“Would you like us to open them, or leave the combinations with you?”
Mom was in no position to answer.
Grams raised her eyebrows, asking me. It was always freaking up to me.
I raked my hands through my hair and took a breath, getting control back. “Open them now, please. Let’s get this over with.”
Two soldiers stepped forward, careful not to jar Mom and Grams, and opened the locks with nearly simultaneous pops. Without further preamble, the hinges squeaked as they ripped off the scabs we’d fought so hard to grow and opened up new crates of grief.
“Is there anything else?” I asked the captain, unable to take the vacant look on Mom’s face for another minute.
“No, ma’am. These are all of his belongings sent home by his unit.”
All of his belongings meant his journal! “His laptop is in there, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. We had to wait for the computer to be cleared, which is why it took so long.” He looked down at the floor and I grasped his meaning.
“Cleared his computer?” I asked, trying to misunderstand him. “You mean checked for viruses, or classified data, right?”
He grimaced and took a breath. “No, ma’am. Official policy states we have to wipe the hard drive before returning it to the family.”
You had to be fucking kidding me. “You wiped his hard drive?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was having trouble holding my gaze.
“His pictures? His journal? Everything we had of him? You just erased it like you were taking out yesterday’s trash?” My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, desperate to draw any blood they could. Even mine.
“Please understand—”
“No! You stole from us! You took something you had no right to!” I shook my head, trying to dislodge this nightmare. “We’ve done everything you’ve asked for! Everything! Why would you do this to us?”
“It’s policy.”
“Screw your policy. You erased what was left of him! His thoughts! This is wrong, and you know it!”
Mom’s low wail ripped through me, finally letting loose the very sound bottled inside me. Her misery echoed my own, and I dismissed Captain Wilson by turning my back.
Mom knelt in front of one of the boxes, one of his army-tan T-shirts held up against her face, breathing him in on the inhale, screaming on the exhale, calling out his name. My throat closed up, but I found my voice. “Get out.”
I didn’t need to say it twice.
The soldiers filed out into the fresh air and left us trapped within our own grief.
“What’s going on?” April struggled down the stairs, and I didn’t have the energy to yell at her about her hangover anymore.
“Dad’s stuff,” I answered, gently lifting Mom to the couch by her arms. Grams rocked her like a baby as she kept the shirt against her nose, soaking it in tears and gut-wrenching sobs. She hadn’t cried like this before, not that I’d heard. She’d been too numbed, too full of shock to grieve like this a month ago. I almost wished I could shove her back into her catatonic state and spare her all of this.
I picked up another T-shirt and brought it to my nose. It smelled like him, like rainy days and reading on the couch. It smelled like hugs and scraped knees and comfort over first heartbreaks. It smelled like him so much that he could have been wearing it. But that was impossible. He was buried twenty minutes from here and couldn’t wear this shirt again.
I would never have another hug, another laugh, another Sunday crossword.
All I had was this damned shirt, and I understood Mom’s wailing. It echoed the screams building in my heart that I didn’t dare let escape. Instead, I took another breath of Dad’s scent and wondered if they had been thoughtful enough not to wash it.
“What do we do?” April’s voice shook next to me.
I’d seen Mom do it for every deployment, and this was no exception. “Get the Ziploc bags. The big ones.”
She came back a moment later with the gallon-sized bags. Soon, these shirts wouldn’t smell like him anymore, and we really would have lost every part of him. “Start smelling the shirts. If it smells like Dad, bag it.”
“Why?”
I swallowed back my tears. “When you were two and Dad deployed, you had night terrors. No one knew why, but Mom couldn’t get them to stop.” I nearly laughed. “God, they told me this story over and over. Anyway, Mom never washed Dad’s pillowcase, so she slipped it over your pillow. It smelled like him, and you slept. Once that smell wore off, she un-bagged some of his shirts that she’d saved and covered your pillow with those.”
Silent tears tracked down my sister’s face. “Okay.”
I squeezed her hand. No words would do.
While Grams let Mom cry it out, April and I sorted the things that smelled like him from the things we knew had been washed, bleached, or never worn. After the second box, we had seven shirts that smelled like Dad.
I gathered up the bags and took them upstairs and into Mom’s walk-in closet. The bottom drawer of the tall dresser was empty. It’s where he’d kept all these shirts. I slid them into the drawer and shut it.
I stood, taking stock of the top of the dresser where he kept his treasures, as he had called them, the little things we’d made for him over the years out of rice and macaroni and egg cartons. My handprint in plaster from his first Father’s Day sat next to a picture of all three of us we’d given him for his last.