pressing against her until she was forced to look back at him.
When she did, she saw a tear in his eyelashes. He wiped it with the back of his hand and shoved the ear covers back on.
Did he not want to hear her anymore? Had it hurt him?
Far from staring now, he was looking at his shoes, at the railing, at anything but her. After she had let him listen to her, after she had exposed that part of herself to him, he had nothing to say, not even a glance to give?
She handed him the notebook and the pen, and walked away without another written word.
Darya walked the hallways of the hospital for a long time after that, not sure where she was half the time. She walked through a cafeteria, and an atrium full of plants in large clay pots, and a hectic corridor with gurneys lining the walls. At 2:00 a.m., she realized that she was in a hallway in which all the rooms started with a 31. Sighing, she walked until she found room 3128 and peered through the window next to the door.
Her mother, with her now-scraggly red hair and yellow-tinged skin, lay in the bed, hooked up to an IV and a few monitors. Khali sat beside her mother with her head on the edge of the mattress, fast asleep. Resting against the wall was a violin case. For if Darya changed her mind, probably.
Not for the first time, Darya wondered what it was that made Khali so attached to their mother. Their father had told her once that their mother hadn’t started drinking until two years after Darya was born, when Khali was seven. There wasn’t an inciting incident as far as Khali knew—no great losses, or deaths, or arguments—but the strain of the world had weighed on their mother always, more than it weighed on other people. And she had cracked under that weight.
A sad story, maybe, but Darya did not feel particularly sympathetic. The world was terrible for everyone these days, and they still got up, got dressed, went to work, kept their families together.
It didn’t really matter, though, did it? It didn’t matter whether she felt sympathy or not. Khali had asked her for something. Khali had always been there for her. And Darya would give it to her.
She opened the door. The sound roused Khali from sleep, but not their mother. Khali stared at her sister like she was an apparition, and Darya supposed she did look like one, in a pale hospital gown, her hair half shaved, wandering in uncertainly. The door closed behind her.
She walked to the violin case and crouched over it to open it. Khali had probably brought the violin because it was so portable; she could not have known how perfect it was for this occasion. Darya had chosen it as her third instrument because it was so difficult for her. It seemed only fitting that she should play it on an occasion that would also be difficult for her.
Usually Hearkeners listened to death songs with a computer in hand instead of an instrument, to transpose the music so that it could be preserved and played later. Khali didn’t have a computer to bring, and neither did Darya, so the instrument would have to do.
She sat down in a chair opposite Khali, with their mother between them. Khali opened her mouth to speak, her eyes full of tears, and Darya pressed her finger to her lips. She didn’t want to hear Khali’s gratitude—it might make her too stubborn, might make her want to take back what she had already done.
Darya reached up and removed her ear covers. She put them on the floor and set the violin in her lap. She understood, then, why Christopher’s face had screwed up when he took his ear covers off. At first all she heard were sounds—clapping and clamping and stomping and banging, like a crazy person in a kitchen full of pots. She scowled for a few seconds as the sounds transformed into notes . . . into instruments.
And then the song of her mother’s dying came to life in her mind.
The notes were low and consistent, at first, like a cello solo—but not like a solo, more like a bass line. And then, arching above it was something high and sweet—painfully sweet—faster than the cellos—but not too fast, not frantic. Then the low notes and the high notes melded together into one melody, twisting around each other, straightening out in harmonies. She thought of the song she and her mother had sung in the kitchen. Her mother had had cake batter on her fingers.
Darya stared at her mother the way Christopher had stared at her,
The melody changed, turning darker. If it had had a flavor, it would have been unsweetened chocolate, bitter, smooth. Her mother’s eyes were on hers, clearer than they had been for the years that Darya lived with her, but bloodshot, ugly. She remembered the night she had awoken to her mother breaking plates in the kitchen, raging at their father for one reason or another. She felt a surge of anger.
But still the music went on, lifting again, swelling, louder. It was so loud Darya moved to plug her ears, but she couldn’t plug her ears against this song, she couldn’t block out the sound of her mother’s death. The sound of her ending.
Loud and pounding, a heartbeat contained in a song, low and high, vibrating in Darya’s head. Even if there had been a thousand symphonies playing alongside it, Darya still would have picked it out from the rest—it was insistent—she had to hear it—she picked up the violin and wedged it between her chin and her shoulder.
Darya didn’t know what to play first. There were too many competing melodies at work in this complex death song, hard to pick just one. Finally she isolated what seemed to be the dominant notes and began to play them. She had not been in school long enough to be good at this, but she remembered what she had learned: Listen first, and trust your fingers to play what you’ve just heard. Don’t listen to yourself; listen to the song.
Darya trusted her fingers. She played furiously, her eyes squeezed shut and her jaw clenched, as the song swelled again, the notes turning over and over each other. Her arms ached and her head throbbed but still she played, not for her mother and not for herself and not for Khali anymore, but because the song required her to play, to find its strongest moments and bring them to the surface so that someone else could hear them.
Her fingers slowed, then, finding the melody she had heard first, the low, persistent notes. They moved into the high, sweet notes, the notes that hit each other so hard she thought they might crack each other in half. They were weak like her mother was weak, sprawled on the couch in her nightgown—but beautiful like her mother, too. They were the smiles that surfaced in the afternoon, when her mother was more lucid, and the happy tears she cried over her daughter’s voice, and the light fingers that went through Darya’s hair as she brushed it on her better mornings.
And then the notes were low again, low and slow and barely changing, barely moving, a vague utterance in near solitude. They were the weight, the weight her mother bore, the world that crippled her.
The song, moving in Darya’s brain—melodic—dissonant—fast—slow—low—beautiful.
Then she felt tears on her face, and she threw the violin onto the bed and ran.
She ran back to her room. As she ran, she heard pieces of songs all around her and clapped her hands over her ears, but it did her no good. The world was
The nurse saw her on her way back in and grabbed her by the arm. “Where are your ear covers? Where have you been?”
Darya just shook her head. The nurse ran down the hall and returned a few seconds later, new ear covers in her hands. She shoved them over Darya’s ears, and all the music stopped. Relief flooded Darya’s body like cold water. The nurse steered her to her bed.
Darya crawled under the sheets, gathered her knees to her chest, and stared at the opposite wall.
She slept past noon. Khali came in to speak to her, even touched her hand lightly, but she pretended that she couldn’t feel it. She had done what her sister wanted, but she had not done it with a good heart; she had done it out of obligation, something she had always avoided. And she felt angry—angry with herself, for doing it, and angry with Khali, for making her feel like she had to, and angry at the death song itself, for refusing to leave her alone from the second she awoke.
Darya sat in bed for the rest of the day, eating small spoonfuls of flavored gelatin and watching the news report on an attack that had happened in Kansas City earlier that morning. She stared at the death tolls, numb.
