the feelings of others, taking the pulse of one person or an entire room, if only so she’ll know whom she can make angry and when to run the other way.
Yet it is Adele Suzanne most fears. Adele’s emotional compass is keen because she is still a child—no one spots a liar faster than a smart child—and unrelenting because she must watch people closely or she will lose the world.
Suzanne turns to drain the pasta, hot streaks of steam pelting the side of her neck and face.
Ben does not set out wineglasses, so Suzanne does not uncork the bottle she picked up earlier, reading labels against price tags, the sun filtering through the store’s filmy window warm on the back of her neck, the clerk watching her with slight interest. She does not open the wine she chose before she knew her lover was dead. Before he was dead, or at the moment he died? The radio has not said what time the plane dropped from the sky.
“Like a stone in water.” The witness voices an accent so Midwestern that it sounds Southern. Suzanne turns the dial, clicks off the cheap radio. Without the word survivor, and there isn’t one, the details can do her no good tonight.
Suzanne distributes water glasses, and they take their usual seats around the food. Adele lifts her glass, leaving behind a wet circle she traces with a fingertip. She looks at the food, at each of them. Had they been a household of three, which for a while it seemed they might be, family dinners would have been shaped by sound. Rising or falling or stalled, but always sound or its absence. But Ben and Suzanne’s baby did not arrive, and after Petra and Adele made them a quartet, they worked to make a world defined by sight, touch, smell, taste rather than by sound and not-sound.
In their deep concern for Adele—the child who never turned to Petra’s violin, who never winced at sudden noise, the child with wide eyes but only a small seal of a mouth—the three musicians do the best they can. Suzanne has trained her eyes and hands to move with some fluency. Now that Adele can follow the shapes and motions of lips, Suzanne speaks slowly and faces her squarely. Of course none of their hands are so nimble in language as Adele’s. The swift precision of hers is that of a conductor who knows the music so well that he does not use a score.
Suzanne watches Adele’s fingers through dinner, sometimes forgetting to answer, forgetting to mouth or sign, “Yes, I had a good day, too.” She is thinking of Alex’s hands at work, and that today feels like the worst day of her life.
Petra carries the conversation with Adele, chatting away like an older sister, asking Suzanne if Adele can have soda with dinner, as though it is Suzanne and not Petra who is the mother. Suzanne does what Petra wants her to do: she says no for her.
Away from her violin Petra’s long fingers lack the speed and clean sweeps of her daughter’s, but they share their exuberance, the beguiling lack of self-consciousness. They move without her watching them, like Suzanne’s fingers when they press and release the strings of her viola but at no other time. Suzanne envies this fundamental honesty, this fluency in a speech not yet divorced from action and feeling by time and intent. For all her faults, Petra doesn’t lie. She says she doesn’t have to, an advantage of not giving a flying fuck what other people think. Suzanne wonders what it is to lie in gesture, whether it is easier to detect deception in a first or second language, in spoken or signed speech. Hands caught in the act. She folds hers in her lap, resting from eating the food she cannot quite taste.
She remembers to ask Ben about his work. He is collaborating on a composition with a man who is both a mathematics professor and on the adjunct music faculty, and they are arranging it for a small orchestra.
Ben nods, stabbing tubes of pasta. “We decided to cut the faux-scherzo.”
“Too obscure? The joke that isn’t?”
His hair, recently grown out from a self-inflicted haircut, flops side to side as he eats. He looks at Suzanne as though there is food on her face, more amused than annoyed but at least a little annoyed. “I argued that it pandered, and Kazuo agreed. The whole point of this staging, of using