Chapter 13: The Key in the Shoe Cabinet

The Key in the Shoe Cabinet

One summer, sixteen or seventeen years ago, when I was still in high school, I spent a weekend afternoon shopping with my sister and brother-in-law. By the time we headed back to their place, we were carrying half a bag of fresh peaches and a few containers of cold dishes, laughing and talking as we walked.

The moment we came through the door, my sister set her heavy key ring on top of the shoe cabinet.

I remember it plainly. She had only recently moved into that apartment, and the key ring was new. There were keys for more than a dozen doors on it, along with a small brass bell that gave a bright little jingle whenever it moved. She put it down without a second thought. We dropped the food in the kitchen, then collapsed onto the sofa in front of the electric fan while my brother-in-law went off to cook.

After dinner, once everything had been cleared away, we were getting ready to go out for a late movie when my sister suddenly cried, “Where are my keys?”

All three of us stopped.

We all remembered her putting them on the shoe cabinet when we came in.

We went straight to it and began searching. It was an old wooden cabinet, the kind with several pairs of slippers on top and three drawers underneath. We moved every slipper, pulled out each drawer one by one, and ran our hands over the bottom boards again and again. There was nothing there. Not so much as a glint of metal.

“Could they have fallen underneath?” my brother-in-law said.

He crouched down and lowered his face to the floor, peering into the shadow beneath the cabinet. I knelt beside him and reached under as far as my arm would go. My fingers found only a clump of dust and a few strands of hair.

For the next two hours, we turned the apartment inside out.

We searched the cracks between the sofa cushions, the gaps behind the television cabinet, under the pillows in the bedroom, around the stove in the kitchen, beside the bathroom sink, even in the flowerpots on the balcony. Anywhere a key ring might conceivably have slipped, we looked. Sweat dampened our T-shirts. The peaches began to soften in their bag. Still, the keys were gone, as if they had vanished cleanly into the air.

“This is impossible,” my sister said at last, sitting on the floor with her fingers tangled in her hair. “I know I put them on the shoe cabinet. What, did they grow wings and fly away?”

My brother-in-law frowned. “There are more than a dozen keys on that ring. If they’re really lost, we’re in serious trouble.”

I stood there staring at the empty shoe cabinet. Then, for no reason I could explain, a thought came to me.

Try the drawers again.

It was not quite an idea. More like a nudge. Quiet, but strangely firm.

Almost without thinking, I walked over and pulled open the lowest drawer once more. The instant it slid all the way out, something dropped with a sharp, clean clatter.

The key ring, brass bell and all, fell from the narrow space between the drawer and the body of the cabinet. It struck the tile floor with a bright metallic ring.

The three of us stood frozen.

We had already searched that cabinet. We had taken out every drawer. We had felt along every corner and even checked the backs of the drawers. How could the keys have fallen out of a place where, only moments earlier, there had been nothing? And the key ring was far too bulky to have hidden unnoticed in such a narrow seam.

My brother-in-law picked it up and shook it. The little brass bell jingled in his hand.

“There was nothing in that gap before,” he said. “Nothing.”

I crouched down and touched the space where the keys had fallen from. It was so narrow I could barely fit a finger inside. There was no possible way it could have held that heavy bunch of keys.

We went to the movie in the end, but I hardly watched it. Through the whole film, my mind kept circling back to that key ring.

The memory has stayed with me all these years, lodged there like a small, stubborn riddle. Even now, whenever someone in the family brings it up, we still look at one another in the same bewildered way. We had searched everywhere. We had nearly given up. And then, somehow, the keys had simply fallen out by themselves.

Sometimes I wonder whether some mischievous little ghost hid them that afternoon, laughing at us as we rushed around in a panic, and only put them back when the game had gone on long enough.

Or perhaps some kindly wandering spirit saw the trouble we would be in without them and quietly returned them to the drawer.

Some things never give you an answer.

Like that ring of keys, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a summer long ago, leaving us with a mystery we still have never been able to explain.