She sighs and takes it from me. “I want music the way I would crave food if I was beginning to starve.”
“Do you ever hear it in other things?” I crouch to gather her music sheets. “Sometimes I think I almost do, in the wind, or a train horn.”
“I hear it in everything,” she says, bending to help. “The rhythm of footsteps. Doors closing. Even flies buzzing and tapping the windows.” Her mouth turns down into a half smile. She hesitates. “Aila, I’ve always wondered. Do stars . . . sound like anything?” Her voice turns almost shy. “I’ve only seen them in pictures.”
“No,” I say. “At least, if they do, we can’t hear it on earth.”
“I wish I could see them.” She sets her violin into its plush velvet case as though she’s tucking in a baby. “Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if there was music in everything. If stars could sing, or shadows scraped along where they fell. Or if the wind made leaves tinkle like wind chimes.”
I clear my throat. Now it is my turn to be shy. “When you’re in love . . . Is—?um. Doesn’t that kind of make everything sing?”
She smiles in a way that is both wide and sad. “Yes,” she says. “And when it’s over, everything gets disjointed, until some days I can hardly find the music in anything anymore.”
She leans over to pick up her violin case, and I think, That is what grief feels like, also.
At dinner that night, Will’s hand is only a whisper away from mine. He catches my eye and smiles.
I want to tell him that I miss the sound of his singing through the wall.
I want to tell him, Sometimes I almost think I can hear the music again, whenever I’m with you.
Beas catches my arm in school the next day as I’m walking out to Mrs. Cliffton’s car. She pulls me into a side classroom and thrusts a book in my hands.
I turn it over.
Shakespeare: A Biography.
I cock an eyebrow at her.
“I know you’re not really looking at Shakespeare anymore,” she says, her voice hushed. “But look at this . . .” She flips to a section called “The Disappeared Years.”
“There are no records of Shakespeare at all during this period of time. No one knows what he was doing then—?he simply vanishes.” She bites on her lower lip. “People think he was searching for something. Do the math, Aila.”
1585 to 1592.
“Seven years?” A smile begins to dawn across my face. “Shakespeare had seven disappeared years?”
I look at her. She looks at me.
“It could be nothing,” she says, taking the book back from me.
“It’s probably nothing,” I agree.
But I slide into Mrs. Cliffton’s car with a new sense of lightness, and before I fall asleep that night, I crouch down on my hands and knees.
Reach through the gauzy cobwebs and pull Mother’s book back out from under my bed. I work through Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale. My pen nub scratches against the page, transferring Mother’s notes to mine, and I realize how much I want this theory to be true. I want my mother to help solve this mystery from the grave. To not have abandoned the people of Sterling. To redeem their memory of her. And to redeem mine.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Date: December 15, 1942
Bird: Potoo
Known as “ghost birds” for their ability to blend into a dead tree stump. Can remain perfectly motionless. Eyelids feature a slit for the bird to see out, so that whatever the bird is looking at has no idea it is being watched.
Once I know Juliet is dead and the Stone isn’t coming, Phineas’s cough begins to rattle my bones through the walls at night. I take more and more jobs so I won’t have to hear it. I try not to notice the stripe of bone peeking out from his sleeve. How sallow his skin has become.
But I do not stop pursuing the Stone. When Juliet’s husband ignores the letters I send to his house, I decide to pay him a visit in person. No one is at the house when I knock. I snoop around the outside windows, looking for an entry point, until I catch the next-door neighbor spying on me. I leave empty-handed.
