Chapter 8: What Was Behind the Locked Door
Gwen was in the small back room where she had been sleeping.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap when I knocked and pushed the door open.
She looked up.
She read my face.
"It's done?" she said.
"The hard part is done." I sat down next to her.
"Ray's filing everything this morning.
Margaret knows.
Paige knows."
Gwen nodded slowly.
She looked at her hands.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
"Strange," she said.
"I've been afraid of this moment for so long.
Now that it's here I don't know what to do with myself."
"You don't have to do anything with it right now."
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, "I want to open the door."
I looked at her.
"The locked room," she said.
"I want my things back."
I stood up.
The locked room was at the end of the hallway.
A simple interior lock — the kind that could be opened from the outside with a flathead screwdriver or a coin.
I used a quarter from my jacket pocket.
The mechanism turned.
The door swung open.
The room smelled like dust and something faintly floral.
Old paper, maybe.
Or the dried flowers Gwen used to keep in a small vase on the windowsill.
It wasn't being used as storage.
That had been a lie.
The room was exactly as it had been left, except that everything of Gwen's had been pushed to one side and covered with a sheet.
Like it had been hidden rather than stored.
Gwen stepped past me and pulled the sheet back.
Her grandmother's jewelry box.
A cardboard box of framed photos.
A stack of letters tied with a rubber band — my letters, the ones I had written from overseas, the handwritten ones from the first year before email became easier.
A small wooden box she had brought from her parents' house when we got married.
A wedding album.
She picked up the album first.
She opened it to a random page and stood there looking at it.
I watched her face.
She touched one of the photos lightly with her fingertip.
Us at the reception.
She was laughing at something.
I was looking at her instead of the camera.
"I forgot about this one," she said softly.
"I remember it.
You had just spilled champagne on your dress and thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened."
She let out a sound that was almost a laugh.
It surprised her.
She pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment.
Then she sat down on the floor right there in the doorway of the room, the album in her lap, and she cried.
Not quietly.
Not carefully.
The way a person cries when they have been holding something for a very long time and the container finally gives way.
I sat down on the floor next to her.
I didn't say anything.
There wasn't anything to say.
After a while, she leaned her head against my shoulder.
I put my arm around her.
The house was quiet.
Outside, a car started somewhere on the street and drove away.
"David," she said finally, her voice rough.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry I said you shouldn't have come home yet."
"You were scared."
"I was." She turned the page of the album.
Another photo — the two of us outside the church, squinting into the sun.
"But I was also wrong.
You should have come home exactly when you did."
I looked at the photo.
"Yeah," I said.
"I think so too."
We stayed on the floor of that room for a long time.
Long enough for the morning light to shift across the hallway and reach us where we sat.
Eventually she started going through the box of photos.
She handed me ones she thought I'd want to see.
I handed them back.
We talked about small things — where the photos had been taken, what year, who else had been there.
At some point she took off the beanie.
She didn't announce it.
She just reached up and pulled it off and set it on the floor beside her.
The bruise was still visible.
Dark yellow at the edges now, fading.
I looked at it for a moment.
May you like
Then I looked back at the photo she was holding out to me.
I took it.
