The goats needed watering at six, same as always, same as it had been since before Mara could remember, and she did it without thinking — hauled the bucket from the pump, sloshed across the dry-packed yard in her father's old work boots, the ones two sizes too large that she wore anyway because they were his and the leather still held the shape of him. The July heat was already mean at six in the morning. It pressed down on the hills like something with weight, something with intention, and the kudzu on the fence posts had gone from green to a scorched and dusty olive that looked, in the early light, like the hills were wearing something dead.
She filled the trough. Billy watched her with his yellow rectangle eyes, then lowered his head and drank.
That was fine. Animals that needed you were fine. They were the best kind of company in that they did not ask you how you were holding up, did not look at you with the particular soft catastrophe of adult concern, did not say things like your father would have wanted and we're thinking about you, Mara, we really are. The goats wanted water. She had water. Transaction complete.
Aunt Ruth was still asleep. Ruth slept the way she did everything — with aggressive commitment, doors closed, curtains drawn against the heat. She had arrived from Knoxville in February with two suitcases and the expression of a woman who had rearranged her entire life without complaint, which meant she rearranged it loudly in other ways, talking over the radio, clattering pans at seven a.m., asking Mara questions about school and eating and feelings that Mara answered in the fewest words that qualified as answers. Ruth was not a bad woman. Mara had never decided she was a bad woman. She had decided, more carefully, that Ruth's particular kind of love — brisk, anxious, organized into casseroles and reminder notes on the refrigerator — was a language Mara did not speak.
Her father had spoken it either. He'd spoken Frost and geological survey notation and the Latin names of limestone formations and the specific quiet of two people who understand they do not need to fill all the air between them. He'd spoken that better than anyone.
Six months, two weeks, and four days ago he had driven his truck to the Calloway Mine access road and walked in with his recording equipment and his field journal and his good flashlight, the one with the yellow grip she used to borrow when she read under the covers. And he had not come back out.
Mara filled the trough a second time, because Billy had drunk the first one down to silt.
By noon the thermometer on the barn siding read ninety-four degrees and the air smelled of hot pine and the particular mineral dryness that came off the hills in July, like the earth itself was sweating. Mara did the rest of her chores in the order she always did them, which her father had established and which she maintained with the ferocity of someone who understood, without being able to say it plainly, that routine was the only architecture holding the shape of her life. Feed. Water. Check the fence line on the south pasture where the wire had been pulling loose since May. Come back. Eat whatever Ruth left on the counter. Do not look at the chair at the kitchen table.
She looked at the chair.
It was empty in the specific way it had been empty for six months, two weeks, and four days, which was different from how a chair was ordinarily empty, different from how any other chair in the house was empty. This chair had a presence to its absence. A gravity. She ate her sandwich standing at the counter instead and washed the plate before Ruth came downstairs.
They talked about the fence wire. They talked about whether the pump was running slow. They talked about everything except the thing that sat in the room with them at every meal, patient and enormous, the missing man who had arranged his whole world around his daughter and then stepped into the dark and not stepped back out.
"Mrs. Pauley called again," Ruth said, pouring coffee she wouldn't finish. "From the school. Wants to know about your placement tests."
"I already took the placement tests."
"She wants to talk about results."
"I know what the results are."
Ruth looked at her over the rim of the cup. There was something in that look — not pity, something more complicated, something like recognition — that Mara didn't want examined.
"You can talk to her," Mara said. "You can tell her I'll come in August."
Ruth nodded and drank her coffee. The refrigerator hummed. A fly worked itself against the window screen in slow, hopeless circles.
Outside, the hills folded into each other under the white press of the afternoon sky, and somewhere beneath them, very far down, the limestone caverns ran through the dark like the roots of something enormous.
Mara did not think about that.
She was very practiced at not thinking about that.
The heat did not break at sundown. It shifted, the way it did in Kentucky July, from a pressing thing to a surrounding thing — less assault, more enclosure. Mara lay on top of her covers in the dark with her window open and felt the air move against her arms in slow, insufficient increments. The ceiling had a water stain her father had never gotten around to fixing, roughly oval, roughly the size of a dinner plate, and she had spent enough sleepless hours studying it that she had named it without meaning to. Not with a real name. Just the stain. A landmark in the geography of not sleeping.
Through the wall she could hear Ruth's measured breathing, then, gradually, the soft architectural sounds the farmhouse made when the temperature dropped — the groan of old boards adjusting, the tick of the roof expanding and contracting, the way old buildings spoke to themselves in the dark, a private language of settling and endurance.
The pipes ran along the interior of the west wall, behind the plaster, old copper that her father said predated the house's last renovation by thirty years. In winter they ticked steadily, almost rhythmically, and in summer they were quieter but not silent — water pressure, he had explained to her once, sitting on the edge of her bed in the specific posture he had for explaining things, forearms on knees, hands loosely clasped, makes the pipes resonate even when you're not drawing. Like plucking a string, Mara. Same principle.
She heard the pipes.
Not the ticking. Not the ordinary summer murmur. Something lower, more sustained, with the cadence of — not water. With the cadence of breath. Of words.
She lay still. The stain on the ceiling. The flat cotton smell of the hot night. Her own heartbeat, which had become very loud.
The sound from the pipes was soft and continuous and shaped like language.
She thought: this is what happens. This is the thing that happens when grief goes on long enough. She had read about auditory hallucinations — she was the kind of girl who had read about auditory hallucinations — and she knew they were common, documented, a well-mapped territory of the mind under prolonged stress. She was twelve years old and had been running a farm with inadequate adult supervision for six months and had not, she could admit in the scientific privacy of her own skull, been sleeping with any regularity. The mind produced what it needed. The mind, under sufficient pressure, conjured.
She turned onto her side and pulled the pillow over her head.
The sound continued.
It was not, she noticed despite herself, random. It rose and fell with a particular rhythm. It paused in certain places and sustained in others. She had heard that rhythm for twelve years across a thousand nights, in the doorway of her room with the lamp on, his reading voice soft and even. And something slid into focus in her chest that was not recognition — she refused it as recognition — but that occupied the same anatomical space.
She put the pillow back down.
She lay in the dark and she listened to what she was telling herself was not her father's voice moving through the pipes in the west wall of the house he had built additions to with his own hands, the house his family had worked since before Mara's mother was alive to work it alongside him, the house he had promised her would always be home and which she was now lying in at eleven p.m. in ninety-degree heat listening to the pipes.
Just the pipes.
The sound paused — a breath, the space between lines — and then continued, and she caught, unmistakably, the structure of iambic pentameter. She knew iambic pentameter. He had made sure of that.
She was out of bed before she made the decision to move.
Standing barefoot on the floorboards, her hand against the plaster of the west wall, she felt the faint vibration of it — not mechanical, not the thrum of pressure through copper — something she felt in her palm and in the bones of her wrist and somewhere further in, somewhere that didn't have a name in the anatomy books she'd read either.
She pressed her ear to the wall.
The plaster was warm from the stored heat of the day and smelled of old house, of chalk and time, and against it she heard the voice shaped by the pipes, filtered through copper and plaster and thirty years of a building's existence, and it was saying:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
She stood there for a long time.
The voice was wrong in some ways she could not yet name and right in ways she could not stand to examine. It was her father's voice the way a drawing of a face is a face — not the thing but the outline of the thing, the shape the thing left in the air. Close enough. Almost. The almost was a splinter she could feel in her palm.
She took her hand off the wall. Pressed it back. Took it off again.
"Stop it," she said, to herself, to the room, to the heat, to whatever grief did when you let it go on too long.
The voice went on for another few minutes. Then it stopped, and the pipes ticked, and the night settled back into the ordinary catalog of its sounds.
Mara stood in the dark with her back against the wall until her heartbeat came down to something she could work with. Then she went to her desk, took out a composition notebook — the black-and-white kind, which she used for observations, for lists, for the careful recording of things she needed to think through — and wrote at the top of a clean page, in her controlled and small-lettered handwriting:
July 14th, 1983. Heard sound from west wall pipes, approx. 11:15 p.m. Duration unknown. Characteristics: low, sustained, rhythmic. Resembled speech. Resembled reading aloud. Not going to write what it resembled reading. Heat 94° today. Not sleeping well. Note for record: not sleeping well.
She capped the pen. Looked at what she'd written. Added, underneath:
Not going to write what it resembled reading.
Then she crossed that line out, twice, with force.
She did not sleep.
At two in the morning she was in the hallway outside the bathroom with her ear against the interior wall, where the pipes ran up from the basement to the second floor. The wallpaper here was old and slightly soft, a pattern of blue flowers her mother had chosen and which Mara found she could not look at directly still, which she remedied by closing her eyes and pressing her face to the cool lath and plaster. Nothing. Then something. Then the low shape of it again, quieter from this angle, the way music sounds when it moves through rooms, losing its edges, keeping its character.
She moved methodically down the hall.
She stood in the doorway of her father's study with her hand on the jamb and her flashlight off. She had not been in this room since February when she'd moved his papers off the desk and stacked them neatly in a box that she had sealed with tape and placed on the shelf beside his geological survey manuals. She had not been in this room since then. She stood in the doorway and did not go in.
The voice was loudest here.
She could hear it through the floor — the pipes ran below this room too, she knew, she had the whole system mapped in her head the way she mapped everything her father had taught her to understand about the house — and it was fuller here, more layered, as if multiple pipes were resonating in overlapping registers. She made herself listen with the careful, cataloguing attention she'd been praised for in school, the attention that was not emotion but its opposite, a cold instrument she'd sharpened to a fine edge over twelve years of being the smartest person in most rooms.
It was not her father's voice.
It was something performing her father's voice.
The difference was real and she held onto it the way she'd hold the fence wire when she had to pull it taut — both hands, all her weight, leaning back from it. The difference was real and it mattered and she would not let go of it. Something was speaking through the pipes of her house in the cadence of Robert Frost and the approximate register of her father's reading voice, and it was not her father, and she was not losing her mind, and she was going to stand here in the doorway of his study in the dark at two in the morning and listen to it with scientific precision until she understood what it was.
The pipes breathed.
The voice said: Mara.
Her name. In her father's approximate voice. Soft and specific, the two syllables weighted the way he weighted them, the first one down, the second slightly lifted, a small question at the end of it even when it wasn't a question.
She made a sound she had not planned to make, a single sharp exhale that was not a cry, that she would not let be a cry, and she put both hands flat on the doorframe and held herself still.
The pipes were quiet.
She waited.
She waited in the dark hallway with her hands on the wood and her face very controlled and her eyes very dry, because she was twelve years old and she had been running this farm alone for six months and she had not cried in the presence of another person since the week after he disappeared and she was not going to cry in the hallway of her own house because a sound in the pipes had said her name.
After a while she went and got her composition notebook and her flashlight and her father's blanket from the cedar chest in the hall, the old wool one with the smell of the cedar and him that was fading now, fading no matter what she did, fading no matter how carefully she replaced the cedar blocks, and she sat down in the hallway with her back against the wall and the flashlight on the notebook and she wrote down everything she had heard, in order, with times where she knew them, and a description of the acoustic properties she could identify, and the word approximate underlined twice when she wrote about the voice.
Approximate.
The pipes were silent the rest of the night. She sat and listened to the silence with the same attention she had given to the sound.
At five-thirty the birds started up in the apple tree outside, the old tree her father had planted the year she was born, its roots going down through the topsoil and into the clay and further, down to where the limestone started. She listened to the birds. She watched the hallway gray toward morning.
When she heard Ruth's alarm go off at six, Mara closed the notebook, stowed it under her arm, and walked back to her room. She put the flashlight in the drawer of her bedside table. She sat on the edge of her bed with the notebook in her lap.
Her father's voice had said her name twice.
The second time had sounded almost exactly right.
She opened the composition notebook to a new page and wrote, at the top, in letters smaller and more deliberate than she usually used, as if the act of writing it constituted a decision she was making with care:
It gets the rhythm right. It doesn't get him right. There is a difference and I know what it is.
She stared at the page.
Wrote, below that:
Figure out what it is.
Outside, the hills were coming back from the dark in the colors of another hot day — dusty green and rock-gray and the pale dry gold of the fields she'd need to walk at seven. The goats would want water. The fence on the south pasture still needed wire. The world was full of things that needed her specific attention and she would attend to them in order, same as always.
She put the notebook in the drawer with the flashlight.
She went downstairs and put the coffee on before Ruth came down, because she knew Ruth liked to come down to a percolating pot, and knowing what the people around you needed and quietly providing it was a habit so deep in Mara it did not feel like kindness, just knowledge, just the ongoing practice of understanding how things worked and acting accordingly.
The pipes in the kitchen walls were quiet.
She put her hand flat on the wall above the sink, just once, briefly, while the coffee percolated and Ruth's footsteps were still moving overhead.
Nothing.
She took her hand down and went to get her father's boots from beside the door.
The hills waited, still and pale and full of their deep subterranean dark, and the morning came up hot and indifferent, and somewhere below the roots of the apple tree the limestone held its ancient and patient silence, and Mara Voss walked out into the July morning to water the goats, her face composed and her eyes clear and her mind moving, carefully, around the edges of a thing she had not yet let herself name.