Side B

Mr. Lund had a machine for it.

He carried it in a leather case, like a doctor's bag, and when he opened it on the folding table it turned out to be a small gray player no bigger than a pack of cards, with a speaker the size of a coin and a pair of tiny knobs. It had been made, I think, when my mother was in high school. He lifted the micro-cassette out of its shell with a pair of tweezers, examined the tape through a magnifying glass, rubbed the spool gently with a cotton swab, and fitted it into the slot with a click.

"I'll play it once," he said. "I'd like to digitize it afterward, with your permission. The tape's very old. It might not survive the second pass."

"Play it," said my mother.

"Are you sure you wish to hear it here?"

"I'm sure."

She had not let go of my hand. She hadn't, I realized, since the grave. Her fingers were frozen. Her face above the collar of her coat was white as paper, and the tip of her nose had gone red with the cold, and I saw a muscle moving at the corner of her jaw, steadily, like a pulse. Ansel stood behind us with his hands in his pockets. Nobody had moved.

I looked at the little machine.

It was gray. It was ordinary. There was a window in the top, and behind the window I could see a spool, a wheel of brown tape no larger than a button, and a smaller wheel beside it, empty. When he pressed the key they would begin to turn. And my grandmother, who was in the ground, whom I had last seen in a hospice bed that smelled of bleach and lilies, whose hand had been cold and light as a bird's, would say something to me.

For Maren and June.

I had not known she knew my name was going to matter.

Mr. Lund pressed the key.

…

At first there was nothing but the hiss.

It was a different hiss from the other tape. It was deeper, closer, with a faint roaring undertone like the sea in a shell. A clock ticked in the background, an old loud kitchen clock. A faucet dripped. Somewhere a window had been left open and the wind was making a thin sound in the frame.

Then a chair scraped, and a breath was drawn.

"All right," said my grandmother.

I closed my eyes.

I had not realized how much I had forgotten. It had not been so very long. But the voice was in my head like a coat in a closet, and the real one, rough and low and a little amused, came out of that little coin of a speaker and hit me in the chest. All right. She had always said it before she said anything difficult. She had said it before she told me about my grandfather's death and before she taught me to knit and before she sat me down, once, in her kitchen, and told me where babies come from.

"All right, Maren. All right, June. I don't know which of you will hear this first. I'm hoping it's the pair of you together, because I'd like to think of you together. It's a comfort to me. I'm an old woman and I'm sitting in a kitchen and I have a very long way to go."

She stopped. The clock ticked.

"I'm going to tell you a thing, and I'd ask you to let me tell it without stopping. It's been a long time since I said it. I'm not sure I'll get through if I'm interrupted."

My mother made a small sound.

"I died once."

…

The wind went through the pines.

I heard it. I heard the stones around us creak in the cold, one by one, and a crow somewhere, and the soft sigh of the grass. But the voice from the machine filled the whole of the hillside, and everything else seemed to stand back to make room for it.

"Twenty-four years ago. In our kitchen. It was a Tuesday night in March, and it was raining. Walter was at the table with his books. Maren was upstairs. She had a cold, and she'd gone to bed early with a library book and a bottle of ginger ale."

My mother's hand went rigid in mine.

"There was a knock at the back door. Two men. Polite. One of them wore a hat, and I knew him, I'd seen him at the Christmas party. They said they'd come about the audit. They said it wouldn't take a minute. And Walter stood up. He was a mild man, your father, Maren, he never in his life raised his voice, and he went to the door and he said, 'Gentlemen, it's late.'" A pause. "And one of them took out a gun."

"I was at the stove. I had a pot of water on. I don't remember deciding. I remember a noise, and a smell, and my own legs moving, and the feeling of my husband's back against my arms. I got in front of him. That's all. That's the whole thing. I got in front of him, and I thought: not him. Take me."

The clock ticked.

"They took me."

…

I think I stopped breathing.

I could feel my mother shaking, beside me, and I could feel the cold of the ground coming up through my shoes. I looked at the little speaker, and at Mr. Lund's gloved hand resting on the table, and at the green baize and the lamp and the gray sky, and everything seemed far away and very sharp.

"I woke at the stove," said Ida. "A minute before. The pot was just beginning to steam. Walter was at the table, writing, and he looked up and said, 'Ida, you're white as a sheet,' and I said, 'I'm all right.' And I knew. I knew exactly what was about to happen. I could see the man's face. I could hear the knock."

"It was a Tuesday. It was raining. The clock said nine fifty-one."

"I knew the rule. I didn't know it then, but I knew it in my body. I'd died for him, and I'd come back, and I had one minute. And I did everything right. I took the gun from the drawer. I sent Maren's father out the front door in his slippers. I locked the back. I called the police." Her voice broke, and steadied. "And I could not save him."

"They found him two streets away. They'd been watching the house. They didn't need the kitchen. A car came out of nowhere on a wet road. It was very quick."

My mother put her free hand over her mouth.

"That's how it works," said Ida. "I've had twenty-four years to think about it. You can only change what you know. I knew the knock, and the men, and the gun. I didn't know about the car. I didn't know that the one who wore the hat was only the second in the chain. I came back, and I couldn't see far enough."

…

"I want you to understand what I did after," said the voice. "Because I'm not proud, and I'm not sorry, and I'd like you to hear both."

"I went on. I put on a black dress and I stood in the rain and I let a man in a hat tell my daughter it was an accident. I let her believe it. She was fourteen. She was standing on the stairs in her pajamas and I looked up and saw her face, and I thought, if I tell her, they'll come for her. And I said, 'Thank you.' And I shut the door."

My mother was crying. She did not make a sound. The tears simply ran, down both cheeks, one after another, and fell off her chin onto her coat.

"I took a job. Not for the money. I took it at the county annex, a clerk's job, in the Records office, because that was where your father's trail went. I thought, I'll find out why. I'll find out who sent them. I'll keep my head down and my eyes open. And I did. It took me three years to see the first of it. It took me ten to see it all."

"I signed some papers I should not have. I'm not going to tell you which. You'll find them. I told myself I was learning the thing from the inside. I told myself I was one old woman against a county, and I'd do what I had to. Some of that was true, and some of it wasn't."

"And then, twenty-one years ago, a boy walked in off the street, in a stolen coat."

I looked at Ansel.

He stood a little behind my mother with his hands out of his pockets and his head bowed, and his shoulders were shaking. He did not look up.

"He said his name was Ansel," said Ida. "He said he wanted his file. I looked at him, and I saw something. Not in his face. In the way he held himself, as if the air around him had a hole in it. He told me, later, over a thermos of soup, in the dark, in a drawer. He told me about a fire. He said, 'I woke up the minute before.' And I thought: I know that. I know that. I thought I was the only one in the world."

"And that's when I knew the rule."

…

"It's simple. It's the simplest thing in the world. Whoever dies in the place of someone they love comes back. Once. To the minute before. And they remember who did it."

"I never told your mother. I never told anyone. For twenty-four years I carried it, and I don't know why. I think I was ashamed. I think I thought I'd failed. I'd come back, and I'd been given a chance, a whole minute, and I hadn't been enough." A long breath. "I've decided I was wrong. I wasn't a failure. I was a woman with one minute and a gun and a very large county. That's all."

"And I've decided something else."

"June."

The sound of my own name startled me so badly that I flinched.

"June, I'm going to speak to you now. I hope you'll forgive me. I'm speaking to you as I'd speak to a girl across a table, which is, I suppose, how I think of you. You are thirteen years old, or you are younger, and you may not have heard this part. I don't know. I'm an old woman, and I'm making a tape.

"I know you, you see. I've known you since you were four. I've watched you in the garden, and at the table, and in the back of the car. I've watched you take a thing that wasn't yours and give it back. I've watched you step in front of a smaller child. You do it without a thought. It's what you are. I'd give a great deal for you to be different."

"And I've a dreadful feeling in my bones."

My mother had gone still.

"I think you'll be asked," said Ida. "One day. I don't know how. I pray it doesn't come. But I think someone will be in danger, and you'll be in the room, and you won't stop to count. And if that happens, if you ever hear this, then I want you to know."

The clock ticked. The wind moved in the frame.

"You are not the first."

…

"You are not the first, and you don't have to be the last. There was a woman in a kitchen. There was a boy in a drawer. There are others, in nursing homes and bus stations and God knows where. We are a small, strange, tired, foolish company. We don't know each other. We are each of us entirely alone."

"Don't be."

"Don't let anybody make you carry dying alone. Not a man in a hat, not a prosecutor, not a priest. Not even your mother, God love her. Not me. If you've died once, you've done the most difficult thing a person can do, and you did it for love. It's not a secret. It's not a shame. It's not a burden to be carried in the dark. Put it down. Find someone who knows. Sit with them. Say it out loud."

"That's all I have."

She was silent for a moment. Then, so low that it was hardly a breath, with a trace in it of the old dry laughter:

"And Maren. The scar on my head is from the ladder. I know you always wondered. It's only a ladder. Some things are only what they are."

The tape clicked.

The hiss went on a moment, a thin gray ribbon of nothing, and then it too stopped, and the little wheels went still. Mr. Lund, with a tiny gesture of respect, bowed his bald head. Somewhere very far away a train blew its whistle, long and low.

…

My mother was on her knees.

I hadn't seen her fall. She was kneeling in the frozen grass at the foot of my grandfather's stone, with her face in her hands, rocking back and forth, and a sound was coming out of her that I had never heard from a person. It was not loud. It was a long low wail, drawn out and broken, with all the years in it. She cried the way a person does who has been holding her breath for twenty-four years and has been told she may let it out.

I knelt beside her.

I put my arms around her. She turned and clung to me, hard, with her face against my shoulder, and I felt the whole of her body shaking, and I held on. I held on with every bone. Ansel knelt on her other side and laid his hand on her back, and for a long time nobody said a word. The wind went by. The crow called. Mr. Lund turned discreetly to the tripod and busied himself with the lens.

I looked at my grandfather's stone over my mother's head.

He kept the books.

I thought of a woman at a stove, with a pot of water just beginning to steam. I thought of her face, turned to the door. I thought of a girl in a bathroom, with a cloth over her mouth, saying the same thing in her head: not her. Take me.

I thought: we were never alone. She was here the whole time.

I thought of something she had said in the dark, a thousand years ago, with her fingertip on my spine. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

"She knew," I said.

My voice was small. My mother lifted her head.

"What?"

"She knew, Mom." I could hardly speak. "Grandma knew what I'd carry."