There were thirty-one of them.
I counted from the doorway before I went in, twice, because the first count came out at thirty and I could not accept it for reasons I did not examine.
They were on metal shelving along the left-hand wall, three shelves deep, in rows. Boxes, mostly — shoeboxes, shirt boxes, a few larger ones, one that was almost as tall as me leaning against the end of the rack. All wrapped. Not neatly, not the way a shop wraps things; wrapped the way a man wraps things, too much tape, the corners fought into submission.
The paper was different on almost every one. Balloons. Stripes. One with cartoon horses that had faded to grey on the side facing the door. One in plain brown kraft paper with the paper itself drawn on in marker.
And on every single one, in the top right corner, in the same square capital handwriting, a year.
They were in order. He had put them in order.
I sat down on the concrete floor just inside the door, which was warm, and I stayed there for a while.
I don’t want to dramatise this. There was no big cinematic collapse. I sat on the floor of a storage unit off Highway 99 with my car keys still in my hand and I looked at thirty-one wrapped presents and I could not make my brain do anything at all with the information. It just kept sliding off.
The thing that eventually got me up was practical and stupid. I realised the door was open and anyone could walk past, and I did not want anyone to walk past. I got up and pulled the roller door down behind me and turned on the light — there was a light, a bare bulb, he’d had it wired or it came with the unit, I don’t know — and then I was alone in an orange metal room with all of it.
I opened 1995 first, because it was first.
I was seven in 1995. That’s the year he left. March, 1995.
Inside the paper was a shoebox, and inside the shoebox, in a nest of tissue, was a Beanie Baby. A purple one, a platypus I think, still with the little heart tag on its ear in a plastic protector.
I had wanted one so badly that year that I had made a chart.
I don’t know how he knew that. I have never known how he knew that. He left in March and this was bought for a birthday in September and there is no version of events I have been able to construct in which that man knew about the chart.
I put it back in the tissue and closed the box and I did not open another one for about twenty minutes.
Then I opened all of them.
I know you’re supposed to do a thing like that slowly. I didn’t. I sat on the floor and I went along the rows and I tore into thirty-one years of wrapping paper like a lunatic, and paper went everywhere, and by the end there was so much of it around me that I couldn’t see the concrete.
Here is some of what was in there.
1996: a bike helmet, purple, small.
1998: a boxed set of the first four books in a series I had been obsessed with. Not the first book. Books one to four, which is what you buy for a kid who you know has already read the first one.
2001: a Discman. Actually cool, actually the right one, actually the year.
2003: a green dress. Fifteen. I remember what I was like at fifteen and I don’t know what he thought he was doing.
2006: a small toolbox with a set of screwdrivers and a tape measure and a torch in it, and a card taped to the lid that said for the apartment. I moved into my first apartment in 2006.
2011: a slow cooker.
2014: a Le Creuset dish, the small one, in blue, which cost more than anything else in that unit by a factor of about four.
2017: a book about grief. Just that. A book about grief, wrapped in paper with balloons on it.
My mother’s second husband died in the spring of 2017.
By the time I got to the end of the row I was making a sound I have never made before or since, and I was extremely glad the door was down.
Because it wasn’t the presents. It was never going to be the presents. It was that they were right.
Every one of them was right. Not vaguely right, not the kind of right you get from guessing a girl’s age off a birth certificate. Specifically, unmistakably, year-by-year right, for thirty-one consecutive years, by a man who had not spoken to me since I was seven and who I had been told, in four words, did not want us.
He knew about the chart. He knew about the apartment. He knew about 2017.
Somebody had been telling him.