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Malini.

Chapter Seven
    Excavation
     
    Two boxes. Everything from the apartment,
all the material evidence that he'd ever had a family before coming
to Paris, fit into two moving boxes. Jacob walked into the gaping
mouth of the Laudners' two-car garage and stared at the brown
rectangles wrapped in packing tape.
    Strange, the thumping in his chest and the
way his throat ached when he swallowed was new for him. Jacob knew
he needed to open them, to go through her things. Uncle John said
it would give him closure. But he hesitated. The truth was he
didn't want closure; he wanted to believe she was alive. He refused
to give up on her. But he also knew it was important to check that
everything was there. To make sure, that when they did find her,
all of her things would be accounted for.
    He pulled a pair of gardening shears off
their hook on the wall and sliced through the tape at the top of
the first box. It was filled with items wrapped in brown paper.
Jacob reached in and unwrapped one—a glass. He grabbed another—a
soap dish: kitchen and bathroom items, all of it. He guessed the
flat ones on the bottom were plates and the things on top were
mixing bowls and drinking glasses.
    When Jacob sliced through the tape on the
second box, white stuffing burst from the incision. The shears had
sliced too deep, into the pillow that used to be his mother's. He
pinched the hole and pulled the pillow out. Her quilt was
underneath it, folded neatly on top of her clothes and a short
wooden box. He caught the scent of cherry blossoms, the smell of
her favorite lotion.
    Resting his elbows on the sides of the box,
he allowed his head to loll forward. With his eyes closed, Jacob
could picture them there, sitting cross-legged on the quilt,
playing crazy eights with a deck of cards so old you could tell the
eight of spades from the fingerprint worn into the pattern on the
back. Whatever happened to those cards?
    Jacob opened his eyes. The brown corner of
the wooden box peaked out from under his mother's salmon colored
sweatshirt. Was it a jewelry box? Did his mother own a jewelry box?
He'd never, ever, seen her wear jewelry. If she'd had any before
his dad died, they would have sold it a long time ago. Jacob
absolutely did not remember the box. He reached in and pulled the
shiny wood from under the linens.
    It looked much too expensive to have
belonged to her. It was koa wood inlaid with a pale carving of a
phoenix. He tried to lift the lid but it was locked. The gold
keyhole was small, like a diary lock.
    Jacob set the wooden box aside and dug
deeper for the key. The moving box was an awkward height and the
cardboard buckled under his weight. He swept his hand around the
bottom and tried to feel for something that might contain small
items. When nothing presented itself, he found a relatively clean
section of concrete and unloaded the items one by one. The glasses,
the plates, even the mixing bowls he freed from their paper
cocoons. Everything was there, everything he remembered from the
apartment. It looked like a rummage sale spread out across the
driveway.
    There was no key.
    It wasn't a complete loss though. Near the
bottom of the bedroom box, he'd found a framed picture of his
family, the one that had hung on the bedroom wall. Smile lines
creased the corners of his father's green eyes, serenity lingered
in the curve of his mother's mouth, and Jacob was missing teeth but
nothing else. This was a picture of a family that didn't exist
anymore—a family extinct.
    The cold bit into him as he rewrapped and
packaged the items back into the boxes. For more than an hour,
Jacob worked to replace everything except for the picture and the
jewelry box. He set those aside to bring inside. When he was done,
he pushed the boxes into a corner of the garage and turned to
leave.
    Across the street, the Victorian loomed
black and blue, a bruise on the horizon. The wind rattled the ivy
on the fence and knocked some icicles free. They fell like knives
slicing