So the next part isn’t really cleaning at all, more like picking over the elements of a riddle. Mostly I just pick up the things lying around, overthink them or stare at them like an idiot. I smooth out crumpled pieces of paper, to-do lists, notes to self, phone numbers that ring through to disconnected accounts, ex-friends and fresh enemies of my folks’, read them and set them down again. I sniff the armpits of my clothes and look at the stains, picking at them with my fingernail. They’re all too big or too small, thermal or wool for a winter that’s long gone, failed zippers replaced with lines of safety pins, buttons dangling, hemlines slipping out. I never learned to sew, so my repair jobs make everything I own look like shit.

I try to figure out if my smell is still the same as my parents’ smell. I try to remember what they look like. Waiting for a bus in Spanish Harlem, I remember I asked her if she was happy. But I can’t see her, can’t call her face into my mind’s eye. We were the same height by then, and couldn’t agree on anything. She just squeezed my arm and exhaled, warm next to my cheek, a hot contrast to the wet bite of the early winter night that blacks out the sky at five in the afternoon, and whispered, “Hush.”

The basement studio we lived in then gave us a break from the wind, but not the cold or the damp or the dark. That night I tried to clean up, but grime oozed from the floor and wall, showered down from the ceiling and between the tiles; you could almost see it pushing in to coat us and the furniture, or to crowd us out and move us on to the next place. Pollution settled on the window, almost a kindness because we wouldn’t have bought curtains for the single, foot-high slit, a view of passersby stamping the sidewalk.

My mother came out into our single room after a long time in the bathroom. While I cleaned, she stared out that window as if through a veil.

“Look at the snow.”

“It’s not snowing, Mom. It’s raining. It’s been raining for a while.”

“Which do you like better, rain or snow?”

I had never thought about it before. “Which one do you like more?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen rain quite like this.” Her words moved out of her like the hiss of something deflating slowly. I couldn’t be sure if she’d heard my question. “The way it’s falling really slowly. It’s thick and fat. I think it’s snow.”

“It’s rain, Mom. Just rain.”

“It’s cold enough to snow.”