The silence persists. Eric pays me another visit while I’m in the shower, and this time I don’t hear him until the lights are off. I can’t tell how close he is to the curtain, or if he is even still there, but I act as if he is. I touch myself and wonder if he is listening. For a few weeks I continue my series of “self-portraits.” I only take things they are unlikely to miss. A lightbulb, a dinner plate, a single winter glove. Things I can crush or hang over a flame, though these portraits of shards and ash ultimately feel less truthful than when I render areas of the house I have thoroughly cleaned. I try to be inconspicuous, but on the night I get into the HVAC unit with a toothbrush, Rebecca comes down the stairs in scrubs and tells me there is a unit on the other side of the house. I can’t tell if she is serious, or if this acknowledgment is meant to make me stop. And as a matter of principle, I stop for a few days. When we cross paths I try to discern from her face whether this is the intended result. But eventually I find myself on the other side of the house, brushing dust out of the vents.

* * *

The next morning, there is money on my dresser. I close the door and count it. I pocket it and buy more art supplies—raw canvas, stretcher bars, Lascaux gesso—and some tea tree oil for Akila. I take the bus to the library, and I sit in the stacks and count the change. Like bone, the money—the paper and nickel and zinc—feels more mutable when held inside the hand. It feels finite, tethered to the source in a way that makes it explicitly transactional, and so of course it is demeaning. But it is also demeaning to be broke. I go down to Special Collections and watch the archivists through the glass. They are capturing a three-dimensional image of a gilded urn. Between the softboxes and umbrellas, they place the urn on a polyester wheel. One archivist turns the wheel, and another captures the image. However, the archivist at the wheel is older and has a tremor in her hand. As they are reaching the last sixty degrees, she loses her place. Eric comes out from his office, smiles, and picks up where she left off. He looks through the glass and holds my eye for a long moment, and then he turns and disappears into his office. Upstairs, I look through the death certificates. I find a certificate for a man who fell out of a window while trying to prove to a tour group that it was made of unbreakable glass, for a man who fell into a machine in a textile mill and suffocated in eight hundred yards of wool, for a man who was crushed by a trash compactor while looking through a dumpster for his phone, and the usual, the strokes, the cancers, the suicides. I look for my father’s certificate, and though I don’t find it, I find four Ivan Darbonnes who died in New York between 1975 and 2018. All of them died in Brooklyn. My father died in Syracuse, five years after my mother. We hadn’t talked in six months, partly because we were (comfortably) estranged, and partly because his new wife was screening my calls. The last time I saw him, two years before his death, he took the Metro-North into the city and we saw a matinee of the newest Aronofsky. After, we went for dinner and he kept saying things were expensive, but occasionally he would pause and tell me what he thought the movie meant. He’d stopped eating sugar and carried around a gallon of his own “chemically altered” water, and before we saw the movie I had to stuff it in my purse. He’d grown skinny and gullible. I lost my patience with him while we were waiting for the downtown A. I yelled at him about electrolytes and we were silent on the train. And then a few years later, I was checking Facebook and I noticed all the condolences on his page.

* * *

I stop cleaning altogether for a couple of weeks, but the money still comes. It comes in a sealed white envelope and the amount is different every time. One hundred dollars. Forty-eight dollars and fifteen cents. Three hundred dollars during a week I don’t do anything at all. I deposit the money quietly, spend some of it on an expensive bottle of polyethylene glycol. I take Akila to get her first protective style. We take the train into the city and find an African braiding parlor on 125th. It smells right, like yaki and hibiscus and lavender oil. Above the Malaysian bundles, a Trinidadian soap opera is on. When the actors speak, you can hear the air in the room. Three women work on Akila at once. They hook in the yaki and speak softly to each other in Queen’s English. Every thirty minutes a man comes in and asks for cash. When he is gone, one of the hairdressers asks me to pay before he comes back. She says he is her boyfriend. Four hours later, a woman comes out with a pot of boiling water to seal the ends of the Senegalese twists. They soak Akila’s shirt on the train back, and at home she changes into something dry.

“A new do! Very nice!” Eric says to Akila when he passes by her room. He lingers in the doorway and asks how much time it took and makes a joke about how heavy her head must feel. He mentions a black woman at work who always changes her hair, and he asks a slew of slightly invasive questions with this bright, apologetic look on his face. I have had this exact exchange more times than I can count, but I can’t tell if Eric is trying so hard because he is white, or if it is because he is a dad. When he leaves, Akila looks at me and laughs.

* * *

I look through my self-portraits, and I can’t see myself, but I am well acquainted with every corner of the house. A habit has been built. I clean all the windows in the house, polish the silver, smoke a few cigarettes. I lie around in the dark and indulge all the bright half-dreams, the speed and pavement, the staggered lips of cliffs and yawning desert. I wander around the house after midnight and find the door to Rebecca and Eric’s bedroom slightly ajar, and they are having what is, in their case, aptly called sexual intercourse. It does not look like porn but still defies description, Eric enormous and rectangular, Rebecca feral and smooth. Regrettably, they are beautiful, and per their soft chatter and tender readjustment, at least a little bit in love. I take a few photos with my phone, and I check the time. I want to go to bed, but I feel obligated to stay until they finish, and when they do, Rebecca rolls over and turns up the TV.

I return to my room, scroll through the pictures, and do three preliminary sketches. I touch myself and try to imagine what it is like to have comfortable, familiar sex, to be pounded sweetly as James Corden does his monologue. I wake up in the afternoon, walk two miles to the rink and get some soft-serve ice cream, feed a pretzel to a pigeon with an atrophied leg. I go to the mall and play the arcade games they keep in the food court, and, after talking to a Sears associate about all-terrain tires, I buy a blue dress.

* * *