He sets the list down. Beside it, Isabelle’s lion lies folded into fourths. He lifts the paper and opens it to stare once more at the roaring red lion, the gaping mouth of blackness. He’s not sure what it is about the drawing that compels him to keep it like this, to look at it again and again the way you do some novelty whose magic hasn’t yet worn off. He refolds the drawing and sets it back on his dresser. He clicks open a pen and adds “Africa?” to his day’s list.

II

Isabelle gives her mother seven minutes to remember anything she may have forgotten to take with her and return to the apartment. Though Isabelle wonders whether her mother truly forgets things or forgets them on purpose so she can return unexpected and catch Isabelle doing whatever she does when she’s alone.

Her mother left this morning at 8:42. Isabelle glances at the clock on the microwave: 8:47. She erases Maggie’s left eye from her drawing; four times now she’s attempted it, but still she can’t get it quite right. She sets her pencil down and unfastens the photograph of Maggie from the corner of her sketchbook. She holds it away from her and squints at it, trying to figure out what it is about her dog’s left eye that is so much harder to capture than the right. If she can identify specific differences—if one eyelid sags lower than the other, if one has longer lashes—then maybe this will make it easier, she thinks. But as she studies Maggie’s eyes, she can pinpoint no distinct differences; the eyes just feel different to her. She refastens the photograph and looks again at the clock: 8:49. The elevator is quiet in its shaft beyond the kitchen wall, and Isabelle judges that she is truly alone now, that it is safe to play.

She leaves her sketchbook on the kitchen table and walks to the apartment’s other end, the formal, unused end with large windows, stiff sofas, long drapes, a piano. She shivers as she approaches the instrument and blows on her fingers to warm them; it always feels cold to her in this room. Her piano teacher has stopped coming to the house. But after five years of study, she knows how to read music and figures she can teach herself. In the three months since the summer, she’s been learning Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

She sits down at the bench and immediately begins to play. No scales, no arpeggios, no chords of warm-up at all. Her mother will be back in less than an hour; she doesn’t have time for anything but the music.