Necklace
Somewhere in 2008, my lucky necklace disappeared. It was a small diamond circle with one square below it. It was an engagement present from my uncle to my aunt, but when they got married, he got her a nicer one and she gave this one to me. I rarely took it off and one day, it was just gone. David knew about me losing that necklace and being bummed so for Christmas, he gave me one that was a circle with 9 diamonds that each measured 9 across. He had it custom-made to honor my favorite number. Shortly after was the last time we saw each other, but due to habit, I still wore the necklace, making it about the 9 and mine rather him. My mom was always telling me to stop wearing it, and on the cruise to Alaska, my aunt saw it and liked it, so we made a deal that I would give it to her after the cruise. For my birthday the month before, my dad had given me a necklace (probably at my mom’s request) so I had put the 9 one in the safe in our room and wore the necklace my dad gave me instead, planning to give it to my aunt when we got off the boat.
It was the strangest thing. The necklace disappeared. While in the safe. Along with earrings my dad had gotten my mom. We didn’t realize because my mom had opened the safe and thought I had taken everything when she found it empty, but I hadn’t. We didn’t realize until after we were off the boat.
I was a little upset but a part of me felt like maybe outside forces wanted me to stop wearing it. It was my last tie to David. It needed to be severed. I understood. I felt worse about my mom’s earrings.
Then last month, when I was home in Fremont, my mom said she wanted to talk to me about something that should stay between us. While we were on the cruise, we shared a cabin with my mom’s friend. I didn’t know her, and she was high energy, a little eccentric. I had asked how they knew her, and my mom said the family knew her growing up and sometimes she spent time with my grandma. She said the reason she was on this trip with us was because she had been at my aunt’s house when my mom came over to finalize the trip plans and she had said she wanted to go, and it would have been awkward to say no. After spending time with her, I remember it was strange that she spent most of her time complaining about my grandmother, like they were lifelong childhood rivals. But she was my mom’s age.
“You remember how your necklace and my earrings were missing? I didn’t want to tell you this, but I always wondered if she had something to do with it,” my mom said.
She said that after we got off the boat, while we had been at the airport in Vancouver, her friend had asked to borrow Canadian money since all she had was US. My mom thought it was weird because all the shops take credit card. But she gave her a 20. Later, her friend came back but said she hadn’t bought anything, but had accidentally dropped the bill in a McDonald’s bag the kids were eating from and thrown it away. My mom always thought it was a strange story.
I should pause here and mention that my aunt, my mom’s sister, thought this woman was bona fide crazy. I don’t know what she thought of her before, but I remember once we got home, my aunt turned to me and said, “We have met a real crazy person!” “Who?” I asked and she said their friend.
So my mom recounted that strange exchange, and said that a month after the cruise, she got a letter in the mail from her friend. In it was a check for $100 and a letter. She wrote that as kids, she’d always been jealous of my mom for how smart she was and her successes (my mom was chosen as a school diplomat to travel to the Philippines). So one day, she stole money from her while she was at their house. She said that after the cruise, my mom had treated her so kindly and been such a good friend, and she had felt guilty for so long that she had to confess and return the money.
My mom said she had long wondered if her friend had something to do with the disappearance of what was in the safe, if she had flung these things into the ocean for whatever reason. But it was such a disaturbing thought, that she didn’t want to vocalize it, but the sudden emergence of this confession and this letter made this intuition buck to the forefront of her mind again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not going to ask her. I just chalk it up to a loss. But all I know is there’s something strange about that woman, something that doesn’t add up.”
In the meantime, the chain on the necklace my dad gave me broke one day, shortly after the cruise. As I was putting it away, I found a necklace of Chinese jade, in the shape of a gourd, on a red string. A traditional lucky necklace. It looked incredibly familiar, except I have no idea where it came from, who it came from. But it felt right, and I’ve been wearing that ever single day. Don’t know why or what it is or where it came from, only that its what I’m supposed to be doing for now.