Lev had never told anyone about the word.
The word was not a word in any language he had looked for it in, and he had looked. He said it still, at 31, in the same moments he had said it at nine and seventeen: when the last of a fire went out, when he reached the final page of something he had loved, when the afternoon went into the specific quality of late afternoon that he had no other name for.
His mother had kept a notebook. He found it three weeks ago, cleaning out her apartment: forty-two pages of entries, beginning from his birth, recording every instance she had witnessed. October 12. Morning light on the wall. Said it twice. She had tracked it for sixteen years and then stopped, with no note about why. He found it the same week his daughter was born.
He heard her say it yesterday, from the other room. One clean syllable, shaped like something decided. He put down what he was doing and went in.
She was looking at the window. He stood in the doorway. She said it again.
He is sitting now with his mother's notebook open to the last entry. March 3. Watching snow. There is a blank notebook on the kitchen table, still in its plastic wrapping, that he bought two weeks before his mother died.