He does not know why he goes.
It is a Saturday in November, and he has no surgery, and Marcus is coming to the city next weekend, and the apartment is as quiet as it always is on Saturdays, and he finds himself in his car without having made a conscious decision, driving south through the city in the gray afternoon light.
He parks on the corner of Lehigh Avenue. He sits for a moment.
The house is still there. Of course it is still there — rowhouses in this neighborhood do not disappear, they just change color. The house that was his family's is a different color now, a dark red instead of the cream it was when he was a child. The windows have been replaced. There is a different door. Someone has put a small concrete porch out front that was not there before.
Everything that made it the house is gone. What remains is the structure — the bones of the thing, the specific width and depth of the lot, the angle of the alley alongside it.
He gets out of the car.
He does not go to the door. He stands on the sidewalk across the street and he looks at it the way he has always looked at things that hurt — directly, without flinching, because he learned when he was ten that looking away does not make something smaller.
He thinks about his mother in the kitchen. The specific smell of her cooking, which he has never been able to identify because it was a combination of things — spices and the particular warmth of a wood-framed house and something under both of those that was just her. He thinks about Maya making a face at the camera. He thinks about his father sitting at the dining table with case files spread across it, eating dinner without looking up, muttering occasionally to himself in the way of lawyers and people who have arguments with ideas.
He thinks about the night.
He does not flinch from that either. He stands on the sidewalk and he lets the memory be full and complete and present — the wrong sounds, the closet door, his name in his sister's whisper, the forty-five seconds when his entire life became before.
He has spent twenty-four years trying to make the before mean something in the after. He made himself into a surgeon. He made himself into what he made himself into. He has kept a list and worked through it with the discipline he applied to everything else.
The list is done.
He is standing on a sidewalk in South Philadelphia looking at a house that has the same bones as the house where everything ended, and he is thirty-six years old, and the list is done, and he does not know what comes next.
He stands there for fifteen minutes.
A woman comes out of the house — young, early twenties, headphones around her neck, unaware of him — and she goes down the block in the other direction and the door swings shut behind her.
The house is just a house.
He goes back to his car. He drives home. He does not take the long way.
That evening, he takes the photograph off the shelf. He puts it face-up.
He looks at his mother and his sister for a long time.
Then he puts it back on the shelf, still face-up, and goes to bed.