Shizu went back down to the same spot on the seventh morning after burying Tsuru on the hill behind the shrine.
She went alone without telling anyone. She climbed down from the unused rocks on the north side, where the current was too strong. She held seawater in her mouth, tapped the rim of the bucket three times, chanted, “Shu, shu, shu,” and plunged headfirst beneath the surface.
Tomokazuki was waiting in the same place.
She hovered motionless above the sandy floor in a way no living person could. She wore a white sash, and her hair was cut to the nape of her neck. In her hand was an abalone shell larger than the one before. Slowly, she held it out again.
Shizu knew every rule the old man had taught her. She knew not to accept it, not to answer, and not to say thank you.
She reached out and took it.
The woman's fingers were colder than the water—cold in a way the stones on the sea floor weren't. The shell was so heavy that Shizu's arm dropped several inches, and the instant their fingertips touched, Shizu heard a long, thin whistling sound that trembled at the end. It rose beneath the water, even though no one could whistle underwater.
She didn't smile. She merely nodded, like someone accepting an object—and accepting the person who gave it to her—then sank into the deep water where the light couldn't reach.
On the beach, Shizu pried the shell open with a sharp metal tool. The meat was unnaturally tough, and along the innermost edge of the shell was another pearl. It was exactly the same size as the one in Tsuru's hand, with the same color and the same luster.
A perfect pair.
A craftsman in town made them into earrings for sixty sen. He complained that the pearls were unusually difficult to drill through; one drill bit snapped. He said pearls like these should be sold at a department store in Nagoya, not hung from the ears of someone who spent eight hours a day diving. Shizu didn't answer. She paid him and put them on right there outside the shop.
That evening, she walked back to the village along the beach, and the sea began to speak.
It wasn't one voice. It was dozens, hundreds, layered over one another like waves breaking out of sync. A sailor from some monsoon season no one could remember shouted for someone to cut the sail rope. A child called for his father. An old woman said she was cold. The voices of everyone who had drowned in this bay over the past two hundred years spoke all at once, each repeating their final sentence over and over, forever.
Shizu dropped to her knees on the sand and pressed her hands over her ears until they hurt. Then she realized the voices weren't coming through her ears.
A rehearsal room in the Lat Phrao neighborhood. Monday afternoon, three days before the audition.
“Again.” Auntie Phai tapped the rim of the drum three times. “One, two, three, four.”
Mook came in half a beat late.
She was late the second time, too. On the third, she came in correctly—but only because she was watching the drummer's hands, not because she could hear.
Ever since the day at the secondhand shop, the sounds in the rehearsal room always reached her a little late. Only half a second. Like watching a movie where the sound and the actors' mouths were just slightly out of sync. Too little to explain to anyone, and more than enough to make a singer miss her entrance every time.
“You didn't sleep, did you, bitch?” Auntie Phai asked. There was no humor in her voice.
“I did.”
“Then take off the earrings while you rehearse.”
Mook didn't answer. Her hand rose to touch her earlobe before she even realized it. Auntie Phai watched that hand for two seconds, then called a fifteen-minute break even though they'd only been rehearsing for twenty.
During the break, the drummer went out onto the balcony to smoke with the guitarist. Mook couldn't hear everything. Just fragments drifting in through the half-open door: “Maybe we should take another job,” and, “If you can't handle it, just say so.” Auntie Phai followed them outside, then came back alone, laughing too loudly and saying those idiots were just hungry. She'd feed them some Korean barbecue and that would solve everything.
Mook sat in the same folding chair, her fingers still touching her earlobe. She told herself to take them off. Take them off, and everything would go back to normal. She'd go back to being a nightclub singer who never missed an entrance and would never hear Mom finish speaking. That was as far as the thought got before her fingers slid down and rested limply on her knee.
On audition day, the parking lot behind the theater was packed by five in the morning. More than two thousand applicants stood in lines along the metal fence, clutching their queue cards. Seventeen-year-olds loudly warmed up their voices. Fifty-year-old adults stood quietly, hugging their portfolios. A coffee vendor pushed her cart past for the third time.
Mook stood beside the second concrete pillar from the back entrance. That was where someone spoke to her.
“Tell Daeng I still haven't tied the scaffolding rope on the other side.”
A man's voice, around forty years old, with an Isan accent. Flat and unhurried, as if he were speaking under the midday sun.
Mook took one step back. The voice vanished. She stepped forward again, returning to the same spot. The voice came back—the same sentence, the same tone, not a word changed.
She was standing where a man had fallen to his death during the theater's construction, and he had been repeating that sentence there every second for more than fifty years.
Auntie Phai approached with two iced coffees and stopped short when she saw Mook's face.
“What are you hearing?”
“The person who died here,” Mook answered honestly because she didn't have the strength to lie. “Auntie, if I can stand in the middle of that stage, I'll be able to hear Mom finish speaking.”
Auntie Phai stood frozen, holding the two iced coffees as condensation ran down her wrists. Then she did something Mook hadn't expected. She didn't curse. She didn't laugh. She didn't call Mook a bitch.
“And if you hear her all the way to the end, will you take them off?” Auntie Phai asked.
Mook opened her mouth to answer.
Then a long, thin whistling sound that trembled at the end rose in her left ear, cutting through the middle of the parking lot in central Bangkok. It was followed by a woman speaking a short sentence in a language Mook had never heard in her life.
It was the voice of someone who hadn't died in this parking lot, hadn't died in this city, and hadn't died in this century.
An announcement called for queue number four hundred eleven.
Mook looked down at her queue card, then walked through the back entrance without answering Auntie Phai's question.