The singing didn't stop.
It wasn't loud. It was the kind of sound you have to stand still to hear, like a radio playing in another room with the door almost shut. The rain was coming down again, light on my hair, light on the road, and underneath it, my own voice, singing my name, in a key I had never sung in, to a tune I had never learned.
"Mara," Jonah said. "Mara, what is it? What do you hear?"
I didn't answer him right away, because I wasn't sure what I was hearing, and I didn't want to say it out loud until I was sure. I stood there on the road with the paper still in my hand and listened.
The voice sang my name again. Slow, clear, patient, the way you sing to someone who is far away and might not hear you the first time.
*Mara. Mara. Come home.*
Not Clara's words. Clara's song was finished. This was something else. This was a different song, and it knew my name, and it was singing it the way you sing a name when you want the person to turn around.
"It's me," I said. "It's my voice."
Jonah frowned. "What do you mean, your voice?"
"I mean the voice singing is mine. I'm not singing. My mouth is closed. But the voice is mine."
Jonah listened. He stood very still, the way he'd stood for forty-seven minutes, and he listened to the rain and the road and the wet air, and then he shook his head.
"I don't hear it," he said. "I hear the rain. I hear the road. I don't hear any singing."
That should have scared me more than it did. Instead it made something in my chest go very quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone finally tells the truth.
"Then it's singing to me," I said. "Only to me."
Jonah looked at me for a long moment. His face was wet, and his coat was wet, and his hands were still in his pockets, and he looked like a man who had just watched something impossible happen and was trying very hard to believe it anyway.
"Can you hear what it's singing?" he asked. "The words?"
I closed my eyes and listened. The voice was still there, patient, unhurried, singing the same two lines over and over.
*Sing it where the rain comes down,*
*sing it where I can hear.*
"There's a song," I said. "Two lines. It keeps repeating them. Sing it where the rain comes down. Sing it where I can hear."
Jonah was quiet. Then he said, "That's not Clara's song."
"No," I said. "Clara's song is finished. This is a different one."
"Then whose is it?"
I opened my eyes. The road was empty. The old church was dark. The rain was coming down on the guardrail, on the asphalt, on the place where Clara had died seven years ago, and the voice was singing my name, and I didn't know whose song it was, and that was the worst part — not knowing.
"I don't know," I said.
Jonah took his hands out of his pockets. He reached out, the way you reach out to someone standing on the edge of something, and he put his hand on my arm, just for a second, just long enough to be sure I was really there.
"Seven years ago," he said, "after they told me about Clara, I stood in the kitchen and I heard her singing in the other room. I went in, and there was no one there. I never told anyone that, until today. I thought I was going mad. I thought grief was playing a trick on me."
"You weren't going mad," I said.
"No," he said. "I wasn't. And you're not going mad now. So let's find out what it is."
He was right, and I knew he was right, but my feet didn't want to move. The road felt safer than anywhere else. The road was where the sentence had been finished. The road was where the pull behind my ribs had gone. On the road, the voice was just a voice. Somewhere else, it might be something more.
"Mara," Jonah said. "Let's get out of the rain. Let's go back to the library. Whatever this is, you'll think better somewhere dry."
I nodded, because he was right, and because my hands were shaking, and because the paper in my hand was going soft in the rain. I folded it carefully and put it in my coat pocket, and we walked back to the cars, and I drove, and Jonah followed, and the whole way back the voice sang in the car with me, low and patient, my own voice, singing my name.
I tried to hum along with it, just once, to catch the tune, to see if I could hold it. The moment I opened my mouth, the singing stopped. Not faded. Stopped. The car was silent except for the wipers and the rain on the roof, and I drove with both hands on the wheel and my mouth shut, and a few seconds later the voice started again, patient as ever, as if it had only been waiting for me to be quiet.
I understood something then, and I didn't like it. The song didn't want me to sing along. The song wanted me to listen.
When I pulled up in front of the library, the lights were on.
I sat in the car and stared at them. I had locked the door at four-thirty. I had turned the lights off. I remembered doing it, the way you remember locking a door — the click, the key turning, the dark windows behind you as you walked away.
"Jonah," I said, when he came up beside my window. "The lights are on."
He looked at the house. "Did you leave them on?"
"No," I said. "I turned them off. I remember."
"Maybe you didn't," he said, gently, the way you talk to someone who has just been through something strange. "Maybe you thought you did."
I got out of the car. The rain was still coming down, light and steady, and the voice was still singing, and it was louder now, closer, the way a voice gets louder when you get closer to the room it's coming from.
"Mara," Jonah said. "Wait. Listen."
I stopped. I listened. And then I heard it — not my voice, not the singing, but something else underneath it. A sound like a page turning. A sound like a book opening. A sound like a house waking up.
The front door was unlocked. I knew it before I touched it. I put my hand on the knob, and it turned, smooth and easy, and the door swung open, and the warm air came out to meet me, and the house smelled like paper and dust and rain, and the voice was singing inside, clear now, no longer far away.
*Sing it where the rain comes down,*
*sing it where I can hear.*
I walked in. Jonah walked in behind me. The desk was where I'd left it. The red book was where I'd left it. But there was a book on the desk that I had not left there — a thin book, the color of wet slate, with a label on the spine, and the label said my name.
MARA ELLISON.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it, and my hands stopped shaking, and my heart stopped racing, and everything in me went very still, the way the rain had gone still at 5:46.
"Jonah," I said. "That's my book."
Jonah came up beside me and looked at the desk. "Your book?"
"Every book in this library is an unfinished life," I said. "Mine is here too. It was here the whole time. On the shelf. With all the others. I never looked at it. I never opened it. I was afraid to."
"Then how do you know it's yours?" Jonah asked.
"Because it's open," I said. "And it's singing."
I walked to the desk, slowly, the way you walk toward something that might bite you, and I looked down at the open book. The pages were thin, the ink was dark, and the handwriting was mine. Not like mine. Mine. Every loop, every slant, every place where the pen had pressed too hard. I had written these pages. I just didn't remember writing them.
I read the first line.
*She came to the library on a Tuesday, in the rain, with a suitcase she didn't unpack, and a name she didn't use anymore.*
I read the second line.
*She thought she was the Keeper. She didn't know she was also a book.*
My hands were shaking again. I turned the page.
*She learned the rules one at a time, the way you learn a house, and the third rule was the one that stayed with her: if a book opens for you, it has chosen you. Finish the sentence, and the life is finished. She never asked what happened to the Keeper who finished a life. She never asked, because she was afraid of the answer, and now the answer was open on the desk in front of her, in her own handwriting, and it was singing her name.*
I turned another page, and the writing got faster, the way writing gets faster when you're trying to keep up with something you're hearing.
*She stood on the road to Burlington, at 5:47 p.m., and finished a sentence, and the pull behind her ribs was gone, and she heard her own voice singing her name, and she understood—*
And then nothing. The rest of the page was blank. The next page was blank too. The book was waiting.
"Mara," Jonah said, very quietly, behind me. "What does it say?"
I didn't answer him. I was listening. The voice was still singing, and now I could hear the words clearly, every one of them, and they were not the two lines anymore. There was a third line. A new line. A line I had never heard before.
*Sing it where the rain comes down,*
*sing it where I can hear,*
*tell her the sentence is hers to finish.*
My breath caught. I turned around, and Jonah was standing in the doorway of the library, and his face was white, and his mouth was open, and his eyes were wide, and he was staring at me the way you stare at someone who has just said your name in a voice you have never heard from them.
"Mara," he said. "I can hear it now."
"What?" I said.
"The singing," he said. "I can hear it. It's singing your name. And Mara —" He stopped, and swallowed, and said it again, slower, like a man reading words off a page he doesn't understand.
"It's singing your name, and it's asking for a sentence. And the sentence is yours. It's yours to finish."
I looked down at the book. The blank page. The unfinished line. The sentence that stopped at *she understood—*.
I put my hand on the page, the way I'd put my hand on Clara's book a hundred times, and the page was warm. Warm, the way a book is warm when someone has just been reading it. Warm, the way a room is warm when someone has just left it.
And then, from the shelves, from every book in the library, all at once, came a sound I had never heard before and will never forget — the sound of a thousand pages turning, all together, like a thousand doors opening at once.
And the voice, my voice, sang the third line again, louder this time, and it wasn't asking anymore.
*Tell her the sentence is hers to finish.*