WHEN IT WAS DONE, when he was transformed and handed back to her as something else, in an overly air-conditioned lobby under poorly hung photos of sunsets, the first thing Claudia wanted was a bigger purse: she couldn’t fit him into her bag. She whispered this to Edward, and Edward turned immediately to ask the man behind the counter about the closest mall. When they got in the car, they kept the windows down.
Under the fluorescence, past the garish fountains and the smell of chlorine that settled on their tongues, around diamond-shaped planters of waxy green plants, they shuffled, Claudia glancing in the windows of stores as though reviewing bills she had forgotten to pay. At a kiosk meant for teenage girls, Edward bought a shirt, then removed the polo he’d been wearing for three days and pulled the stiff T on. I love my attitude problem, it said. He held Claudia’s hand. They walked. When she finally pointed at a black shape behind glass, a sagging behemoth of leather and zipper, he placed her on the tiled ledge of a Windex-blue pool and retrieved it for her. She transferred her things into it, wallet and sunscreen and car keys, leaving the jar for last, padding the space with a sweater before placing her brother inside, and brought the metal tag along its track of teeth until the gap was closed. Her mind changed visibly on her face, as though receiving some new and crucial piece of information, and she moved the zipper back a few inches to create an opening.
—
IN THE MOTEL ROOM, Edward slept, finally, above the covers of the still-made bed, while Claudia moved through the room, the limited visibility of the near-evening, touching the detritus of her brother. From the plastic sack the crematorium had handed her, she removed his signature pink Keds and arranged them on the floor. Inside them, her feet felt for the places where his toes had made impressions, the grooves they had left much larger than the reality of hers, the indentations still slick with sweat. Almost as soon as it arrived, the small comfort of the act was gone, replaced by the tight fear that she might change something essential about the shoes’ interior. She kicked them off with a yelp, fell into a clotted weeping that kept her, blind and hot, for ten minutes. When she had quieted, the room reappeared, the wall-mounted television and the bleached floral pattern of the duvet, but amid the tawdry pastels something else found her.
That she had missed Paulie’s wallet, its slim worn shape mostly concealed by some jeans of hers on the cheap wood bureau, seemed like a gift, like his hand on the back of her neck.
Their father had given it to Paulie when he turned thirty, the last age Seymour would watch him become, and had spent too much on it, as though he had known. It was a fine brushed leather, the color of a roasted hazelnut just rubbed of its skin, and over the years Paulie had relished the responsibility it conferred: patted it in his back pocket and lingered while he paid for things at the corner store—cartons of orange juice, travel magazines, holographic key chains. As she stood to reach for it, she realized she had never seen the contents, that this had been one of few private corners of his life.
For reasons she couldn’t name, she looked first at the money, twenty-seven dollars, the bills arranged by denomination, a fact that hit her like the sprain of a muscle, knowing what slow, hard work it must have been for him. In his ID card picture he had tried to appear solemn, pained by bureaucratic process, and the image looked little like her brother. In the other pockets, she found a photo of their parents waving on a dock; a scientific drawing of a Japanese flying squid torn, perhaps illicitly, from a library book; a note from Edward, which read, Dear Mr. Mayor, swing by when you can. I have an adventure planned; a glossy magazine clipping of a baby’s bottom; a snapshot of him and Claudia at a wedding, each pointing at the other with a mouth in an O; and one of them as children, asleep under the kitchen table, their tiny features dwarfed by adult feet.
The sounds were few, the highway and the faucet in the next room and the heavy steps of someone going to fetch ice or a candy bar, but she found comfort in them, that they were similar to what he had heard as he left. She would not vocalize the thought, but Edward had known, when she’d paid for a week in advance, that she needed to stay where Paulie knew to find them. She owed him that, had spent her life on that promise.
In the dark hours of early morning she was awakened by nothing, her body distrustful of the stillness itself. Her hand shot to the lamp like a reptilian tongue. Edward’s eyes opened as though they’d only just closed, and he turned to see her.
“It would have happened no matter what,” he said.
She looked like a beggar, no aspect of her life uncharted on her face.