Who could have wrested away every remnant we had of Abba — before the shivah is even over?

The first thing that hits me when I close the soundproof door and switch on the lights to Abba’s study is that everything is gone.

Everything.

The desk is there, and the chair and the light fixture and the bookcases of seforim. But the computer screens and the strange, scientific-looking tools, and the papers and notebooks and assortment of pens and even the family pictures — they’re gone, vanished, disappeared, just as if they’ve never existed.

As if someone got here first.

Blood rushes to my head. How can it be? The door was locked. No one has been in here since, since…

Unless someone has? Late at night? Ima, maybe?

The idea is laughable. Ima never set foot here even when Abba was alive.

My sisters, Rikki and Tehillah, are no-goes, too. They’re six and four years old, and besides, if they’d been behind this dramatic clear out of the study, they’d have left a trail of cookie crumbs behind them.

And the thought of them cleaning up anything — let alone a room full of hundreds of different, complicated belongings — is outright laughable. They barely put away their toys.

I sink down in Abba’s chair and then wonder if I’m not supposed to do that. Does it make a difference if your parent isn’t alive anymore? I don’t know. All I know is that I want to sit here, it’s somehow the closest I can get to Abba now.

Which sounds ridiculous.

It’s just a chair.

I take in the bare, bare tabletop, the shelves neatly lined with seforim and nothing else. Who could have wrested away every remnant we had of Abba — before the shivah is even over?