11:02.
You play the voicemail.
"Vera…"
A woman's voice. Older than your mother's. Breathless at the end of each clause — not old-person breathless, hunted breathless.
"…eto Nina. Zvonyu iz Vladivostoka."
Nina. Vladivostok.
"Ya znala tvoyu babushku. Oksanu."
I knew your grandmother. Oksana.
"U menya est' chto-to. Priezzhai. Poka est' vremya."
I have something. Come. While there is still time.
"Poka est' vremya."
While there is still time.
The message ends at thirty-two seconds.
You play it again.
You write Nina. Vladivostok in pencil inside the textbook you were going to open this morning and did not open.
You close the textbook.
11:09.
Your phone.
Mom — Leaving Albany. 2 hrs, maybe 3.
You stare.
Mom — I love you. Do not leave the city.
Your mother has not said I love you in a text message since you moved down.
Alina — Your mom called me last night. I gave her your address. Please be there when she gets there.
Last night. Before Perry. Before the lamp. Before the cut.
Your mother was on her way before the fall and the blood.
Or your mother started moving the second you did.
Alina — I called her because you have not been eating for three weeks and yesterday you left your jacket at the restaurant and came home without it and I watched you do that.
You had forgotten the jacket. You remember the jacket now. It was hanging in the hall at the TA's apartment when the door broke.
It is still there.
Your jacket is in an apartment on Perry Street. Your jacket has your name stitched inside the collar, because your mother has been stitching your name inside your collars since you were six.
Alina knew for three weeks you were not eating. You did not know Alina knew. You thought you had been careful.
11:14.
You are not going to wait for your mother.
You are going to Silver Center.
You have a window.
11:47.
Washington Square, noon — students, the jazz trio on the east side, the man selling small ugly paintings of the arch, a squirrel being fed. You cross without looking up.
The building went up in the 1960s on the footprint of a building from the 1870s. History has been inside it through both.
Silver Center, third floor. History. The hall smells of nothing — the specific nothing of academic buildings, whose smell is absence maintained by air handlers.
The door is open.
Professor Marcus is at his desk. Half a bagel on a paper plate, from the cart on Waverly, where the man who runs it has run it since before Marcus was tenured. Coffee. The window behind him open three inches, the May air moving the papers on his desk but not enough to lift them, which is the wrong amount of breeze for work.
"Vera."
"Hi, Professor."
He does not look surprised to see you.
"Sit."
You sit.
He moves the bagel half-inch to the left.
He touches the edge of his glasses with his thumb — the way a man touches a scar. Nothing is wrong with the glasses.
"How is the chapter coming."
"Slowly."
"The famine material is hard."
"It is."
He nods. He looks at his computer screen. He looks back at you.
"The archivist mentioned you."
"At Tamiment?"
"He said you requested folder forty-seven."
You did not request folder forty-seven. You requested twelve. You requested thirteen. Folder forty-seven was open on a table when you got there. The archivist said it had been returned. You took it anyway.
"I — yes."
"You know what's in folder forty-seven, don't you."
He is not looking at you when he says it. He is looking at his coffee cup.
Silence.
"I've read through it."
"Good."
He turns the coffee cup in his hand. Once. Again. His thumb on the rim.
The office smells of old paper and the coffee. The May wind moves the papers a little. Somewhere on the floor below, a door closes.
Marcus touches the edge of his glasses with his thumb again. The building's been louder this semester. He does not say in what way louder. Everyone is tired of being tired. He says it to the papers on his desk.
"Be careful with the Shevchenko material," he says.
You had not told him your grandmother's maiden name.
You had not told him your grandmother was Ukrainian.
His office has three photographs on the wall behind his desk, all of them of him with other historians at conferences, and none of those historians is the person you are thinking about.
"Professor."
"Hm."
"How did you know that name."
He looks at you for the first time since you sat down.
He has very tired eyes. They are not unkind.
"I did not know it," he says, "until yesterday."
You are walking down the hall.
The hall is long. The hall smells of the same nothing.
Keep your face still.
A door opens behind you. You do not turn. It is a student or a janitor or a man who is neither.
You take the stairs, because elevators record who is on them and when.
You exit on the Mercer side. Not Washington Place. Not Waverly. Mercer, because Mercer has the block-through doorways and the cameras on Greene are new.
You do not look behind you.
You know enough.
12:38.
Across from the Silver Center, leaning on the brick of the building across the street, not reading anything, not doing anything, wearing something that does not belong to this weather, is a man.
He is not looking at you.
He is looking at the middle distance.
He looks already finished.
You pass him.
You do not stop.
You do not accelerate.
You walk the way you have been walking these blocks for three years.
When you reach the corner of Mercer and Houston you look back once, like anyone checking for traffic, and the brick where he was standing is empty. It has been empty for long enough that a pigeon is there.
12:52.
East Seventh. Alina is out. Rosa is out. The apartment is yours for an hour, maybe two.
You go to the drawer.
You do not open it.
You put your hand on the drawer.
You leave your hand there.
The wood is warm from the radiator under the window. Your palm warms the wood further.
You have stood at this drawer in this position many times over the past eleven months. You know the exact pressure it takes for the drawer to begin to open. You have never applied it.
For one second your fingers remember a cold they are not touching.
Today you do not apply it.
13:04.
Your phone.
Mom — 90 minutes. Traffic on the Taconic.
You look at the message.
You look at the drawer.
You do not know what you are going to tell her.
You do not know what she is going to ask.
You know she is going to ask.
You take your hand off the drawer.
13:06.
You sit on the bed.
The phone rings.
Not Mom.
Not Alina.
Not Carmen.
A number you do not know. 917. New.
You answer.
Static. Three seconds. Then a voice — a man's, middle-aged, unaccented American.
"You need to return what you have."
You say nothing.
"You need to return it today."
You say nothing.
"We know about Nina."
The line goes.
Your thumb slips once on the edge of the phone.
I sit with the phone in my hand.
I do not move.
I know what I have.
I know where they think I will go.
I know what they do not know.
13:08.
You get up.
You go to the closet.
You take down the small canvas bag you have never used, the one your mother sent you when you moved down, the one she packed with a granola bar and a note that said for emergencies.
The granola bar is still inside. The note is still inside.
The date on the granola bar is a year after you moved down. She replaced it once.
You put the envelope in the bag.
You put the key in the bag.
You do not put the small cold thing in the bag.
You leave the small cold thing in the drawer.
Charlotte's drawings go back on top. You are sorry. You close the drawer.
13:10.
You are not going to be here when your mother arrives.
You are going.
⁂