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Marcus It always starts with the heater. It ticks before it warms, a small metal coughs from somewhere under the dashboard, and then the air in the car turns the color of toast. I know it’s winter without looking. The windows are fogged at the edges, and the snow outside is the blue kind that only happens after dark, when the whole county is the same quiet shade and the fields have stopped pretending to be fields. My mother is humming. She hums when she’s happy, and she hums when she’s thinking, and in fifteen years I never learned to tell the two apart. Tonight it’s a song from the radio, one of those old ones with the static folded into it like a second instrument. I’ve spent a decade trying to name it. I’ve never gotten past the second line, because in the dream she never gets past it either. She loses the words, laughs at herself, and begins again from the top, as if the song were a stair she kept missing in the dark. “You’re doing it again,” she says. “Doing what?” “Counting.” She doesn’t look at me. She’s smiling at the road, or at something a little beyond the road. “I can hear you counting the mile markers, Marcus. Your lips move.” They do. Forty-one. Forty-two. It’s a habit. Numbers hold still when nothing else does, and a green sign with a white number on it is the most honest thing a county road has to offer. “They’re there anyway,” I say. “Someone put them there. It seems rude not to notice.” She laughs, the short one, through her nose. It’s the laugh she uses when she’s trying not to encourage me. “Your father says you were born with a calculator in your hand.” “Dad says I was born with a complaint in my hand.” “That too.” The road is two lanes, black with a thin glaze of white along the shoulders, and the snow comes toward us out of the dark in long slow threads, each flake lit for a second in the headlights and then gone. There are no other cars. There haven’t been any since the gas station, where she bought a bag of the cheap peppermints she pretends she doesn’t like and put it in the cup holder between us. The bag is still there. I can hear it crinkle every time the car takes a gentle curve. I look down at the wheel, because I always do. This is the part of the dream I’ve never been able to leave alone. There’s a moment, just one, where I check whose hands are on it. They’re at ten and two, the way the driving manual says to hold them, the way the instructor said to hold them, the way nobody actually does. I remember thinking that Dad never held a wheel like that, not once in his life, he drove with one wrist hooked over the top like a man leaning on a fence. And I remember noticing that I’d noticed, and thinking it was a strange thing to think. Then the thought slides off like water off glass, and the hands are just hands, and they’re cold, and they’re gripping something. My fingers ache. I don’t know why they’re so cold when the heater is working so hard. “Hey,” my mother says. “Look at me a second.” That’s the part I would give anything to keep. She’s turned in her seat. The dashboard glow lies along the side of her face, soft and green, and her eyes are the same brown as the coffee she never finished in the mornings, the cup always found hours later on the windowsill with a skin on it. Her scarf has slipped. She’s about to say something. Her mouth has already begun to shape it, a small, ordinary word, the front edge of a sentence she thought she had all the time in the world to finish. I want to hear it. Every night I lean toward it like someone leaning toward a door left open an inch, with light and low voices on the other side. The radio crackles. The song stutters, and for a moment the static is louder than the music. Then the headlights come, and they aren’t ours. They don’t arrive the way they do in films, with a long slow sweep across the glass. They’re simply there, two white coins pressed against the windshield. The snow turns gold. The whole car fills with a light that has no source and no temperature. My mother’s mouth is still open around the word, and the word is still unsaid, and the world holds its breath the way a room does just before someone drops a plate. I never hear what comes after. The dream ends one breath early, always one, as if some careful hand were guarding me from the last page. I wake with the shape of her voice in my chest and nothing in my hands. 5:40 a.m. The alarm hasn’t gone off. It never does, because I’m awake two minutes before it. Somewhere in my twenties I stopped needing the thing and started keeping it out of loyalty, the way you keep a watch that no longer runs. I lie still and count the ceiling tiles. Six across, seven down. Forty-two. I once counted them eleven nights in a row to see whether the number would change, and it didn’t. I find that comforting. I find it a little embarrassing that I find it comforting. The apartment is on the fourteenth floor. I chose it because it was high enough to be quiet and low enough that I could still see the street, still see people going about their small errands as though the day were something that could be walked through. Outside, Lake Michigan is a gray rumor behind the buildings, more a change in the quality of the dark than a thing you’d call water. Somewhere below, a garbage truck grinds its gears. Chicago is clearing its throat. My hands are cold. I flex them against the sheet, all ten fingers, and wait for them to remember they belong to someone who has a nine o’clock. They’re slow about it. They always are, after that dream, as though they’ve been out in the weather and need a while to be let back in. On the nightstand my phone lights up with a reminder I set a year ago and never deleted. It says only Oct. 29. It doesn’t say why. I never wrote the why. A calendar, I’ve found, will keep a date for you, and it asks nothing about what the date is for. I do the math without meaning to. It’s tomorrow, then. Ten years tomorrow. The alarm goes off at last, a bright, cheerful chime with no idea what it’s interrupting. I silence it and sit up. The floor is cold enough to make me suck air through my teeth. I stand, and I go through the morning the way I go through a column of figures, one line at a time, so that nothing can be carried forward that I haven’t looked at. Coffee first. The machine is a good one, stainless steel and slow, a gift from Claire three Christmases ago with a note that said you need one thing in that place that isn’t gray. It is gray. I never had the heart to tell her. I fill the filter, press the button, and watch the first dark drops fall into the pot while the kitchen fills with a smell that, on a better day, I’d call a comfort. My phone buzzes against the counter. u alive? It’s Devon, and he’s added a skull emoji, because that’s how he says good morning. Devon Park is twenty-six, sits two desks from me, and has never in his life sent a text with a capital letter. I’ve known him for three years. In that time he has taught me the names of every food truck within six blocks of the office, how to pretend I’m listening during the Thursday risk calls, and that a person can be loud and kind at once, which I hadn’t known. Alive, I type. Coffee in progress. lmao ok. dont forget ur leave starts friday. HR emailed me bc u didnt reply I replied. u replied w one word. HR doesnt know what to do w one word I look at the screen for a moment. The thing is, I hadn’t wanted the leave. A week, the email said, a mandatory use-it-or-lose-it week, which every analyst on our floor treats as a small gift from heaven and I treat as a clerical error. What I would do with a week is a question I hadn’t answered. The office is a place where the numbers agree with each other. My apartment is a place where I count tiles. Go somewhere, Devon sends, before I can type anything. anywhere. a lake. a cabin. a stranger’s couch. just not ur kitchen I like my kitchen. ur kitchen is a hostage situation I laugh, once, out loud, and the sound startles me in the empty room. I hadn’t heard it in a while. By the door, half hidden under a rain jacket, are the boots. I bought them in September, on a Saturday, for no reason I could have defended to a loan committee. A woman at the outfitter’s measured my foot and told me the thing I should know about breaking in leather is that you have to walk in them before you need them. I told her I wasn’t planning on needing them. She smiled at me with the particular kindness of someone who has heard that before, and I paid, and I brought them home, and they’ve sat there since, patient as a dog. Next to them is a map I haven’t opened. I’d picked it up from the same shop, folded in thirds, with a green-and-brown rectangle on the cover and the name of a state forest I’d barely heard of. At the time I told myself it was just in case. I pour the coffee. I drink the first mouthful too hot and let it burn, because burning is at least a sensation with a clear origin. Then I take the mug to the window. Fourteen floors down, the street is waking. A man in a long coat stands at the bus stop, holding a briefcase against his chest like a small child. A woman in running tights jogs in place at the light, her breath going up in white commas. A delivery van backs slowly into the loading zone, beeping, the sound travelling all the way up to me thin and polite. It’s the last week of October, and the sky has that low, even gray that Chicago does so well, as if someone had hung a sheet over the city to keep the dust off. I stand there until the coffee is half gone. There’s a call I’ll make on the third Sunday of the month, the way I always do, and it’ll last eleven minutes, because that’s roughly how long my father and I can speak before we reach the end of what can be said. He’ll ask whether I’m eating. I’ll ask whether the roof is still holding. He’ll say it is. We’ll both say we should get together, and neither of us will say when. Then there’ll be a pause on the line where something could go, and nothing will, and one of us will say well, and the other will say well, and that will be that. Claire will send a text sometime today. She always does, the day before. It won’t mention the date. She’ll ask if I want her to come in for the weekend, and I’ll say I’m fine, and she’ll say ok with a period, which from my sister is the sound of a door being quietly shut and quietly left unlocked. I’ve never told either of them about the dream. I don’t know how I’d begin. Hey, Dad. I keep having this dream where the heater ticks and Mom turns to say something and I never hear it. He would nod, and say nothing, and look at some point over my left shoulder, and the silence would be so large that neither of us would be able to find the other in it. So I keep the dream the way I keep the date. I keep it in a drawer, and I don’t ask what it’s for. I rinse the mug. I put it on the rack. I choose the gray tie, and then, because it’s the day before, I put it back and choose the dark blue, as though a small mercy of color could be set against the rest. I knot it three times before it sits straight. My hands are warm now. I check them, the way you check a pocket for keys. At the door I stop. The boots are still there. The map is still there. The light from the hallway lies across them in a long pale strip, and for one stupid moment I have the feeling that they’ve been waiting longer than I’ve owned them, that someone put them there before I ever walked into the shop, and that all I’ve done is finally notice. I pick up my bag and leave them where they are. In the elevator, the mirrored wall gives me back a young man in a blue tie, clean-shaven, a little too thin, with the kind of face that people tend to describe as reliable. It’s a good description. It’s the one I’ve worked on. I look at him until the doors open on the lobby, and then I look at the floor, and then I walk out into the cold, counting steps. Forty to the corner. Forty-one. Somewhere behind the traffic, from a shop window or a passing car or nowhere at all, a radio is playing something old, with the static folded into it. I don’t catch the song. I only catch the second line, the place where the singer loses the words and begins again. I find that I’m humming it. I stop, because I can hear how it sounds, and because there’s no one beside me to say that I’m doing it again.