I.
When I was seven years old I used to show people where I lived on my flat hand. Four fingers pressed tightly together as if glued, my thumb sticking out at 45 degrees. I’d point to the middle of my palm, and declare, chin upturned, this is where my mama lives. I’d point to my thumb, this is where my daddy lives.
My daddy used to carry my bag for me, the pink flowered duffel I carted between lives. He lifted it because my small hand—the one that carried both homes—couldn’t. Daddy would load me and the duffel into his 2002 Saturn. This car is as old as you, princess, his voice light and just a little bit mysterious. He’d strap me in the front seat, a finger against his lips. Our secret. My imagined adulthood made me closer to him, feet dangling, brushing the top of the bag.
At Mama’s, his hand, not mine, carried the bag upstairs. He gave me a dazzling grin when he dropped it in the center of the room. I watched from my window as the red Saturn pulled out of the cracked driveway and peeled out of sight.
I tried to lift the bag but it wouldn’t budge. I tried lots of different ways. Digging in my heels, leveraging my weight, I lifted with my knees. I grunted and groaned. I gave it a running start. I landed with a crash that brought my mama upstairs. The bag resisted her tanned arms too. She braced her knees and yanked. She coaxed. We tried together, pushing hard before pulling harder, we threw all of our weight at the little pink bag, screaming like caged animals. We managed about an inch of movement before we both collapsed. She scooted closer to me, enveloping my body with her own, both of us taking labored breaths. She asked about my trip and I thought about the front seat. The secret buzzing warmly, locked behind my lips.
II.
The first time I am back in the bedroom that belonged to a child I am twenty. The bag is still here, it sits as it always has, preternaturally still, looming in the center of the unchanged room. I wonder how the girl who used to live here could breathe. I cannot imagine how her small lungs could find space to expand with the bag filling up the room from floor to wall.
My father’s sleek Impala rolls up the smooth driveway. When I go down to greet him after all this time, he sighs, impatience mars his otherwise unchanged face. I tell him I need a hand with my bag, which has only grown heavier over the years. What I could move perhaps a centimeter the year prior now has no give at all. He purses his lips but follows me inside. We haven’t spoken in a long time but there is a moment of mourning when he says that the Saturn was scrapped. He’d grown tired of it—always breaking down. I lead him in, taking the first left upstairs. He doesn’t seem to remember the way.
I point to it. Sitting there. The same place it was dropped thirteen years ago. Its weight bulges against the flowered seams. The quilted fabric stretching in odd shapes, its contents fighting to be freed. He doesn’t seem to notice that the pink blossomed bag that had once rested under my feet in the passenger seat would now easily fill the backseat. Really? his eyebrows say as he looks from me to the floor. This really isn’t something I can lift myself. I am so needy, so incapable, it’s unbearable. He would have thought I was raised better than this. I hold my breath as he moves towards it, grabbing the straps with both of his large manicured hands. I barely breathe as it lifts off the floor to reveal a flat dark stain beneath, one I have never seen before. I marvel at it until the weight becomes too much, his muscles give out and the bag is dropped once more, making no more than a thud against the worn carpet. He turns to me now and I think he may have grown a few inches, or maybe it is just that I have shrunk a few. He is just as tall as he was when I was seven.
What on earth do you have in there?
My throat itches for speech that will not come. We stand on opposite ends of the bag, the past and the future collapse around us. We look at each other, his face is mine; it’s like looking into a mirror.
