He kept looking at me, kept giving me the look, and there was nothing else to see. There was nothing else in his face that I could make out under the look, and it occurred to me then, posing with my brother thirty years ago, that standing in front of me was a seven-year-old boy who had already vowed to show the world only the face that he wanted it to see and had done so at a time while he was still negotiating speech.

He stepped back, finally, into my embrace, turned to the camera and offered the unsmiling face, until our grandmother gave in and took the picture of Nicholas posing in the way he was willing to be seen.

There is no photograph of my brother standing on my feet. There is no photograph of my brother laughing. In the photographs from those years, in every one of them, I am the brother in the back, the one who always looks like any boy who ever smiled for a grandmother.

Nicholas is the one who always looks like Nicholas.

This is the room I thought that I would start in, and for the past several hours I have stayed in it, sitting on my brother’s unmade bed, without starting.

I could start anywhere. Any room would do.

I could empty ashtrays, open windows, take down pictures, put books in boxes, check the kitchen for spoiled food. I could throw out old onions.

I could flip through the mail that has kept coming and pitch the junk.

I could pick my brother’s clothes up from the floor and try them on for fit, then go through drawers and feel under folded clothes, under lining paper, for things he might have hid there.

Music could help me start, then help me hurry. I could hum “Moon River.”

That would be a record Nicholas would have. In another room, records fill a wall of shelves that do not stop until the ceiling. Everything that I could ever want to play or sing along to is here for me to play. I could pick out Broadway scores and belt out the big numbers over the stars who belt them on the records.

Or, as I used to see my brother do when he was a little boy, I could lip-synch in the mirror. I could close my eyes the way I used to watch him do, making them look closed but, I was always sure, keeping a space to look through, his eyelash space, so that he could see what he looked like with his eyes closed.

Nicholas used to do that.

I do not know for a fact that he stopped doing it.

He used to pretend that pencils were long cigarette holders and would glide around rooms flicking ashes into flowerpots, saying things like, “Daddy, don’t be droll.”

That is something else my brother used to do.