My mother didn't move. The furnace came on, a low rumble under the floor, and went off.
At 11:52, Oliver lifted his right front paw, the white one, and reached down, not walking, reaching, and set it on the black key just to the left of the middle, in the worn hollow, and pressed.
The note rose up and filled the room. E-flat. Three hundred and eleven times a second. Round and soft and endless, the sound of someone saying your name. It went up the stairs past me and down the hall and into every room of the house, and it hung there in the blue air and didn't fade, didn't fade, the longest I'd ever heard it, as if the piano itself were holding its breath.
And my mother leaned forward, just a little, toward the piano, the way you lean toward someone across a table to tell them something nobody else is supposed to hear, and she whispered.
I almost didn't hear it. I've wondered, since, whether I heard it at all, or whether I only knew what the words had to be. But I think I heard it. I think the house was so quiet with the snow that a whisper carried.
"I hear you, Mama," she whispered. "I hear you."
The note was still going, thin now, a thread.
"I'm home," my mother whispered. "Everybody's home. Everybody's safe." And then, so softly that it was hardly more than her breath going out, "You can sleep now."
Oliver began to purr. I could hear it from the landing, that thin humming purr I'd heard on the tape, the one that sounded like purring at someone. My mother reached over and put her hand on his back, flat, the way I had that afternoon in the gray light, and held it there.
Then she took her hand away and lifted both hands to the keys, and she played the song.
She was terrible at first. I want to tell the truth about that, because the truth is better than the version where she sat down and played it perfectly after twenty-one years. Her fingers were stiff and slow and she hit a wrong note in the second measure and stopped, and I heard her breathe in hard through her nose, and she started over. She started over from the E-flat. And the second time she got through the first page, haltingly, the left hand coming in late and lumpy, and turned the page with a rustle, and kept going. And somewhere in the second page, something happened. I don't know how else to say it. Something in her remembered. Her shoulders came down. Her head tilted a little to one side, the way I'd see it tilt a thousand times afterward, as if she were listening to someone just behind her. And the song came out of the old piano, simple and slow and rocking, a lullaby for a four-year-old with scarlet fever, in a key the old composers said was for love and devotion and conversations with God, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and I have heard a great many things since.