Thursday night into Friday morning. Eleven-twenty. The house is asleep. Your mother is asleep in the guest room two doors down. Your father is asleep in the master bedroom at the end of the hall with the door most of the way shut. Charlotte is asleep in her bed under the quilt her mother made when she was four. She has had it every night since. The squares are uneven.
You are sitting on the carpet beside her bed with your back against the wall. The house-heater comes on once every twenty minutes with a soft under-floor click and the vent near the window breathes warm into the room, dry in the way Colorado winter air is dry even heated, for three minutes and then is quiet again. The streetlight at the corner is thirty yards off and one pane away. Its light makes a trapezoid on the carpet that crosses Charlotte's bedside table and stops at the lower corner of her bed.
On the bedside table there is a glass of water half-drunk, a paperback of A Wrinkle in Time from the school library that Charlotte is partway through, and a drawing on a folded sheet of printer-paper Charlotte did this afternoon before dinner. You do not unfold the drawing. You know what it looks like. She showed it to you at the kitchen counter while your mother was at the stove.
Your phone vibrates once in your lap. You step into the hallway before answering. The hallway is darker than the bedroom because the streetlight does not reach here. A voicemail notification. The number is a Turkish country code. You know the number without having saved it.
You listen with the phone against your ear, standing in the hallway in your socks.
The cousin in Kadıköy speaks in English because she knows you do not speak Turkish. Canım, she says first, and then in her careful English she tells you that the memorial service for Yelena is set for the first Sunday in December at the house on the hill road, and she understands if you cannot come but she wanted you to know, and please call if there is anything you need, and she will not ask again, and she hopes you are well, wherever you are. Hayırlısı, she says — the word slips in among the English the way old-country words slip in, and you recognize it without remembering from where until later you do: Yelena, one morning, a melon, a knife angled toward her palm. She says canım again at the end before she hangs up.
You do not call back. You put the phone face-down on the floor in the hallway and you stand there with one hand flat against the wall for a moment.
You go back into Charlotte's room.
Charlotte has not moved. The trapezoid of streetlight has shifted about an inch across the bedside table because the earth has turned that much since you left. Your hand finds the edge of the quilt and does not lift it. You have not touched the drawer today and the drawer is not in this room.
There is a weight I have been carrying since Prague that is not in my bag. The bag is in the guest room across the hall with the scan and the photograph and the monograph and the document I have carried since New York inside. The weight is not in the bag. I know where the weight is: the weight is in the spaces between things. Six women whose names I have learned in six cities are the weight. Only one of them is my grandmother. Not all of them died in ways called what they were. The ones who did not die are also the weight. I have not laid it down. I do not know how.
The seventh name is one I have never been told. The TA said it once. The bruise heard it. I have not heard it since.
From the room at the end of the hall — the master bedroom, the door most of the way shut — there is the faint sound of a television your father has left on. The television is on the cable channel that plays old films late. You can hear a man saying something about silence in the specific cadence of someone who was never meant to be speaking in this kitchen in Denver tonight, a cadence that is four hundred years old and English and not yours. You listen for half a second and the sentence is gone.
Charlotte breathes out. Charlotte's breath catches once, the way eight-year-olds' breath catches when they are dreaming something, and releases.
You sit with your back against the wall and you look at her.
The drawing is folded on the bedside table. The drawer is not in this room. The other drawer — the Bleecker drawer — is wherever it went when you left for Prague. In the drawer there is the drawing Charlotte made in the spring when she was seven, a horse with six legs in a green crayon that has faded one degree since she drew it. Charlotte will be eighteen and the drawer will be in a different room and the horse with six legs will still have six legs. I do not know I have thought this.
You watch her sleep. The heater clicks on again. The vent begins to breathe warm into the room.