I have a treasure. Do you want to know what it is? I could draw you a map to it. First you need to find the place where I live now, in a city in the northwestern quarter of our fair country. In the room where I sleep, there is a dark varnished maple dresser whose origins are unknown to me. On top of that dresser, you will find a jewelry box with many small drawers and hinged doors, like a magician’s cabinet. The very bottom drawer pulls out a long way, and you will need to pull it out almost completely in order to discover a packet of white tissue paper tied with a string. Undo the string, unfold the wrapping paper, and there you will find my treasure.
It’s a necklace, if you really want to know. It was given to me by my father. I don’t wear it anymore—because time has made it into a treasure, and you don’t dangle treasures from your neck. Not real ones.
It’s not the locket he gave me for Christmas. This he gave me that June, that same June that everything was happening. It was for me to wear at the prom. Ours was a small school, so everyone, even sophomores, went to the prom.
When he gave it to me, it was wrapped in the very same tissue and string (such consistencies are important)—except it was also in a gold foil box with a little bow on top. The box is lost now. You can’t save everything. You can’t save every little thing.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, and it was just before bedtime, so there were very few lights left on downstairs. We sat in a comfortable pool of kitchen light, surrounded by dark doorways, and we felt safe.
“I just thought you should have something nice,” he said. “For the dance.”
He was embarrassed, and he stirred more sugar into his mug of coffee for something to do with his hands.
I unwrapped it and held it up to admire it. It was a simple gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a dragonfly. Its wings had little bitty rubies in them, and the whole thing sparkled. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever been given.
“It’s perfect,” I said, because I wanted him to know he had done a good job of making me happy. He smiled and nodded and sipped his coffee, more pleased than he let on. That was our way, then. He and I, we were timid about the common practices of life now that I’d gotten older. But we helped each other along, and we stumbled through. We knew the quiet codes that stood in place of more overt, gangly expressions of love—and we got by all right.
I remember wondering for a few aching moments if maybe this had been a piece of my mother’s jewelry. I pictured her as a girl who would like dragonflies. A wisp of a creature with a name that pointed to darker things.
But then he rose from the table and rinsed his mug in the sink.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said. “Miss Simons—Margot—she, uh, she helped me pick it out. You might want to thank her, too.”
“Oh,” I said. I forced a smile, but he wasn’t looking at me anyway. “Yes. Yes, I will.”
He came up behind me, leaned down, and kissed me on the top of my head.
“Good night, Lumen,” he said. And then I heard the stairs creak with his footsteps as he went up to bed.
*
I didn’t wear the dragonfly to the prom. That was my statement. I wore a party dress that was a few years old but still fit decently, and I wore the Christmas locket my father had given me—the one with pictures of him and my mother in it. My father and I never exchanged words about it. I saw him glance once at my neck, and that was enough. He distracted himself by taking pictures of me in my dress in front of the living room bookshelves.
If Miss Simons noticed I wasn’t wearing the dragonfly, she didn’t let it show even a little bit. In fact she stood with me before the mirror in my bathroom and helped me hide with makeup, as much as possible, the sewn-up part of my face. When she was done, I looked like a different Lumen entirely—some future version of Lumen, maybe, the woman I might become.
We both looked at my reflection in the mirror. I thought she was going to tell me how pretty I looked, but instead what she said was, “You’re tough, Lumen. Tougher than anyone I know. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.”
After all, I realized, she wasn’t a bad woman. I wanted to give her something in return.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean,” I said, “for everything. For the necklace.”
She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at me in the mirror, a true smile, and she knew.
My father didn’t ask if someone was taking me to the dance, because he would not pry so far into my personal life—and the answer would only lead to discomfort whether it was yes or no. Instead he simply asked if I needed a ride to the school, and I told him yes.
When he pulled up in front of the school, I could tell there was something on his mind, so I didn’t get out of the car immediately. I waited, and together we watched people arrive, walking through the double doors of the big building, linked arm in arm in their finery.
“Margot and I are going to a dinner party tonight,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Friends of hers.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be home by midnight. You’ll—you’ll be home by then?”
It occurred me that we were talking about a curfew. We hadn’t had a conversation about a curfew in years—there had been no need for one. Where was I going to go? I had been a good girl, impervious to trouble. But now things were different.
“I mean,” he went on, “there’s no moon tonight.”
I was embarrassed. We both were. I looked down at my hands.
“I’ll be home.”
“You’ll be home,” he said. He did not look at me but nodded to himself, as though confirming a truth that he was ashamed to have questioned in the first place.
“I promise.”