Emily
She had always had an affinity for putting things in boxes. There had been an old shoe box when she was very little where she stuffed in everything that was most important to her each night before she went to bed. That way, if it was one of the bad nights, she would only need to remember the box and everything would be okay. If the yelling got out of hand and her mom pulled her out of bed to leave again, then she could grab her box as they went. She had learned to depend on her box after one too many times of finding herself on her aunt's doorstep in the middle of the night in her pajamas with nothing else that was hers to hold onto until they inevitably went back.
In her head, boxes represented security. You could tuck things away in boxes and know that they would be right there waiting for you whenever you needed to go looking for them. Beyond that, boxes were practical. It did not matter what type of mess and disorder reigned in the interior of a box. As long as you could still close the lid, no one else would ever know. There could be complete chaos. There could be tangles and unsorted piles. There could be mix ups and things that should not have been kept. There could be things that you wanted carefully hidden. All anyone else would see was the smooth, carefully polished facade of an equally carefully stacked set of boxes. Boxes covered a multitude of failings. They let you determine what others could or could not see. They let you decide what (and with whom) you would or would not share. Emily functioned best when she could sort her life into boxes. She liked them, wanted them, and needed them even.
Problems arose when the people around her tried to climb out of the boxes into which they had been sorted. Papers and pictures stayed put. People, sometimes, did not. She did not like that. It messed with her system. Messing with her system ruffled her. She did not like to be ruffled. It was like shoving the metaphorical lid off the box that was Emily and offering a crack through which people could peek at the contents within all of their unpolished glory instead of at the careful neatness of the outside container. That was not acceptable. It had to be fixed as quickly as possible, so she fought to keep the people around her in the boxes where they belonged. She pushed at them to make them go back. Failing that, she kept pushing them right out of her life. It was better that way. There was no place in her life for pieces that had nowhere to fit. She had no place in her for pieces that would not stay in the spot that she wanted them to be. It was work (and sometimes it was hard), but she had no foundation for any other way to try to be.
When Roger had made his appearance in her life, he had been the perfect fit to a box that she had assembled in her head as she packed away all of her remembrances of her brother. She wanted things that made it clear that the woman who had lived the life that ended up the way that it did was behind her. Roger was everything she wanted her life to become.
He was a clean slate. There were not years of expectations unfulfilled and recollections of missteps standing between them. They took trips and they laughed together and they lived in the moment and only looked forward instead of always being tied to ghosts of the past. Roger was the happily ever after box. He was the house in the Pines that she had stared at as a little girl. He was the normal man with the normal job who would be able to help her build a normal family - the kind where you could ask about someone's day or job or where they had been the night before and not get yelled at for prying or find yourself avoiding eye contact because you knew that you were being lied to when they answered you.
Roger was attentive. He made plans, and she was at the center of them. He thought about the future as something beyond the next Saturday night or some sort of a vague someday. He committed to things and followed through with them. Roger was dependable. He was solid. He was a box where everything on the inside looked just as finished and orderly as it did on the outside.
Then, everything went wrong. Bombs detonated around the country and shattered everything.
Her boxes crumbled all around her and none of the pieces had places to go. She was left reeling. She was left lost. She needed her boxes.
She had lost Roger, she had lost her life plan, and the only box that was pushing itself forward to be used was the one that held Jake. She did not want the box that held Jake. She had put the box that held Jake away - shoved it somewhere behind the contents of the life that she wanted and hidden out of sight and out of mind. The box that held Jake was labeled with warnings and accusations and covered with caution tape that read unreliable and destruction causing. She wanted the Jake box to go away, but it felt like every time that she turned around there it was shoving itself to the front again. And with the Jake box came the Jonah box and with both of them came a crack in the tape that she had used to seal shut the box that was Chris.
She was in mourning again, and mourning was something which she had never dealt with well. This new round of mourning was no exception. She was angry; she was confused. She lashed out; she closed herself off. She tried drinking; she tried solitude. She tried working; she tried volunteering. Nothing worked. Her boxes were still all popping open and spilling out their contents leaving everything in chaos and confusion.
She was losing who she had worked so hard to make herself to be.
She tried shoving things back in their places, but that was not working either. Roger was gone, and all the things that belonged in the Roger box taunted her with that fact. And then there was Jake. She did not know how to deal with a Jake who was doing things and being someone who did not match the labels that she had wrapped around his box. Jake was not the hero. Jake was not the fixer. Jake was not the person with a plan; he was not dependable. He could not be relied on; he could not be trusted. But the pieces would not fit any longer. She could not force him back into his box.
She could not make anything go back in their boxes. She got a little reckless; she could see that from the perspective of later, but she still did not think that stealing what Jonah had already stolen had been a poor idea. It was a little reckless; it was a little of the Emily who used to be who was supposed to be packed carefully away, but it was not a bad idea. It had worked, hadn't it? She had been in desperate need of something working the way that she knew that it should.
With everything inside her head lost in disorder and forced reconfiguring, it would have been nice to have someone outside of her head that she could talk through the chaos with to try to regain her bearings. That was something also denied to her by the new reality into which she was being pushed. There was no Roger. There was only the missing space where Roger had been. She could not cry on his shoulder. She could not talk to him. Mary was preoccupied, and Heather just did not understand. Mary had her own problems and concerns taking up her attention. Heather was a doer and a fixer, but no one but Emily could fix the mess inside her head. She just could not seem to make any progress, and when she thought that she had wrenched something back into the place where it belonged, some other box would shift out of place and come crashing down on her head.
And the box labeled Jake just would not go away. It would not stay where it belonged. It would not close. It would not hold the things she wanted to place inside it, and things she did not want kept pushing themselves under her notice. She could not get away from him. He was everywhere it seemed, and so were the memories that she did not want to remember.
She needed something to change, and the longer the disorder of the outside world went on, the more it felt as if what would have to change was her boxes and how they were organized. The reorganization would have to begin with Jake.
