A few clear plastic containers stored clothes she never wore. Her hand caught the corner of one. She slid it toward her, popped open the top. Cable knit sweaters, the kind that went out of style in the nineties, were rolled up like sleeping bags. A pair of old sweatpants from the University of Washington was torn at the knee. Underneath was a plain, brown cardboard shoebox. She hadn’t come across it since they first moved into the house eight years earlier.

It belonged to her father.

The mind was a strange thing. Ever since becoming pregnant, thoughts of her long-deceased father seemed to waft to the front of her mind. She would have never expected this, that a pregnancy, and the loss of the pregnancy, would form another connection to him, would resurrect his life, and the loss of him, all over again.

After his death, his worldly possessions, the few pieces of furniture he owned, his clothes, had all been donated to a local charity in Delhi. His landlord had discovered the box while cleaning out his apartment, found Shan’s return address on a letter she had written to her father and mailed the box and its entire contents to her. It arrived with a note offering his deepest condolences for her loss. He described her father Vijay as one of his best, most timely paying tenants.

When she first opened the box thirty years ago, she hoped to find a message or sign that she’d been in her father’s thoughts in the last days of his life, some manifestation of regret for leaving her and her mother. She wanted evidence that she’d meant more to him than India.

It was merely a haphazard filing system.

She lifted off the lid, spilled the contents onto the bed. The maps remained folded and creased, the guidebooks wrinkled and warped. There was the thin, gray paperback book. Exodus by Kavita Grover. She flipped through it. Words and phrases dripped down the page, segmented themselves into verses. Her father had been a lover of biographies, histories, National Geographic. She always wondered how he’d come into possession of a poetry book. In her teens, she read it a few times, even selected a poem from it, “A Folded Heart,” to recite to her eighth-grade English class for an assignment.

The loose papers in the box were soft and grainy between her fingers. Pen marks, circular, light-brown stains, branded the margins. She selected one page, an old bank statement, brought it to her face, hoped the passage of time had somehow resurrected her father’s scent—coffee, a hint of nicotine, Old Spice aftershave from a freshly razored cheek.

It reeked of mildew.