She avoided the loft. The place seemed sentient, full of Russell’s presence, his pocket change, his pants, a used tissue beneath the bed (she realized now that too would’ve worked for DNA). She was afraid to touch anything, the toaster, the computer—even the tissue. Yvonne offered to come over and scour the place. The sooner you make it yours, she advised, the better. But how could Ana touch anything or remove his things—his shoes, his shirts, his papers—before she had a body, before it was official, before the piece of paper arrived that said he was no longer? Habeas corpus. “You should have the body.” Shouldn’t she have the body? How did one say that in Latin? Surely Russell would have known.

It was somehow easier to visit the loft in the evenings, around dusk or later, when the lights were out and the radiators hissed and she’d pick through the pile of condolences gingerly, afraid to handle too many at a time. They came from around the world: from friends, colleagues, people she’d never even heard of. Someone in Thailand. Public school friends from England (how they’d gotten his address, she didn’t know). The clock in the loft was off by an hour; no one had turned it back that fall. The plants lay dead in the kitchen window and on the roof. Ana put the mail aside and sat on the bed in the twilight, the blue counterpane, the one they’d brought back from England, still on the mattress. She’d close her eyes and wait for the sound of his footfalls, his key in the door, the click of the lock, thinking, It could happen; he could come home; she could have the body. Would he come? Did he know she was waiting? A girl shouted “chinga!” in the street. A grate slid shut for the night. When she opened her eyes, the headlights were backed up to Brooklyn on the Williamsburg Bridge. Planes lowered over rooftops across the river. One every few minutes blinking into LaGuardia, so many planes each hour, each day. What were the odds that one wouldn’t return from the sky?

At her lab, there was the unavoidable parade of colleagues. They stopped her in the hall, knocked meekly on her door, offered her what words they could (inadequate, fumbling) or slipped small notes in her box (kind, a bit cowardly). She had to endure all that. A second death—of words.