All those rows of doors. So many doors, and not the usual roll-down aluminum. More like a sanatorium or a teen detention center: thick, rectangular, the smudged square window crisscrossed with lines and a number taped on as an afterthought. Not all the doors had been painted the same color, and teal or magenta made the institutional effect worse somehow. The smell of mold was stronger. Sound behaved oddly, as if the shifting weight of clutter behind the doors was making itself known.

What did I know about storage units? Nothing. I’d only known our mother’s, a place we’d rented to appease our father, who didn’t want to become a hoarder. But, just maybe, if you drove all the way to the outskirts of the city, to the edge of the mountains, what you kept here you wanted at arm’s length. And what you wanted kept at arm’s length could be precious or fragile as memory. Even a bad memory.

Nine through eleven followed one through three. Had I missed a passageway? It was a warren, with several crossroads. Perhaps the storage units went on forever, the space wandering beneath the mountains in some terrifyingly infinite way. A moment of panic, at the thought of getting lost, as I kept walking and didn’t find number seven.

But I found the right door.

Or the wrong door, depending on your point of view.

[3]

“It was all meant to be” is a powerful drug. Crossing that threshold into Unit 7, I couldn’t have told you what was preordained and what was chance. Or how long it might take to separate the two.

All I saw at first was the emptiness of some square stripped-bare cliché of an interrogation room. A modest wooden chair stood near the back, under flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling. A medium-sized cardboard box sat on the chair.

I stood in the doorway and stared at the box on the chair for a long time. Left the door open behind me, an instinct about doors slamming shut that wasn’t paranoid. The trap could be anywhere. It was so still, so antiseptic, inside. Except for one moldy panel of the back wall. I don’t recall dust motes even. Like a crime scene wiped clean.

But I checked the far, dark corner, the ceiling, before walking up to the chair. I did that much.

Just an ordinary cardboard box. The top flaps had been folded shut. Lightweight, when I gave it an experimental nudge. No sound coming out of it, either. No airholes. Nothing like a puppy or kitten, then. Immense relief in that.

I put down my purse, pulled back first one flap and then the other.

I think I laughed, nervously.