She stood and unzippered her knapsack. She’d brought hardly any clothing—just a long print dress. She was still wearing the same sweater, the same Levi’s, the same bra she’d worn since leaving New York City. Somehow to change her clothes, to shower (even to eat) seemed a kind of betrayal, an acceptance; and if she could only ignore the exigencies of her own body, she might outwit the deadly hours that kept slipping past. She removed a toilet bag from the pack and emptied it on the chenille. A toothbrush, a comb, the Valium Yvonne had given her, the sleeping pills (Halcion) she’d taken from the loft. Aspirin. A tube of deodorant. She removed Russell’s wrinkled T-shirt from her pack. She’d taken it from the laundry bag, unwashed, and had carried the blue pocket T with her on the plane as a pillow and slept with it wrapped around her head at night. Russell once told her that Elizabethan women kept apples tucked in their armpits and gave them afterward to their lovers. The T-shirt was something like that. Her own private apple.

She removed last a ziplock bag from the side pocket of the knapsack. Sometime that first day back in New York City, Yvonne had come onto the rooftop and put a hand on Ana’s shoulder and said matter-of-factly (because there was no other way to say it): They want some of Russell’s hair. Yvonne didn’t have to explain. Ana knew immediately why. Russell analyzed DNA all the time in his systematics lab—ironically. He studied the evolution of bird species by examining their genetic sequences. He’d often talked about the transformation of a species over time, how one molecule of guanine or cytosine could create a totally different bird, a slow-motion metamorphosis. He gathered study skins—preserved birds—from around the world, both for the museum collection and for his own study of their nuclear DNA. So Ana knew all too well about the hair.

She opened the ziplock, removed a maple hairbrush, and set it in her lap. That morning in New York, she’d searched the loft in a fit of growing hysteria, collecting every strand of hair she found, from the bed, the mattress, the pillow, the bathroom floor—not sure if any of them was his or hers or someone else’s (she’d never noticed before the profligacy of hair in every corner of the loft). Finally, Yvonne forced her to stop; it turned out Russell’s own Kent hairbrush was sitting right on top of the toilet.