The apartment goes so quiet I can hear the friction of my own pulse against my eardrums.
Crack.
The sound isn’t as loud as I expected. It was small.
Then footsteps.
Movement.
The sounds of drawers opening, shelves being cleared, rooms being systematically taken apart.
I stand in the closet and I wait and I count seconds until the sound is thin.
Until footsteps cross the foyer.
Until the ruined front door scrapes against the frame.
Silence.
I count to a hundred. Then another hundred. Then I tell myself they are gone and I open the closet door and step into the hallway.
The living room is on my left. I already know. I already know and I turn toward it anyway because I have to, because he is my father, and I cross the wrecked room in ten steps and drop to my knees on the rug beside him.
“Papa.”
I press my fingers to his neck. I press so hard I feel the bone, desperate for a quiver, a spark, a lie.
“Papa, please. Please, come on, come on—” My hands are shaking too hard to feel anything and I press harder, shifting my fingers, trying again. “No. No, no, no, Papa, look at me, please look at me?—”
Nothing.
The light in the room is the same as it had been half an hour ago.
The sun is still hitting the dust motes in the air.
But his eyes are fixed on a point behind me, and they are empty.
There is no one left to hate.
There is only the quiet.
A sound comes out of me.
Something without words, something that has no shape, and I put my forehead down against his chest and sob so hard my whole body convulses with it, these horrible, gasping, ugly sobs that I couldn’t stop if I tried.
“Hey.”
My head snaps up.
Four men.
Still in the room.
The one near the window is already turning toward me—tall, dark-jacketed, hood still drawn up and casting shadow across the top half of his face. He’s completely still as he watches me.
The whole room is.
There’s that suspended, airless second where everyone is recalibrating.
