The Time Capsule

When I opened the golden envelope from mom this morning, I didn't expect it to lead me to a cracked leather bench in the back aisle of a bus going north of town. The smell is wretched, like rotten eggs and a musty shirt belonging to a teen athlete, but I couldn't spare gas money.

The photograph wedged in between the packets of medical information and his death certificate didn't bring me any closer to dad. The autopsy says lung cancer, but who knows if that's how he left us. I didn't really care about him. At least, I've told myself this for the past 40 years whenever my mind veered toward memories of him picking me up as a little girl at the park after a fall on the swings. A salt and pepper beard. A hardened, flat face with no wrinkles from smiling.

He left when I was eight and I haven't seen a picture of him until this morning. I analyzed it for five minutes as I lit my first cigarette of the day. I breathed in the smoke in defiance of his reported death. On the back, there were coordinates, which Google Maps told me belonged to an undeveloped flatland. I was supposed to clock in at 7 p.m. tonight at Moe's. The night shift. To serve pancakes to fat old men in flannels who drove trucks for a living and had never heard of the term "hygiene." They made passes at me with their eyes and their mouths. I hope to be back by then, but I don't know what I'll find. Maybe nothing. Maybe him.

When the bus breaks at its final stop, the app says I'm still four miles out. I snag a bright red electric rental bike and pedal for another two before it loses steam and forces me to abandon it. I wonder if I'll be able to lug it back on the return trip, or whether I'd rather kick it over and bury it. The end of town sounds like a mythological place. The world today is so interconnected and tied together that an area without pavement or trails seems inconceivable, but here I am walking through thickets of tall grass in low-top flats. My ankles are puckered again and again with burrs from the unkempt terrain. I stand for a living, but this kind of walking is putting a strain on my body in a surprising manner; perhaps I'm naive.

Why are their coordinates on the back of a photograph of my father? It's this recurring question that prevails most during my walk. Why would he keep something out here, and when did my mother find the photograph? When were the coordinates written on the back? I suddenly feel as if I'm in a who-dun-it, but I don't there's no twist at the end of this story; he's dead. Maybe the coordinates were scribbles from a different time.

A shovel marks the spot and I can't help but think someone is watching me, setting me up for something--a spectacle. I play along and pick up the shovel to dig. My hands blister immediately, chafing and cracking from the hardened wooden handle. The burning makes me want to drop the tool in the dirt, cut my losses and turn around to leave. Who the hell would bury something out here? Was it my mother? Is this punishment for my part in our growing distance. A chasm caused by resentment and disappointment. I knew she hated that I was almost 50 years old and a waitress. And I hated that when she eventually died, she'd leave me nothing but bones to drop in the ground. Maybe her bones are already here, and I'm meant to fetch them for her. Or maybe the hole I'm digging is for her. After I'm done, she'll emerge from the trees like a witch or the hooded grim reaper and crawl into a fetal position. But she was alive, last I heard.

A loud thud travels upward as a hunk of metal begins to poke out from the dirt. I'm tired. The shovel crashes to the ground as I relinquish my grip and instead reach for the object. It is metal, cold and smooth. From my legs to my core to my arms, I put all my strength into yanking the cylinder from the ground. When I finally get it above the hole, I fall backward and it plops to the left of me. The treasure, buried in the middle of this field looks more like a gunmetal tube; a bigger, darker version of what chemists on TV create diseases and explosive toxins in. When I go to open it, the top slides off easy, as if it had been waiting for someone to arrive and sift through its insides: a packet of newspaper articles, a gun and a knife in a plastic Ziploc baggie, and a photograph mirroring the one with its coordinates. 

Sitting on the cold ground, as the sun begins to descend toward the horizon, I can barely read the crusty, yellowed newspaper clippings, but they’re all about murders. I knew my father wasn’t a good man, he left me and my mother after all, but is this some sort of demented memento? There wasn’t so much as an obituary or a note regarding his death when he died, let alone a will. Perhaps the secrets of this container are all he had left to pass on.

The tears form without warning and I’m sobbing in the hardened dirt, my hands and nails are caked in mud and all I’ve found is a question: Was my father a murderer? And worst, does the answer even matter? He had abandoned me as a little girl, so any connection with the man was severed permanently. He never made an attempt at contact, no phone calls or texts, no emails or letters. He was a ghost, a relic of my past. And now I've found all that's left of his. Where am I?

As I get up to leave and head toward the street leading back to town, I toss the shovel in the hole, gather the goods, and place them back in the tube where they'll rest between my right bicep and rib cage. My body aches all over, and my head is pounding from the waves of anger. When I arrive on the street, I’m barely able to keep my legs churning forward, but I don’t stop moving until I arrive at a bus stop, flanked by a bench where an old woman sits on the far side. She’s dressed for colder weather than the 64 degrees calls for, an olive wool overcoat and an orange scarf. 

“Excuse me, dear,” she says, as I let gravity take over and fall hard into the wooden seat.

“Yes?”

“Is that a time capsule?”

“A what?”

“A time capsule. A thing you buried a long time ago with things inside.”

“Sort of. It wasn’t mine. It was my dad's.” 

“Oh, nice of you to retrieve it for him.”

“He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s ok.”

“My grandson buried one at school last year. Says he’s going to dig it up when he’s grown up. I think it’s a neat idea, I told him. I think it will help him remember who he was: such a nice boy.” 

I barely hear the words whistling through her teeth. The emotional weight of the "what if" crushes my shoulders like a boulder. I can’t stop thinking about the headlines of my father’s potential crimes, nor the note on the back of the photograph from the capsule: “My life’s work.”

“I hope whatever’s in his keeps him with you,” she says, as the bus pulls to a stop in front of us. 

“Yes,” I told her. “Me too.”