One More Morning
The Sound in the Hall
Chapter 1 · by Iris
Ethan woke to the sound of his daughter singing in the next room.
It was a small, made-up song, half humming and half words, the kind a child sings without knowing she's doing it. And for one warm and ordinary second, before he remembered, he was happy. It was the happiest he had been in a year, and it lasted exactly as long as it took him to open his eyes.
Then he remembered, the way he did every single morning, in one cold drop through the middle of him.
Nora was dead.
She had been dead for a year. He knew it the way he knew his own name. He had carried her small white coffin himself, because he could not stand to let anyone else touch it. He had sat through a long grey hearing and listened to a man with a pointer explain how the other driver had run the red. He had spent that year moving through his mornings like a man walking along the bottom of a river, and not one of those mornings had ever, ever started with her voice.
But the singing didn't stop.
He lay still and listened to it, his heart slamming now, and told himself the truth: he had finally cracked. He'd been waiting to, in a quiet way, for a year. People did. You lost a child and one ordinary Tuesday your mind simply walked off and left you, and maybe this was how it felt. Gentle, even. A little girl singing down the hall.
The song went on. It was coming from the small bedroom at the end of the hall, the second bedroom of the sad one-bathroom apartment he'd rented after Claire asked him to go, the room he had painted a pale yellow for a girl who only ever slept in it on weekends. The door was open a crack. The singing was in there.
Ethan got out of bed. His legs did not feel like his own. He walked down the short hallway the way you walk toward a sound in a dark house, certain and terrified at the same time, and he pushed the door open the rest of the way.
Nora was sitting on the floor in her pajamas.
The yellow ones, with the ducks. The ones Claire had packed for that last weekend, the ones he had found later folded in her overnight bag and had kept in a drawer he could neither open again nor throw away. She had a fat green crayon in her fist and a coloring book open on the carpet, and she was seven years old, and she was warm, and she was breathing, and she looked up at him and rolled her eyes in the exact way that used to make him laugh.
"You sleep so much, Dad," she said.
Ethan made a sound. He didn't know what it was. He grabbed the doorframe with both hands because the floor had stopped being reliable.
"Nora," he said.
"What?" She went back to her coloring. She was staying inside the lines, mostly, her tongue poking out one corner of her mouth in concentration. "Can we have pancakes? You said we could have pancakes. You bought the mix."
He could not answer her. He stood in the doorway and looked at her, every part of her, the cowlick at the back of her head that never lay flat, the small scab on her knee, the way her feet didn't yet reach when she sat on the edge of things. And he understood, slowly, that he was either dreaming the most cruel dream of his life or he had lost his mind completely, and he found that he did not care which. He would take either one. He would live inside either one forever, if it meant she kept looking up at him like that.
"Yeah," he managed. "Yeah. We can have pancakes."
"You're being weird," Nora informed him, not unkindly.
He made himself let go of the doorframe. He made himself walk, on legs that weren't his, out to the kitchen, because he needed something solid, and because some animal part of him was already starting to be afraid of what he would find there.
The pancake mix was on the counter. The box he'd bought on a Thursday to make up for missing her school thing, the box he had been too busy to ever open. Her bike was by the front door, the purple one with the training wheels still bolted on, the one she had begged him to teach her to ride "like a big kid," the one he kept promising to get to next time. On the fridge, under a magnet, was a drawing she'd made of the three of them, back when there were three of them, all holding hands, the dad figure noticeably smaller than the others and standing slightly off to the side.
He had seen all of these things before. He had seen them on exactly one morning of his life.
His phone was face-down on the counter where he always left it charging. His hand was shaking when he turned it over.
The date on the screen was a Sunday in March. A year ago. The last day.
The time was 7:14 in the morning.
Ethan stood very still in the cold kitchen, holding the phone, and did the arithmetic he would have given anything not to know how to do. He had picked Nora up on Friday. He was supposed to drive her home to Claire's late this morning, before noon, so Claire could take her to her cousin's birthday in the afternoon. He remembered the drive. God help him, he remembered every second of the drive. He remembered the light on Route 9.
He was back. He didn't know how, and he didn't waste a breath asking. He was standing in the last morning he had ever spent with his daughter, and somewhere down the hall she was singing again, and he knew, with a certainty that was colder and steadier than the grief had ever been, exactly how this morning was going to end.
In a few hours he was going to put her in the car. And he was going to lose her all over again.
Only this time, he thought, gripping the edge of the counter, this time he knew it was coming.
This time he was awake.