Jamaica Plain, August 2010.
By four o'clock the living room on Wyman Street had stopped being a living room. It had become a staging area for Grace's departure: boxes along the couch, a laundry basket of towels, a lamp wrapped in a bath mat because she refused to pay for bubble wrap.
Noah sat on the arm of the recliner with his recorder resting on his knee, the red light on.
Grace pulled the tape gun across a box marked BOOKS (HEAVY) (DON'T BE STUPID). It made a long, tearing shriek that ended in a satisfied little clack. He loved that sound. It was the sound of something being decided.
"Did you take my good scissors?" Grace asked.
He held the recorder a little closer to the box.
"Noah."
"One second."
"No. Not one second." She straightened, pushed her hair off her forehead with her wrist, and pointed the tape gun at him like a weapon. "I asked you a question. You answered a box."
"I was getting the tape."
"You're always getting something." She tore another strip. "Here's some free advice before I leave you alone with Mom for four years. When a person talks to you, take out the earbuds. Put that thing down. Look at their face. It's not hard."
"I'm not wearing earbuds."
"Spiritually, you are."
He pressed stop. The scissors were in his room, under a pile of cables he had been cutting to length. He went and got them and put them in her hand, and she said, "Thank you," in the voice she used when she meant *finally*.
Their mother came through from the kitchen drying a pot. "You're not wearing that."
Noah looked down at his shirt. "Wearing it where?"
"Marisol's. Her mother asked about you at church on Sunday. She said, 'Is Noah coming?' and I said yes."
"You could have said maybe."
"I could have." She went back into the kitchen. "There will be food. Change your shirt."
Grace grinned at him over the box. "Bring the recorder. Girls love that."
In his room he changed into the least wrinkled shirt he owned and sat on the bed for a minute. On the laptop, the folder labeled ABUELA was still open from the night before. Forty-one files. His grandmother explaining arroz con gandules for the third time, refusing again to say how much sofrito. *Until it looks right. You'll know.* His grandmother counting the crossings on her rosary. His grandmother singing half a bolero and stopping because she had forgotten the rest.
The newer files were longer. Not because she said more. Because the spaces between her words had grown, sometime in the spring, into something his mother didn't want to talk about at dinner. He had noticed it first in the recordings, before he noticed it in the room.
He didn't tell anyone that was why he kept them.
At night, when the house was asleep, he streamed radio documentaries on headphones: a man walking the length of a river, a woman interviewing everyone who had ever worked at a diner before it closed. He listened to the way the makers cut from a voice to a room and back, how a single cough could tell you more than a paragraph. He had dozens of files nobody would ever open. He wanted to make something people actually heard.
He put the recorder in his pocket, then took it out and checked the batteries, then put it back.
He expected nothing from the party except the hot dogs, which his mother assured him would be excellent.
***
He had gone behind the grill for Marisol's mother.
Not for her exactly. For her laugh, which came out of the kitchen window loud and sudden, the way his grandmother's used to before she got tired. He wanted it without the music on top of it, so he crouched in the shadow where the lights didn't reach and aimed past the bushes, and the cicadas got in the way, and then he liked them.
He had already seen the girl at the edge of the yard. That was the part he would never have admitted.
She had been standing near the porch steps with an empty paper plate, not eating, not talking, watching faces. Not the way people watched who they wanted to be seen by. She watched the uncle at the grill and the cousins under the chairs and Marisol's mother in the window as though each of them were telling her something. He knew that look from the inside. It was what he did with rooms.
For a few seconds he forgot the cicadas entirely.
Then she was walking toward him, and he panicked, and held up one finger, and was glad of the dark.
Afterward he would remember the conversation in pieces: Latin, Boylston, three streets. The sour candy he had seen her buy and never once seen anyone else buy. He talked too fast about the recordings and heard himself doing it and couldn't stop until she asked a real question back. She kept asking real questions. That was the strangest part.
When he asked what the summer sounded like, he was sure she would say cicadas. It was the easy answer, and they were right there, doing their big part. Instead she told him about a ceiling fan and her mother humming songs that didn't exist, and he forgot to adjust the level and didn't care. He thought, *that's the whole thing. That's what I mean and can't say.* He typed her name into the file while she hid her face, partly because it was true that he labeled things, and partly so she couldn't make him delete it.
Over cake she said Romeo and Juliet, half joking, and he said what he actually thought before he could check whether he should.
Her voice changed when she answered. *After is boring.* He had heard that kind of change in recordings, when someone moved from the story they told everyone to the one they didn't. He had stepped on something. He didn't know what. He made a joke about a sequel to give it back to her, and decided to be careful with it from now on.
He still thought the ending was wrong. Two people who loved each other that much should have wanted the boring part. They should have wanted to be old and annoying in the same kitchen. But he could see she wanted the story to stop at its brightest point, and that he wanted it to keep going, and that this wasn't a thing either of them could be argued out of over melting frosting.
In the photograph he kept the recorder because holding it made his hands make sense.
It was half a block into the walk home that he realized the red light was on. He had turned it on without thinking, because her sandals made that small slap and scuff on the sidewalk and some old reflex in him reached for it. He had told her by the grill that she could say no. Then he hadn't asked.
"Noah," she said, and he clicked it off and laughed as if it were nothing. It wasn't nothing. His ears were hot for the rest of the block. Grace's voice ran through his head: *You answered a box.*
***
He left her at the bottom of her steps and walked away up Boylston in the wrong direction.
She probably thought he was showing off. He wasn't. He just wasn't ready to be home yet, where the evening would turn into something that had already happened. The heat sat on the street. Somebody's television was laughing on a third floor. He passed the corner store, dark now, its ice-cream sign switched off, and stood in front of it for a second for no reason he could have given anyone.
He went around by Centre Street and came home the long way to his own house too.
Grace was at the kitchen table taping the last box, a mug of cold coffee at her elbow. She looked up and took one look at him.
"Oh no," she said.
"What?"
"There was a girl."
"There were lots of girls. It was a party."
"Mm." She pulled the tape across, smoothed it with her palm. For a moment he thought she would push, and he got ready to be annoyed. Instead she said, "There's a plate in the fridge if the hot dogs weren't excellent," and went back to her box.
He would think of that later, in the week after she left, as one of the nicer things she had ever done for him.
In his room he plugged the recorder into his headphones and lay on his back on the bed. He found the file. *TINA 8-21-10.*
His own careful announcer voice, which he hated. Then cicadas, a long electric swell. The uncle's spatula scraping the grill. A train somewhere. And her: *Our ceiling fan. It clicks.*
He listened to it twice. The second time he closed his eyes and listened only to the space before she answered, the half second where she had clearly decided not to say cicadas.
There was, of course, no fan on the recording. There couldn't have been. The fan was three streets away, clicking over an empty bed while she stood in Marisol's yard.
He opened his phone. He typed and deleted *had fun tonight*, which sounded like something his mother would write. He typed and deleted *good luck with jane eyre* because he had already said it. He needed a reason, and he didn't have one, so he made one up.
*your fan is very loud btw. i could hear it in the recording.*
He pressed send before he could think about it, then thought about it for a long time. She would catch it, or she wouldn't. If she didn't, he was a weird boy who heard imaginary fans. If she did, she might think it was dumb.
The phone stayed dark on his chest. Ten minutes. Twenty. Down the hall, Grace's tape gun shrieked one last time and the kitchen light went off.
He fell asleep around one, half sure he had ruined it.
In the morning the phone was under his pillow, and there was a message waiting.
*you recorded me in marisol's backyard. but ok. it's been practicing since 4th grade. it's ready for its solo.*
He laughed out loud, alone in his room, loud enough that Grace banged once on the wall.
***
Four days later he bought a pack of the sour candy nobody bought.
He told himself it was research. He had never tried it. Mr. Haddad at the register raised his eyebrows at the purchase as though a natural law had been broken, and Noah said, "Trying new things," and went out into the heat with the bell jangling behind him.
She was at the bus stop on Centre Street with her bag over one shoulder, looking at the schedule the way people look at something they already have memorized.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." She looked at the candy in his hand. "Those are mine."
"I paid for them."
"Spiritually, they're mine."
He nearly told her his sister had said the same word to him days ago, then didn't, because it would mean explaining he had been thinking about her when Grace said it, which wasn't even true. He held out the pack. She took one. Neither of them said anything about what either of them was doing at the corner store and the bus stop at the same hour on a Wednesday.
Her bus wasn't coming for twenty minutes, she said. She was babysitting on Thursdays and Wednesdays this month and the kids lived near Hyde Square, so she could walk if she felt like it. She seemed to decide, while saying this, that she felt like it.
They walked down Centre Street past the laundromat and the hardware store and a café with chalk drawings on its sandwich board. A truck idled at the curb. Somebody's radio played merengue out of a second-floor window. The candy was so sour it made his eyes water, and she watched him eat it with open satisfaction.
"You hate it."
"I'm adjusting."
She told him again about wanting to live somewhere you could see a horizon. Somewhere flat, maybe, or near the ocean. Somewhere the sky didn't have a train line drawn across it. She said it as if she were testing whether he would laugh this time, now that it was daytime and nobody had a birthday.
He didn't laugh. He found he wanted to hear all of it: what the place would smell like, what she would do there, whether she would miss the corner store. He also found, underneath that, a small cold feeling about her being somewhere else, which was ridiculous, because he had known her for four days. He didn't mention the thing he thought about at night with headphones on, making radio somewhere bigger than his bedroom. It was too vague to say out loud. It seemed like hers deserved the space more.
At the corner of Perkins Street a bus went by with a long pneumatic sigh, and a man on the bench in front of the bakery was arguing pleasantly with a pigeon. Noah's hand went to his pocket.
Tina saw it.
"Can you not?" she said. Not sharp. Just plain. "Just this time. Can you just talk to me?"
His hand stopped. He thought of Grace and the tape gun. He thought of the sandals. He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and held it up so she could see.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Yeah. Okay."
She looked at him for a second as if she had expected an argument and had prepared for one. Then she smiled, a little lopsided, and they kept walking.
It was strange at first, the man and the pigeon going unkept, the bus sighing away into nothing. Then it was less strange. He listened to her talk about the two kids she babysat, one of whom was convinced he could communicate with ants. He told her about his grandmother and the measurements she would never give, and he didn't tell her about the spaces between words, but he came closer to it than he had with anyone.
A block from Hyde Square she fell quiet, and after a moment he realized she was humming.
Not a song. A few rising notes, a turn, a few more, nothing he had ever heard on any radio. She was looking at a window box of tired geraniums and clearly had no idea she was doing it. It was exactly what she had described in the backyard. Her mother's sound, carried three streets and into the afternoon without her permission.
The recorder was in his pocket. It would have taken two seconds.
He kept his hands where they were.
*You'll have to remember it,* he told himself, and was surprised by how much that frightened him, and how much he liked it anyway. He tried to fix it in his head: four notes up, the turn, the fall. By the time they reached the corner he had already lost the third one.
"This is me," she said, nodding toward a gray two-family with a plastic slide in the yard. A small boy was crouched beside the steps, staring at the ground with great seriousness.
"The ant guy," Noah said.
"The ant guy." She hitched her bag up her shoulder. "Thanks for the candy."
"Thanks for the walk."
She went up the path. Halfway there she turned around, walking backward a step. "Same time tomorrow, I'm usually at the stop. If your research isn't finished."
"Tomorrow's Thursday," he said, which was a stupid thing to say, because she obviously knew what day it was.
"It usually is, after Wednesday," she said, and went inside.
He walked back up Centre Street alone with the pack of candy in his hand. The man was still arguing with the pigeon. Noah didn't record him either. He thought, for a while, about nothing very large. Not about anyone being meant for anyone. Not about forever, which was a word he associated with Grace's old posters and his mother's soap operas.
He was thinking about whether the 39 ran late on Thursdays, and how early he could get to the stop without it looking like he had gotten there early, and whether the third note went up or down.