The number had been disconnected. An operator with a Spanish accent gave me another. I dialed the new number, my courage beginning to falter. Then she picked up. For a moment, I’d called to tell her I’d be late for breakfast. Muscle memory, too, the thing that doesn’t stop until our muscles do. I heard myself ask, “Teresa?” A second later, before she could say anything, I heard myself ask again. My voice bounced back in maddening delay, the time it took for the word to make the loop from Europe to outer space to America back up to the communications satellite and down to Europe’s surface again. Canon at unison.
She needed no other sound. She struggled to say the syllables of my name, not quite managing. At last she got out a comic, choked “Joey!” The nickname she rarely called me, out of too much love. She laughed, and that sound, too, quickly broke up and weeded over.
“Teresa. Ter. I got the strangest message. From Milton Weisman…” I could barely talk, distracted by the echo of my own voice bouncing back like crazed, imitative counterpoint against my own words.
“Joseph, I know. I told him to write you. I’m so sorry. It’s so horrible.”
Her words were pure dissonance. I couldn’t find the key. I had to force myself to wait, so our words wouldn’t collide in the satellite echo. “What is? His cable made no…”
She drew up short. I heard her turn like a massive freighter, doubling back to fish me out of the water. “It’s your sister. She called me. She called me. She must have remembered my name from…” From when I had never introduced them. The idea of hearing at last from a woman Teresa had wanted to love broke her down into time-lapse crying.
“Ruth?” At that syllable, Jonah jerked up in the chair where he listened. He stood and leaned toward me. I held him off with a palm. “What’s happened? Is she…?”
“Her husband,” Teresa cried. “It’s so awful. They say he was… He didn’t make it, Joseph. He isn’t… He never…”
Robert. My wave of relief— Ruth alive — snapped back in horror: Robert dead. The whiplash shut me down, and I couldn’t breathe. Teresa started talking again before I started hearing. She laid out a thing I’d need explained to me over and over again. Even now. She went on in detail, details impossible for her to know and useless to my understanding.
I must have cut her off. “Is there a way I can reach her?”
“Yes.” Excited, ashamed. Part of the family at last. “She gave me a number, in case… Just a minute.” And in the seconds it took Teresa to find her address book, I lived all the lives that mine had beaten out of me. I sat holding the line, stopped. Robert Rider was dead. My sister’s husband — killed. Ruth, from nowhere, wanted me to know. She had tracked me back to the woman who would always know how to find me, the woman who faithful Joseph was sure to stay with forever. But I’d sentenced that woman to oblivion years ago.
In the seconds while I waited for Teresa to come back, she became infinitely vulnerable to me, infinitely good. I’d hurt her beyond imagining, and here she was, glad for the chance to help me in my hour. All good things were scattering. Death fed faster, the more it took. We get nothing; a handful of weeks. The best we have is broken up or thrown stupidly away. Teresa came back on the line and read me a number. I wrote it down, blindly. I’d forgotten how many digits an American phone number had. Teresa corrected my mistakes in dictation, and we were done.
“I love you,” I told her. And got back silence. Of all the things I thought she might say, this wasn’t one. “Teresa?”
“I… I’m so sorry, Joseph. I never met them. I wish I had. But I’m as sorry as if he’d been…” When she started again, it was forced natural. “Did you know I got married?” I couldn’t even exclaim. “Yep, married! To Jim Miesner. I’m not sure you two ever met.” The bullet-headed man she used to come to my bar with, before me. “And I’ve got the most beautiful little girl! Her name is Danuta. I wish you could meet her.”
“How? How old is she?”
She paused. Not the pause of satellites. “Five. Well, closer to six.” Her silence was defensive. But we all have the right to make what we need. “I… I’m back with my family. With my father. You were right about all of that.”
I got off the phone, polite to the point of numb. I wobbled to my feet. Jonah was looking at me, waiting. “It’s Robert.”
“Robert.”
“Robert Rider. Your brother-in-law. He was shot by a policeman over a month ago. There was an arrest. Some struggle. I…didn’t get all the details.”
Jonah’s shoulders tensed. What details? Death settled all the details. In his face, I read the extent of his banishment. Ruth had tried to contact me. The calls, the messages, all for me alone. She’d never once tried to reach him. “How is she?”
“Teresa didn’t know.”
“I meant Teresa.” He flicked his fingers toward his chest: Give it here. I didn’t know what he wanted until I looked down and saw the telephone number crumpled in my palm. I handed it over. “Area code two-one-five. Where is that?”
Nowhere I’d ever lived. He gestured toward the phone. I shook my head. I needed time. Time to put together all the time that had just come apart.
We sang that night. With what concentration I had, I braced for catastrophe. But somehow we survived, dragged along by overpractice. We took the slowest Josquin in history. Those in the audience who weren’t scandalized or bored to death fell through the auditorium floor and descended into the cracks between space. Whatever the final verdict, no one would ever hear its like again.
I lay in bed that night thinking of Ruth. Our sister had been way out ahead of us. She’d jumped into the future long before Jonah or I had admitted to the present. She’d seen what was coming down. She was riding the nightmare before her older brothers had awakened from the dream. I’d always imagined that Ruth’s suffering came from being too light to merit race’s worst injuries. That night, in a crowded hotel in Avignon where most guests assumed I was from Morocco, I finally saw. Race’s worst injuries are color-blind.
Something kept Jonah up, too. It wasn’t the Josquin. At 3:00A.M., I heard him pacing in the hall outside my door, wondering whether to knock. I called to him, and he walked in as if keeping an appointment. “Pennsylvania,” he said. I just blinked in the dark. “Area code two-one-five. Eastern Pennsylvania.” I tried to fit the information to my sister. Da’s last hallucination had her moving to California. That’s where I’d always imagined her. Jonah didn’t sit. He stood at the window and pulled back the drape. On the horizon, the Palais des Papes glowed like a monstrous Gothic illuminated manuscript. “I’ve been thinking.” He made the words stretch from last afternoon all the way back several years. “She must be right. Ruth must be right. I mean, about…the fire. No other way.”
He looked out the window, on all the violence he’d so long and beautifully denied. Jonah had met Robert only through me. The details of Robert’s death were to us still as obscure as God. But this death confirmed the central fact of our lives, the one we’d forever kept as abstract as the art we gave ourselves to. We’d lived as if murder weren’t constant in the place we came from. We hid in the concert hall, sanctuary from the world’s real sound. But thirty years ago — a lifetime — long before we knew how to read the story, stray hatred scattered us. As Jonah said the words, the fact turned obvious. And just as obvious: Some part of me had always believed.
He stood for a long time, saying nothing. Nor could I say anything to him. But Jonah was my brother. We had, at one time or another, played everything together. Alone of all things, we knew each other. He’d taught me, and I him: All music lived and died inside the rests. Sometime around four o’clock, he said, “Call her.” He’d been keeping his eye on the clock, on the time differences, for the very last moment it would be decent to call.