"It makes sense," I said again, because it did, to me, at twelve, the way things make sense in the dark at midnight that don't make sense in the morning, and because I wanted her to stop looking like that.
"I stopped playing," she said. "Everything. I couldn't sit at a piano without hearing that note. And Mama never said a word. She never asked me to answer. She never asked me why I quit. She just kept playing it every night until I left home, and I'd lie there with my pillow over my head. And then I moved away, and I married your father, and I thought, there. It's done. She'll stop now." She looked down at the envelope. "And she never did. Did she?"
"Mrs. Kostelnik said every night. Even at the end. She said Grandma said somebody in the house had to keep saying it. In case."
My mother bent over then, folded right over the envelope with her forehead almost touching the keys, and made a sound like something tearing. I put my arms around her, as far around as they'd go. She was small. I'd never noticed how small she was. On the other end of the bench, Oliver stood up and walked across the keys, and they sounded under his feet, three or four notes, random and soft, the first time I'd ever heard him play anything but the one, and he stepped down into my mother's lap and lay down on the envelope and began to purr.
* * *
She read it the next morning, at the kitchen table, before anyone else was up but me. I know because I came down at six-thirty and found her there with a cup of Sanka and the four sheets of music spread out in front of her and the blue letter open beside them. She'd been crying, but she wasn't crying now. She was reading the music. I could see her lips moving very slightly, and the fingers of her right hand moving on the tabletop, on the yellow oilcloth, pressing, lifting, pressing.
"Is it pretty?" I asked.
"It's simple," she said. "She wrote it for a four-year-old. It's in E-flat, it's three pages, it's the kind of thing you could play with your eyes closed." She touched the first note, the one with the fermata over it. "I used to be able to. She wrote it for me the winter I had scarlet fever and she sat by my bed for two weeks. I didn't know that. I didn't know that till just now." She turned over the first sheet, where there was writing on the back I hadn't seen, a few lines in faint pencil. "She wrote it down here. 'Carrie sick, fever 104. Wrote this for her on the nights she couldn't sleep. She likes it when I start on the E-flat. She says it sounds like someone saying your name.'"
She put the sheet down.
"I don't remember any of that," she said. "Isn't that strange? I don't remember being sick. I just remember the song."
My father came down at seven in his robe and found us both at the table, and he looked at the music, and at her face, and he didn't ask anything. He just came around behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders, and she reached up and put one of her hands over his, and they stayed like that while the coffee maker gurgled and the radio on the refrigerator said it would snow tonight, four to six inches, and a white Christmas was a sure thing.