Page 20

My mother holds on to me in the yard, and it's shorter than twelve minutes, and it's harder. "Sunday," I say.

She pats my chest. "You call me."

"I will."

She looks past me at Nora, loading her bag into the car. Something crosses her face. She takes it back and folds it away, and I don't know what it was.

"That's a good girl," she says quietly.

"I know."

They drive down the valley road. I stand in the snow until the car goes round the bend.

At four the truck door shuts in the yard. Boots on the porch. The door opens, and the cold comes in, and she comes in behind it with snow in her hair and her cheeks red and something in her face that I have only ever seen on a mountain, when the crew reaches someone I've been talking to for a long time.

"Cole."

"Mm."

"Listen."

She plugs her recorder into the speaker. Turns the volume up. Presses play.

A sound fills the room. Fast. Light. A hard, quick patter, like hooves a long way off. I don't know what it is for two seconds.

Then I know.

I set the handset down. I turn in the chair. My hand comes up over my mouth, and I don't decide to do it.

"A hundred and fifty-two," she says. Her voice is shaking. "Ten weeks. I dropped your mother and drove straight to the clinic. They let me hold it right up to the machine."

For four years, this speaker has given me voices. Scared ones. Cracked ones. People on rock in the dark with their breath going quiet. Every night I have listened for the signal that means somebody is in trouble.

This is a signal that means somebody is alive.

I can't see. I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, and it doesn't help.

"Come here," I say.

She crosses the room. I pull her between my knees and put both hands on her stomach. It's flat. Warm. Nothing there to feel. I press my face against it anyway, through her sweater, and the recording keeps going over my head, galloping, small and steady and furious to be alive.

Her fingers slide into my hair.

"Halloween," I say, into the wool.

"The fog."

"The boulder field."

"You said you wanted it to take." She's laughing and she's crying. "It took."

Something goes through me that doesn't have a name. I stand up. I take the recorder out of her hand and set it on the desk and let it play. Then I switch off the radio set. The room goes quiet except for the little heart.

"Cole."

"Nobody gets me tonight."

"You didn't ask me anything."