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mints on the pillow, a doorman in a dark blue suit with brass buttons, a blue cap, your mail and messages waiting for you in a gleaming wooden cubby behind the front desk. They had never been to New York and didn’t know what it meant to live in a hotel, a dark room at the end of a dark hallway, a mirrorless bathroom shared with a dozen other people.
    That Christmas we were fool enough to expect you. On Christmas Eve Aunt Lily called my mother to read your horoscope: A TRIP TO VISIT OLD FRIENDS WILL BRING YOU MUCH JOY AND CONTENTMENT ! But you never showed, and soon enough we forgot about you again. My mother kept moving us every year or so, kept falling in and out of what she considered to be love, and with all of this going on we stopped speaking your name, stopped thinking about you even in the privacy of our minds, indeed for some time it was as though you had never existed. And yet when the phone rang that day (it was a Sunday in November, just after we’d turned back the clocks, and we felt ourselves to be standing at the mouth of a cave, the upcoming months of dark and cold, the long season awaiting us, we were going to have to pass through it again), somehow there was the sound of you in it, later we would each confess that we had known from the first ring. My mother had been making meatballs—she was married again and trying to be a good wife—and she’d told me to answer. “It’s for you,” I said, and she held up her fingers, slick with meat and egg, wriggled them.
    â€œHold the phone to my ear,” she said. “Be a help for once.”
    I rolled my eyes—those years, this was more or less my only form of communication—and she said, “Hello? Yes? Yes. Yes?” And then, “Oh. Oh no. Oh God, no.” Tears down her face, and if there was any doubt it was over now, I knew, I knew, I knew it was you. My mother clutched the phone, said, “Get a pen.” A grave calm had come over her—the calm that settles on us when we’re burdened with a gruesome task—and she said a few more things, wrote with slippery fingers an address, a number, another number, another. Then she set about the business of calling Pop, calling her sisters. It seemed she was on the phone for days after your death. She was, at that time, married to Walter Adams and therefore not really speaking to her sisters (“Black!” they whispered. “Black, Black, Black!” And from their mouths the word seemed to lose its meaning, was less a word than a sound, an expletive). She was six months pregnant with Shirley, the daughter she would lose. Shirley was a kicker. The day after you died, while my mother was talking on the phone to someone about your death, about the procurement of your body and possessions, I felt Shirley kick. Typically my mother wasn’t the kind of pregnant woman who endured the inquisitive touch, but that day she did, and I walked around for the rest of the day remembering it, quick and soft, I walked around thinking, something was alive in there. Alive.
    For some time we didn’t know what had happened, we only knew you were dead. Later we learned the details, how a cleaning lady found you dead in that Brooklyn hotel room, facedown and overdosed, the bed pissed and puked on. You were entirely alone. There was no trace of Mary and Kim. Whether they left you or you left them no one could say. All at once we felt the shame which should have been with us for years, the shame of having fallen out of touch with a loved one, the shame of having turned away from someone who needed us, someone who was alone, a brother.
    For a time my mother and Nana and Pop and the aunts made efforts to find your girlfriend and daughter— Mary and her mother Kim! They walked around your Brooklyn neighborhood with pictures, taped up flyers, but nothing came of it. Malinda heard from our cousins that Pop had hired a private detective, and I imagined a man in a