I woke up alone. I felt a crushing desolation, certain of the inevitability that Caleb had come to his senses and left me. Our ending had been in view since the moment we met. I had prepared myself for the end a hundred times before, but as the years wore on, I had gotten comfortable, fallen more in love, hadn’t been able to believe that he would actually, truly leave me. I thought of all the things I should have done to be a better girlfriend, a better human being. I would call him, I would find him, I would make him love me again. Feeling resolved, I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and drew back in surprise.
Caleb’s shoes were by the nightstand.
Gravity suddenly had nothing on me; I was weightless, buoyed by sheer relief. He hadn’t left me; he hadn’t even left the house.
Opening the bedroom door, I heard strains of Pearl Jam and could smell coffee and the rich, golden scent of buttery pancakes, all of which served as further confirmation that Caleb was still there and hinted optimistically at his mood.
As I descended the front stairs, the doorbell rang. I tightened my robe and opened the door, expecting to find a contrite neighbor apologizing for skipping the funeral in the universal mourning language of casseroles. Instead, there sat a large cardboard box, taped up tightly and dented at the corners, and, beyond it, the retreating figure of a delivery person.
“Who was it?” Aunt A asked, coming down the stairs as I tugged the box, which wasn’t so much heavy as it was large and awkward, into the living room.
“UPS. They left this.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s addressed to you, and the return address is some post office box in California.” I froze as I said the word California. I glanced quickly at Aunt A, who looked stricken as well. “You don’t know anyone in California, do you?”
“Open the box,” she said dully. “Let me get you some scissors.”
I ripped the tape from the box with my bare hands and flung open the lid. Together, Aunt A and I peered into the box, which was crowded with a jumble of incense-scented, light-colored cloth; strings of beads; and assorted knickknacks. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “They’ve sent us your mother’s things.”
I reached into the box and delicately fingered a strand of beads, as though they might shatter at my touch, barely resisting the urge to wind the long ropes of color around me, to wrap myself in my mother’s essence and try to breathe her in one last time. Did these things help her find peace? Did they fill her with love and purpose, like we once had?
Why did you go, Mom? And why didn’t you say goodbye?
Aunt A and I got no further than the beads before Caleb announced breakfast was on the table, and we agreed it would be a shame to allow such delicious-smelling pancakes to get cold. Aunt A went upstairs to fetch Ellen (who I was fairly certain hadn’t eaten a pancake since the early 2000s), and I folded the box’s flaps closed. There was a certain sense of relief at being forced to abandon the project, albeit temporarily. It had been a brutal and emotionally devastating week, and I wasn’t certain I could withstand the added trauma of confronting my late mother’s personal effects.
But after breakfast had been consumed and the kitchen had been cleaned, Aunt A returned to the box and I felt compelled to follow her. I had to imagine that Aunt A was feeling some of the same dread at the thought of opening it, and I couldn’t allow her to suffer alone.
“I wish this hadn’t come today,” she said, staring down at it.
“Me too,” I agreed, my voice catching. “After everything . . . You know, we don’t have to open it right now.”
“It’s not going to get any easier.”
“No.” I sighed. “It’s not.”
“Come on,” she said, kneeling beside the box and patting the ground beside her. “Let’s do this together.”
I nodded and sank to a seat. She was right: sorting through my mother’s belongings would never be anything less than heartbreaking, and I knew that we could each use the moral support. As Aunt A pulled open the box, I took a deep breath, futilely hoping to catch a whiff of my mother’s unique scent, vanilla and lilac and something green. But all I smelled was cardboard, and the musty scent of stale objects. My heart nearly cracked open.
Aunt A extracted a long, beaded necklace and dangled it before her, the glass beads twirling and catching the light. “This would’ve looked pretty on her,” she said quietly.
I nodded in agreement, not daring myself to speak, feeling the lump of tears working its way up my throat. I plunged a hand inside and extracted a sky-blue scarf. I rubbed the gauzy fabric between my thumbs and against my face, hoping to feel some kind of connection. I felt nothing. Nothing about that piece of cloth reminded me of my mother. For all I knew, it wasn’t even hers. We could have been mailed items belonging to someone else’s dead mother. How would we ever know?
Unsettled, I reached into the box once more. There had to be something that would stir me, something that felt unequivocally hers. My fingers hit something papery but soft, something that felt like a well-worn piece of stock paper, and I carefully pulled it free. I caught my breath when I recognized it as the cover to our mother’s treasured copy of Anna Karenina. The book had been one of her favorites, one that Lanie and I had tried—and failed—to read on many occasions. One cold winter, stuck in Berlin while I raised money to keep traveling, I found a copy in the hostel’s library and finally made my way through the tome. None of it stuck with me so much as its famous opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
As Aunt A and I sifted through the modest, sad artifacts of my mother’s existence, fruitlessly searching for the rest of the book, I realized that this was the uniqueness of this unhappy family: a mother who had left behind nothing but broken incense burners and threadbare scarves that reeked of patchouli.