Personal Effects

by E. M. Kokie

  Pinscher swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I force my hand to relax, and I walk sideways, my open hand up in front of me, hoping to make it clear I have no intention of jumping him — at least not without provocation.

  “Be cool,” Michael says, one hand on Pinscher’s shoulder, the other palm up to me. “Everyone’s cool.”

  We move around each other, rotating so that we each edge toward where we were heading before we ran into each other.

  “We OK?” Pinscher asks.

  “No.” We’ve never been OK. “Pull some shit like that again . . .” I trail off. Jake steps past Pinscher toward me. Stevie grabs his arm to stop him. “But stay away from me and I’ll stay away from you. All of you.”

  Pinscher nods and I nod back. I make my arms fall limp. After a beat, Pinscher holds out his hand to shake. I ignore it, keep staring at his face.

  “Come on, Matt,” Michael says.

  No way will I shake that asshole’s hand. “Just stay away from me.”

  I force myself to turn around and walk away, but I don’t relax until I hear their footsteps moving in the other direction.

  There are only a couple of other losers in the library trying to catch up on end-of-the-semester stuff. Ms. Roberts keeps squinting at me if I even dare breathe too loud. But I can’t concentrate. All I can think about is Celia. T.J. and Celia.

  Images from T.J.’s pictures keep flashing in my head between sentences from Celia’s letters, almost like a slide show, but one that’s been edited out of order or messed up. I can close my eyes and see them against the red-black of my eyelids.

  The ice is melting, making these little rivers that trickle along the edges of the street. Spring’s almost here. . . .

  One of the smaller pictures: Celia and some guy dressed for skiing. Both of them falling over, laughing, their dark skin vivid against the snowy background and ski clothes.

  . . . laughing while Aiden wiped milk . . .

  . . . harder when it’s cold, and dark and . . .

  Picture of a house, white and gray. And trees, near a river.

  . . . all the kids with ice cream and dressed in the most ridiculous costumes . . .

  Two little boys, holding plastic guns. A mosaic, scarred and battered.

  You left only yesterday, and already I can hardly stand it. . . . Sometimes I dream you’re still here, and your leaving was the dream . . . When I wake up, it’s like you just left. . . .

  I thought he had redeployed right after he left us. But he went to visit her, without telling me.

  Jordan and Shay took me out tonight, sweet in their attempts to distract me. I smiled a lot for their sakes. Even danced some. Made it ache even more, how much I miss you.

  So many of the letters talked about people I don’t know, have never even heard of. She wrote about a party they had for him before he left on the last deployment. It made me dizzy to think about all these people who knew him and to wonder who told them he was gone, if they even know.

  Dinner with Missy and Will tonight. They’re not letting me hibernate. I promised Zoe she could pick the ice cream for dessert.

  After the first fast read, I’d read through her letters more slowly, more carefully, tucking each back in its envelope before moving on, keeping them in order. I’ve read them so many times that parts of them are burned on my brain. When I close my eyes, I can see her signature branded on the inside of my eyelids; always signed the same, Love you, C. Her flowy script and a loop to the single letter, so that it looked like more. Always telling him she loved him, she missed him, she said they all did, whoever “they” were.

  Her mushy stuff and missing hims were hard enough to read, but a lot of them were full of details and stories that made me feel like I was reading about a stranger in a magazine or newspaper. Like this “Theo” wasn’t my brother at all.

  She sent cards: for Christmas, T.J.’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, others, some for no reason at all, obviously sent with packages, because there were no envelopes. One birthday card had had something taped to the inside of its cover, gone. I wish I knew what.

  . . . I couldn’t really find Halloween masks this early, so I bought whatever other stuff I could find — funny glasses and noses, makeup . . . Have fun! (But not too much fun.) . . . Miss you. . . .

  I didn’t even know T.J. would want Halloween stuff. Did he tell her, or did she just know? Dad and I sent T.J. food and news and magazines, and things he needed. I know we did. And yet I wonder how much better her packages were, how much more special. If she knew to send things we didn’t. Maybe she sent him sexy things.

  . . . I miss waking up with your hand on my stomach . . . rubbing slow, lazy circles . . . your soft snoring into my neck . . . your bristled chin rubbing against my shoulder. . . .

  I keep trying to picture T.J. with the people in the pictures, and in the letters, but the words are all wrong, the images all strange. I can’t even make sense of some of the words. Not like I can’t read them, but that none of it seems real. So, in my head, the words all jumble together in weird combinations, like the Mad Libs we played as kids.

  “Matt?” I jump. Ms. Roberts twists her mouth to the side. “Are you in need of assistance?”

  “No. Thanks.” I pull myself up in my chair.

  “Then I suggest you get to work.”

  I try to work on the paper. But I can’t. There are more important things to think about, to plan.

  AFTER LAST PERIOD, SHAUNA’S WAITING AT MY LOCKER, like I knew she would be. She probably left class early and ran all the way, just to be sure I couldn’t sneak out.

  “I heard about the hall,” she says. “You OK?”

  News travels fast, unless Michael took it upon himself to run right to her. “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, you’re great.” She laughs, but nothing’s funny.

  We walk in silence out to the parking lot.

  “Is there going to be trouble?” she asks, resigned to it.

  “No.” I turn so she can see my face. She bites the inside of her lower lip. She isn’t sure whether to believe me. “At least not today,” I add. “Probably not even this week. So, no, I don’t think so.”

  She studies my face until she’s satisfied that I’m telling the truth, then hands me the keys. I drive when she’s really excited or trying to say she’s sorry. Today, probably a bit of both. She bounces toward the car, all nervous energy and excitement.

  “Where to?” she asks once we’re buckled in.

  “The river?” I suggest.

  She looks at me for a beat, blinking, clearly understanding that something really is up if I don’t want to go to her house, where her mom will feed me.

  We drive through for some snackage and then park in the small gravel lot near the bend in the river where it’s shallow. A picnic table in the shade is perfect and quiet.

  I take my time eating, trying to work out how to start or what to say. Shauna’s done and waiting for me before I’ve eaten much at all, which pretty much never happens. When the waiting gets to be too much, she makes a frustrated yelp and smacks my arm.

  “I can’t take this anymore! What’s going on?”

  I push the rest of my burger away and wipe my hands on my jeans. I reach for my shake, hit the cup, and scramble to right the cup before it spills all over. Then I move it away from me, so I can’t knock it over again.

  “Matt, just tell me.” She takes a deep breath and then lets it out with a shaky sigh.

  I work my throat to get it out, the words crammed in and jumbled. “We got T.J.’s stuff.” I suck in some air. “His personal effects.”

  Shauna’s eyes go wide. “But I thought . . . that bag . . . from —”

  “So did I. But Cooper showed up Friday with three footlockers.”

  She grabs my hand and squeezes it. “Did your dad go crazy, or . . . ? Wait, he did let you see them, right? I mean —”

  “He, uh, didn’t. He just put them away, in T.J.’s room. But —”

  “You h
ave to go through them!” She jumps up, then sits down again to grab her backpack, preparing to jump again. “I’ll help you, or be your lookout, or . . . we could wait for poker night, and —”

  “Shaun, I already did.” She drops her bag and flops back onto the bench. “I went through everything Saturday night.”

  She settles in, eyes huge. “Oh, my God. Does he know?”

  “No. I snuck in while he was out.”

  “Shit.” She looks impressed. And all’s forgiven.

  “Yeah, well . . . I figured I’d better look through it all, and fast, just in case.”

  “Yeah.” She reaches for my hand again. “And?”

  I shake her off — too distracting. “And . . . his uniform, clothes, iPods, books, photographs, games, CDs . . . all kinds of stuff. The letters people wrote him.” I reach into my backpack and pull out the heavy plastic bag. “Including these.”

  Her eyes dart back and forth between the letters and my face. “From?”

  “T.J.’s girlfriend.”

  “Get out!” she yells, slapping my arm again. “Who . . . I mean . . . Where? Girlfriend?”

  “Yup.”

  “And she wrote him letters? You have letters from her?”

  I pick at the edge of the table. “Yeah.” I look back up at her. “Some of them are, um, kinda . . .” I can’t say it, even if I can’t scour the sexy parts from my brain.

  Her cheeks go suddenly pink. She gets it.

  “Want to read some of them?” I ask quietly, pushing a bag with some of Celia’s letters — sort of a best-of-Celia selection — toward Shauna.

  “Seriously?” She reaches for the bag between us, but pauses when her fingers touch the plastic. “I mean, it’s OK?”

  “Yeah.” I need her to read them, to see her reactions.

  She starts pulling them out of the bag.

  “They’re in order by postmark, so . . .” I sit on my hands to keep from reaching for them, to protect them.

  She smiles. “Keep them in order. Check.”

  I turn my face away, hot at her teasing. But while I sort through a few of the pics she should see, I watch her carefully pull them out in small groups, keeping them in order.

  When I was reading them the first time, words kept ricocheting off my brain and bouncing around the inside of my skull. Words like love and bed and kisses. Hands. Sheets. Sweet. Sexy. Touching. Missing. Worry. Sad. Phrases like be careful and come home and love you.

  It’s easy to see the letters that are extra worn, with creases and marks and edges frayed from careful, but repeated, handling. T.J. read those letters over and over. They were always the really sexy ones. Which was weird, like spying on him, on them.

  There were just so many. She had to have written him a couple times a week. And so many didn’t have envelopes, and others were stuck into cards, meaning she had to have sent more packages, too. As many letters from Celia as everyone else combined. I skimmed some of the other letters, but compared to Celia’s, they’re pretty boring. I left them in the box under my bed.

  Shauna unfolds the first one, postmarked right after T.J.’s unit deployed. The last one’s postmarked a few weeks before T.J. was killed. I keep hoping that Celia didn’t find out he was gone by her letters coming back.

  “Holy shit.” Shauna looks up from the letter, her eyes blinking rapidly. “Theo?”

  It’s kind of fun, watching her. “I know. Keep reading.”

  She clears her throat and starts to read aloud, which feels weird, but I can’t tell her to stop. I want to hear her read them.

  “I just this morning answered your latest e-mail, so it feels stupid to write again already, but this is a letter day. And I never miss a letter day. Even though these take so long to get to you, I can’t help it. There’s something NOT ordinary about writing you a letter. Picking out the paper, touching it, tucking in a treat, an article or a picture. Giving you some part of me to hold. To feel. [Insert deep sigh here.]

  “I miss your hands, holding me, touching me. Don’t get me wrong, I love your e-mails (and don’t stop sending them), but I love the letters more, for having something from you to hold.

  “So when you get this letter, and all the news is not really newsworthy anymore, just think about how I picked out the paper and paused over the words and signed it, knowing you would be able to feel me . . .”

  Shauna trails off, waving the letter at me. “When you said he had a girlfriend, I thought, I guess, like”— she leans a little ways back from the table —“some kind of . . . fling, but . . .”

  I nod.

  “Matt! I thought, like . . . Holy shit!” She laughs, hits the letter with her hand. “This . . . She . . . Matt!”

  The laughter ripples through my chest, too, because of all her possible reactions, this one is the best, the most fun. This one is pure Shauna. My Shauna. It’s strangely calming, like pretty much nothing else has been.

  “Now you understand why I’ve been weird?” I ask.

  “No shit. But, Matt, she loved him.”

  “I know.”

  “And if she was writing this, then T.J . . . .”

  “Loves, or, uh, loved her? Yeah,” I say. “I’ve figured that part out. Keep going. There’s more.”

  “More?”

  She dives back in. Reading me bits from time to time. Other times curling in on herself and reading with her fingers pressed to her lips. She hands me a candy to unwrap, too engrossed even to deal with the wrapper. After I hand her the candy, I chew the bits of sticky grape off my fingers and continue looking through the pictures.

  “Are any of those of her? Do you know?”

  I hand her the one of Celia in her uniform. “I’m pretty sure this is her. I Googled around, found a picture of her on a website for a university — I think she works there.”

  “Wow.”

  “There’s a bunch of pictures of her, at different times. Not a lot of anyone else. And I just . . . I don’t know, but I instantly knew it was her. And then the picture I found online confirmed it.” I stare at the picture of her at the picnic table. “I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s why he didn’t tell us.”

  “Huh?”

  My face gets hot in a different way.

  “Oh,” Shauna says. “Because she’s black? You really think he would think that would matter to you?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe Dad, but . . . T.J. didn’t tell me, either, so . . .” I hand her the next couple of pictures so I can stop talking. “I found those, too.”

  “Do you know any of the guys?”

  “No. But these two,” I say, pointing to the guys outside the restaurant with her, “I think they’re Army, too. Probably all from his, her — I don’t know, maybe their — unit.”

  “What about them?” she asks, pointing at the two guys at the umbrella table with them.

  I look at their faces again — could be more of the unit, I guess, but on leave. Or friends. The guy on the other side of T.J. could be Army. He has that look: short hair, strong, something about the way he’s sitting, too. His skin is almost as dark as hers, but not all suntanned like she is. Can’t tell if that means he doesn’t spend a lot of time outside or just never really tans. But the guy on the other side of Celia doesn’t look Army. And his skin’s light enough that it’s even kind of sunburned, especially his nose, so he doesn’t spend much time outside. And his hair is way longer than regulation. No, I’d guess not military.

  I blow out my breath. “No idea.”

  She goes back to the letters. I wait. She’ll come to it soon — maybe three or four letters down.

  The closer she gets, the harder it is not to jump ahead and just force her to read that letter, to ask outright. But I need to see her find it, figure it out for herself.

  When the small square flutters out of a letter and falls face up on the table in front of her, I brace for it. She turns the photo around. Her brow creases. Then her face smoothes out and rounds with her smile. I know what the picture lo
oks like — I’ve stared at it for hours. Celia — softer and more relaxed than the other pics, but definitely her — holding a little girl.

  “Matt?”

  “Read the letter.”

  T.J. read this letter many times. He opened and refolded it again and again, the edges fuzzy from his hands, each time tucking it safely back in its envelope, picture and all.

  I can tell she just wants me to tell her, but she hands me the small square picture and prepares to read.

  “Theo,” she begins.

  Already I pretty much know this one by heart, but I close my eyes and listen anyway.

  “It’s Friday morning, just after 8am. It’s been an oh-so-long week, so I took the day off. Mom picked up Zoe an hour ago for a day with Grammy and Pops. So Missy stopped up for coffee before work, bringing fresh cherry scones, still warm. Wonderful! Especially because we could just have a relaxing morning, and talk, really talk, without Zoe’s little ears to worry about. Love the girl, but sometimes I just need some time with Missy, alone, to talk.

  “Now, a fresh cup of coffee, just on the good side of too sweet, a blissfully quiet house, and a fresh sheet of paper. So, where to start?

  “Sunday, Thomas stopped by with a few pictures he took on Dad’s birthday — the best one of the bunch is enclosed. Zoe looks like an angel (as you can see, it’s pre–chocolate cake and ice cream). I framed a bigger copy, but Thomas thought you’d like a smaller one — easier to have with you, to hold on to.

  “Yesterday was one of those crazy unseasonably warm days where everyone forgets their troubles for a while. I was done early, so I called Missy and Mom and told them I’d pick up Zoe from day care, and we went to the park. You would not believe how much she’s grown — and how much she’s talking — can hardly shut the child up! And it’s all, ‘I do it by my sef’ (no L as far as I can tell). Baby Girl is turning into Little Miss Independent. Made me smile and wish you were here.

  “She misses you. She keeps asking when you’ll be home from work. She must think you’re always at the office, like Missy, or Will, work being where the adults go when they’re not home. Yesterday she got that puzzled expression midslide, and when I caught her at the bottom, she looked around like you were just there, and she asked again. I didn’t have that talk in me yesterday, so I distracted her with ice cream. I’m sure you, of all people, could get behind that. She wanted ‘los and los and los of prinkles’ on hers — and her idea of ‘los’ is definitely in line with yours when you order lots and lots and lots. She even waved her hand for another spoonful like you do. We all thank you ever so much for teaching her that.