Belongings

She came up from the subway tunnels blinking into sunlight, but the sky was hazy with smoke or dust. Wes was too young for the endless stairs, and so she carried him on her hip with Dani in the sling round her front. Dani, at least, was sleeping now — a small blessing. 

The stranger who had offered to carry her suitcase set it down with a smile that stopped at his eyes. And everyone ahead of them had spilled into the street to look at the smoky sky, then look at the scene in front of them. Some sobbed. Some had been sobbing since the first rockets hit.

Halfway down the street, one building had crumbled — slid into the crater at its foot as like a sandcastle undermined by the tide. Three or four cars had been twisted into wrecks next to it. She stared at this gap between buildings and found she couldn’t remember what had been there before. An optometrist? No, that was still there, two doors down. A kebab shop? A shoe shop? It didn’t matter. It was rubble now. Most of the surrounding windows were broken. A realtor next to the station entrance seemed untouched — fading photos of houses and flats still hung in its window as if someone might walk in for a viewing.

Four years ago, she and Alex had found their flat in a shop just like it. They’d wanted to stay in town, wanted to stay close to jobs and nightlife. That was before the children. Before the war. Back when wars happened in other places. 

Now, Alex was somewhere on an assignment, writing about the survivors of these bombings. People made homeless in their own city. Somewhere on the outskirts, he was wearing a flak jacket and press badge, reporting for a news outlet that was harder and harder to access. She wondered who was still able to read his work. 

She had dreams of him dying, sometimes. Dreams where she cried and screamed, and woke up still crying. Now, it was her life, her children’s lives, in danger. This had been the worst attack yet. She wanted Alex here, where he belonged, carrying the suitcase he always carried to the shelter. The one she’d left behind. 

The important one.

 * * *

The first time an air-raid alert came shrieking through their phones, it had been eight p.m. The panic was like an electric current. They’d had no preparation, other than notices explaining the closest shelters and evacuation zones. Together, they’d whisked up the children and bundled them in blankets, grabbed wallets and keys, and fled for the station. 

They hadn’t thought of diapers. Hadn’t thought of spare clothes, warm hats, or anything to sit on. They hadn’t had time to realise they would want toys, distractions, snacks for Wes. Infant formula for Dani. They hadn’t realised how long the wait would be.

But after that first long night, they prepared. They packed not one, but two suitcases. The first was stuffed to bursting with children’s clothes, spare clothes for themselves, and everything they might need for an extended stay in the shelter. 

The second suitcase contained their lives. 

Alex downloaded every photo they’d ever stored on a cloud service and copied them onto a portable drive. He did the same for their documents — taking photos of passports, the mortgage, utility bills, their wedding license and the children’s birth certificates — every document he’d been able to find. He put copies on his phone, copies in the cloud, and copies onto the same portable drive as the photos. He printed out paper copies and put those in the suitcase as well. It was a long and frustrating process, but worth it.

Then, the two of them went through the flat choosing objects they felt they couldn’t live without. Alex picked out a copy of his first paid article in a magazine; a leftover invitation from their wedding night; Wes’s first baby shoes; and three of his earliest journals. 

For her, it was the album of black-and-white photos from her mother’s family, none of which she’d thought to scan. They were photos from the 30s and 40s, many with relatives she couldn’t even name, but they were her history, nonetheless. Then there was the silver locket her grandmother had worn most of her life, the blanket she’d first wrapped Dani in, and a dozen other trinkets from her youth. 

When she’d heard the explosions today — when she knew that this one was not a false alarm — she hadn’t even debated what to do. She couldn’t take two suitcases alone, so she’d grabbed the first suitcase, as always, and run. 

 * * *

She tried to call Alex, but it would not ring. There was an unusual tone, then a disconnection. She tried again. And again. Same result. The signal was strong, but nothing was going through.

She texted: We’re safe. big one today. sooo much damage. where r u? stay safe. x

The word Pending appeared next to her message.  

She tried the tracking app. Alex could not be found. It would not even produce a map.

Her battery was at fifteen percent and the charger was in the other suitcase, so she put the phone in flight mode, planning to recharge at home.

Somewhere on the other side of the block, a column of black smoke rose above the rooftops. There were other, more distant, fires, too. And she could smell it now, like a mixture of burning plastic and concrete dust. And something else — a metallic smell, sharp and chemical. Fuel or accelerant or explosive payload. She didn’t know. 

She put Wes on his feet. He was sniffling but not crying. So, she took him by the hand and began the familiar walk to the flat.

Rubble had been flung from the blast sites and littered the pavement. The wheels of the suitcase rattled and jammed in it. She avoided looking at the impact craters too carefully, afraid of what she might see there. Afraid that Wes might see it, too. But still, it happened — a body. Not in a building, but on the street. 

It was a man, elderly. Perhaps he’d been trying to make it to the shelter when the alerts started. His body was cruelly twisted, tossed by the force of a blast, maybe. His mouth gaped open. 

She froze in that moment, stepping backward. A sound crawled from her throat: part choke, part guttural cry. It was a sound she’d never heard from herself, and it shocked her into movement. She pulled Wes up into her arms careful not to crush Dani — whose tiny nose was now wrinkling in the acrid air — and she hurried past, the suitcase rattling like a demon behind her. 

They turned off the main road and went one more block before she felt safe to let Wes down again. They were close to home, now, and this part of the street was untouched. Still, faces peered from windows, and people stood in the road surveying the distant fires. Sirens of all kinds had begun echoing. A nearby helicopter beat time to the chaos. 

And then she rounded the corner, and the world fell apart. Her building was gone. 

Not fully gone. No. In fact, a portion of it still stood as if it were a doll’s house — walls open to the street, her neighbours’ belongings on display, pictures still hung on the inner walls. But where her flat had once stood, there was only a ragged hole that spanned their building and part of the next, concrete and twisted steel framing its edges.

She knew immediately that everything was lost. All their furniture, all the plates and cups, the beds and clothing and houseplants and bicycles and food and appliances and books. All buried beneath the debris. 

And yet, she continued toward it, transfixed. She walked up to where the door should have been and set the suitcase aside. She pulled Wes with her into the broken house. He started to cry, but she couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t react. She had to find the other suitcase. Alex’s suitcase. It had to be here. She picked a route to move through the wreckage, but as she started forward a hand gripped her shoulder and stopped her. 

It was a stranger, his face grey and sleep deprived. And she realised that he was shouting. That he had been shouting at her for some time, but the sound of it had been like background noise. He was shouting for her to not get so close, that it was dangerous. That the whole thing could come down. What was she thinking? 

The man was middle aged, the same height as her, heavy around the middle. She turned and looked at him. She opened her mouth, but found she had nothing to say.

He stopped shouting and became calmer.

‘You lived here?’ he asked, and the past tense struck her like a fist.

She nodded. Wes was still crying, and she smoothed his hair out of habit, saying, Shh, shhh, shhhh.

‘A right mess,’ he said. ‘I’m just over there. Missed us, luckily.’

He pointed vaguely toward a row of houses. 

‘I have to find my suitcase,’ she said, moving again to search.

‘It’s there, love,’ he said, pointing back outside. ‘You have it already.’ 

For a moment she was confused.

‘Not that,’ she said. ‘The other one. I couldn’t take it. It was just … the rockets and the noise, and we ran to the shelter, and Alex always took it, but Alex is gone. Alex is … I don’t know where.’

She felt the quaver in her voice, the jumbled words, and she hated it. She did not want to be that woman who cried in front of strangers. 

There was sympathy in the man’s face, but annoyance, too. He swayed for a moment, taking one faltering step closer to the ruined flat as if to search for the suitcase himself, then thought better of it. Instead, he asked her to pick up the boy, then took her by the elbow and lead her gently away from the creaking wreck of her home. 

The world had become strange and dreamlike. She was home, but there was no home.

‘You’ll never find anything in there,’ he said. ‘It’s gone.’

Were it not for Dani and Wes, she would have slumped to the road right there and given in. Let the magnitude of it wash over her. They had nothing. Absolutely nothing. No roof. No water. No transportation away from here. No photos from their past. No trace of their lives before this. In one second, everything had been wiped away. Without the other suitcase, the documents, the drive, the cloud, she could not even prove who she was. Could not prove who her children were. Could not prove that Alex was her husband, or that this was their flat. She couldn’t prove that they belonged here.

‘Fucking monsters,’ the man said abruptly, making her jump. ‘Think they can take our country. Fucking bloody shit-eaters!’ Then he spat at the ground next to him, fists clenching. 

She flinched. Shifted Wes behind her, and glared at the stranger, his face red and twisted.

‘Well, it’s not on, is it? This is our home!’ he said. Then, calming some: ‘I’m sorry.’ 

The city was like this, now — kind, but only to a point. Giving, but also selfish. Stress, shortage and grief had rubbed people raw. And when the man began to walk away, she was relieved. But he stopped at a distance and turned.

‘You need to get those children someplace warm and safe,’ he said.

She prayed he was not offering, but at the same time hoped that he was offering. At least they would be close to home. At least they would be at home when Alex came back.

But the man rummaged in a pocket and pulled out a crumpled flyer. And when she saw what it was, something inside of her crumbled.

‘There’s emergency shelter set up in the park,’ he said. ‘Tent city, but they’ve got food and water and all. If there’s still space.’

She had seen the camps. She had watched the reports on television from her own flat, surrounded by her family and belongings. She’d watched from safety as all those bewildered people flowed into parks littered with sprawling tents — a tide of hopeless, ragged beings, eating handouts, praying for the decency of other side not to strike the camps. They were people without neighbourhoods. People without furniture or food or cars or appliances. People without televisions. And now, she realised, they were people like her. And somewhere, Alex was writing about them.

The man held the flyer out for her to take. 

‘I know,’ she said, and did not reach for it.

He glanced once again at the ruin of her home, then at the suitcase beside her.

‘At least you got something,’ he said.

‘Yes. Something.’

‘All right, then,’ he said, and walked away, wadding the paper back into his pocket.

* * *

She took out her phone and turned off flight mode. Again, it connected. Again, the call would not go through. The battery was now at five percent. 

She texted: The flat is gone. nothing left. shit signal. are you OK? pls pls call. x

Her finger trembled over the screen.

She wrote: couldn’t take the other suitcase. should have taken it. not the clothes. we have nothing fuck i’m so sorry. pls be ok. pls be safe. i love you. 

The message read, Pending. The battery sank to three percent. 

Dani began to fuss, then wail. She needed to be fed. 

And this was it — there was no more choice. She would find her way to the park, to the tent city. Join the drab mass of humanity huddling together in terror — a metropolis of the deprived and depleted. She would do what she must to feed Wes and Dani, hoping for some way out, some working communication. Hoping for some haven not held up by a tent-pole. Hoping they would stop dropping bombs. Hoping that the internet still existed, that the cables were not cut, that the providers had not simply gone home to their own families, leaving the servers to rot. Hoping for Alex. For Alex. For Alex. Hoping that he was okay, that he would find them. 

She took Wes by the hand and began to walk. But before they had reached the corner, her phone buzzed in her pocket. 

She took it out to look, and with one percent on the battery display, the notification read: 

Alex: Thank god! On the way. Will be there by tonight. Meet at shelter? I can get transport. Fuck the suitcase. Who cares? Love you.  

She laughed out loud, and a few heads on the street turned, but she didn’t care. Alex was alive and coming back. They would have nothing, but they would be together. And that was everything. She pulled Wes up to her hip and walked faster toward the shelter, pulling the wrong suitcase behind her through the rubble. ◼︎