No Last Names

The shift ends the way they always do: with a kid who put something somewhere it shouldn't go.

This one is five years old, with a pink bead up his left nostril and absolutely no regrets. You get it out with a little suction and a lot of distraction, drop it into a specimen cup and hand it to him like a trophy. He looks at it with deep respect.

"Can I keep it?"

"You can keep it," you tell him. "You can't put it back."

His mother laughs for the first time in two hours. You chart, hand off to day shift, and peel your gloves off at 7:41 a.m. with the particular light-headedness of a woman who has been awake for twenty-three hours and drank her last coffee at four.

Thandi Mokoena catches you at the lockers, braids piled high, lipstick somehow perfect at the end of a night shift. "You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a 'my kid is going to wake me up in four hours' face." She bumps your hip with hers. "Kiss him for me, Ava. Tell him Auntie Thandi found him a garbage truck sticker."

"You did not."

She produces one from her scrub pocket, green and glittery, and you love her so much you could cry, which is how you know you need sleep.

South Philly in September smells like rain on brick and somebody frying peppers before eight in the morning. You take the 47 bus down to Christian Street and walk the last blocks with your hands in your hoodie pocket, past the Italian Market stalls rolling up their awnings, past crates of figs and the old men at the fish counter arguing about the Eagles in two languages.

Ferri Formaggi is three doors from the corner, wheels of provolone hanging in the window like golden bells. Nunzia Ferri has the door open before you reach it. She is seventy-four, four foot eleven, and wears the same black cardigan in every season.

"He ate," she announces. "Two eggs. He says he hates eggs. He ate two."

"You're a miracle worker."

"I'm Italian. Same thing." She steps aside, and there he is.

Leo is sitting on her counter stool in his dinosaur pajamas, eating dry Cheerios one at a time out of a paper cup, his black hair sticking straight up at the crown the way it has since the day he was born. When he sees you, his whole face opens.

"Mama!"

You catch him with your whole body. He smells like Nunzia's soap and cheese rind and warm little boy. Your son. Three years and ten months old, obsessed with garbage trucks and the moon, left-handed, stubborn, and the owner of a pair of eyes everybody comments on. Amber, with a dark ring around the edge. Your eyes, exactly.

"Auntie Thandi sent you something," you say, and give him the sticker, and he gasps like you handed him a car.

Nunzia waits until he's busy sticking it to his own forehead. Then she lowers her voice. "Yesterday at the playground. On Christian Street. There was a man."

The tired falls off you. "What man?"

"A young one. Nice coat. He had one of those cameras, the big kind." She makes a lens with her hands. "He was taking pictures of the swings. I looked at him like this." She demonstrates. It is a look that could peel paint. "He went away."

"Nunzia. Was he taking pictures of Leo?"

"Of the swings." She shrugs, but her mouth is tight. "Leo was on the swings."

You look out the shop window at the street, at the ordinary morning. A delivery van. A woman with a stroller. Nothing.

"Probably some photography student," you say.

"Probably, Ava," Nunzia agrees, in a voice that means she doesn't think so either.

You sleep from nine to one with Leo at preschool, wake up with your face mashed into the pillow, and spend the afternoon being a mother: laundry, a library book about the moon, mac and cheese, a bath where Leo narrates the sinking of every plastic boat. By eight he is in bed. By eight-thirty he is asleep, one arm flung over his garbage truck, mouth open.

You stand in his doorway longer than you need to. You always do.

Then you go downstairs, pour a glass of wine you won't finish, and sit at your kitchen table listening to the rain start.

Rain always does this to you. It takes you back.

Positano. February. The off-season, when the hotels are half shut and the sea is the color of slate. You are twenty-five and your mother has been dead for eleven weeks, and you are spending her life insurance on the trip she planned for thirty years and never took. The Hotel Lucerna has one other guest. You meet him on the terrace at midnight, under the lemon trees in their big clay pots, both of you pretending you came out for the view and not because you couldn't stand your rooms.

He is the most beautiful man you have ever seen. That is not an exaggeration; you're a nurse, you're precise about these things. Black hair wet from the rain. A jaw cut like a statue's. Dark eyes with gold in them, and a black suit he's been wearing since a funeral.

"Whose?" you ask, because you're too tired to be polite.

"My mother's," he says. "This morning."

"Mine was eleven weeks ago."

He looks at you for a long moment. Then he pours you a glass of limoncello from the bottle he stole from the bar, and says, "No last names. No cities. Tonight we're just from here."

"Then what do I call you?"

"Raff."

You never learned the rest. You left before sunrise because your ferry to Naples was at six and because staying would have been the most dangerous thing you'd ever done. You wrote four words on hotel stationery and tucked it under his hand.

Six weeks later you were back at work in Philadelphia, throwing up in a staff bathroom, staring at two pink lines.

You never looked for him. You wouldn't have known where to start. A man named Raff, from somewhere, who had buried his mother in Italy. You decided you would do it alone, and you have, and you're good at it.

You're good at it.

The doorbell rings.

You check the clock on the stove: 10:42 p.m. Nobody rings your bell at 10:42. Thandi texts. Nunzia knocks on the window with her ring. You set down the wine and walk into the narrow front hall and look through the peephole.

Two men stand at the curb in dark coats, rain running off their shoulders. A long black car idles behind them. And on your cracked marble stoop, close enough to touch the door, a third man stands with his head bent.

He looks up.

Your hand goes flat against the door. Your heart does something no monitor would forgive.

You know that jaw. You know that stillness. You know those eyes, dark with gold in them, because you have spent four years trying to forget them, and failing every time your son laughs.

You open the door. You don't decide to. Your hand does it.

Raff stands in the rain in a charcoal coat, older, harder, more beautiful, which should not be possible. In his hand is a glossy photograph. Your son on the playground swings, head thrown back, laughing at the sky.

"Ava," he says. It's the first time anyone has said your name like that in four years, like it's the answer to something.

Then he holds up the photo and asks, very quietly, "Is he mine?"