because I knew, the second I got it open, that this had ridden out one storm sealed in a wall and been set free by another, and it was not ours.
It was a metal case, rust-spotted, and when my wife and I worked the catch, inside was a life. Photographs, a stack of them, curled and old. A childs single small shoe. A wedding ring. A Bible with a name written in the front. And a few brittle newspaper pages from nineteen sixty-nine, about a hurricane called Camille that came through this same Gulfport coast and killed people by the hundreds.
Whoever built this wall had lived through Camille. And they had lost somebody to it. Everything in that case was salvage, the few things pulled out of the water and the wreckage after the worst night of a persons life. And instead of keeping them out where they would have to see them and grieve every day, or throwing them away, which no soul could do, they had sealed them up inside their own garage wall. Close. Kept. But out of sight, where the grief could not reach out and grab them every time they walked past.
Tucked in with the photographs was a note, the ink gone brown.
I cannot look at these and I cannot let them go. So I am putting them in the wall, where they are safe and I am safe from them. If the house ever comes down, let it be the water that gives them back, the same water that took her.
Let it be the water that gives them back. Fifty-some years later, another storm, another flood, and the water did exactly that. It tore open the wall and handed a family back the child they had sealed away because the loss was too big to live beside.
We have owned this house eleven years and never known. The people who walled that case up were long gone from here, but the name in the Bible gave me a place to start, and I found them, grandchildren of the woman who had sealed it, down the coast a ways. They had heard the family story, that a great-aunt or a little cousin was lost in Camille when their grandmother was young, and that their grandmother never spoke of it. They had not one picture of the child.
Now they have all of them. I drove the case down myself and put it in their hands, and a grown woman held a photograph of a little girl she had heard about her whole life and never seen, the great-aunt who drowned as a child in nineteen sixty-nine, and she wept, and then she laughed, because the baby was beautiful and now she had a face.
The storm took our drywall and a good bit besides, and it cost us to put it right. I would pay it ten times over. That storm reached into a wall and gave a family back a little girl the sea took sixty years ago. Some things, it turns out, the water only borrows.