I turn forty-seven on a Thursday, which feels right, somehow. Thursday. The most forgettable day of the week.

  I know it's my birthday because my phone tells me. A little notification from the calendar app, the one I set up years ago when I still had things to schedule: Daniel's Birthday - All Day Event.

  All day.

  As if it's a conference.

  As if there's an agenda, breakout sessions, a catered lunch.

  What a joke.

  I swipe it away while the coffee maker gurgles out the last of the store-brand grounds I've been stretching since Monday, and I stand in my kitchen and I wait.

  I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.

  …

  Well, OK, that's not true. I know exactly what I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for the phone to ring. For the screen to light up with a name. For someone, anyone, to have remembered.

  By eight-fifteen, nobody has.

  Karen won't call.

  I know this the way I know my Ford’s check-engine light will be on when I start the car — it's just the state of things now. The resting condition. We haven't spoken since she mailed the finalized divorce papers back in August with a Post-it note that read Take care of yourself, Dan in her architect's handwriting. All clean lines and precise angles, even in farewell. She doesn't owe me a birthday call. She doesn't owe me anything. That's what “Dissolution of Marriage” means, doesn’t it?

  My mother won't call because she's been dead for the last six years, which is the kind of excuse I can't argue with.

  My father won't call because he's in a memory care facility in Scottsdale and thinks I'm still in junior high, and the last time I phoned him he asked if I'd finished my science fair project. I said yes. He said he was proud of me. It was the best conversation I'd had in months.

  Which leaves Sophie.

  ---

  Sophie is twenty. She's a junior at UMass Amherst, studying environmental science, which is a field that might actually exist in ten years, so she's already smarter than me in that regard. She has Karen's cheekbones and my tendency to go quiet when she's angry, which is a combination that makes her devastating in ways I don't think she fully understands yet.

  She hasn't called me in six weeks.

  Before that, it was four.

  Before that, three.

  I've plotted the intervals. I can't help it! The gaps are widening on a curve that, if you extend it out far enough, approaches silence asymptotically.

  Never quite reaching zero, thankfully. Just getting infinitely close to it.

  I call her at nine-twelve, sitting on the edge of what’s left of the air mattress, which has almost fully deflated overnight to the point where my hip is resting on the floor through a thin membrane of vinyl. The phone rings four times. Five. I'm composing the voicemail in my head — keep it light, keep it easy, don't mention the birthday, don't be the dad who guilt-trips — when she picks up.

  "Hey." A single syllable, flattened by the particular exhaustion of someone who looked at the caller ID and had to talk themselves into answering.

  "Hey, Soph. How are you?"

  "I'm fine, Dad. I'm kind of in the middle of something?"

  She's always in the middle of something. I used to be in the middle of things too, not too long ago.

  "T-that's okay. I just wanted to —"

  "Is everything all right?" The question comes fast, clipped, and I recognize the tone. It's the one she uses when she's bracing for bad news. God, when did I become someone my only daughter braces for?

  "Everything's fine, sweetheart. I just wanted to hear your voice."

  A pause.

  In the background I can hear something — music, or a television, or the ambient noise of a life being lived in rooms I've never seen. She moved into an off-campus apartment in September. I know that much from her Instagram feed, not from her.

  "O…kay? Well. I'm here. You're hearing it."

  I laugh, or try to. It comes out wrong — too thin, too eager.

  "So… how are classes? How's the — you were working on that watershed project, right? The one in the Connecticut River valley?"

  "That was last semester, Dad!"

  "Right. Right, sorry!"

  Another pause.

  I can feel her deciding how much of herself to allocate to this conversation. Triaging me. I taught her to code when she was twelve — basic Python, little games, a calculator that converted Fahrenheit to Celsius — and she'd sit on my lap in the home office and watch the terminal like it was a window into somewhere magical.

  Stolen story; please report.

  She’d called me a wizard then. She was twelve. I was thirty-nine and I had a career and a house and a marriage and a dog and I was a wizard!

  "Look, Dad, I have a study group in like ten minutes, so…"

  "No, yeah. Yeah, of course. Go. Go study! I just—"

  Say it. What's the worst that happens? She already sounds like she wants to hang up. What are you going to do, make it worse?

  "I just… called to say hi."

  "Hi."

  Soft now. Not warm, exactly, but not the flatline of the opening syllable. A flicker of something. Like that goddamned fluorescent tube back at the library. "I'll… call you this weekend, okay?"

  But, of course she won't. We both know she won't.

  But the lie is a kindness, and I'll take kindness in whatever dosage it's prescribed.

  "Sounds great, Soph. Love you!"

  "Love you too. Bye, Dad."

  The line goes dead.

  I sit there with the phone pressed to my ear for another few seconds, listening to the nothing, because the nothing still has the shape of her voice in it and I'm not ready to let that go.

  She didn't remember.

  I put the phone down. I sit on my deflated air mattress in my studio apartment on the morning of my forty-seventh birthday and I press my hand against my side where the thing lives and I feel it pulse — or I imagine I feel it pulse, which amounts to the same thing when you can't afford a doctor to tell you the difference.

  Happy fucking birthday, Daniel.

  …

  The coffee maker beeps.

  I pour the coffee. I drink it black because I ran out of milk two days ago and haven't been to the store because the store requires money and money requires a series of steps that starts with getting off the air mattress, and some mornings the activation energy for that particular reaction is higher than others.

  Today it's particularly hard. But I get up anyway.

  ---

  Rhonda has left a sticky note on the returns desk: Basement — Donations unsorted, 4 boxes. When you get a chance. Thanks!!

  Two exclamation points. How about that.

  Rhonda punctuates the way she manages — with excessive, apologetic enthusiasm, as if she knows she's asking too much and hopes that typography will soften the blow.

  The basement of the Millbrook Public Library is not technically a basement. It's more of a “lower level,” according to the signage, which was installed in 2003 during a renovation funded by a grant that has since been defunded.

  But, in practice, it's very much a basement: concrete floor, exposed pipes, the faint tang of mildew and old paper and general neglect. The overhead lights are the pull-chain kind, bare bulbs that turn the space into some kind of noir film every time you reach up and yank.

  I pull the chain.

  The bulb sways.

  The shadows shift like curtains.

  The donation boxes are where Rhonda said they'd be — stacked near the freight elevator, four large bankers' boxes with DONATIONS written in Sharpie, each one filled with the reading habits of someone who's downsizing or dead.

  I start sorting them.

  Romance goes in one pile, mystery in another.

  Anything published before 1980 gets inspected for condition; anything after gets scanned into the system.

  Most of it will end up at the book sale, priced between fifty cents and two dollars, arranged on folding tables in the community room where retirees will pick through them with the quiet intensity of archaeologists at a dig site.

  The first box is mostly James Patterson.

  The second is cookbooks.

  The third is a mixture — some literary fiction, a few self-help titles with cracked spines and highlighted passages that feel uncomfortably intimate; like… reading someone's therapy notes.

  I sort. I stack. I work.

  The fourth box is lighter than the others. I open it and find children's books, a few old National Geographics, and an old Bible with a torn cover. I empty it, flatten the box, and I'm about to drag everything to the sorting shelves when I notice the gap.

  No; not in the box. In the shelving.

  The basement has its own stacks, you see — metal utility shelves bolted to the walls, filled with overflow, out-of-circulation stock, periodical archives, things the library keeps because throwing away a book feels like a sin even when the book is a 1994 phone directory for a county that no longer exists. I've been down here a dozen times, maybe more, and I've never paid much attention to the shelves. They're just… wallpaper. Background geometry.

  Except…

  The bulb is swinging from when I nudged the cord in passing, and the moving light catches something. A shadow that doesn't belong. A shape wedged between two shelves at the far wall, in a gap where the units don't quite meet. A gap maybe four inches wide, where the wall's cinder block peeks through…

  And where something has been... placed.

  Or hidden. Or forgotten.

  I walk over.

  It's a book. Well, obviously it's a book — I'm in a library, after all; everything down here is a book, it would be stranger if it were a shoe or something.

  But this book is not like the other books. The other books are mass-produced paperbacks and remaindered hardcovers and periodicals in plastic sleeves. As for this book, it is —

  I pull it free.

  It resists, slightly, as if the gap has been holding it tight, and then it comes loose with a sound like a breath released.

  It's heavy.

  That's the first thing I notice. Not the dense, compact weight of a reference book — but in a different way. It feels like something that settles into my hands with intention, the way a cat settles into a lap.

  It is bound in a dark material that I think must be leather but doesn't feel like any leather I've touched.

  Too smooth. Too warm.

  The color of it shifts when I tilt it under the swaying bulb — now brown, now closer to black, now something between the two that doesn't have a name in the part of the spectrum I'm familiar with.

  There is n title on the cover. No title on the spine. No author. No publisher's imprint. No ISBN. The edges of the pages are rough-cut and uneven, the color of old bone.

  …

  I flip it open.

  Blank.

  Every page.

  I fan through them, five or six hundred pages of heavy, cream-colored stock, and every single one of them is empty. No text. No images. No handwriting, no marginalia, no faded ink, no watermarks. Just page after page of absolute nothing, thick and smooth under my thumb as I riffle through.

  I check the inside covers.

  There is no library sticker. No barcode. No Dewey decimal classification, no checkout card, no Property of Millbrook Public Library stamp we put on everything. No evidence that this book has ever been processed, cataloged, or known about by anyone in this building.

  I turn it over.

  The back cover is identical to the front — that same nameless dark, that same unsettling warmth. I press my palm flat against it and I swear — I swear — I feel something. Not a vibration. Not heat, exactly. But… something more like recognition. Like the book is aware of the pressure of my hand and is deciding what to do about it.

  Which, I realize, is fucking insane.

  I know it's insane. I'm standing in a library basement holding a blank book and projecting sentience onto old bookbinding because I'm forty-seven years old today and nobody remembered and there's something growing inside me that I can't name and can't treat and I'm losing my mind in the most boring, low-budget way possible.

  I should put it back.

  Or bring it upstairs. Give it to Rhonda, let her figure out where it came from and what to do with it. Maybe it was some donation that never got processed. Maybe it was something left behind by a previous librarian. Maybe it’s nothing special, just a blank novelty journal that someone wedged in a gap years ago and forgot about.

  Yes, taking it upstairs is the reasonable thing to do. The responsible thing.

  I look back at the book.

  The book, obviously, does not look back.

  But it sits in my hands with a weight — that warm, deliberate, almost conspiratorial weight I imagined earlier — and I think about the range of my current possessions. The air mattress. The truck. The birthday that nobody cared about.

  I look back at the blank pages. Six hundred or so pages of nothing. The most honest thing I've encountered in months.

  "Well… Happy Birthday to me, I guess" I say to no one in particular.

  I put the book in my bag.