The Man Who Asked About School

Chapter 1: School

The first strange thing was the photograph.

I found it inside my mother’s old sewing box, beneath loose buttons, bent needles, and three wooden spools of black thread. The picture showed Turin’s Porta Nuova station on a wet winter afternoon. People hurried beneath umbrellas. A tram waited beyond the entrance. Near the edge of the frame stood a tall man in a dark coat.

He was holding a child’s hand.

The child was me.

I was forty-three when I found the photograph, though I looked no older than six in it. My hair had been cut badly around my ears. I wore the red wool coat my mother had made from one of her own.

I remembered that coat.

I remembered the station.

But no one had taken a photograph that day.

My mother had been dead for four months.

Until then, I had avoided opening her things. Grief had made every object dangerous. A chipped coffee cup could ruin an afternoon. The smell of lavender soap could leave me sitting on the kitchen floor, unable to move.