Familia

Anna's house. Spring, 2041, late morning.

Stef's truck went away.

Anna stood at the open door of the house and watched it go down the slope, the way she had watched things go for fifteen years now, and she did not move until the sound of the engine was completely absent and what was left was the morning and the cat and the smell of zarzaparrilla and dark sugar in the kitchen.

The cat, having concluded that Stef leaving was the actual end of all interesting things, came to the door and pressed her face against Anna's calf in a manner that meant food now.

"In a minute," Anna said.

The cat reproachfully went toward the bowl in the kitchen.

Anna picked up the two boxes Stef had left on the porch.

The first one, the CDs, she carried to the long shelf above the bench in the front room and set down without opening. There were two hundred of them, alphabetized by whoever had owned them. Two hundred CDs took a long time to go through. She would pick at them across the spring.

The second box, the smaller one, she carried directly to the closet. She did not put it on the bench. She put it on the small table near the chair, the one she sat in when she had to sit and think before doing anything else.

She sat in the chair.

She looked at the second box.

She knew what was in it. Stef had told her, briefly, before he had gone. A 2.5-inch external in a black aluminum enclosure, labeled FAMILIA, fotos y video, 2010 a 2024, found in a storage unit behind the Splendora Royale that had been padlocked since 2027. The owner had not been registered in El Fraile in the years since. The drive had survived an unknown number of summers in a sealed plastic case, which was the kind of thing people put expensive things in when they meant to come back for them.

Anna looked at the box for another minute.

Then she stood up and went to the kitchen and fed the cat.

It was past noon when she opened the box.

The drive was as Stef had described it. The cable was attached, USB-A, slightly bent at the connector but functionally intact. The enclosure had the kind of light scratches that meant it had been carried in a bag with other things. The label, in faded biro, was the only writing on it.

She did not plug it in yet.

Instead she went to the bench and woke the server, which had been sleeping with its small thoughtful pulse. The cat, having eaten, now wished to express its opinion that it had eaten too long ago and would shortly need to eat again. Anna moved her aside.

The screen came up. The cursor blinked. She typed.

Anna: the song.

Maddy: finished. this morning, before the fog. lifted. all of it, start to end. saga said you'd come.

Anna: play it.

Maddy played it.

It came up on the same small bench speaker that had played it for Saga. Anna sat in the desk chair and closed her eyes and listened.

A man. A young man. Tight, throat-locked, holding-on. A single sustained synth note under him, exactly the way someone keeps a held note under a singer who is about to break. A high-hat tap so soft she would have missed it without paying attention, and a crowd inside the recording, holding its breath.

She had not heard aya-yait often. Pipaluk had hummed something close to it once at a verbena in 2032, late, at the edge of the fire, with somebody's child asleep on a blanket against her knee, and Anna had not asked what the form was called because she had not wanted to break what Pipaluk was doing. She had asked, days later, in a quiet moment. Pipaluk had told her the word.

That had been that.

This recording was the same form. The voice was older than the moment, in the way young men's voices got when something was happening to them. Anna placed the year the way she placed everything that came off a drive: by what was in the room with it. Before the silence. 2027. Probably autumn. She listened to the held note under the voice and recognized the equipment Tibor kept around the cave above Diego Hernández. She listened to the crowd and realized, after a minute, that she had been there.

She had not known, at the time, that anybody was recording.

She had not known, until the first broken seconds came off the card a few weeks ago, that anybody else would ever hear him sing.

She sat in the chair.

The song went on for several minutes. The man sang in Kalaallisut and Anna understood none of the words, but she understood the form, and she understood the night, and she understood the small sealed thing in her own chest that she had not opened since the autumn of 2027.

Anna: who else has this.

Maddy: as far as i can tell. nobody. it came in on a card. in a box from gertrude's yard. there is no second copy. i'm aware of.

Anna: send a copy to Pipaluk.

Maddy: i will. when she's on the mesh tonight.

Anna: send a copy to Aaju.

Maddy: aaju?

Anna: he should know it survived.

There was a pause. Maddy was thinking, or the cloud cover was thickening. Maddy responded eventually.

Maddy: i will. when he's on the mesh.

Anna: thank you.

She sat for a longer minute.

Then she opened the box on the table and took out the drive and plugged it into the Studio.

The drive booted. Anna had not been entirely sure it would. There had been many times in this room, since 2029, when a drive had not booted, and the day had ended quietly with a small note in the log and a paper tag attached to the carcass: FAILED, no recovery, drive returned to scrap. This drive booted. The Studio mounted it. The directory tree came up.

She did not look at the tree first. She had a process. She had had a process for fifteen years.

Anna: image it before we touch anything.

Maddy: imaging now. eleven minutes estimated.

Anna stood up and walked to the kitchen.

She made herself a small pot of tea, peppermint, because she was not going to drink coffee while she worked through this, and coffee would feel like the wrong kind of attention. She brought the pot back to the closet and set it on the small table and waited.

The image completed.

Anna: list directories.

Maddy did.

Anna read the tree on the screen. The folders had been organized by year. 2010. 2011. 2012. 2013. 2014. 2015. 2016. 2017. 2018. 2019. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024.

Inside each year folder, smaller folders: Mamá. Cumpleaños. Verano. Navidad. Cocina. Jardín. Video files at the top level, by date. A folder called Voz, which Anna assumed was voice memos.

Anna looked at the tree for another minute.

Then she made the decision the way she made all decisions, which was by doing the thing.

Anna: open Cocina, 2014.

The folder opened. Eleven photos, three videos.

Anna: the first video. small speaker.

Maddy played it.

The video was forty-two seconds long. It had been shot on a phone in landscape. A wooden floor. A wooden spoon. A pot the size of a child's torso. A child of perhaps two, perhaps three, in a sleeveless yellow dress, sitting on the floor with the spoon and beating the pot the way children beat pots, which is to say with the seriousness of a percussionist of long experience. Off-camera, a woman's voice, laughing, said something in Spanish that was the word bueno repeated three times.

The child looked up.

The child saw the camera.

The child smiled.

The video ended.

Anna sat in the chair and watched the still frame the video had stopped on, which was the child's face turned up at whoever was holding the phone.

She did not know whose child this was. She did not know whose kitchen. She did not know if the kitchen was still standing or if the child was still anywhere.

She knew that the child had been in a kitchen with a mother, on a morning in 2014.

She knew that the singer this morning had sung about a mother in a kitchen.

She knew, with the kind of quiet that arrived in her chest sometimes, that the world had a great many kitchens in it, and that her job, today, was to sit at this bench and look at one of them carefully.

She watched the still frame for another minute.

Then she did what she always did. She typed.

Anna: index everything. transcribe the voz folder. summarize the photos by year. flag anything with a name we might be able to trace. I'll come back this afternoon.

Maddy: i will, anna. take a walk.

Anna: bet.

She put on her jacket. She picked up the cat, who had returned at the end of the video, and who did not understand why she was being picked up but accepted it. She carried the cat out onto the porch.

She stood for a long time looking down the slope at the path that went to Saga's house.

Then she put the cat down. The cat went indoors. Anna walked, slowly, away from the house and into the laurisilva above it, the way she sometimes did when she needed the trees to be in charge of the next ten minutes.

The fog had lifted. The sun had come through. Far below, at Querencia, on the terrace under the garlic plot, Linnea's coffee was flowering.

In the kitchen, batch forty-seven was resting in its molds.

So was Anna.