The Keychain

Chapter 7: What She Kept

The front door was open. From the street I could see straight through the house to the kitchen light at the back, which meant she'd come in and not bothered to close anything behind her.

I stepped over the threshold and stopped.

I couldn't see the floor. From the entry through the living room there was nothing down there but wreckage — chair legs, a lamp on its side with the shade crushed flat, the coffee table split along the grain, a paperback bent open face-down like something had stood on it. Glass in a wide fan across the tile where the console mirror used to hang.

I picked my way in.

The frames were the first thing I looked at, because they were at eye level. The wedding portrait by the stairs had gone over onto its face and the glass had held. I turned it up with my shoe.

My face was inked out. Black marker, heavy, worked back and forth until the paper had gone soft in the middle and started to tear. She'd gotten the eyes and the mouth and everything above the collar. Below that, in the tuxedo, one hand on her waist, a body with nothing where the head should be.

Every other frame in the house looked the same way. The hallway, the shelf by the kitchen, the small one from the lake. All of them mine, all of them gone over in the same marker, the same pressure.

I kept walking.

Seven years, the ceramic bowl she'd thrown herself in a class and glazed the wrong color, which she'd laughed about for a week and then put on the mantel anyway. It was in pieces on the rug, and someone had stepped on the pieces.

Six years, the painting we'd done together at one of those wine places where they hand you a canvas and a brush and nobody knows what they're doing. I'd done the sky. She'd done the water. The water had come out looking like grass and we'd hung it anyway. It was under the side table with a bottle of ink emptied over it.

Five years, the glass puzzle we'd spent four nights on, the one with the lighthouse. It was in the fish tank. Sitting in the water like a rock, the pieces still stuck together, the fish going around it.

I stopped there. There was no point in counting further.

I went up the stairs.

The bedroom door was open. Her side of the room was neat. The glass cabinet along the far wall hadn't been touched — not a scratch on the glass, not one thing out of place.

J. had given her a snow globe from a trip. It sat on the middle shelf with a little felt tag under it. A fountain pen, still in the box. A small brass figure of a bird. A scarf, folded square. A framed picture of the two of them at somebody's party, her laughing with her head back, his arm along the back of her chair.

Each one set down square to the shelf edge. Spaced.

Nothing of mine had made it into that cabinet in eight years.

"Get out."

She was in the doorway behind me. She'd come up without a sound. Barefoot, in a shirt I didn't recognize, hair pushed back off her face, and a wooden hanger in her hand.

"I don't believe you came back here," she said. "This is my house."

"I came for my things. I'll take them and go."

"Your things." She laughed and it came out wrong, too loud for the room. "Your things are downstairs. Go look at your things. Take all of it. Take every piece of it out of here."

She pointed down the hall with the hanger.

I stepped around her toward the closet.

She got in front of me with both arms out.

"The car," she said. "The little handmade car. Give it back. I made that with my own hands, you don't get to keep it."

"The ugly thing I threw in the trash years ago?"

Her mouth opened.

"If you want it," I said, "that's where it is. Go through the trash."

She threw the hanger. It hit the wall by my shoulder and clattered down.

"This is my house! Get out!"

"Half of it's mine," I said. "You can't put me out of it."

She stood there breathing at me.

Then I opened the closet and she came at me.

I took a jacket off the rail and she had the sleeve in her fist before it cleared the bar. She pulled it out of my hand and dropped it and went down on one knee on the carpet with it and used her teeth on the seam until it split.

"That jacket," she said. "I paid to have that pressed. You're not taking it."

I reached for the dopp kit on the shelf. She got it before I did and threw it at the wall. The head came apart. She didn't say anything about it. She just stood there looking at the pieces on the floor.

I picked up the laptop. She took a pair of scissors off the dresser and cut the cord in two and stood holding the two halves, one in each hand, breathing through her nose.

I looked at her.

Eight years ago she'd done something like this over a parking space and I'd thought it was the most charming thing I'd ever seen. She'd been twenty-five and furious and she'd thrown a shoe.

I put the laptop down on the bed.

"Keep it," I said. "Keep all of it."

She stopped.

"I'm not taking any of it."

I walked past her. There wasn't one object in that house I wanted badly enough to stand in a room with her while she cut cords in half.

I was at the top of the stairs.

She said, "Stop."

I stopped.

"The ring," she said. Her voice had gone soft and thin. "My ring. I picked it. It's mine. Give it back."

I turned around. I held up my hand, the left one, and turned it over so the light from the window went across the back of it.

"There's nothing on this hand," I said. "You told me you were taking it in to get cleaned. You never brought it back."

I let the hand drop.

"I went through that room downstairs," I said. "Every shelf, every drawer, the tank. It wasn't in any of it."

She was looking at my hand. Her face was still.

"So if you want to know where it is," I said, "ask your assistant."

Her breath went in and didn't come back out right. Her hands came up and stopped halfway and stayed there, and then the tears started, and she didn't wipe them.

I went down the stairs and across the glass and out the front door.

I got about four steps onto the porch.

Her arms came around me from behind, both of them, hard, her face pressed flat into my back between the shoulder blades, and her whole body was shaking.