"Mommy," she said, wrecked and satisfied.
"I see her," Marcus said. His voice came out lower than he expected. "I see her, baby."
He looked into the drawer again, not grabbing, only looking, the way a man looks at water he is about to step into. The hospital bracelet lay curled beside the envelopes. Naomi Ward, it said, and a date in December, the day Amara was born, not the day Naomi died. He had cut a different bracelet off Naomi's wrist himself in a hospital room that smelled like cold air and alcohol, and he had put it in a bowl on the dresser and lost track of it. Claire had not lost track. Under the bracelet, a corner of blue notepaper showed Naomi's handwriting. The envelopes were addressed to Mr. Marcus Ellison at the Wilton Drive house. One of the return addresses was Denise Ward in Savannah. Another was a name he half remembered from Naomi's school. The flaps were not all pristine. Someone had opened some of them and closed them again, badly, the way a person closes a thing they wish they had not touched.
He felt anger arrive, not as a shout but as a change in the temperature of his hands.
"Don't," Claire said. "Not with her here. She doesn't understand any of this. She understands crying and being picked up. Pick her up. We can talk when she is down."
"She understands the drawer," Marcus said.
"She understands that I told her no."
"You told her her mother was an old picture."
"I told you she got upset over an old picture. That is what happened. You are making it into a trial because you walked in on the worst thirty seconds of a very long day."
Amara patted the glass again, harder. The frame tipped. Marcus caught it. The catch brought him closer to the drawer, and the drawer, being open, offered him the blue paper. He did not take it yet. He looked at Claire instead, at the high collar of the blouse, at the hair pulled back, at the mouth that had been gentle in his kitchen when gentle was what he thought he needed. She was afraid. He could see it, and the seeing did not cancel anything. Fear was not an empty drawer. Fear had been busy.