Nia did not go to school that week. She stood in the empty corner a long time. The dust outline had been cleaned, but she could still see it. June, who did not believe in lying to children about the shape of loss, said, "She's gone. We are here. Both of those sentences get to be true even when they hurt each other."
At the funeral the church was full. People said Denise was an angel now, which made Nia angry in a way she did not have words for, because angels did not sit on kitchen chairs and say soft thumbs, and she did not want an angel. She wanted the rented harp back in the corner and her mother's voice telling her she had rushed the comfortable place. A woman from the hotel left an envelope. The church musician played a piano version of a piece Denise had loved and played two wrong chords and did not stop. Nia respected the not stopping. It was what Denise had taught.
Afterward, in the apartment, June sat on the floor in her black dress and let Nia sit inside the circle of her arms without talking for almost an hour. The radiator knocked. Nothing answered. The corner stayed empty.
"We are going to figure it out," June said at last. Her voice was rough. "Not today. Today we eat the casseroles and we don't answer the phone. Tomorrow or the next day, we start figuring. You are not going to lose the music and her. That would be a theft on top of a theft. I don't know how yet. Not knowing how is not the same as not doing it."
Nia pressed her face into June's shoulder. She smelled citrus lotion and church basement coffee. Outside, the city made its ordinary noises, indifferent and somehow insulting. Inside, a girl who was not yet nine made an agreement with an instrument that was not in the room.
She would keep her hands. She would keep the piece. She would wait for a harp the way you wait for a person you love to come back, except she was old enough, even then, to know that people and harps return by different rules.
Eastbridge Community Arts occupied a storefront that had once been a tax office and still had the nervous energy of a place where numbers had gone wrong. The front window was papered with flyers for guitar circles, a youth choir, and a painting class that met when the instructor was not working doubles. Inside, the radiators leaked a little and the linoleum had a map of old leaks. At the back, behind a folding screen painted with uneven sunflowers, stood the harp Denise had told Miss Alvarez how to find.
It had come from an estate. A woman had died, and her children wanted the instrument gone before it became another object to feel guilty about. The harp was a pedal harp, older than Nia, with a crack in the soundboard that a technician had declared stable if nobody did anything heroic, and a C pedal that stuck a fraction of a second too long, like a word on the tip of the tongue. The gold of the column had dulled to the color of weak tea. It was, even so, a real harp. When Nia saw it for the first time, two months after the funeral, she put both hands behind her back so she would not grab.
Miss Lorraine Alvarez was sixty, with silver-streaked black hair in a clip and the posture of a choir director who had spent decades telling children to stand up without telling them they were small. She had known Denise from a city musicians' cooperative that met in church basements and argued about rates. She had cried at the funeral in the practical way of women who cry and then look around to see who needs a ride home.