Broken River

By the time Irina has walked into the guitar shop with her gig bag strapped on her back, she has already mastered the chords D, G, C, and E minor; has tried, with some success, to teach herself tablature; has haltingly strummed her way through some Beatles songs using transcriptions she has found online; and has tried her hand at song-writing. She is feeling quite pleased with herself and is looking forward to the moment when Jasn says to her, “Okay, kid, let’s learn some chords,” and Irina says, “Chords, you say?” and bangs out her own personally written song, complete with lyrics. Bam!

“Aw, you can learn that stuff off the internet,” her teacher says with a dismissive and oddly dramatic wave of the hand, like he’s trying to dispel a cloud of smoke from a joint. Irina suspects Jasn smokes a great many joints because he smells quite powerfully of them and because he treats her like she’s about forty and they are in a band together. “If you wanna learn some really tasty licks, you need to know scales.”

“I don’t think I need to do that. I’ll just play chords, like Bob Dylan.”

Jasn appears appalled. “Who the hell told you to say it that way? It ain’t dialin’, like you’re makin’ a phone call! It’s dillin’, like you’re, I dunno—”

“Ha! Exactly!” He holds up his hand as though for a high five, so she gives him one. “Anyway, even a rhythm guitarist needs to know scales, kid. There’s notes in between the chords, and the notes come from the scales. Trust Daddy J. Okay!”

He takes his own guitar in hand—they are plugged into the same very large, very smooth-sounding amplifier—and begins to instruct her in the G-major scale, since that was the key whose chords she admitted she had already learned. Sometimes her fingers don’t seem to reach, and Jasn removes one from the fretboard with his own long, yellow fingers and places it in the correct spot. She is surprised that she doesn’t mind being touched by him. He is the least threatening and intimidating adult she has ever encountered. By the end of the lesson she can limp through the G scale with a reasonable degree of confidence and is already thinking about which of the notes she has learned will go in between which chords of her new song.

The lesson’s almost over. Her father will be back shortly. She says, “Hey, I wrote a song, you wanna hear it?”

“Excellent,” Irina says, then fishes from her jeans pocket the paper she has written the words on. They are an expression, of course, of her obsession with the Geary murders, which have dominated her thoughts for weeks; she could easily write a hundred more songs on the subject, based on a hundred little details mined from the CyberSleuths forums. But she doesn’t yet know enough chords to keep from writing the same song over and over. She unfolds the paper, looks around for a place to put it, sees none. “Hold this, okay?” she says.

Jasn holds up the paper in the air between them, and Irina draws a breath and sings:

Ohhh, poor little Samantha Gee

You poor little orphan of Route Forty-Three

Ohhh, Samantha Gee, where did you go!

Samantha Gee, I think that I knoooowwww

Samantha Gee, I think that I knoooowww

You came back to fiiiiind

Oh, you came back to find something you left behind

Walkin’ around, down that lonely street

I’m the one you were destined to meet

You’ll be glad you met me, Samantha Geeeee

“The route number is fictional,” Irina says quickly, to head off criticism. “It’s sort of a blues song.”

She plays it again, and this time Jasn plays along, adding a kind of bassy part under her singing and inserting these little melodies— these must be the tasty licks!—at the end of each line. It’s so good! It sounds like a totally professional song. She only wishes she could sing better. But Jasn says, “You keep singing, kid, you’ve got a good natural voice for blues.”

“Don’t patronize me,” she says without thinking. It’s what her mother tells friends who claim to like her books.

This makes Jasn laugh like a hyena. “I wouldn’t dare, kid! It’s the truth! I mean, you sound like you’re ten or whatever—”

“I’ll practice my scales, I swear. Those little noodles you were making are cool.”

She likes this guy. She likes his droopy mustache and goofy enthusiasm. She likes that he calls her “kid,” even though it’s probably because, like many adults, he isn’t able to retain her slightly unusual name. She has been called Helena, Irene, Ileanna, Irma, Ellen, and India. One teacher at her old school always called her Caroline, but that’s because a girl with that name used to sit in her seat. Anyway, it’s time to go. She and Jasn emerge from the practice room, and the mean girl behind the counter, who has dyed hair and about thirty tattoos and does not ever seem to smile, is nevertheless smiling at Irina’s father.

“Hey, little buddy!” says the mean girl, about half an octave above her regular voice. “You sounded awesome in there!”

“I’m twelve,” Irina says for the second time in five minutes. There’s no worse age, when you get down to it; you’re not, in any sense, a teenager, and so are not given allowances for such traits as sullenness and not wanting to get out of bed. You’re supposed to still be energetic and cheerful, even if you are, at heart, a grumpy and basically lazy person. And meanwhile you have to endure the trials of puberty, one of which is repeatedly hearing adults utter the word puberty, the most horrible word in the English language. It contains all the awful words: pubes, beauty, boobs, pretty. Über. Über pretty booby pubes! “Are you noticing any changes in your body, Irma?” the dumb doctor wanted to know at this year’s checkup. Yeah, I’m noticing it wants to run screaming out of this office.

“She could start a band,” Jasn says, clapping her on the shoulder. “A few more scales and she could play lead guitar in Hubble Bubble!”

“Classic rock covers,” the clerk says, recovering her former bitchiness. It is embarrassingly obvious that she’s trying to impress Irina’s father, who, to his credit, seems less than receptive to it, even though the girl is kind of sexy. Indeed, Irina’s father is now actually, literally licking his lips. Maybe they are just dry. He also smells weird and has ever since he met her at art class to walk her over here.

“Yeah, rock and roll, man!” he says, idiotically, handing Jasn twenty bucks.

“Catch you next time, Karl,” the clerk says, with a wink in her voice. “See ya later, Rinny!”

Rinny! Her father must have referred to her this way in the girl’s presence. But that doesn’t mean the girl can. Is nothing sacred? Suddenly Irina feels as though everything is going to pieces. Too much that used to be certain is suddenly confusing and new and not necessarily very good.

Jasn is speaking to her now: “Okay, kid, bring me your best stuff next week, got it?” But Irina has already hitched the guitar up onto her shoulder and is pushing her way out the door and into the overcast and mildly stinky fall day. She feels bad for letting the real world seize and dispirit her so quickly—at the very least she should have been happy to see her dad. But when he emerges, slowly, from the guitar store, drawing a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and a cigarette out of the pack, and says, “Hey, man, lemme smoke this, okay?” she pretends not to know him and instead leans up against the brick wall of the abandoned storefront next door and pulls out her iPod. She can get a weak Wi-Fi signal from the guitar shop ($uper$hredders is the password) and uses it to Instagram a fortune-cookie fortune she has found adhering wetly to the sidewalk: TODAY MIGHT BE THE BEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE. Thanks, cookie. Her father smokes placidly six feet away, thumbing at his phone; he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and mops his face with it. To distract herself from her profound disgust with the handkerchief and the concept of the handkerchief, she opens her email app and reads, once again, the email correspondence she has been engaging in with her new friend—or acquaintance, really but they are going to be close, Irina just knows it—Sam.

From: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

To: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

Remember me??

From: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

To: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

Dear Irina

Hi, yes, I remember you. It was nice meeting you at the Dairy Queen. You said something about knowing something about me, but like I said I don’t think we have met before? I am curious though, so here is an email like you asked for.

Your friend Sam

From: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

To: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

Hi Sam I am glad you wrote to me! Yes its true I have SUSPICIONS about you. I believe you have an identity besides the one you think, maybe you don’t even realize you’re somebody else, but I think you have been in Broken River before and you’re back to try and learn something about your past and I think I can help you. To fill you in about who I am my father is a sculptor and my mother is a writer, and we live by the state forest in a house that I think if you saw it would bring back memories of your past. I’m from Brooklyn which is part of New York City but I don’t miss it. I’m home schooled which mostly means reading whatever I want and sometimes taking a test altho I have not had any of the tests yet. Write back if you know what I mean or want to know more

Sincerely Irina

From: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

To: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

Dear Irina

Well I definitely don’t want to disappoint you but like I said I’m from Buffalo and I’m here because of my brother. To be completely honest he is in the jail. He’ll be out before long, so I’m just helping out my uncle and working at Denny’s, and then I guess I’ll see what happens when my brother gets out. My life is pretty boring and I don’t get what you mean by me being somebody else. Though like I said I’m kind of curious.

Sam

From: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

To: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

I’ll be frank, I think you are a girl called Samantha Geary who’s parents were MURDERED in 2005 in my house and who disappeared. Samantha/you was 5 then and now would be 17 which I think is about your age. If you want to know more lets meet.

From: lee.samuel.fike@yahoo.com

To: irinaofthedeep@gmail.com

Irina,

I’m 19 and my parents are alive as far as I know. My mom definitely is, anyway. My Sam is from Samuel, not Samantha, because of a dead uncle. For some reason I have boys names haha. You’re an interesting girl though. Maybe I will see you around.

Sam

Irina knows a brush-off when she hears it, but there’s that last sentence, Maybe I will see you around. It could be politeness, or it could be an invitation. It could be an unconscious invitation. Irina is going to take her up on it, one way or another. She pokes Sam’s email address to add it to her contacts and then adds a photo: the one she surreptitiously took while standing in line at the Dairy Queen. It’s grainy and smeary, because she had to zoom in, and Sam’s face is half-obscured because she was bending down to her ice cream cone. She looks at the new contact card she has made with a certain amount of pride—A friend! I made a friend!—and then, after a moment’s thought, replaces the photo with her internet-swiped Samantha Geary yearbook shot. They look similar, there’s no question. Maybe Samantha was actually seven when the murders happened. Her parents were probably druggies or something, maybe they probably couldn’t keep track! Or maybe Sam is lying a little bit, to appear more grown-up?

Irina got a feeling when she saw her sitting there on the guardrail next to the Dairy Queen, working her way down her vanilla cone. She had a feeling Sam was not an ordinary girl, so she lifted up her iPod and pretended to check her own hair in the selfie cam while in fact taking the photo. The line was long and the weather was hot and she became increasingly concerned that Mysterious Vanilla Cone Girl would finish and leave before she, Irina, even had her own ice cream in hand. But in the end, there was time not only to sidle on over with her own vanilla cone (for solidarity) but to say hi, compare personal facts (both new in town, both enjoy ice cream, etc.), and exchange names.

When Sam said her name was Sam, Irina’s body turned into pure electricity, and she said, “Samantha Geary!?” and Sam said, “No, sorry, Fike,” and Irina said, “Samantha Fike?” and Sam said, “No, just Sam,” and then they stared awkwardly at each other for a couple of seconds, Sam appearing amused and alarmed, Irina squealing inwardly, her toes madly tapping the sidewalk. “But you’re from here originally,” Irina said, and Sam said “No, sorry,” and Irina said “But you’re here now,” and Sam laughed and said “Sure, you could say that, I guess.” Irina gave Sam her email address, which Sam did not write down but did repeat out loud, and Sam gave Irina her email address, which Irina typed immediately into her iPod. “I will email you!” Irina said, and Sam laughed again and said okay, and Irina liked her so much, she likes her so much. And now, a bunch of emails later, she likes her even more.

“Father,” Irina says now, loudly, to try to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Are we going?”

The two of them stand there, eight feet apart, leaning against the crappy-ass guitar shop wall. Irina stares up at the crumbling hotel facade across the street and tries to think of something, anything, that will keep her from crying. So she thinks about the comic-book shop near their apartment in Brooklyn, the one run by the angry little man with the big white dog. She never liked it, though she pretended to Father that she did because he liked taking her there. She isn’t into comics, she didn’t like the angry man, she doesn’t like dogs. And the kids—and adults, for that matter—who were always hanging around in there frightened her.

Yet, in spite of what she told Sam, suddenly she misses it. The emotion she was trying to suppress is attaching itself to it. It is a real place, it’s a place she used to go into because it was there, and it has carried on without her! Irina’s plan has backfired. She is going to cry! She is looking forward to this aspect of childhood being over—this thing where you can’t control your emotions and they aren’t even about the things you really care about.

She can’t help it—she lets out a single strangled squawk, and then she is crying and crying.

A moment later she feels her father’s arm around her shoulder and he’s saying, “Jesus, kid, what the hell.”

The arm disappears. She can hear his back cracking as he stands up straight. “Okay, yeah,” he says. “Sorry, let’s go.”

Her chest is still hitching as they walk back past the arts center—it seems like years since the painting class she was just at—and to the car. They get in it and pull out of the space and some guy honks and her father hits the brakes hard and swears. Their heads bobble back and forth. “Sorry, Rinny.”

She realizes that she’s mad at him. Maybe it’s the nickname. He’s overusing it today, probably because the guitar store clerk liked it. Her mother doesn’t, and Irina doesn’t particularly, either. But she likes that he devised it for her, and she has imagined that it’s the kind of thing her future husband might call her, if she ever gets married.

But no, it’s not the nickname, or even that he told it to that stupid girl. It’s the smell. He smells like an ashtray in a gym in a department store. She looks over at him, and he’s sweating and clenching his teeth as he flips off the guy who honked at him and then jerks the car out into traffic. “Goddammit,” he says, and then he wipes his forehead with his hideous snotcloth.

She can’t hold back. “Do you blow your nose into that thing? You blow your nose and then you wipe it all over your face?”

He hazards a glance at it as he shoves it into his jacket. “Ahhh, yeah, but … it’s in a different part of … yeah. I guess that’s kinda disgusting.”

Unexpectedly, he gets mad. “Hey, man, you don’t get to tell me what’s acceptable and what’s not,” he says.

They drive home in almost total silence. At some point he says, “What’d you practice,” and she says, “Wouldn’t you like to know,” and immediately feels bad, almost worse than before. She manages not to cry again. When they get home she runs to the stairs, passing, along the way, a duo of worker dudes who are dismantling a corner of the living room that has succumbed to blossoms of blue-black mold. The men smell like cigarettes, gross ones, grosser than Father’s weed. In her room, she takes clean clothes out of her dresser and heads for the shower. She can hear the clickety-clack of her mother’s laptop down the hall: doubtless she has her earbuds in and can’t hear, otherwise she would come out and ask how the classes went. Irina doesn’t want to talk about how the classes went. Adults buy you something, anything, they think they deserve detailed reviews and progress reports. Just pony up and leave us alone! She slips through the bathroom door, locks herself in. Then she runs the water and gets undressed while it heats up. She wants to wash Broken River off herself, the tears, the car ride, her father’s weird smell. She is naked when a knock comes on the door. It’s Father, loudly whispering. “Hey, what are you doing in there, man?”

“I’m taking a shower,” she loud-whispers back, because that’s what you do.

“So do I! Which is why I’m doing it!” That was less a whisper than a quiet shout.

“Too freaking bad!” Irina actually shouts, full throated and genuinely angry, and she gets under the water and flings the curtain shut. Through the wall behind the faucet handles she feels, rather than hears, the sound of her mother’s wheeled office chair being pushed back, then feels a door opening and closing, and then a knock.

She goes away, and Irina cries for a little while longer under the hot water. She is aware that it will soon stop being hot. She washes quickly, then continues to stand there, making sure she uses up every drop so that her father will have to wait. When the hot water is gone, she gets out, dries off, and puts on her clean clothes. She enters her bedroom and closes and locks the door. The smell here is a comfort—familiar, a little rank due to feet and unwashed laundry, a little piney because of the open window and the close-hanging boughs, and a little musty, on account of the mold blossoms that have appeared behind the headboard, which she has not had the heart to tell her parents about. Also, she kind of likes the mold blossoms. They make the wall soft—they feel alive to the touch, yielding and slightly clammy. She climbs onto her bed, shoving aside the laptop her mother, as promised, has bought for her, and reaches behind the headboard to stroke the dark patches. Her fingers are dusted with spores, and she gives them a disconsolate sniff.

She opens up the laptop and dies a little bit inside. It’s been a few weeks since she has added anything to her novel. When she got the computer, she decided she ought to be writing on it, so she typed everything she had so far into a word processor file, changing things a little as she went. Then she tried writing new bits. But it wasn’t the same. She missed her notebook. So she got out the notebook and tried writing in that, but it didn’t feel like the novel was in the notebook anymore, it was in the laptop now, and so she couldn’t write in the notebook, either. After that, she just didn’t feel like writing anything, and she put the whole Quayside project on hiatus.

Now, though, she opens up the Quayside file and starts typing. She has her boy protagonist, Aiden (a name she picked at random; she doesn’t like it; she’s going to change it) meet a girl called Kimmifer (they all have weird names in Quayside) who has amnesia and is trying to discover her past. She’s older than him, seventeen, so she has just started wearing the bustle—until then, she just wore regular pants. She is very frustrated, she can’t do the things she likes to do, and her mother tells her she’ll get used to it, all women do, and she’s a woman now. But she hates it. It is impeding her range of motion. She keeps having to ask men for help with stuff—getting into water taxis or reaching for a birdcage in a birdcage store, which is another thing grown women in Quayside are supposed to be into. (Privately, Kimmifer really does like birdcages.) Aiden (ugh, that really has to go) suggests they take a water taxi down to the Quayside Department of Records, which he knows about from his research into trying to get back to Brooklyn. She agrees, and of course he has to help her into the cab, and he gets very excited touching her hand, although it feels sort of wrong somehow to feel that way. (Irina’s thinking is that she is actually his long-lost sister? which will have to be written into the opening chapters somehow. But in a subtle way, so that it isn’t obvious the moment Kimmifer arrives on the scene that she is the sister. Irina is aware that she is ripping this off from Star Wars, but Star Wars probably ripped it off from something else, so no big deal.)

There: she did it. She worked on her novel. The words are on the page now, they’re real. So why do they feel fake? Why does she feel like a fraud? Would anybody else notice the difference between the fraudulent words and the real words? Would the Irina of three years ago, or of three years from now? Is this what a real writer feels like all the time—unsure if she is real? She hears voices—Mother speaking to the repair guys. The phrases “temporary fix,” “probably come back,” “could be everywhere,” float up the stairs. She could ask her mother this question, but even the question itself feels fake. She closes the word processor with a couple of angry keystrokes, and the word bad escapes her lips. She opens her browser up to the Geary thread.

Not much new stuff, although smoking_jacket is at it, again promising to contact the new owners of the house about having a look around. Irina has been waiting for this to happen. Maybe it already has and Mother or Father has declined to let smoking_jacket come. Or maybe they have said yes and they are just waiting for the right moment—that is, when she, Irina, is not at home. At some point she should come clean to them about knowing everything about the murders. She can handle it, after all—she has not only been handling it, she has been enjoying it! But something is holding her back. Maybe even her parents don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t handle it, given the problems that they have been going through. Let the murders, and CyberSleuths, be hers alone.

Now she does something impulsive. She opens up a new-post window and types, I think that I have found Samantha Geary. I know her name. She moved far away after the killings but now is back in the area. I entend to protect her identity and privcy but here is a photo of her. I asked her if she was her and she did not say no. The dates match up. I think she is hopeing to solve the mystery of her parent’s deaths.

Irina uploads the Dairy Queen photo, making sure there are no details in it that would identify Sam or where she is standing. Then she spell-checks the text and corrects intend, privacy, and hoping. Then she hits POST.

If she expected an adrenaline rush, and she admits to herself that she did, it doesn’t arrive. There’s just a silence as the post appears on her screen. She refreshes the page a couple of times over several minutes, and nobody has responded. Well—maybe nobody will believe her. She can live with that; she knows the truth! It will out, eventually. Is that how you say that: the truth will out? It doesn’t sound right.

Irina sits in silence for a few minutes, refreshing the browser page, hoping for a response. From down the hall comes the quiet clackety-clack of Mother working on her novel. It makes Irina feel guilty about not working on hers. Then the clacketying stops, Mother’s office chair creaks, and a response appears on the screen, from smoking_jacket: Interesting, if true.

Irina is too shocked to react at first. Walking in is not done. Mother comes across the room and flops down with a groan on the bed beside Irina, stretches out her legs and crosses one over the other, squeezes her hands in between her knees. “What are you working on?”

Irina glances down at her laptop. The blurry photo of Sam is right there on the screen, beside the name Samantha Geary. She snaps the laptop shut. Guiltily!

Her mother pauses, staring at the space where the browser page was. That didn’t look like your novel, Irina expects her to say, but instead, after a little grunt of acknowledgment, she says, “You said you’d been having trouble after switching to the computer.”

“Good. You need to have problems and then solve them, if you’re going to be a novelist.”

“What do you want,” Irina says, perhaps a bit too nastily, perhaps annoyed with herself for wanting to lean against Mother, whose bony shoulder is right there.

There’s a pause. Mother cracks her toes. “Your father is … did something happen? In Broken River?”

Another long pause, during which Irina considers slipping out from under the covers and escaping to the kitchen. But Mother says, “Sorry, baby. I don’t think it has anything to do with you,” and her tired voice induces in Irina another wave of longing. “I mean, I’m sure it doesn’t.”

Mother opens her mouth, then closes it again without speaking. It gives Irina a chill. It’s like something a ghost would do.

“It’s not like I want to move back,” Irina goes on, lying. “I just want to visit. And go to our places. I miss the Sandwich Dungeon. I miss Grawlixes Comics, even the jerky guy and the dog, even though I don’t like it. And WORD Brooklyn. There’s no bookstore in Broken River.”

“I looked it up. It was called the Book Nook. It’s out of business. You can still see the shelves and whatnot through the window.”

“It was probably no good anyway because it had a stupid name and it’s full of those wire spinning display things that always have romances or Jesusy things on them.”

Irina’s trying to sound hard, but her mother laughs. “You’re probably right. Okay, sure. We should go back. Maybe I’ll have a draft of this book soon and will have to meet with my agent—maybe you could come with me. We can see a show. We’ll take pictures of Times Square, like tourists.”

And like that, Irina forgives her for … whatever it was she was mad about. “Yes! That would be excellent. Is Father invited?”

She has said it without thinking. Of course Father is not supposed to go to New York. And Irina is not supposed to know that. And she has accidentally behaved as though she doesn’t, even though she does. The layers of regret are piling up. Her mother seems to consider for a moment, then quietly says, “If you want.”

“Maybe just you and me would be good,” Irina says, and Mother’s body relaxes.

Mother kisses the top of her head and gets up from the bed. Or tries to. She kind of convulses instead, and a small sound escapes her, a little squeak. Then she draws a deep breath and slowly peels herself off the mattress. This series of motions gives Irina a chill, though she doesn’t understand why.

This gets her mother’s attention. She’s standing beside the bed, pressing a hand to her spine, curving herself backward like a blade of grass in a wind.

Irina says, “When I was fighting with Sylvie, I got pains in my jaw and shoulders, like, all the time.”

For a second she looks like she’s going to respond, but in the end she just nods. She goes to the doorway, steps into the hall. Looks back.

“But seriously,” she says. “What’s that you were looking at, on your laptop?”

Irina is left with a complicated series of feelings: mild sadness that Mother has left the room; relief that their conversation is over; irritation that it was Mother, not she, who broke contact; annoyance at the complexities of adult existence in general and her parents’ in particular; puzzlement at the parental intent in this whole encounter; and a niggling feeling of dissatisfaction, as if they were supposed to have accomplished something, or reached some agreement, or solved some problem, when in fact they have not. Was it her fault? Is there work she’s supposed to be doing, as Child in Chief, that she has neglected? She squeezes her eyes shut and tips her head back and takes deep, deep breaths through her nose, and hums something in a minor key. And then she’s through it.

Irina considers returning to CyberSleuths to see if anyone else has responded, but no: once she makes a habit of that kind of behavior, there will be no end to it. Instead she picks up her guitar to practice her scales.

She likes unamplified electric guitar: it’s private, as much feel as sound. She plays all the chords she knows, in a random order. Each one vibrates differently against her body. Each one seems to touch some different interior part of her. She starts making up chords now, just random fingerings, to see how they make her feel.

And then one of them makes her feel something very specific and strange. It is the feeling of being watched. And not watched as in monitored, like there’s a hidden camera and somebody somewhere is observing her on a screen. The watcher is here in the room with her. A presence. A thing without form or motivation but with a consciousness. It isn’t evil, but it is scary. Something is watching her.

She is startled—so much so that her body jerks and she drops the guitar. The headstock dips and bumps into her laptop, and she cries out and snatches the instrument back up and examines the computer. There’s a scratch on the case, a little scuff, but it isn’t cracked or anything.

Irina looks around the room. It’s just her room, that’s all. The sun’s low in the sky and very bright, and the shadows of branches are moving against the far wall. Soon she will be called downstairs for dinner. She hears voices, Mother’s and Father’s, and soon Father’s footsteps sound on the stairs and the bathroom door opens and closes. Water runs. Irina’s sense of this presence is draining away. It was here, she’s sure of it. The chord, it was the chord that did it, and she tries to work out what the notes were—where she’d placed her fingers. She tries several combinations, but they’re all wrong. It’s hopeless. She isn’t going to get it.

The experience has left Irina with a sense, strangely enough, of calm. She lays the guitar down where her mother was sitting. She shuts her eyes and listens to the vigorous splashing and thumping of her father’s shower. She listens to the breeze moving the branches outside. She’s going to sleep now—she’ll sleep until dinner. She sends her thoughts out to the thing: Watch over me. It isn’t here anymore, but perhaps it can hear her. Father’s shower has combined with the wind, and now there is a sizzling from below, from the kitchen, where her mother is cooking, and the distant sound of traffic from the road and the creek as it runs over and around rocks. It’s the sound of the world, and the thing watching her is part of it, and this feels like the solution to a problem: that’s why the chord revealed the thing, it’s because it’s made of sound! It’s this feeling, the feeling of the problem presenting itself and being solved, that tips her over into dreamless sleep.

8