Sunday

"There is a day of the week on which the dead are most nearly present, and it is never the one they died on."

April

The pancakes were terrible.

Lauren stood at the stove in her kitchen in Dorchester at a quarter to ten on a bright raw Sunday morning in April, in her father's old flannel shirt, with a spatula in her hand and a cloud of blue smoke rising from the pan, and looked at what she had made. It was black on one side and raw on the other. It had folded over on itself in the middle like a wounded animal. She poked it. A bubble of batter welled up through a crack in the crust and burst, sadly, with a little sound.

"It's a start," said a voice behind her.

She did not turn. "You're not allowed to be kind."

"I'm not being kind. I'm being accurate." Ethan came and stood at her shoulder. He had a dish towel over one arm and a wooden spoon in his hand, and he had put on weight since the winter, a good ten pounds, so that his face had lost its look of a drawn blind and was only thin and angular and alive. He peered into the pan. "The heat's too high, you've put in too much baking powder, and you're flipping too early. But the basic idea is sound."

"What's the basic idea?"

"That a thing can be terrible and still be made with love." He took the spatula from her hand. "Move over, Captain."

She moved over.

He cooked. He did it without fuss, with the economy she remembered from his kitchen on Hampshire Street, a pinch here, a flick there, the butter dropped in the pan and tilted until it shivered, the batter poured in a perfect round. She watched his hands. They had stopped shaking in January. It had been a slow thing, a recovery by inches: first the egg, in February, a single poached egg on a piece of toast, eaten standing up at the counter with his eyes shut; then, in March, a chicken, roasted, which he had carved at the table with the grave concentration of a man defusing a bomb; and now, in April, in the clear cold light of a Sunday morning, pancakes, for six.

He was a cook again. She did not say so. She stood against the counter with her arms folded and watched her brother make breakfast, and felt something in her chest unclench by a quarter inch.

…

They came in ones and twos.

Chloe came first, down the back stairs in an oversized sweatshirt and a pair of striped socks, nineteen, long-limbed, tousled, with her hair in a knot on top of her head, who kissed her mother on the cheek and her uncle on the shoulder and went straight to the refrigerator with the air of a girl who had made a decision about orange juice. She had come home from college for the weekend. She did not mention the reason. She had read all of it, every word, in the dormitory at two in the morning with the lights off, and when she came back at the start of the spring term she had stood in the door of her mother's study for a full minute without speaking and then crossed the room and wrapped her arms round her neck.

I'm so proud of you, Chloe had said. And I'm so angry that you have to be the one.

Lauren had held her. She had said nothing at all.

The doorbell rang at ten.

It was Janine, in a gray raincoat, holding a plastic bag of bagels from a shop in Astoria, and behind her, with a cello case on her back, in a navy school blazer with a patch on the pocket, her braid down to her waist and her round glasses shining, was Kate.

She was fifteen and a half. She had grown an inch since the funeral. She stood on the doormat in the thin bright light, looking at the hall with its coats and boots and shelf of unmatched mittens, and then at Lauren, with the particular grave attentive stillness of a child who has been taught by grief to look carefully at everything, and said, "Hi, Captain."

"Hi, kitten," said Lauren.

It came out before she could stop it. The girl's eyes widened. For a second Lauren thought she had made a dreadful mistake, and then Kate's mouth did something small and wobbly at one corner, and she said, in a very dry voice that was so much her father's it took Lauren's breath: "Nobody's called me that since August."

"I'm sorry."

"No." Kate shook her head. "It's okay. I think I'd like it, actually. If it's you."

…

They ate in the kitchen, at the long scarred oak table, with the window open on a back garden full of crocuses.

It was a cheerful meal. Lauren was astonished by that. She had expected a funeral, a stiff polite occasion with lowered voices, and instead there were pancakes, and bagels, and orange juice, and a great deal of syrup, and Chloe telling a story about a boy in her chemistry class who had set his eyebrows on fire, and Kate laughing, in spite of herself, with her fork in the air. Janine sat at the end with her hand round a mug of coffee. She had begun to look less like a woman who had been struck by a car. She asked, shyly, about the pancakes. Ethan said it was a family recipe. Lauren said that was a lie.

At eleven, Kate went to get her cello.

She set it up in the living room, beside the radiator, in the pool of sun from the bay window. The others drifted in. Lauren sat on the sofa with her feet under her. Ethan leaned in the door. Chloe curled up on the rug. Kate sat, and drew the bow across the strings once, softly, to tune, and a low warm note rose in the room like the sound of a door being opened in a house a long way off.

"It's the first Suite," she said. "The Prelude. Dad's favorite. He used to say it sounded like somebody walking into a room where they weren't sure they'd be welcome." She hesitated. "I've been practicing it since October."

"We'd like to hear it," said Lauren.

Kate nodded. She closed her eyes. And she began.

It was a slow rolling figure, a pattern of notes that circled and rose and fell and returned, patient, plain, untroubled, in a major key that seemed to open out into light. It did not hurry. It did not ask for anything. It went round and round on itself like water in a bowl, and under it, here and there, the low string answered in a deep slow note, like a hand laid on a shoulder. Lauren sat with her hands in her lap. She watched the bow move. She watched the girl's face, grave, intent, and utterly absorbed, with the light on her glasses and her lower lip caught in her teeth, and she thought of a man in a gray cardigan who had written in pencil, on the back page of this very book, a number that had saved her brother's life.

She will come, he had written.

She had come. It had not been enough. But it had been, she thought, with a clear and bitter tenderness, a great deal more than nothing.

…

The telephone rang at ten past one.

It was the kitchen phone, the old wall phone with the long cord that Chloe had begged her for years to replace, and it rang in the middle of the dishes, with a bright insistent trill that made everyone look up. Lauren dried her hands. She crossed the kitchen. The number on the little screen began with a plus sign and a string of digits that she knew by heart.

She put it on the speaker.

"Hello?"

"It is Sunday," said a voice.

It was a small crackling voice, a long way off, with the faint hollow echo of a bad line, and it spoke each word separately, in English, with the slow care of a woman setting out stones across a stream.

"Mrs. Jiang," said Lauren.

"It is ten at night. I am in the kitchen. I have said that I will call on Sunday." A pause. "Nobody asked. I only do it."

Chloe had come to the doorway. Ethan, at the sink, had stopped with a plate in his hand. In the other room the cello had fallen silent, and Kate stood in the arch with her bow hanging at her side, listening.

"How are you?" said Lauren. "Are you well? Are you eating?"

"Yes. I eat." The voice sounded faintly amused. "Eileen sends me a book of English. Every week, one word. This week it is tenacious." She said it with relish. "I think it is me."

"I think so too."

"The room is quiet. I have kept it. I do not move the books. There is a, how do you say, a plum tree. In the yard. My neighbor, Mr. Liu, he dug it. I said I wanted one and he came with a spade and did not ask why." A rustle, a creak of a chair. "It is small. It will not have fruit for four years. But it has leaves."

"That's lovely."

"I will eat the first one," said Mrs. Jiang, "and I will give the second to a stranger."

Lauren found that she could not say anything. She stood with her hand on the receiver and her eyes on the garden through the window, the crocuses, the old fence, a squirrel running along the top rail with a stolen bagel. Behind her someone sniffed. It was Chloe.

"Is the girl there?" said Mrs. Jiang. "Ray's girl. With the music."

"I'm here," said Kate.

She had come across the kitchen. She stood next to Lauren with the bow in her hand and her round glasses crooked, and bent her head toward the phone, shy, serious, and very straight.

"Hello, Mrs. Jiang."

"Hello. I hear you play. Before. The telephone is old, but I hear." The tiny voice grew gruff. "It is good. It is like a person walking in. You will play it for me when I come."

"Are you coming?"

"In June. Eileen says there is a ticket. I will see the, the place where she," the line crackled, "where she lived. And I will see you."

"Okay," said Kate. "Okay. I'd like that."

"Good. Eat something. You are too thin."

"You sound like my dad."

"Then he was a clever man." And then, rather fast, the way a person says a thing she has been rehearsing at the stove for weeks: "I will call next Sunday. And the next. I do not want that you wait, and I do not call. I have thought about it. It is only a thing I can do."

"We'll wait," said Lauren.

"Good." The line hissed. "Goodbye, Captain. Goodbye, Ethan. Goodbye, girl with the music. Eat the pancakes."

"How did you know about the pancakes?"

"A mother always knows," said Mrs. Jiang, and hung up.

…

Later, when the others had gone and the sun had moved off the kitchen floor, she found her brother on the back porch, sitting on the top step with his elbows on his knees and a cup of tea going cold between his hands.

The garden was full of long gold light. A child was shouting somewhere on the next street. She sat beside him, with the old step creaking under her, and they watched a robin hop across the lawn and put its head on one side, and listen, and stab.

"Can you still smell it?" said Ethan.

She did not need to ask what he meant. "Sometimes. On the T. In the market. A man in a coat." She turned the cup of tea in her fingers. "Not as much. I think it dulls."

"It doesn't. I think we learn not to look."

"Do you want it to stop?"

He thought about it for a long time. A breeze stirred the crocuses. "Dad said it was a gift," he said at last. "He said that we were the ones who would know. So that somebody would."

"He said that you only have to remember that the people you find are somebody's."

"Did he?"

"Yes. In Worcester. In the back room." She smiled. "I was nine."

"I was six. I don't remember." He looked at his hands. "I remember a clock. And that he smelled of soap."

They sat in silence. The robin flew off. The shadows of the maple lengthened on the grass, long and blue, and in the next yard someone began to rake.

"Ethan."

"Mm."

"You can say it now, you know. You don't have to keep saying the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"I'm alive. You can say I'm fine."

He considered it. He lifted his head and looked at the garden, the green coming up through the brown, the crooked fence, the shine of the tea in the cup, and she saw his face change, slowly, in the evening light, the way a face changes when it remembers what it has been trying not to forget.

"I'll say it when it's true," said Ethan.

"And until then?"

"Until then," he said, "I'm alive. It's a very good answer. It has the great merit of being accurate."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. He put an arm round her, and the tea went over, and neither of them moved to catch it. They sat there on the step, in the gold of the going light, and listened to the neighbor rake, and the faint far traffic, and a bell somewhere ringing the hour, and across the whole bright city, in a thousand kitchens, the Sunday telephones beginning to ring.