07:48.
You wake with the cut open.
The washcloth on the floor. Blood dried to the cotton. The bruise on your inner thigh still darkening.
Outside, the bodega hum.
You do not get up.
07:51.
The key is on the nightstand. You put it there. You do not remember putting it there.
In the morning light the metal catches what it did not catch at four a.m. A number. Stamped on the side. Worn flat but readable.
47.
07:52.
Forty-seven.
You know what forty-seven is.
Forty-seven is a locker.
07:54.
You get up.
The bruise moves with you.
07:58.
The drawer. You open it.
Charlotte's drawings.
You slide your hand underneath.
The small thing is still cold.
You close the drawer.
08:17.
Coffee. Black. The window open three inches. You quit cigarettes yesterday. You smoke one.
The phone on the table. Four unknown numbers now. Three from last night. One new, 06:03 this morning.
You do not play it.
You put the key on the table in front of you. You stare at it. The stamped 47 is the first new thing you own today.
Alina comes out of her room. She looks at you. She looks at your hands — the cut on your palm, dried dark at the knuckles — and she looks back at you.
"Are you okay."
"Yes."
"You're not."
"Yes I am."
She opens her mouth. She closes it. She goes to put on her shoes.
"If you are not back by tonight I am calling someone."
"Who."
"I don't know yet. Someone."
She leaves.
08:41.
You leave by the fire escape.
The man in the coat is not on Avenue A but he is on Avenue B, two blocks north, reading a newspaper from a vending machine that sells only one paper and has sold only one paper for six years.
You do not cross Avenue B.
You go south.
09:03.
A train, because a cab leaves a record.
You transfer twice. You get off at 42nd.
09:22.
Port Authority.
The lockers are in the basement, on the west side, past the long row of vending machines.
A man with a mop cart is at the far end of the row. He does not look at you. He has seen every kind of person use these lockers and he has been trained in seeing without looking.
You walk the row.
Forty-three. Forty-four. Forty-five. Forty-six.
Forty-seven.
A standard steel rental locker. Matte. Old. The keyhole scratched from a hundred keys that were not this one.
You put the key in.
The key turns.
What you put in it is what you cannot carry and cannot throw away and cannot take home. A man in a different city is breathing because a thing he left in a locker is still there. He has not checked in three years. He may check tomorrow. The brass handle is cold. The coin has a worn rim. The number is forty-seven.
You are not the one who deposited this.
You are not the one meant to come back for it.
You are going to open it anyway.
09:24.
The door swings.
The air that comes out is older than the building. Dust, and the faint sweetness of paper kept too long in heat.
Inside: one thing.
An envelope.
White. Business size. No stamp. No address on the front.
You take it out.
The key is still in the lock.
09:25.
You turn the envelope over.
Your name is on the back.
In your grandmother's handwriting.
Not similar. Not close. Her hand. The way she made the V — left-leaning, cross-stroked. The way she crossed her r's. Her hand, the hand that wrote your name on birthday cards from 2004 to 2019.
The envelope is recent. New paper. The hand that wrote on it is dead.
Keep your face still.
09:26.
Inside: one photograph.
A print. Small. Matte. The kind no one prints anymore.
A girl of about nine. On a staircase made of dark wood. Behind her, a window. Outside the window: a language you recognize and do not speak — Ukrainian, or close enough that you cannot tell.
The girl is you.
You are nine.
You are wearing a dress you do not remember ever owning. Velvet. The left sleeve too long — pulled down past the wrist, bunched at the cuff.
You are not smiling.
Behind you on the staircase — out of focus, legs only — another person. Adult. Wearing pants you would recognize if they were in focus. You are sure of this without knowing why.
09:27.
You turn the photograph over.
One line, in your grandmother's hand.
Ne zabud'.
Do not forget.
09:27.
You read it again.
09:27.
You read it a third time.
I am holding a photograph of myself I have never seen before.
My grandmother has been dead for seven years and the paper is new.
09:29.
You close the envelope.
You close the locker.
The key comes out in your hand. You take it with you.
The envelope goes inside your jacket, against your ribs, on the side of the tattoo.
You go back up into the terminal. The mid-morning crowds. The departure boards. Buses leaving for cities you have never been and cities you grew up thirty miles from.
The man in the coat is somewhere you are going.
10:14.
East Seventh. Different route home. Through the Bowery, cutting east at Second Street, doubling back by St. Mark's.
You take the photograph out twice on the way.
Both times the girl in it is still you.
10:47.
The apartment.
Alina is not back.
You go to the drawer.
Charlotte's drawings on top. The horse. The six legs.
You lift the drawings.
The small thing is still there. Cold. You have finally stopped flinching at it.
You put the envelope beside it.
Two things now.
You close the drawer.
10:49.
Your phone rings.
Not Carmen.
Not an unknown number.
Your mother.
You look at the screen for a long time.
You do not answer.
It stops.
It rings again.
You answer.
Your mother has stepped out of the library into the staff restroom to make this call. You can hear the tile. You can hear her heels.
"Vera."
"Hi Mom."
A silence. Then:
"Something happened last night. I felt it. What happened."
"Nothing happened."
"Vera."
"Nothing happened, Mom."
Your mother, who you have not told a true thing in eleven months, who has been a school librarian for thirty-nine years, who still crosses herself when she passes a church and pretends she does not, makes a sound on the other end of the line that is not a word.
You wait.
She says: "Ty ne odna."
The line goes.
It is the sentence her mother said to her when her mother was seven. It is a sentence that does not travel except mother to daughter. You have not heard it in seventeen years.
10:51.
I sit on the bed.
I do not open the drawer.
I know what is in it.
I know what has been in it for eleven months.
I know what is in it now.
I count them again tomorrow.
⁂