September 24. Thirty-one days until it’s been a year.
My sister drowned a mile from where I’m standing, and the man in the bowler hat wants to see my passport.
“Procedure, miss,” he says, as if I’ve argued.
I haven’t. I’ve been awake for twenty-six hours and rained on in two countries and one airport. I’m not going to argue with a hat.
He holds my passport under the lamp and goes through it page by page, like a twenty-two-year-old from Pennsylvania is something anyone would bother to fake. The porters’ lodge smells of wet wool and furniture polish. Somewhere a radiator knocks, three times, then once.
“Hollis,” he says finally.
“That’s me.”
He closes the passport but doesn’t hand it back. He looks at me one beat too long, and I watch him decide not to say something.
“You’ll be the American.”
“I’ll be the American.”
“Founders’ Scholar.” He reaches under the counter for a key on a brass tag. “Staircase K. Top floor.”
He sets the key down between us and keeps two fingers on it.
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“Same as—” he says, and stops.
The radiator knocks. Three, then one.
“Same as my sister,” I say.
“Yes.” The fingers lift. “We were all very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
I’ve said it three hundred and twelve times since last October. I keep count. To the police officer with the soft voice. To the woman from the university who flew to Pittsburgh to sit on our couch and never took her coat off. To the girls from Margot’s high school, who cried harder than I did and posted about it after. Thank you is a door you close politely, so nobody sees what’s in the room.
The brass plate on the counter says MR. GARLAND. He tips his bowler about a quarter of an inch. I didn’t know men still did that. Margot did. Her first year here, she called me most nights, late, from bed, to report some new insane English thing.
They have a man whose whole job is the door, Wren. He wears a hat. I love him.
I pick up the key and my passport. Something is stamped into the brass tag, worn soft by other people’s thumbs: a lamb lying down, with a halo over its head.
I was raised Catholic. In every story the nuns told us, the lamb doesn’t make it to the end.
I put the key in my pocket and go back out into the rain.