Who Answers at 3:07

The letters came back one at a time, like birds.

They came through the winter, in plain envelopes, in all kinds of handwriting. Some were neat. Some were scrawled. One was typed on a typewriter, with a smudged ribbon and a cigarette burn in the corner. One was a single sheet of lined notebook paper, torn at the edge, with a boot print on it, as if it had been dropped in a street. They arrived at Whitcomb's office and she forwarded them, in a manila envelope, every Friday, with a note clipped to the front. Mom opened them at the kitchen table. I sat across from her and watched her face.

Yes. Tell me. — Camille, in Akron, who had been tying her shoes by the door when Dr. Raman rang the bell, and had said, oh, I thought you might be the people from the news.

Yes. Tell me. And then I'd like to meet her. — Rafael, in Toledo.

Please don't. — An old man in a driveway in Columbus. I am seventy-one years old. I have a wife who loves me and a dog that is afraid of thunder. I am happy. Thank you for asking. He had ticked the third box with a firm black cross. I watched my mother read it three times. She laid it down on the table with great care, as one lays down a thing that is hot, and she said, "That one's the best."

"Why?"

"Because he got to say it."

By the end of January there were twelve. By the middle of February, thirteen. Nine had asked for the truth. Two had asked to meet their families. Two had asked for nothing: the old man in Columbus, and a woman who signed a name at the bottom, her own, and underlined it. And one of the nine, the last, the one in Duluth, had sent a letter that was not a letter at all, only a single line in a trembling hand across a blank page.

Is it too late?

Ansel had answered it. He had sat for three hours on a woman's sofa and told her that it was not.

…

He found Nell in March.

I think I should say that again. He found Nell. He did not tell us beforehand. He had been looking, I understood afterward, for twenty-one years, in the way a person looks who is not allowed to look: a name in a phone book, a face on a bus, a birthday card he sent to a post office box in a town in Kentucky that always came back. He had found her in the end the simplest way. She had written to him.

It was on cream paper, with a bakery's name on the top. Penny Loaf Bakery, Louisville. She had seen the story. She had read his name in the paper, and she had read, in the small print, the name he had been given at thirteen. Daniel. She'd called the number in the article and left a message. My name is Eleanor Pike. I used to be called Nell. I think you used to know me.

He drove there overnight.

I did not go with him. It wasn't mine to go. But he came back on a Thursday, and called me, and said, "Will you walk with me?" and I said yes, and we met at the lake.

It was a cold bright day. The sky was a hard enamel blue. The lake lay out beyond the breakwater in long gray swells, and the wind came off it with a smell of ice and iron and distant weather. There was a bench at the end of the pier, facing the water. We sat down on it, side by side, in our coats, with our hands in our pockets, and for a while neither of us said anything.

"Is she okay?" I asked at last.

"She's twenty-seven."

"I know."

"She runs a bakery. She has a husband named Glenn who's a plumber, and a son, a boy of two, with red hair." He smiled at the water. "She's got a scar on her forearm the shape of a comma. From a heater. She doesn't know how she got it."

I looked at him.

"She doesn't remember," said Ansel. "The fire. She was six. She remembers a smell, she says, of toast. She remembers being very warm and very sleepy and someone lying on top of her. That's all. Twenty-one years, and that's all she's got." His voice wavered. "She doesn't know I was there. She doesn't know what I did."

"Did you tell her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to see her face." He took a breath. "I knocked on the door of the apartment above the bakery. She opened it. She looked at me, and she said, 'Yes?' And I said, 'Nell?' And she stood there with the knob in her hand, and the color went out of her face, and she said, 'You're the one who sings.'"

"Sings?"

"I did. I used to. In the bunk. She'd wake up in the night, scared, and I'd sing something. It was nothing, just a tune, my mother's. A lullaby in no language at all." He stopped. "She didn't know me. She didn't know my face. But she knew the voice. She knew it in one word."

I could not speak.

"She cried," said Ansel. "And I cried. And the baby woke up and began to scream, and Glenn came in from the back with a wrench in his hand, and stood in the door, and said, 'Nell, who's this?' And she said, 'This is my brother.'"

A gull went over, crying.

"That's all," said Ansel. "That was the whole thing. 'This is my brother.'"

…

I had thought about what I wanted to ask him for a long time.

I'd thought about it on the stairs, and in the car, and lying in bed in the dark. I had gone over it and over it, so many times that it had worn smooth. I held it now in my mouth like a pebble. The wind pushed at my hair. Below the pier the water slapped on the stones.

"Ansel."

"Yes."

"Will it come back?"

He looked at me.

I looked at the lake. "The dying. The thing you said. In the fire, with Nell. Does it come again? If something happens, if I do the same thing, if I get in front of someone, will it happen a second time?"

"No," said Ansel.

"Never?"

"The rule only gives one." His voice was gentle. "I've asked. I've asked everyone I ever met who knew. It's the same, always, a single time. You pay, you come back, you get the minute. After that you're like anybody else." He paused. "If you die in someone's place after that, you stay dead."

"That's what I thought."

"It's meant to be a mercy."

"Is it?"

"I think so. I think if it gave you two, you'd spend your life waiting to be used." He smiled. "This way you get to be a person."

I turned it over. The cold made my eyes water. I watched a freighter creep along the line of the horizon, a long black bar with a white smudge of smoke, going very slowly toward nowhere.

"Then I want to spend what's left on something else," I said.

"Like what?"

"I don't know." I swallowed. "Something that isn't counting."

He didn't answer. He only put his arm around my shoulders, awkwardly, as one hugs a younger cousin, and we sat there in the wind and watched the ship.

…

The trial began on the first Monday in April.

I testified on the third day.

It was held in the federal courthouse, a big gray building with a lot of steps, and there was no crowd outside, because Whitcomb had asked the press not to come, and for once the press had agreed. They'd learned a thing or two that autumn. They had learned that a child was a child. A reporter from the Plain Dealer had written a short column, three paragraphs, that said only: The Ostrander girl will testify Wednesday. This paper will not publish her photograph. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a year.

They gave me a screen.

It was a panel of frosted glass, on wheels, set up at an angle in the witness box, so that I could see the judge and the lawyers and the jury but not the man at the defense table. It had been Whitcomb's idea. You don't have to look at him, she'd said. You can look at me. I'd said I'd rather look at him. She had considered that, and said, We'll leave a gap.

There was a gap. It was about the width of two fingers, at the edge of the glass. If I leaned my head a quarter inch to the left, I could see him through it.

…

I told it all.

I told it the way it had happened, in order, from the beginning. The alarm at 3:07. The hand in the dark. The long black stairwell, and the cold, and the smell of smoke. The voice that said Ms. Ostrander. I told them about the bathroom, and the cloth on my mouth, and the counting, one, two, three, four. I told them what I'd seen and what I'd heard. I told them about the face.

I said that I'd died. I said it plainly. A man in the third row of the gallery made a small sound, and the judge looked at him over her glasses, and he stopped. I said that I'd woken up in my own bed with my mother's alarm clock in my hand, and that I knew exactly who had killed me, and exactly where he would be, and that I'd told nobody, because nobody would have believed me.

"Why are you telling us now?" the defense lawyer asked.

He was a smooth tall man with a voice like warm syrup. He had been very polite. He had asked me about my school, and my favorite subject, and whether I had many friends. And now he stood at the lectern with his pen in his hand and an expression of tender skepticism. "It's a rather remarkable story, Miss Ostrander. Don't you think?"

"Yes."

"A child who says she came back from the dead."

"Yes."

"Do you expect this jury to take that seriously?"

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "I don't expect anything. I'm only telling you what happened. You can believe it or not." I leaned a quarter inch to the left, to the gap, and I looked through. "It doesn't change what he did."

…

I will tell you what I saw.

He sat at the defense table in a gray suit, with his hands folded. The wrist brace was gone. His hair was cut. He had a pair of rimless glasses, a new pair, that gave his face a mild, thoughtful, scholarly air, and he sat with his chin up and his eyes on the front of the room as a man sits in church, listening, attentive, entirely composed. He did not look at the screen. He did not look at me. He had not, in three days, looked at anything directly.

It was four in the afternoon.

The courtroom had tall windows along the west wall, and for most of the day the blinds had been drawn. A bailiff had opened them at four, because the day had gone gray and the lamps were buzzing. The sun had come out at that exact moment, as it does in April, in a long low gold slant through the glass, and it lay across the floor in a row of bright bars. It reached the rail. It crept along the table. It came, slowly, across the polished wood, toward the folded hands of Desmond Voss.

I watched it.

I leaned my head a quarter inch to the left, and I watched the light touch his sleeve.

He did not move. His face was still. But I saw the muscle at the corner of his jaw tighten, and the hand on the table draw back, a half inch, no more. The light climbed his wrist. It reached his cuff. It ran up his arm to the shoulder, and over it, and touched his cheek.

And Desmond Voss turned his head.

It was a small movement, a flinch, quite deliberate. He tilted his chin a few degrees away from the window, as a man turns from a draft. He narrowed his eyes. He lowered his lashes. For the length of a breath, in the middle of a federal courtroom, in front of a jury and a judge and a gallery of strangers, he sat with his face averted from the sun.

He's afraid of it, I thought.

I'd thought it before, in a darkroom, in a red glow. I had put the thought in a corner of my mind. Now I took it out and looked at it plainly. He wasn't afraid of the dark. He was not afraid of the police, or of prison, or of me. He was a man who had spent his whole life in the margins, in the shadows behind other men's names. He was afraid of being seen.

He can't bear to be developed.

I looked at him for a long time. And I found, to my great surprise, that I felt nothing at all. Not triumph. Not hatred. Only a calm, enormous, impersonal pity, the pity one feels for a stain on the underside of a stone when somebody lifts it.

…

That night, in my room, in the new apartment, I lay on my back in the dark and waited.

My mother was asleep in the next room. I could hear her breathing, long and slow. The refrigerator hummed. A car went by on the street outside, and its headlights slid across the ceiling and were gone. My phone lay on the nightstand, face down, plugged in. Beside it was the clock.

It said 3:06.

I lay there. I did not move. I watched the red digits, and my heart went slowly, one beat at a time.

3:07.

The phone buzzed.

It buzzed once, against the wood, a short dry shudder. The screen lit up from underneath, spilling a pale blue glow onto the ceiling. I rolled over. I picked it up. There it was: a small round icon of a bell, and under it, in plain white letters, a single line.

3:07 — Daily.

I had set it myself. I'd set it on my first morning home from the hospital, the night I came back, the night I woke at 3:07 with a clock in my fist. I had set it so I would never again be late. For nine months it had gone off every night, and I'd lain with my eyes open, and my heart pounding, and counted to a hundred. It had been the one thing I could control.

I looked at it for a very long time.

The screen dimmed. The bell shivered, and rang again, patient, insistent. Get up. Check the door. Count the cars. He's coming. It was the voice of a girl who had died once. It had kept me alive.

You can put it down, said my grandmother, in the dark.

I pressed my thumb to the bell.

A little menu opened. Snooze. Edit. Delete alarm.

I looked at the last word.

I pressed it.