Chapter 3
“Are you sure we wrote them down?” Arthur asked.
Wren sat cross-legged on the floor of their bedroom closet.
Around her, the walls seemed to stretch toward the sky and close in.
Hanging clothes pressed so tightly together they threatened to snuff the oxygen right out of the room.
Damn, this apartment was small, but hey, at least it also had roaches.
A junk box sat in front of her, overflowing with crap, picture frames and obsolete electronics cords peeking out from underneath the lid.
“I’m absolutely certain that we did,” she said in defeat.
What she was looking for was not in the junk box.
She grabbed another from behind the loose, flowy ends of some hanging dresses and dragged it out.
She popped the lid off the container. It had Christmas Lights scrawled on it in faded Sharpie and crossed out, then Books crossed out, then, finally, Etc.
The top layer of this one, too, was all cords and cables for long-deceased cell phones and digital cameras.
She grabbed a spaghetti-like mess of them and chucked them into the trash bag next to her.
“OK,” Arthur said, sitting back on his heels next to her.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Arthur pulling the cables out of the trash and giving them an extra look.
She was certain he’d end up saving them just in case there was an emergency need to charge an iPod Shuffle from 2005.
And he thought he wasn’t ready to be a dad.
“Are you sure that this actually happened and you’re not fabricating the entire thing? ”
“Yes, asshole. If I could rotate my spine I’d give you the worst death stare right now. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“Where were we?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“When? What year was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I have to say you make a compelling argument.”
“OK,” Wren said, resigned. “Some of the details are a little foggy. But I distinctly recall staying up late one night and writing down all the things we wanted to do before we turned thirty. Our bucket lists. We wrote it down, and we saved them…somewhere. I’m sure of it.
We bared our souls to each other and you can’t even be bothered to remember. ”
“We were high, weren’t we?”
“Or tipsy. Maybe both. I can’t remember.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Will you just help me look?”
Wren scraped her way down into the next layer of the box like a geologist studying rock formations and reached the frames.
Old pictures of her and Arthur that had been replaced on the walls with newer options.
There was the first photo of the two of them ever taken, both glassy-eyed and slightly blurry in the college dorm, canoodling uneasily like brand-new lovers.
A photo of one of their first dates, mini golf.
Wren holding the score sheet with a victorious smile on her face, Arthur sagging dramatically, as if in anguish, hamming it up.
Noticeably absent were any photos from the past few years.
Sure, on the walls they had hung exactly one set of professional portraits taken in an orchard, but Wren had found it buggy and sweaty and too difficult to walk and laugh and gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes at the same time without looking like a total psycho.
She’d vowed to never do portraits again.
And inside the box, there were a few snapshots, mostly taken in the low light of this very apartment.
But Wren felt like there should have been more.
Maybe the obligatory photo of the two of them holding up the Leaning Tower.
Instead, here was a bland selfie, sitting on the couch eating macaroni.
“I’ll help you find it. But can you explain the idea one more time? I think all the food hit you in the car and you started nodding off while you were explaining it. You weren’t making a lot of sense. At one point there was mention of pirates.”
Wren groaned, growing mildly frustrated. She was feeling unnecessarily antsy. Like time was already a-wasting. And there wasn’t much left of it to begin with. In just a few weeks, the baby would be here and this would all be moot.
“I had a major epiphany when I was devouring my sundae,” she said.
“I’ve always wanted to take down the Heifer.
Talked about it, put it off, said, ‘Ah, tonight’s not the night,’ a hundred times.
But what am I waiting for? If not now, when?
Right? Soon I’ll be too busy spooning rapidly melting bites into a toddler’s mouth to give two shits about getting my face on the wall. ”
“If it’s that important to you,” Arthur said, “you should have just said so.”
“It’s not just about the Heifer.” She sighed.
How could she articulate this to him? His life was about to change forever, but not in nearly the same way as hers.
For some reason she thought of a Nat Geo documentary.
She’d be the haggard lioness feeding a brood of cubs and wasting away in the heat, and he’d be the proud male lion off loafing in the sun, getting fat, and banging whoever the hell he wanted.
Arthur would never do that to her in the real, human world, outside the Wild West of the Serengeti, of course.
But there was something more permanent and binding about her role in all this that she couldn’t quite put her finger on; that much was for sure.
“It’s my maternal instinct, or lack thereof.
I think the reason it hasn’t kicked in yet is because I feel like I have unfinished business.
The ice cream is just a representative example. A metaphor, if you will.”
“Unfinished business. That’s something a ghost would say. Are you planning on haunting someone?”
She ignored him and continued.
“I’ve never left Baltimore, not once in my life.
We’ve been holed up in our apartment, trying to save money, just trying to get by.
” And nobody had ever told them that just getting by would be so goddamn hard.
That it would require working all day just to come home and eat dinner so you could go to bed so you could get up the next day and work some more, and all that fifty-some weeks a year just so you could live in a shitty apartment and watch your life get more and more expensive without ever actually getting the chance to live any of it.
“And I haven’t minded being patient, I always knew that our time would come, but there’s just so much left to do.
So I think my body is physically rejecting the idea of settling down permanently. ”
“Like a bad hair graft.”
“Exactly.”
“I think I’m getting it,” he said. “Just like I feel like I’m missing the wisdom and experience that I’m going to need to be a great dad. And the way we fix that is…”
“The bucket list. If we can just find the damn thing.”
Arthur stroked his beard, professor-like. Except Wren could tell he was momentarily distracted by a patchy spot, and he was considering what it might look like to chop the whole thing off. “We can always remake it,” he said, refocusing. “Come up with new ideas.”
“No, that completely defeats the purpose. I want to go back and remember who I wanted to be before being an adult fucked it all up.” She wanted to remember what her hopes and dreams were when they were pure and untainted.
Would nineteen-year-old Wren be proud of who she turned out to be?
Twenty-nine, living here, hopping from job to job, getting pregnant her greatest accomplishment to date?
Adult Wren was pretty sure she knew the answer, and she didn’t like it.
What did she think and hope her life was going to be like, and with less than a year before she turned thirty, where had she gone wrong? She needed that list to know for sure.
“I get it. Except we’ve been at this for an hour and we’re running out of boxes to check. The only one you haven’t opened is that one with a stack of laptops in it that I’ve been too lazy to recycle.”
Wren realized he was right. They weren’t going to find it.
It had to be, what, ten years old? She flopped backward, realizing about halfway down that she should have checked for a soft landing spot, but luckily her head landed in a pile of Arthur’s sweaters.
He had so many sweaters. “So we’re doomed,” she said.
She exhaled. “It’s OK. We can just wait, delay our adventures until our kid’s all grown up.
Might as well pop out a few more while we’re at it.
What’s another couple of decades anyway?
Your parents are proof that it’s never too late.
” Damn it, she was starting to well up despite her best efforts.
It felt ridiculous, all this over a couple scoops of ice cream.
But suddenly it was like she could see the next several decades of her life flying by and losing herself to them completely.
This was not how she was supposed to be feeling right now.
“Hey,” Arthur said, reaching over and wiping away her first tear the instant it formed. “I just remembered something.”
“What is it?”
“There’s one more box.”
In the corner of the living room, the box of “college junk” Arthur’s parents had so kindly brought them had been unceremoniously shoved into a corner, a blanket folded on top of it as some sort of half-hearted camouflage.
“You think there’s any chance it’s in here?” Arthur asked as she slid it out into the middle of the carpet.
“I think there’s a good chance,” she said. “You’re just sentimental enough to keep something like that. And we’ve looked everywhere else. Is it OK if I open it?”
“Knock yourself out,” he said.
“You’re sure? You don’t want to preview it first in case there’s some steamy letter from an ex-girlfriend sitting on top or something?”
He rolled his eyes. “I only had one girlfriend before you, and I’d hardly call the relationship steamy.”
“Oh, I remember her. She had a funny name…Chipper, Chimmy. Something like that.”
“Chipmunk.” Arthur sighed. “It was her camp name.”
Wren cackled as she unstuck the edges of the packing tape holding the box top on. She remembered Chipmunk now. When Arthur had first told her, she’d teasingly asked him if he liked her because she knew her way around nuts.
“Shut up, it was a formative experience,” he said. “But no, I don’t think you’ll find any memorabilia from the relationship in there. Other than maybe the rock she painted for me.”
With the tape removed, Wren pulled off the lid, singing a heavenly little aah as if golden beams of light might shoot out of the box at any moment.
Arthur sat down next to her and peered inside.
They sorted through stacks of papers, his Intro to Creative Writing journal with Lumineers lyrics scribbled on the front (he was one of those guys), embarrassing posters that once hung on Arthur’s dorm room walls, and even his diploma still rolled up in its original casing.
And there, just when they thought they were going to come up empty-handed, half-stuck to the very bottom of the box was the dried-up, slightly crispy piece of paper Wren was looking for.