clouds; he waves at the door. “You go on in now.”
When I step in, it doesn’t take me long to notice this time that the baggage is alphabetised. Surname first, then given name. Many names I don’t recognise, but some I do.
Beaumont, Alfred.* Darling, John. Darling, Michael. Darling, Wendy. Hook, James. Hook, Jamison. And my eyes snag on a bag on one of Jem’s shelves—he has many. Not as many as Peter, mind you, but there’s this one particular bag, and it’s beautiful. Quilted leather, gold chain, white—I won’t go around naming names, but the bag’s a brand that we’ve all heard of, and I have the strangest but most distinct impression that actually, that bag is mine. Or rather, that bag is his baggage of me.
It’s a good bit smaller than I’d have hoped—that’s disheartening—but honestly, the bag is lovely still all the same.
I think about it—about picking it up, peeking inside. I could do it. No one would know. And then I think of him looking at the thoughts I’m about to put away and decide that being in this room is a trust system and one I must honour.
I stand in front of the great mirror and find myself more weighed down than I realised.
I should explain how the baggage system works, I suppose. Because now that I’ve been here a minute, it’s easy enough to understand.
When you check in a piece of baggage, you mustn’t think it’s gone forever nor that it no longer has any bearing to you.
Imagine this: You’re carrying around a disastrously heavy duffel bag, you wear it on your shoulder, and it weighs enough that it makes you walk funny while you’re holding it.
But then you put it down. The bag is still there. Even if you were to leave the room, even if you were to leave the house, the bag is still there. And of course, you could think of the duffel bag at any given moment, think of how you felt when you held it, how heavy it was, why it was heavy, what was inside it—but it’s so much easier to not think about the bag when you don’t have to hold it. And as time goes on, the harder it becomes to remember the contents of a bag. If you check a bag every day, it’s quite easy to remember what you’re carrying around in it, but if you put it away, it sort of fades away into a blurry memory of a thousand things that could be crammed into a bag.
The thoughts I put away when I arrived, I don’t not ever think of them; they’re just a balloon floating by with a string I don’t grab. What my mother is doing in El Salvador or Honduras or wherever she is*—it’s balloon with a string so high up in the sky, I’d have to climb something tall to remember it.?
You pick up so much from just living, I think. Some of the bags are draped over me, backpacks and handbags and shoulder bags—all things that are relatively easy to shrug off, which I do. There are some in my hands though, and I’m holding on to them tightly.
My mother. Where Brodie is. Why do we take medicine every day? Is there really something in the water? Did that fish die? Is that bird okay? Jamison’s face when he saved me and I was drowning—that pops into my mind once an hour easily. How his brows dipped with what I thought was concern but maybe now I’ll conclude to be just a nosy curiosity. His eyes falling down my body that day when he fished me out of the water and I wondered if I’d ever felt so seen. What Itheelia meant when she looked at our palms and made that “hmm” sound. That’s the first one I put down today, and as soon as I drop it, it feels stupid to have held on to all this time. Nothing—she meant nothing by it.
Why Rune doesn’t like Peter—I let go of that next. Now, I’ve said before that it’s slander what they say about fairies and how because they’re small, they can only feel one thing at a time—that’s a lie—but it is true that they can hold a grudge, and Rune has one against Peter. It’s not a big deal is what I think the second I lay it down. People don’t always get along. It doesn’t mean anything and certainly doesn’t mean anything sinister.
I cannot put down fast enough the thought about Peter and Jamison being related. Glad to be rid of it, but I’ve found that one difficult to drop on my own. Cousins—first cousins? Peter would find betrayal in the mere fact of it, but for me to know it and not to have told him—that’s a different sort of betrayal, I suppose. I don’t know why it feels like putting down this thought will make it less true, but that’s how it feels, so I brush my hands clean of it.