Page 40 of Hunger

The slamming of the phone.

The two-week silence.

Jenny coming home. The father in the front hall with his arms crossed. The argument. The shouting. Things said in the kitchen that none of them will recover from for a long time. The mother trying to hold both of them and failing.

The day Jenny leaves with her things in two suitcases and a violin case. The mother in the driveway watching the car pull away. The mother walking back into the house. The father in his study with the door closed.

The next two years.

The phone calls every Wednesday at nine forty-five. The father never on the line. The mother always asking Jenny to come for dinner. Jenny always declining. The galbi sitting in the refrigerator until the father throws it out.

The photograph on the nightstand. Jenny at seventeen in the dark dress, mid-bow, the violin against her shoulder, her face transformed. The photograph the mother keeps and the father pretends not to see and never asks her to put away.

The conversation the mother had with the father six months ago, in their bed in the dark, the mother saying:I should have stopped you. I should have stopped you with the letters.The father saying nothing for a long time. The father saying, finally:I know.

I pull back from the feeding.

I lower the woman the rest of the way to the floor. Her head tilts to the side. Her breath is slow and steady. The wound on her neck is already clotting.

I sit beside her on the kitchen tile.

The Massenet is in my head. I don't know music as these people know it — I haven't let music into me in centuries — but I know what I've just heard and I know what it did to the father and I know what Jenny had to do to make it sound like that.

I lift her gently and carry her to the couch in the room beyond the kitchen — a family room with photographs on the walls. I lay her down. I tuck a throw blanket over her. I arrange her so it'll look as though she came in here and sat down and fell asleep.

I look at the photographs on the wall.

Jenny is in many of them. Jenny as a baby. Jenny at the beach with a sand bucket. Jenny in a school uniform. Jenny with the quarter-violin under her chin, age six. Jenny in a dark dress at a music stand.

I find the photograph at the end of the row.

It's the one. The senior recital. The dark dress. The mid-bow. The violin under her chin. Her face transformed.

I look at it for a long time.

Then I leave.

The back door clicks shut behind me. The yard is dark. I walk to the gate, to the corner, to the van.

I drive west toward Millfield.

I don't need to stop at a music shop tonight. I know what I need. The Massenet. The violin part for the Meditation from Thaïs. I'll find it. The London firm can have it to me by tomorrow afternoon if I make the call when I get home.

The road unspools through the dark. The sky beyond the windshield is full of stars and the moon is a thin crescent low on the horizon.

Jenny.

The shape of the name has changed in me. It has weight now. It has years now. I know how she came to be the woman sleeping in the bedroom of the apartment in Millfield. I know what was taken from her. I know who took it.

I know what I'll give back.

The sky is going pale when I pull into the driveway of the farmhouse. I've been awake too long. I've been moving too long.

I make the phone call from the kitchen.

Whitfield answers on the second ring. He never sounds as though he's been asleep.

"Sir."