The cedar blocks we always toss into the wool bins to keep the moths away still smelled like lavender when I reached into the pocket of Dwayne’s heavy charcoal winter coat. It was a Tuesday morning, the kind of gray, heavy-skied day where the light coming through the kitchen window never quite decides to break through the clouds, and I was just trying to get the hall closet sorted before the humidity settled in for the afternoon.
My fingers brushed against something cold and ridged down in the bottom lining, caught in a loose seam where the nylon had torn a little bit over the years. I pulled it out, expecting a stray guitar pick or an old receipt from the hardware store, but it was just a small brass key on a greasy little metal ring. Stamped right into the soft brass head, clear as anything, were the words Unit 38.
When Dwayne came home for lunch fifteen minutes later with a grease smudge on his cheek from the repair shop, I laid the key right in the center of the oilcloth kitchen table. He didn’t even look at his coffee mug before his shoulders went just a tiny bit rigid, that fractional tightening of the neck muscles I had learned to read over sixteen years of folding his laundry and listening to him talk about carburetors.
He said it was just an old locker from his bachelor apartment over on Miller Street, somewhere he used to keep spare tires and winter rims back before we bought the house on Tenth. I didn’t say anything back right then, just nodded and poured his coffee, but the math didn’t sit right in my head because Dwayne didn’t move to Miller Street until 2015, and that key looked older than our marriage.
The thing about living in a town like ours is that you know where every business sits even if you never go inside them, and I knew there were four different self-storage yards tucked behind the lumber yard and the car wash off the bypass. I didn’t tell Dwayne I was going anywhere when I backed the Buick out of the gravel drive at two o’clock. The first two places gave me nothing, just polite young men behind counters who looked at the brass key and shook their heads before telling me their locks were digital keypads now, not old brass tumblers.
But the third place, Security Storage out past the grain silos, had a row of cinder-block buildings with green tin roofs that had been sitting out in the weather since the early nineties. The girl behind the counter was half-asleep over a crossword puzzle, and when I laid the key down on the counter and asked her what locks took that specific shape, she didn’t even have to look up twice. She just reached into a wooden drawer, pulled out a master ring with forty identical brass keys dangling from it, and told me row four was around back past the dumpster.
Row four smelled like hot tar and damp insulation, the kind of dead air that never moves no matter how hard the wind blows across the flat gravel lots. I walked down the concrete corridor with my hand in my pocket, my fingers curled tight around the key, counting the faded stenciled numbers on the metal doors as I passed them.
Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven. And then thirty-eight, with a small grease smudge right below the latch just like the one on the key in my hand. The lock slid open with a heavy, dry click that sounded louder than it should have in the narrow alley between the metal walls. When I pulled the door up, the rusted tracks groaned, and a wall of cold, stale air rolled out over my shoes.
There was no overhead light inside the unit, just the gray daylight spilling in from the open doorway and cutting across a narrow twin bed pushed up against the back wall with a gray wool blanket folded neatly at the foot. A single metal shelving unit stood against the left partition, and hanging from the wire hooks were three dresses made of thin cotton floral print, all of them in a medium twelve, which happened to be the exact size I bought off the rack at the department store downtown. Taped to the back wall with yellowed strips of masking tape were sixteen different photographs of a woman with honey-blonde hair cut into a blunt bob, standing in front of different brick storefronts and gas stations I had never seen before in my life. She had the exact same high cheekbones I saw in the bathroom mirror every morning when I brushed my teeth, and the same small gap between her front teeth that my mother always told me was a sign of a stubborn disposition.
I didn’t move. I just stood there on the cold concrete with the open door behind me, my eyes tracking from the photographs on the back wall down to a stack of manila folders sitting on a plastic milk crate near the bed. On top of the crate was a yellow carbon-copy lease agreement with the storage yard, dated November fourteenth, 2013, showing a monthly payment of one hundred and seventy-five dollars auto-drafted from a checking account I didn’t recognize. One hundred and seventy-five dollars a month for eleven years, month in and month out, through our first mortgage, through the years we couldn’t afford a new hot water heater, through every birthday and Thanksgiving and quiet Sunday afternoon when Dwayne sat across from me at the kitchen table reading the sports page. The math ran through my head without any effort at all, eleven years of twelve months times one hundred and seventy-five, coming out to twenty-three thousand one hundred dollars spent to keep a concrete box dark and dry.
The name signed at the bottom of the lease wasn’t Dwayne’s, and it wasn’t mine either, but it was a name I knew better than almost any other from the old days before we were married. It was Dale Vance, the guy Dwayne roomed with for two semesters over at the community college before Dale packed up his Ford truck and moved down to Mobile to work for his uncle’s roofing company. I remember Dale being loud and sloppy, the kind of boy who left empty soda cans on the porch until the ants got into them, and I hadn’t heard Dwayne mention him once in fifteen years. But there his signature was, neat and deliberate in black ballpoint ink, binding a dead man or a vanished friend to a room that smelled like old cedar and dust.
I stood there in that doorway for nine minutes by the dashboard clock of my mind, watching the dust motes drift through the pale square of sunlight without letting myself breathe too deep because the air tasted like a basement that hadn’t been opened since the Clinton administration. My brain didn’t want to do the heavy lifting of figuring out what it meant, so it just stayed right there on the small things, like the way the gray blanket on the twin bed was tucked in with hospital corners just like the ones my grandmother taught me how to make when I was twelve years old. I wondered who came here to sit on that bed, or if Dwayne came here alone on Tuesday afternoons when he told me he was driving out to the salvage yard for alternator parts. The photographs on the wall didn’t look like they had been taken by a professional; they had that grainy, overexposed look of disposable drugstore cameras from twenty years back, the kind of pictures where the date stamp in orange numbers sits in the bottom right corner like a little accusation.
When the nine minutes were up, my knees felt stiff, and I pulled the storage unit door down with both hands until it caught in the latch with a heavy iron thud that made the next door over rattle in its frame. I didn’t lock it back because my fingers were shaking too hard to get the key back into the narrow slot, so I just dropped the key into my coat pocket alongside my car keys and walked back out to the Buick without looking at the girl behind the glass in the front office. The engine started right up on the first turn, that familiar little shudder in the dashboard that usually meant the spark plugs needed cleaning, and I drove straight past the post office and the library until I pulled into the asphalt lot behind the county sheriff’s substation on Elm Street.
The deputy at the front desk was a young man with skin so clear he couldn’t have been out of high school more than five minutes, and he had a half-eaten ham sandwich sitting on a paper plate next to his computer keyboard. When I told him I needed to report something about a storage unit out on the bypass and a missing persons case from 2013, he stopped chewing and looked at me like I was selling magazine subscriptions. But I gave him Dale Vance’s name and the number thirty-eight, and I told him about the photographs on the wall and the woman with the honey-blonde hair who looked like she could have been my twin sister if we’d grown up in the same house. The boy’s face went completely still, and he reached for his desk phone without saying another word, punching three numbers with a finger that didn’t hesitate at all.
By four o’clock, two unmarked cruisers and a state police van were parked out by the gravel road near row four at Security Storage, their blue lights turned off but their engines humming in the late afternoon heat. I sat in my Buick three rows down, watching through the windshield as men in blue vinyl booties carried brown paper evidence bags out into the sunlight, one of them holding a stack of faded photographs by the very edge with gloved fingers. Nobody came over to talk to me for a long time, just an older detective with graying hair at his temples who tapped on my passenger window with a pen and asked me if I was the one who unlocked the door. I told him I was, and he asked me if my husband knew I was out here, and when I shook my head, he just looked down at his clipboard and told me I ought to go home and wait there where it was dry.
The drive back to the house on Tenth Street took twice as long as usual because a tractor was hauling a load of silage down the two-lane road and nobody could get around it until the turnoff for the co-op. When I pulled into the driveway at five-fifteen, Dwayne’s Ford pickup was already sitting in its usual spot near the side porch, the hood ticking softly as the engine block cooled down in the shadows of the big elm tree. The kitchen was just the way I had left it that morning, the coffee pot cold on the burner and the oilcloth table wiped clean except for the small grease smudge near the corner where I had set his mug at noon. I didn’t turn on the overhead light; I just took off my jacket and laid it across the back of the wooden rocking chair near the stove, my hands feeling lighter than they had since I found that brass key in the lining.
Dwayne was sitting at the kitchen table when he heard the screen door latch, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his forearms dark with grease from the shop, his eyes fixed on the empty space where his winter coat usually hung in the hall closet. He didn’t stand up when I walked in, and he didn’t try to tell me about his old bachelor apartment or the tires he used to keep in row four, because he already knew the state police were parked down at the end of our street by the mailbox. His voice was lower than I’d ever heard it, almost like he was talking to himself across a wide room, when he asked me if I went inside the room. I told him I stood there for nine minutes, and that the woman in the photographs looked like she could have been my sister if things had gone different for her back in 2013.
He didn’t say anything else after that, just sat there with his calloused hands flat on the oilcloth table, staring at the spot where the salt shaker sat between us like a small, white boundary line that neither of us was ever going to cross again. The sound of gravel crunching under heavy tires came up the drive a minute later, two cruisers pulling in behind his truck with their headlights cutting long, pale beams across our living room curtains. I reached down and pulled my gold band off my finger, the one he slipped on my hand in the chapel over in Covington sixteen years ago, and laid it right on the table beside the small brass key that had unlocked the whole ugly thing. Then I walked out the front door into the cool evening air, leaving the screen door wide open behind me as the first blue light began to flash against the siding.
