Three feet wide, two high, two deep; once white, now yellowing with age, the stacks of cardboard boxes age slowly in the closet's quiet depths. Musty air swirls with the openings and shuttings of the door, wafting dust through the handles punched in their sides.

And so, neglected, unchanging, for years.

Now they are rising, sliding into the light; their sides shudder and shift. Lisa's hands, no longer young, arrange them gently in a row. With perfect tenderness, she begins to remove their covers, one by one.

The first box holds a mass of china dolls, wrapped in crackling tissue paper. Their pristine faces are a blank mask of fragility. The second: paints, coloring books, and costume jewelry. All untouched. The third: broken cassette tapes, plastic toys, and a pair of ballet slippers, barely worn. Childhood's faded debris.

The next three boxes hold textbooks, unconsulted for years, and folders full of neatly typed papers and essays - once a sign of promise, now a sign of promise lost, hopes unfulfilled.

The eighth box is the last - emptier than the others, it sags the heaviest from their load. Its lid is taped shut, and marked in crayon, with a large red X. She hesitates slightly before she begin to rip the tape aside, strand by strand.

She finds what she knows to be there, and nothing more:

• Her father's book. It is torn and scratched, and each of its pages marked and scribbled over.
• The book's dust jacket. It is ripped in crumpled into a fist-sized ball.
• A stack of letters. One is typed on a rich, cream-colored paper, and the others are scrawled on looseleaf.

And now that she has found her memories, The pages of the book fall open.