The Shoeboxes

Margaret had been alone all her life. She never thought to be any other way, despite the sermons of Cosmo magazine and Disney princesses and the occasional concerned adult. She was perfectly capable and content to cruise through life on her own. The fastest sinking ships are partnerships, after all, as her dad used to say.

If he was joking, it was lost on Margaret.

Bailey Mason was a decent man, but decent men burdened by the unexpected weight of single parenthood can only do their best. He never spoke about his late wife, and Margaret learned early on it was better not to ask.

He worked on the rigs and lived away in the cruel clutches of the north for weeks at a time. He wasn’t qualified for much else, and the pay covered the bills and a little extra for Margaret’s small college fund, so he left her in the care of his mother.

Grandma Louise drank a little too much red wine, smoked a few too many cigarettes, and slept a little too often under the glow of bad soap operas and long infomercials. She left her sagging sofa so seldom that she began to blend into it, morphing into a blob of booze and boredom that occasionally barked orders at Margaret through the static of a smoky haze.

Margaret had no problem occupying herself out in the yard or in the woods away from her wheezing grandmother. She ran with the neighbourhood cats and climbed with the chipmunks. She built shacks out of sticks and ate apples from the tree. She rescued old books from Louise’s shelves and disappeared into their yellowed pages under the wings of a weeping willow.

Other children sometimes approached her, and she would eye them warily like a wild dog teasing the boundary of domesticity. When they inevitably expected her to share her meticulously folded paper planes or stop and wait while they cried over scraped knees, she’d retreat to her solitary adventures.

When school started, Margaret made no attempt to befriend her classmates. Friendship involved the tedious, exhausting work of filters and compromise. She didn’t care that the teacher always had to assign her to a grumbling partner. It didn’t bother her when she was picked last in gym. She gave no thought to the taunts thrown her way by the boys who ate their own boogers or the girls who giggled at the booger-eating boys.

“Your teacher called me again,” Bailey would say when he visited. “Why don’t you play nice with the other kids?”

“I don’t play with other kids at all,” she’d respond. “Other kids are stupid.”

“Now honey, that’s not nice to say.”

“It’s true.”

“That doesn’t make it nice.”

Then he’d go back north, and she’d continue on in her cocoon of cynicism.

Despite her reclusiveness, she did grow into a fairly normal life. She took up swimming in high school. She read lots of books. She was a decent cook but struggled at baking. She was pursuing a Bachelor’s in Science with the thought of one day becoming a veterinarian.

Her only quirk that was admittedly a bit odd was the collection that she stored in shoeboxes under her bed. Everyone has a hobby, she told herself. Lots of people collect things. But in Margaret’s case, it wasn’t rocks or DVDs or Pokémon cards.

It was love notes.

Her shoeboxes brimmed with pages torn from unattended journals, letters stolen from mailboxes, covers ripped from books, and loose-leaf pages scrounged from garbage bins. They were lined with Post-Its lifted from lunchboxes. They were decorated with polaroid prints of heart-bound initials scraped onto bathroom stalls. They even housed a few wedding bands inscribed with forever promises–lost or discarded, Margaret didn’t know.

It was a colourful collection marked with ink of every hue and script of every skill. Some notes were one word; some were ten pages. Sometimes she collected an entire conversation; sometimes she was left with a frustrating cliff-hanger.

Her first note had been sticking out of a locker as she passed by on her way to biology in senior year. Not knowing why, she reached out and snagged it, stuffing it between the glossy pages of her textbook. At the back of the lab, behind her microscope, she smoothed the crumpled page, running her palm over the alternating loops of pink pen and scrawl of black marker. A thrill zoomed up her spine, and stealing the secret scribbles of love quickly became an obsession.

Every now and then Margaret pulled out the shoeboxes and sifted through the love you forever commitments of honeymooners and I just can’t do this anymore confessions of heartbreakers. She scoffed at the I don’t know loops of indecisive girls and hoped for the what if pleas of friend-zoned boys. She wondered what became of the home at six dull husbands and the come by at three cheating wives. She took extra care of the xoxos penned by doting mothers and proud of you scratches offered by involved fathers.

Although she liked to think every I miss you and don't leave me was a reminder of what she wasn’t missing out on, she did go on a few dates to experiment like one was supposed to in college.

Because she was curious, she assured herself, not because she was lonely.

The boys she dated were a mix of bizarrely buff, infuriatingly aloof, and creepily intense. They followed Google Maps, even though they would have arrived much faster if they listened to Margaret. They took her to movies she had no interest in seeing (and had, in fact, told them so). They pulled out chairs for her as if she were an invalid and walked her to her door as if she might not have found it without them.

They never wrote her notes worthy of the shoeboxes.

“For god’s sake,” she said to the last one, who threw a toddler’s tantrum when she said she would rather stay home and read than accompany him to some sporting event where the beer cost more than her book. “Go find someone else to waste your time and money with.”

So, he did, and Margaret was glad for him. She knew stupid people needed other stupid people, so they didn’t have to feel stupid doing stupid things alone.

Then, one day, while licking the salt off her fingers from the day’s bag of chips behind a stack of newly dropped books at her part-time job, Margaret picked up the phone. “Recycled Reads, Margaret speaking.”

A familiar hacking cough choked through the line. “It’s your grandma.”

“Oh, hi,” was all she thought to say.

“Your dad had a heart attack.”

“Oh.” Margaret wondered how concerned she should sound. “…How is he?”

“Dead.”

Three days later, Margaret climbed into the cab of her father’s F-150, a dusty capsule of possessions that proved he lived. She pulled the door firmly closed and sat straight-backed, staring over the steering wheel at the mustard brown brick of Grandma Louise’s house.

A stale peppermint tree hung from the rear-view mirror. A blister pack of spearmint Trident squares lay haphazardly in the middle console. The leather seat, shaped by years of Bailey’s weight, swallowed Margaret’s thin frame. She knew that if she turned the key, the roar of the seventies would crash through the speakers and vibrate deep in her eye sockets.

The back seat served as a closet. Bailey’s scuffed and stickered hard hats lay belly up, one on the seat and one on the floor. Oil-splattered coveralls lined with reflective strips lay curled on their sides like discarded snake skins. Four pairs of steel-toed boots laden with mud were scattered about like kids tossed around on a wild school bus ride.

A tattered shoebox sat on the front passenger seat. Margaret reached over and gently lifted the lid, laying it neatly on the console. Her parents’ young faces beamed up at her. She gingerly lifted the faded photo, smudged by years of her father’s fingerprints brushing across her mother’s smile. It was the first item in the ‘keep’ pile of her lap.

Next, she pulled out a sheaf of papers—a marriage certificate, a death certificate, a couple of birth certificates. She reluctantly began a ‘keep for filing’ pile under the box’s lid.

Under the banal paperwork of life and death, she fished out a set of old binoculars and a flip phone. They fed the ‘discard’ pile on the seat beside the box.

Bailey’s old pocketknife, its wood handle burned with Love, Dad, dropped into ‘keep’.

The last item Margaret extracted was a thick bundle of envelopes bound with green twine. She reverently turned the stack over in her hands, marvelling at the rainbow of colours and textures stamped with the scars of time.

At the top was her mother’s name in her father’s handwriting.

The weight of what she assumed she held was equally thrilling and terrifying.

It was the ultimate addition to her shoeboxes.

It was the love story she’d never been told.

She gingerly but eagerly tore into the first one.

V -

I miss you. That seems so insignificant to say. It's too simple. Too small. Too casual. The void you've left behind swallows it whole. I can't look at Margaret without seeing you in her dimples, in her curls, in the upturn of her tiny button nose. She won't remember you. She asks for you less and less. I love her, V. I do. I think. But your absence is crushing. I can't breathe. I can’t be here.

-B

Margaret's stomach soured. She rifled through the stack of envelopes, scoured the pages, and searched for her mother's handwriting, but all she found were years of grief and excuses disguised as eulogies.

Her sky-high elation spiraled through devastation and crashed with a flare of fury.

She packed up the mess.

She said goodbye to Grandma Louise.

She went home and burned all of her shoeboxes.