The terminal thinned to cleaners and a long fluorescent quiet. A row of joined seats and the bag for a pillow; the boarding hour would not come.
Around three the arithmetic ran on its own. Had the grass stayed uncrossed, he would have made the ferry, and the flight; the night would already be spent on the far side, and by now he would be beside his mother at the corner in the first grey. There was the terminal instead, and the hour on the ticket; she would stand at the corner alone while he sat under the lights.
Once, under the lights, the park came back—the pages down white on the new leaves, and the hands that had held them. What the gate had settled he never learned; it was not his to learn. The grass had taken the ferry. Given the hour again, he would have crossed the same.
The gate came at last, a quarter to four. A seat over the wing.
The coast fell away below the wing.
Nothing came in the window but the cabin and, past it, the dark. The flat came instead.
His father, and the measuring. Once a year for a run of years his father stood him against the doorframe and laid a hand flat on the crown of his head to take the hair out of the count, and made a pencil mark where the hand had been, and wrote the year beside it small, and each mark came higher than the last, up toward his father’s hand—and that hand had been a year gone now, and the last mark stood level with his own shoulder, and by first light the frame and the marks on it would be down in the street.
A holiday morning once, up before it was light, the new clothes stiff over the chair since the night before. The first leaving after that, for the other city and the university, a bag heavier than this one—his mother at the door, and a hundred metres on he turned to check, and she was at the window, and he raised an arm, and she raised hers.
The first absence had a lie folded in it. Midterms done and the university shut a fortnight, he told home a week—exams still to sit, back straight after—and gave the free week to that city and to nothing he could name later. When he came, his mother and his father sat quiet at the table over a breakfast that would not lift. His grandfather had been a week in the ground. They had kept it from him: he had exams, they said, and no sense in his sitting them in mourning.
The not-being-there ran shorter and came faster. A call taken in a corridor, a date that could not be moved. The last of them needed no lie and left no one to spare him—a ward reached the day after, the bed already stripped.
All of it in the time the seatbelt light took to go dark.
Then the announcement, and the descent.
The runway came up grey, a little after six, first light already on the hangars.
A taxi took the shore road into a city awake ahead of itself. The corner, when it came, had a plane tree and a shuttered grocery and, where the block had stood, a barrier folded back and a heap going dark with damp.
It was over.
His mother stood alone before the rubble, hands behind her back, in the place she had kept to the end.
She did not turn at the step behind her. She was already looking at something on the ground.
He looked first at her, then to where she was looking.
A photograph, face up. A man on a step, a child at knee height beside him, and behind them the doorframe with its first pencil line.
The first of them.
The bag stayed on his shoulder.
There was dust on the new leaves.