One Cold Night

mind. She had practiced that song recently.
    Abandoning the pitcher of milk along with her efforts at hospitality, Susan closed the refrigerator door and padded barefoot down the hall to Lisa’s bedroom. The door squealed when Susan opened it. Glory was sitting cross-legged on the bed, reading something — it was Lisa’s newest diary, the blank book with a green watermarked cover. Dave had picked it up for her at Kate’s Paperie a few months ago, suggesting that Lisa try to write her own songs. Susan hadn’t heard Lisa practicing any original songs and had never asked her what she had decided to do with the blank book. It had been enough that Dave had thought to give it to her and so like him to choose something beautiful from a specialty paper storeinstead of the kind of utilitarian notebook Susan would have bought in bulk at Staples.
    “She’d want me to read it,” Glory said, placing her hands over the exposed pages. “I know because I’d want her to read mine, if it was me who...”
    The inevitable reference faded into silence. The idea of Lisa vanished, missing, taken was too laden to fit into speakable words. It was unnecessary to point out the obvious. They all knew Lisa was gone.
    “What’s it say?” Susan stepped into the room, her toes digging into the pile of Lisa’s blue carpet.
    Glory shrugged. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”
    “But you don’t know anything that could be important, do you, Glory?”
    Glory hesitated, briefly misunderstanding the question, then shook her head.
    “I told everything I know to that cop before, I swear.”
    “It’s okay, honey.”
    Glory lifted her hand from the open diary and her attention fell back to the pages, where Lisa’s script flowed like waves upon waves upon waves.
    In the slatted light that came through the blinds, Glory looked older, more chiseled than Susan had seen her before. Yet Susan felt she knew this moment. One after another, every detail in Lisa’s room became a déjà vu, the last slipping into the next like a dream of a hand that could not stop entering the same glove. Susan felt a headache coming on. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips into her temples. Then she crossed over to the bookshelf to look for Lisa’s song-practice CD. She found it in the compact silver boom box on the floor in front of the bookcase.
    Lisa’s voice announced itself self-consciously:“This is me, Lisa Bailey, and this is my practice disk, so whoever you are, if you’re listening to it — well, you’re probably not supposed to be listening to it, but if you are — this is a test, just a test.”
    Glory looked up from the diary and listened.
    Susan lay back on the carpet, legs stretched long and body propped on her elbows. She let her head hang, feeling the pinch in the back of her neck and the stretch at the front of her throat, as Lisa’s voice filled the room.
    After a few minutes, Susan heard the plunk of Glory getting off the bed and felt the air move as the girl stepped over her. Susan kept her eyes closed, listening to the singing on the practice tape. The door clicked shut behind Glory.
    “The Circle Game” was followed by “Raised on Robbery,” then by something else, by a newer songwriter whose name Susan didn’t know. Unless Lisa had written her own song. Susan opened her eyes, alone now, and listened closely; it was beautiful. Only days ago she had wondered when the Joni Mitchell obsession would be edged out by something new; not that Susan didn’t like Mitchell’s songs — she loved them — but she had been getting just a little tired of hearing the same ones over and over.
    Today Susan could endlessly listen to Lisa’s voice spin out the sweet harmonies. There would be no such thing as annoyance or excess ever again, if Lisa could only be brought safely home.
    The new song ended and Joni’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” began. Susan listened closely to the words, the poetry, and on a rising lyric toward the end, her heart swelled and she lost control.
    She let the tears bleed down her skin, giving herselfto the pain that had completely filled her. She wished for a deep inner knowledge that Lisa was still alive, wished for that elusive connection parents spoke of when a child was gone, the invisibly joining cord. But the innocent trust required by both love and faith eluded her now, much as she wanted to fold herself back into their familiar comforts. She wished she could return to yesterday, to the known