"I'm going to open it," Petra said, after a while.
"The suitcase?"
"She packs it every time. I always unpack it when we get home, after she's asleep, and put everything back, and she never remembers. But I've never—" She hesitated. "I've never looked at it here. Before it's unpacked. I don't know why that feels different."
She knelt on the floor beside the bench and unsnapped the two brass latches, gently, so the sound would not wake Iris. The lid came up. James leaned over as far as he could without disturbing the head on his shoulder.
On top was a man's sweater, gray, hand-knit, folded in thirds. Under it was an old leather shaving kit with the initials J.A.V. stamped on the flap in worn gold. Under that, the papery slithering thing: a bundle of letters, thirty or forty envelopes, thin blue airmail paper gone soft as cloth, held together with a red rubber band, the top one postmarked in a language James couldn't read and addressed in a square, careful, schoolboy hand to Miss Iris Novak, care of the Fred Harvey Lunch Counter, Chicago Union Station, Chicago 6, Illinois, U.S.A.
And under the letters, filling the whole bottom of the suitcase, folded in old yellowed tissue paper, was a coat.
Petra lifted the tissue back. The coat was red wool, a deep, warm, faded red like the inside of a pomegranate, with a narrow fitted waist and a wide collar and a row of shiny black buttons, the kind of coat a twenty-two-year-old waitress would have saved up for months to buy at Marshall Field's on State Street because a soldier in Berlin had asked her to wear red. The wool was worn thin at the cuffs. One of the black buttons had been sewn back on with thread that didn't quite match.
"She packed it," Petra said. Her voice was very odd. "Every time. Every single time. She's been carrying it. She thinks she's wearing it and she's been carrying it in the suitcase this whole time."
She sat back on her heels on the terrazzo, holding the red coat across her knees, and for the first time all afternoon, she cried. She did it almost silently, with her mouth closed and her eyes squeezed shut and her shoulders shaking, the way people cry when they have gotten very good at doing it in rooms where someone is sleeping. Ruby put her pencil down and scooted over on the floor and leaned against Petra's arm, not saying anything, just leaning, the way she used to lean against James when she was small and he was the one sitting on the edge of a bed in the dark. James sat very still with Iris's head on his shoulder and let them both be, and looked up at the owl.
When Petra was done, she wiped her face on her red sleeve, and blew her nose on a tissue Ruby produced from somewhere, and then she stood up and shook out the old red coat and laid it over Iris, carefully, like a blanket, over her knees and up to her chin. The black buttons caught the light. Iris murmured something in her sleep and burrowed into it.
"There," Petra said. "Now she's wearing it."