Wonder Cabinet

They decided early on they would never charge admission. Everyone was welcome. Money had nothing to do with it, at least from the sisters’ perspective.

Grace was the older of the two. Berenice was eight years her junior. At times, this could complicate their relationship, since as children, Grace was clearly in charge. Now in their fifties—you do the math, must I explain everything?—they behaved as equals for the most part, Grace herself taking great pains to ensure Berenice wasn’t overly deferential.

Together, they were building a Wonder Cabinet, made of good, solid wood. At first, they worried about not having anything worthy of putting in it. But Berenice consoled Grace, reassuring her that the cabinet itself might become a source of wonder. So they agreed upon maple and got to work, measuring, cutting, sanding, and applying the lightest coating possible of varnish until the blond wood shone golden.

They scarcely had time to admire their work when Grace had a revelation. She told Berenice she would be right back and disappeared for a short while. When she returned, she was holding what Berenice mistook for a bundle of freshly shucked corn silks, but Grace corrected her, explaining with a laugh that in her hands was a lock of hair from Berenice’s first haircut.

“Don’t you remember, silly?”

Berenice looked at her hair, admired the tiny bow Grace had fashioned out of thin red ribbon to hold the bundle together, but it had been too long ago. She shook her head. Her hair, Grace told her, had darkened to the color of honey within a year or two and remained that way into the present.

Grace held the lock up to the light and then her sister’s head. Then she set the tiny bundle on the first shelf of the Wonder Cabinet. The sisters took in the sight from varying viewing distances and discussed how the maple’s tone had deepened.

Grace asked Berenice if there was anything she would like to add, but Berenice patted her sister lightly on the wrist. “No, I think that’s enough for now.”

***

But in the morning, Berenice couldn’t wait for Grace to awaken. At the first signs of her sister’s stirring, she beckoned her. “Come and see, Gracie!”

Grace rubbed her eyes and followed.

A few steps down the hallway, Berenice stopped her. “Cover your eyes, Grace. I’ll guide you.”

Grace held one hand out to her sister and raised her other so that the palm faced her eyes, and she closed them. It reminded Grace of the games they played in their youth, when she was a teenager, and had been charged with entertaining her younger sister through the long summer days. Out of habit, she counted their paces as Berenice led her into the living room.

“Okay, you can open them.”

Berenice must have moved the cabinet while she’d slept. Its new position, in front of the sofa, was, Grace guessed, the geometric center of the living room. It rested on a small Persian carpet that Grace had never seen before. “It’s the perfect place for it, isn’t it?” she said. Grace admired the rich ruby reds and creamy beige of the carpet. The cabinet’s feet disappeared a full half inch into the plush. “Where did you get it?”

“That’s the funny thing,” Berenice said. “I’ve always had it. At least that’s how it seems to me now. I brought it home after college. I’ve kept it rolled up in my closet all these years.”

Grace nodded in appreciation. She knelt to feel the carpet’s weave on her knees, rubbed her palms across it. The lock of hair was still the only object on the cabinet’s shelves, but with the addition of the carpet, she felt as though its contents had started to overflow, and judging by the gleam in her sister’s eyes, she suspected this to be a thought they shared in common.

***

Was it her turn now? Grace pondered. Or was that somehow the wrong way to think about the cabinet? Berenice answered this for her sister when the next day she began filling the bottom shelf.

“Look with me, sister,” Berenice said, and they both fell backward onto the sofa. Grace couldn’t help but shriek in mock alarm at losing her footing and then giggle as they landed on the cushion. But then, she turned serious as she noted a delicate snakeskin sprawling across the bottom shelf as if its occupant might have slithered loose only moments earlier. Grace wasn’t sure if she liked it, but the lacy pattern fascinated her.

“I found it under the back deck,” Berenice offered, unbidden. “I don’t know where the snake went. He won’t be needing this anymore.”

“No, I suppose not,” Grace mused. The thought of snakes sheltering under their house did not please her, especially not growing ones. But it was unavoidable, she reasoned. Snakes, too, were God’s creatures, after all. Still, she resolved to be more careful when working in the garden and immediately felt a protective pang for her fifty-year-old little sister.

Grace thought the cabinet had an appealingly spare quality about it with so few items and so much space, but Berenice was already projecting a time when the shelves would be filling up. “Do you think it would be wise to attach a couple of drawers now?” Berenice asked.

Grace was astonished. “Whatever for?”

In deference to Berenice’s worries, Grace abstained from adding anything more. The remaining space would belong to Berenice. Meanwhile, each evening the sisters kept one another’s company, allowing their eyes to roam from hair to snakeskin to the overflow of carpet, then back again.

For her part, Grace had become convinced that this was all they really needed. If one looked carefully enough, the patterns emanating from the objects were themselves an infinite source of wonder. When she extended this way of seeing to include the wood grain, her pleasure redoubled. From Berenice’s rapt expression, Grace assumed her sister felt the same way. However, they had not discussed this.

Later, Grace realized she should not have been taken by surprise when, one night, from her sofa cushion, she spied another new object in the cabinet. A small, ornate jewelry box now rested on the top shelf.

The jewelry box looked woven from silver threads and opals. It had a round, almost domed lid, reminiscent of a certain type of crown, and the entire ensemble perched delicately on four tiny feet. The whole jewelry box was no more than two inches across.

“Where did you get it?” Grace said.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s exquisite.”

“Think hard,” said Berenice. “Do you remember now?”

In a vague way, Grace believed a memory was beginning to form, but it remained merely a glimmer of silver in her mind.

“Look inside,” Berenice said.

Grace thought at first her sister meant to look inside herself. But try as she might, she just couldn’t recall a place this object might have occupied in their shared past. She let her eyes wander back to the box and now she noticed Berenice’s smile reflected there. Beneath each opal stud around the rim, there was a tiny mirrored panel. It was then she realized that the whole dome would lift and that this was where her sister wanted her to look.

She felt hesitant, perhaps because she’d gotten comfortable on the sofa, but she willed herself to stand and walk over to the cabinet. As she got closer, facets of her own reflection captured her attention, but when she reached out and lifted the lid, she gasped.

Berenice was laughing. “Now do you remember?”

And she did. Inside the box, resting on its own velvet cushion, was a single tooth, a child’s tooth. Berenice’s.

“My last baby tooth,” she said. “The only one the tooth fairy never collected.” Berenice continued laughing, in striking contrast to Grace’s stunned silence.

“You kept this?” she said finally, her wits returning.

“Why not? It belongs to me, doesn’t it?”

The tooth had yellowed over the years, but otherwise remained a perfect specimen. Of what exactly? Grace allowed the word “bicuspid” to play off the inner landscape of her thoughts but really had no idea if that was the kind of tooth she was seeing. She closed the lid and returned to the sofa, no longer certain of the cabinet’s wonder. The box, she now remembered, had belonged to their mother. Like Berenice and Grace, the jewelry box was something she’d left behind when she disappeared some forty years ago. Grace had just turned eighteen.

“Bicuspid,” Grace said, surprising herself by saying this out loud. She had not intended to say anything at all.

“What? No, those are permanent. This is just a cuspid. A canine. Isn’t it pretty? I’m glad I wasn’t stuck with some ugly old molar. At least I can thank her for that.”

“You mean the tooth fairy or Mother?”

“Ha! Take your pick. They both cut out on us, didn’t they?”

Grace looked at her sister and tried to gauge how she might be feeling. Berenice continued to gaze in the general direction of the cabinet, absently running her finger over one of her teeth that had never detached itself from her mouth, perhaps the very one that had risen to fill the gap.

Grace returned to her place on the sofa and took hold of Berenice’s other hand.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” Berenice asked.

Grace sighed. Her thoughts shakily replayed that morning forty years ago when her sister came to her bedside, confused at first because her tooth was still waiting on the nightstand, then alarmed when she could find no trace of their mother.

It all came back now—the uncontrollable sobs and wailing when Berenice found the note, neatly folded beneath this very jewelry box. Berenice had mistaken it, at first, for a suicide note—the message was so cryptic, filled with dark, rambling talk of angels and heaven and so forth. The only clear thing about any of it was that their mother was going away, by all indications she had already done so.

But once Grace was able to process what exactly was missing and what had been left behind, she relaxed somewhat. It didn’t seem likely that a person planning to take her own life would need a travel bag packed with multiple changes of clothes. This calmed Berenice to some extent, too. Only later would they learn of an airline ticket to Rome, sightings at a villa—never once had they heard from their mother again.

Grace’s thoughts returned to her sister’s question. Could their mother still be alive? She would have to be a very old woman by this point.

“I don’t know, Nicey. I just don’t know.” Grace kept hold of her hand, rubbing it. After so long, she wasn’t so sure she really wanted her to be–but she did not tell her sister this. “What do you think?”

“I believe she is alive,” Berenice said without hesitation. “She went to visit the angels, remember? I guess it suited her. Time has a different meaning there.”

Grace patted her hand again, trying to put her own thoughts in order. “Everyone is welcome here,” Grace said, finally. She was speaking as much to herself as to her sister. Beyond that, she wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it.

The two sisters sat in silence for the rest of the evening and into the night, not bothering to leave the sofa. When morning came, something crucial had been decided between them. With Berenice’s approval, Grace threw open the doors of their home, wide to the world, admitting the first pink rays of sunlight and the gaze of anyone who’d ever searched for something, lost or merely forgotten. Everyone was invited to share in their wonder. Anyone at all.