Page 115 of Before the Bond
"Don't preemptively destroy a good time."
I snorted.
“Fine. Pure girls’ night.”
“Pure girls’ night! Woo!”
I found the go-bag in the back of my car.
I totally forgot it was there.
Sometime in the chaos of the past week — the drive back, the confrontation at the estate, the long hours after — it slid off the back seat and wedged itself behind the driver's side.
I opened and closed that door a half-dozen times without thinking about it. It wasn't until I went to move the car that I reached back and my hand caught the strap.
I sat in the driver's seat for a moment with it in my lap.
It was lighter than it used to feel. Not because I'd taken anything out — I hadn't touched it since the night I'd driven away from here. It felt lighter because what it meant had changed.
The go-bag used to feel like insurance. A hand already on the door handle before I needed it. The specific comfort of a bag packed light enough to carry with one hand down a flight of stairs at two in the morning without waking anyone.
Now it just felt like luggage.
I took it upstairs.
My room was warm. Maureen put fresh flowers in the small vase on the windowsill — which I'd told her wasn't necessary and which she'd done anyway, because Maureen's version of listening was to hear you out and then do what she'd already decided. The afternoon light came through the gap in the curtains and put a stripe of gold across the floorboards.
I opened the go-bag and pulled everything out.
The other bag was in the closet, the one that held the rest of my life.
I unpacked the essentials when I first arrived, the work things, the toiletries, the clothes I needed every day, but the rest had stayed packed. The habit of moving. The subconscious message to a room: I'm not staying.
I pulled that one out, too.
I spread everything on the bed and assessed the contents.
It had things in it I'd carried from city to city for years without really thinking about it: A paperback with the spine cracked in three places — the one I'd bought from a street vendor in Portland and read on a park bench in a single afternoon. A small ceramic bowl I found at a market in Austin, glazed blue-green, barely the size of my palm…
My hands came across a photo. A Polaroid, not one on my phone. I had it printed so that I always had somethingto remember the moment by. It was a picture of my parents on a beach one summer, years before Northern California. My mother squinted into the sun. My father laughed at something outside the frame. I wasn't in the picture. I had taken it.
I held it for a long moment.
Then I found a place for it on the windowsill, beside the flowers.
I unpacked everything else. The book went on the nightstand. The bowl went on the dresser and immediately caught a coin I'd been leaving on surfaces around the room since I arrived.
I found a hook behind the door for the small canvas tote I always carried and never fully emptied. I found a corner of the closet shelf for the things I'd been keeping in the bag because keeping them in the bag meant they were ready to go.
It took maybe twenty minutes.
When I was done I stood in the middle of the room and looked at it.
The same four walls. The same window with its view of the firs. The same Maureen-approved linens and the same heavy stone walls that had made me feel, on my first night, like the estate had grown out of the mountain rather than been placed on it.
It looked different now. It looked like mine.
My past and I could finally, properly, be at home.
