BEFORE I WENT TO SLEEP, I got down on the floor of my room, flipped up the bed skirt, and searched around in all that darkness, reached beyond the newspapers I’d hidden there for a large, shallow cardboard box. When the tips of my fingers brushed the edge, I flattened myself even further to reach it, carefully sliding it out from its resting place. Box retrieved, I shifted positions, legs out, back against the bed. The lamp on the table just above me provided a soft glow. After one deep breath, and another, I removed the top and set it aside.
There he was. My dad.
In his uniform down by the wharf next to the station, stormy clouds hanging over everything, implying rain that hadn’t yet fallen.
I moved on to the next keepsake, and there he was again, this time in the form of his handwriting. LOVE, DADDY written on a birthday card for when I’d turned seven. Then his script on another card, from when I turned ten, this time with a whole line of Xs and Os across the bottom of it, something I’d started to do that year on the cards I’d given him for his birthday and Christmas and Father’s Day. He’d been returning the favor. I had cards for eleven and fourteen and sixteen, too, but that was all. I don’t know why these were the cards I’d saved as opposed to birthdays eight and nine, or even fifteen. It seemed so random to have these and not the others.
Now, in retrospect, I wished I’d saved them all. The fact that I wouldn’t get another card from my father ever again, that when I turned eighteen there would be cards from my mother and my friends, cards sent in the mail by my grandparents who lived in Massachusetts, but not one from my dad, made the ones I’d kept seem precious. The ones I’d so carelessly tossed away or lost seemed like the most foolish, ungrateful thing I could ever have done.
I set the cards aside and peered back in the box.
There, sitting on top of everything else, was the most important thing of all I’d salvaged.
My father’s policeman’s badge. Number 2877. Gold against a black background with black lettering.
Michaela’s dad had given it to me. Handed it to me at the wake, pressed it into my hand without a word as he passed by my mother and me in the long line of mourners come to give their condolences. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, if my dad had a spare or several, or if Officer Connolly had reached right into my father’s coffin and plucked it off his uniform before it could be lost forever to burial.
All I knew was that I was grateful he’d given it to me.
I’d held on to it so hard that night I thought my palm might never lose the impression of it on my skin. When I’d gone to bed, it was still tight in my grip, and it was only in sleep that I’d finally released it. I woke to find it on my bedside table, shadowed and lifeless in the dim morning light. My mother must have come in to see me and placed it there. After the funeral, I put it in this box with everything else that reminded me of my father and hid it in the safe darkness underneath my bed. I couldn’t bear to see so much evidence of my father’s life.
But just looking at it now, holding the badge in my hands, running my fingers along the rough, scalloped edges, made it seem like he might be here with me. And when I held it up to the light, held it away from my body high in the air, I could fill in the rest of my father around it, remember the way he used to wear it on his uniform, picture things as though he was standing there in the room with me, dressed up and about to go to work, come to visit me to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek before he left, even though I might be too old for that now.
I kept that badge as high as I could hold it, until my arm began to ache and until the moment that image of my father had faded and all that was left was the air around it. Then carefully, gently, I placed it on my bedside table.
I owed it to my father—and to myself—to do whatever it took to find out what really happened the night he was killed. To remember any and every detail, however small—like Officer Connolly had said—because who knew what answers that tiny detail might reveal? And now that the lead I’d given the police about Patrick McCallen didn’t pan out, I had to try for another one.
So I got up from the floor. Tiptoed across the sandy house.
“Mom?” I called softly from the doorway of her room.
She shifted in bed. Then roused a little, sitting up. “Jane?”
“I want to call the O’Connors tomorrow,” I said into the darkness, my mother’s outline just visible in the moonlight. “I think I should accept their invitation to dinner. And . . . you know. The other thing.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” she said, her voice thick with sleep.
“Will you go with me?”
“Of course.”
“Good night, Mom,” I said.
There was more rustling. “I love you, sweetheart,” she whispered. “So much. And so did your dad. More than anything else in this world.” Then she laid her head on the pillow and went back to sleep.