It is a Sunday in February, early, when the light comes in through the kitchen window at an angle that catches dust in the air and makes the apartment look momentarily like somewhere worth being.
He is on his second coffee. He does not have surgery until noon. This is the rare thing: an empty morning.
He does not know what to do with empty mornings. He never has. He ends up, always, in the same posture — at the kitchen table with the journal he is not reading, or at the window with a coffee he is not tasting, or just standing somewhere in the apartment like a piece of furniture waiting to be told where it belongs.
He goes to the shelf.
The photograph is face-down. It has been face-down for eleven years. He does not remember making the conscious decision to turn it — he just came home one night when he was twenty-three and it was facing up and the sight of it was like putting his hand on a hot surface, so he turned it, and it has been turned ever since.
He picks it up.
His mother is thirty-one in this photograph. She looks like someone who laughs often and easily, which is true. She has her arm around Maya, who is five, who is making a face at the camera that is simultaneously ridiculous and entirely Maya — the gap-toothed grin, the chin pushed out. His mother is looking at Maya instead of the camera. The photograph caught the moment she turned to look.
It is a good photograph. It is an unbearable photograph.
He does not know how long he looks at it. Long enough for the coffee to go cold.
Maya. He gave that name to the folder on his laptop — not the folder that holds the list, but the personal one, the one he keeps the case files in before he transfers them. He named it after her two years ago, when he started. He did not think about it. He just typed the name. And then he sat there for a moment looking at it, and he felt something he cannot describe, and he left the name where it was.
It is the only thing he has kept of her.
He puts the photograph back on the shelf, face-down.
He finishes the cold coffee at the window.
He does not cry. He has not cried since he was nine years old, standing over something in the kitchen of that house on Lehigh Avenue, before he understood what he was looking at.
He goes to get ready for surgery