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“I don’t know, Alba. It’s a lot of work to keep them.”

“Yeah,” she whispers. “Sometimes I mess up.”

“It’s not your fault. You try really hard.” I reach out and take her hand. She holds mine tightly until sleep relaxes her grip and I can make my hand small enough to slip away.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 (Clare is 38, Alba is 7, Richard is 72)

Clare: I’m in Henry’s old childhood bedroom waiting for Alba’s violin lesson to end. Richard doesn’t mind if I roam his apartment while I wait, but usually I just sit in here and read. The room is small. Henry’s single bed is made up with an old quilt, two flat lumpy pillows, flowered sheets. A bookcase bulges with comics, Bradbury, Lovecraft, trashy Westerns and books about ancient Greece and Rome, Sexton, Plath and Salinger—I wonder sometimes why these books were left here; Henry’s college books are at our house; these books seem to belong to childhood and high school. I suppose he wanted something to read when he ended up in his old bedroom. I am sitting in Henry’s overstuffed brown armchair. His dresser is full of clothing; his coats and shirts still hang in the closet. Henry’s smell is faint in these things, but I sometimes bury my face in them anyway, trying to locate a whiff of him.

Richard says he left the room intact because Henry used to show up at odd times, naked and disheveled; sometimes he would materialize in the apartment and sometimes he’d ring the bell, looking for shelter. Even after he died? I asked. Only once, said Richard, but that was enough to make me hope. I think Richard comes in here and sits, sometimes, too; I find signs of him, little things like teacups and candy bar wrappers.

Today would have been Henry’s forty-sixth birthday. I wasn’t sure if Richard remembered, but when Alba and I arrived he proudly showed us a box of four chocolate cupcakes from the fancy cupcake shop down the street. They are decorated with sprinkles and flowers made out of purple frosting, Alba’s favorite. When the lesson is over Kimy will come upstairs and we’ll eat the cupcakes. I don’t know if we’ll sing “Happy Birthday.” Would that be too weird? Can I sing “Happy Birthday” to Henry without weeping uncontrollably? I’m not sure, but if Alba wants to, I’ll try.

I hear laughter coming from the living room. I walk down the hall, as quietly as possible. Richard and Alba are standing across from each other at a small table, playing a duet. There’s a single page of music on the table between them and they are both playing from it, one reading it upside down, the other right side up. Richard is teaching Alba an ingenious duet called “Der Spiegel”—“The Mirror.” It’s a musical palindrome; Richard called it a retrograde inversion canon. He told us this was how his teacher introduced him to double stopping. None of that made it sound fun to me, but Alba thinks it’s hilarious. She’s been practicing both parts nonstop all week. I hang back in the hallway, watching and listening. The piece is very short, and when they come to the end, they walk around the table so they are facing the opposite piece of music, and they play it again.

The invisible hero of this happy scene is Alba’s other teacher, Terryl. When Richard exclaims over Alba’s progress, or praises her for practicing, or smiles at her seemingly intuitive grasp of a new concept, it is Terryl’s victory, too. I sometimes wonder if Richard senses his double’s existence—how could he not? I’m a little shocked at how easily Alba keeps her other teacher a secret from Richard, but I remember my own duplicitous childhood: my parents never suspected that I was meeting a time traveler in the meadow behind our house.

Do all children have secret lives? Of course they do; they must. Alba is already burdened by too many secrets. I watch Alba’s face as they finish the piece again, change sides. She’s in the moment, almost laughing, then serious as her grandfather gives her the small nod that means Now: together they begin again.

Rebecka Charles

Thursday, December 10, 2009 (Clare is 38, Beck is 33)

Clare: I am sitting in the Ando Gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago. It is a secret space inside the museum’s austere Asian Department, a dark room filled with sixteen wooden columns, six thirteenth-century pots, four softly illuminated Japanese screens and a bench. It is very quiet here. People come in, wander from one screen to another and leave, or they sit on the bench for ten minutes and leave. I have been sitting in this gallery for two hours.

I don’t have to be anywhere else today. Alba is with Kimy. I have deadlines, but they are not pressing. It is a relief to be alone.

Henry died almost three years ago, and I can’t seem to let him go. I am always listening, waiting, expecting. I know he is not going to come back—not yet, anyway. But nothing feels final. I have things to say to him, nothing is finished, but he is not here and he won’t be here soon, so I am stuck, waiting.

Henry’s ashes are in a minimalist Japanese urn which sits on a small red table near the entrance to my studio. Once I am inside the studio it is behind me, and I can think about other things. That’s as good a metaphor as any for the place Henry occupies in my mind now: He is the first thing I think of, but then I have to move along and attend to the day I am actually living. I have to remember, and then try to forget, again and again.

At first I was immobilized by grief. I stood by windows and stared at people and cars and trees without seeing them. I didn’t eat, slept too much, then couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two each night. Then I remembered this room and I began to come here every day. I could cry here without being seen. Eventually I stopped needing to cry. I was empty. I could sit here and watch people moving through the gallery like shadows. Now I come here every now and then, to think.

A woman enters the gallery. She is wearing a long coat and chunky shoes; her steps make loud thunks against the wooden floor. She has dark hair that rises from her head like a halo of smoke and small round glasses that reflect gold in the dim light, as though she is wearing coins over her eyes. She stands briefly near one of the screens and then turns toward me to sit on the bench. She hesitates when she sees me. I gesture toward the end of the bench, Please, go ahead, sit down. She nods and sits. We sit together for a while.

Few people stay in this gallery for long. This woman sits for almost an hour. When she gets up to leave we meet each other’s eyes. We smile. She walks out of the gallery and I wonder who she is, where she is going. Then I pretty much forget her and return to my melancholy.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

I am sitting in the Ando Gallery again. Outside it is a snowy morning, Christmas shoppers are swarming on Michigan Avenue. I’m grateful to be here in the warm, quiet, dark gallery. I can hear a school group passing through the hall, then they are gone and I am alone with my thoughts.

Someone comes in. I remember this woman: she walks directly to the bench and sits down. She turns to me and says, “Hello.”

“Hello,” I say. We sit silently together for a long while. I sneak a look at her. She has her hands folded in her lap; she has placed a hat on the bench between us. There’s something anachronistic about this hat—it seems to belong to an old black-and-white movie. She smells of snow, shampoo, wet wool. It’s hard to tell how old she is. She is slender and has dark skin. Her fingers are long. She has a remarkable ability to sit still.

Usually I’m able to ignore anyone who occupies the bench with me, but now I can’t free my attention from her. I stare straight ahead and I try to remember this woman’s face. After another half hour, she stands and turns to pick up her hat. Our faces are too close and she catches me staring at her. I blush and am grateful that the room is dark.

“Goodbye,” she says, smiling.

“Goodbye,” I reply, and she leaves.

As soon as she is gone I take out my sketchbook. In the dim light I try to draw her face: she has dark eyes, heavy brows, a small tilted nose, a wide mouth; she’s Black. Her hair is combed high today, she’s wearing big hoop earrings. My drawing fails to catch the liveliness of her face, the quality of fierce concentration and interest that emanates from her. When I look at the drawing later, at home, it’s disappointing, wrong. I go to the Ando Gallery every day for two weeks, but she doesn’t come back.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

I see her again months later, after I’ve given up on her. I’m standing near the coat check room at the Art Institute’s Michigan Avenue entrance unbuttoning my coat when she comes in, holding a wet umbrella at arm’s length, burdened with a large backpack. I notice a few things now in ordinary light: she has a gray streak, she is taller than I remembered, she has a pierced eyebrow.

“Oh, there you are,” I say and instantly regret it.