Much can be discerned about a person by the way they pack a suitcase.
Lira Devlin, on the other hand, did not have a suitcase. She was not the traveling type; after leaving home for college, she found work in the neo-hipster college city she had lived in for the past four years, and moving in was more a process of shifting boxes across town than packing suitcases into moving vans or airplanes. Her trip to Belfast and northward, therefore, was by necessity a backpacking excursion.
Not that this was an inconvenience: with the amount of public transportation required in Northern Ireland, she was grateful that all her worldly possessions could be slung over both shoulders and toted on and off buses without stopping traffic. Especially since buses, as she learned, were selectively punctual. They might arrive at the stop when they arrived, but come hell or high water, they were departing forty-five seconds after that. It was in her best interest to be able to run.
Had a stranger peered into Lira’s backpack (which she sincerely hoped was not happening), they would have seen the real-life equivalent of a “How To Pack A Backpack” diagram. Not knowing how long she would be away, she had packed a variety of clothing, folded with military precision. Two pairs of jeans, dark wash and slim-cut, two pairs of shorts (brown and gray, for contrast), handfuls of pairs of socks and undergarments, neatly folded.
In her shirts, she allowed herself a little more artistic freedom: a Bob Dylan concert tee she had picked up when he visited the Palace of Auburn Hills a few years before, still smelling slightly of musty smoke. A University of Michigan sweatshirt. A heavy dark blue knitted sweater that looked homemade but wasn’t. A rain jacket, small enough to be rolled into a ball and thrown into a pocket.
Packed between the layers of clothes, Lira had strewn a handful of other objects, hidden under fabric as if she were afraid anyone else would see them. Two paperback books, for the lengthy plane ride: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and a beat-up, much-read copy of The Devil Wears Prada. An iPod, which if turned on would reveal the last song played to be “Little Bribes” by Death Cab for Cutie. A set of keys, one to the house, one to the back door, one to the safe deposit box she kept under her bed, held together on a key ring shaped like a lucky cat. A man’s leather wallet.
Inside the wallet, Lira had stowed twenty American dollars and about forty British pounds, as well as a motely assortment of change in the back pocket from both nations. Her credit and debit card, driver’s license, and insurance card were neatly organized within. Behind the cards, a small photograph, folded in half, of five-year-old Lira, her mother, and her grandmother sitting by a bend in the Huron River, feeding the ducks and swans from a bag of stale bread. If pressed, she couldn’t remember who had taken the photograph, but she had had it for longer than she could remember. Behind the photograph was a scrap of paper with an address in Belfast scrawled across it, as well as a receipt from an airport Starbucks for a grande chai latte and a blueberry muffin.
At the very bottom of the bag, at great risk of being crushed by the neatly packed pile of objects, lay a coiled rosary, green beads linked together with gold fastenings, and a faux-gold crucifix dangling from the end. Lira had not been to church for the past fifteen years, and so the rosary had fallen to the area in the bottom of a bag where things packed but never used migrate to. Still, when she dumped the bag out on the bed when she arrived, there it would be, directly on top, placed in a position of honor atop the mountain of neatly-folded socks.
