As we walk into the church I want to hold someone’s hand. The idea is so grounding — a hand, like a lightning rod. John’s hand, with its funny wrinkles, or my mother’s, once pristine. Now a bit dirty and tattered. What I need is a little warmth to keep me going. Someone to lend me a little strength. But everyone is all bound up in themselves right now, and I can hardly blame them.
Sara bends down and picks a piece of paper up from a basket by the end of the pews.
“Programs?” she asks. “At a christening?”
“Baba Ada planned all this.” I take the paper from her and cluck at how it flops around, flimsy. “She wouldn’t have been very happy. It looks cheap.”
“She would have gone and burned down the store that sold it to her. Held the clerk’s whole family captive until he agreed to a twenty percent discount.”
“No.” I fold the program and replace it on the pile. “She wouldn’t have.” I’ve tried to bring Ada back with stories. Since she died, I’ve been telling myself every Ada story I ever knew. But even the true ones just make it clear something’s missing. False ones would be worse. Rewriting. Erasing.
“Are you cold?” my mother asks. I realize I’m shivering.
“No,” I say. “I’m just nervous.”
“To sing?” I can see how it would sound ridiculous. Me of all people. But whatever lurking danger has been following me since Kara’s birth has crawled here, certainly. The delicate balance between my mother and my husband — secrets. The knowledge that what happens to me could happen to Kara a hundredfold if I sing to her. Good and bad.
She could have a better voice, a purer song. And. My fingers find my midriff, walk along the scar, which has been slightly weeping, so I have to dress it again. Beneath my clothes, a thin band of cotton wool. Am I to be ridiculed for worrying that the wound means something worse is coming? I move my fingers to my forehead. It’s enough to drive you mad.
“About you,” I tell my mother. “Wouldn’t you be?”
She smiles. “Oh, definitely.”
But the smile fades. She sits down in the last pew and drums her nails on the space beside her. I hesitate, but follow, and we both watch John at the front of the church, directing people around. There’s something funny about the arrangement behind the altar, but before I can think too much about it, my mother asks, “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing all these years?”
“What?”
“You know, Hello, Mama, I’ve missed you. What on earth have you done to fill the time? I’ve been waiting for you to ask any one of the sensible questions, but you never do. It’s not your style, I guess.”
“Huh,” I say.
Sara plays with her bottom lip without realizing it and then sees the lipstick on the tips of her fingers. She pinches her lips together to smooth out the shade, and runs a nail along the line of pink and pale, to assure the definition. This is what she pays attention to as I sit beside her, not answering. I, the daughter, a vague notion she has carried in her head.
“Maybe I don’t want to know.” My voice, catching in my throat, sounds husky. “Maybe I have other things on my mind, or maybe I’m just not interested.”
“Oh, you’re interested.” She takes my hands, both of them, just what I wanted, only times two. Too hard. “You’ve always liked to be told scary stories.”
“Come on,” I say. “You live in the city. How scary could it be?”
She tilts back her head to look at the ceiling and her mouth falls open, just a little. Puppet jaws, on a hinge. The inside of her mouth is just as dark pink as her lips, teeth pearlescent, but studded with aluminum fillings. One gold, in the back. Sara sighs, upward.
“You asked me, on the phone,” she said. “About Greta? I mean, talk about your spook stories. Let me tell you something.” My mother rights her neck and I hear a small crick. “About you.”
“Okay,” I say. Sara angles her head and indicates me closer.
“Well, doll.” She used to call me lalka, like Ada did. Little doll. I guess I’ve grown up. “You were always looking for the curse. Always. Every little bad thing that happened to you, everything you did wrong, you asked me, Was that it? Was that the curse? As if taking five dollars out of my purse without asking is the kind of thing that you’d be forced to do by magic.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t remember that.”
“You were a child.” Sara squeezes my fingers so they crush together. “What the hell do you know?”
“What’s your point?”
“Sometimes,” she says, and then stops. There’s a sound up by the sanctuary. “Things happen just because we do them. Not for any other reason.”
The sound comes again.
“What is that?” I ask. But Sara doesn’t answer. She knows. I know.
It starts as a low moan. The keening of a child who is lost in the woods. And then the sound lifts mercifully, a feather on the wind, that same child looking up at the trees to see a familiar face through the leaves. There is an element of sobbing that I can feel in my own chest — the phlegmatic stickiness and heaving — but also something of joy. I feel my body unsettle as though it had been covered with six feet of dirt and then suddenly dusted off. Light as air.
A violinist I recognize from the Lyric orchestra, the assistant concertmaster in fact, stands on a podium dressed in a dark blue gown. She tilts to one side with her instrument cradled under her chin, bobbing back and forth. Her hair, chopped short against her ears, shakes against the movement of her body. If she tilts right, her hair falls left. Beside her sits Rick, looking at her with suspicious eyes and wearing a tuxedo. With tails. I didn’t expect that from him, today, though I knew he would be here. The godfather. Apparently Ada planned something more for him and didn’t tell me. I put a hand over my mouth and bite back a bit of sudden laughter at the seriousness of his dress — I don’t want to interrupt the violinist. She’s practicing an accompaniment to “Ave Maria.”
The song is so common that it’s almost a rite of passage for singers — everyone must record an “Ave.” Jazz it up or dress it down. And it’s a rite for musical audiences too, performed so often that people like to pretend the song bores them. Like to think they know the story of it. But they’re usually wrong — ask almost anyone on the street and they’ll tell you the piece is a song of worship, in Latin, when in fact it’s Schubert, and the words are German.
It’s not a prayer. It’s an appeal. A young woman, called the Lady of the Lake, asks the Virgin Mary for help and peace in a time of war. Families fighting one another, families perishing. And a man who loves the singing lady leaves for battle, realizing he will never hear her voice again. But the lady doesn’t sing for this warrior, she sings for her father, who has declined to fight and has therefore made himself terribly vulnerable. Hear for a maid a maiden’s prayer. And for a father hear a child.
We haven’t had very many fathers in my family, so maybe I’m not accustomed to them. What I hear is a girl crying for her mother. For a hand that soothed her in the night, and touched her cheek, and disappeared.
I look at Sara. She seems bored, or maybe just distracted. Where did you go? I do want to ask her. How on earth did you fill the time? But I think I missed my chance. Maybe I’m not supposed to know. Or maybe it’s not fate, but just the choice I made. Things happen just because we do them, she said. Sometimes.
The violinist reaches the end of the song and nods to Rick, seated beside her at a piano that I’m sure he had brought in especially for the occasion. He’s very particular about what he’ll play on, sometimes going to the trouble of tuning an instrument himself if he’s displeased with a damper or the tension in a wire. The two of them wait for a moment and I can hear them counting, getting into the same rhythm of notes per heartbeat. And then they begin to play together. The piano is the lake water. The violin plays the part of the wind in the trees.