The Second Verse

The baby had been fed, changed, walked the length of the hall ten times past the floorboard that creaked and ten times back, and was still awake, with the specific wide-eyed insulted wakefulness of an eight-month-old at three in the morning, and Senna Thorne had run out of everything that worked.

Senna stood at the nursery window with her daughter against her shoulder and the cold coming gently off the glass. December outside. Down at the dark end of the street the Brody house burned its four thousand small lights, the way it had every winter of her life on Larkspur Court, and the glow of it lay along the ceilings of half the houses on the block, faint and amber, a second weather. The baby stared at the window with wet furious eyes and did not sleep.

The song arrived without being sent for. That was how it always came — not decided, just there, the way your hand knows a doorknob in the dark. Senna was three lines into it before she knew she was singing.

It was an old song and a small one, the kind that is mostly tune, and the first verse was about the end of a day — the boat drawn up, the tools put by, the lamp brought in — and it could have belonged to anyone, anywhere, for the last five hundred years. It was the second verse that belonged to her family. The second verse was the stars.

The Ferryman lights his lamp for thee, the Tin Rose turns above the sea, the Long Field gate swings low, swings bright, the Little Ewe comes home all night.

The baby went still at the second verse. She always went still at the second verse. Senna had stopped being surprised by this; it had not stopped mattering.

They were not this sky’s stars. That was the thing nobody on Larkspur Court would ever hear in it, if any of them ever heard it, which they wouldn’t, because Senna did not sing in company; the song went from her mother’s mother’s mother down some line of coreward kitchens, and the stars in it hung over a place Senna had never stood. Not one of the four had ever risen over this street. You could not check them from here with any instrument the street possessed, or, she suspected, with most of the instruments anyone possessed; they were far-side stars, homestead stars, the faint ones a settlement names because the bright ones already have names when you arrive. Whether the Ferryman’s lamp was still lit — whether the Tin Rose still turned over whatever sea it turned over — was not a thing that could be known from a nursery on Earth.

Senna sang them anyway, in order, all four, the way you’d count sips.

Her mother had sung it to her in a kitchen Senna mostly could not remember, in a voice she could no longer swear to. That was the honest accounting and she had done it many times: the voice was gone soft at the edges, gone general, a warmth more than a sound. The words had not gone anywhere. The words she could swear to in a court. She had worn them certain the way a thumb wears a corner smooth, when she was small and strapped in webbing in a cold hold with the float dropping, singing the second verse to herself under the noise of the convoy, four stars from a kitchen sky, over and over, in the dark between everywhere.

The baby’s breathing went long and even somewhere around the second time through, and Senna stood at the window a while longer with the warm weight of her, in the amber off the Brody lights, and did not stop singing just because it had worked.

The woman at the clinic meant well. Senna established this early and held onto it firmly throughout.

“There’s the new book, too,” the woman said, at the weigh-in, while the baby regarded the ceiling with suspicion. “If you’re doing songs at home. A lot of mums find the old rhymes are — ” she chose the word kindly — “outdated. The star ones especially. The new editions are current. They redo them every few years now, as it changes. So you’re not teaching them things that aren’t there.”

The book was called Songs for Our Sky, and the cover was a smiling crescent moon over a tasteful, accurate star field, and the woman pressed it on her with the warmth of somebody solving a problem you hadn’t reported having.

Senna took it home and read it, because she read everything all the way through; it was the one law she had ever consciously taught herself, in a childhood where every notice mattered. It was a perfectly good book. The rhymes scanned. The stars in them were real, and currently available, and the small print inside the cover said the edition was certified against the survey within the last three years, which was, she thought, an extraordinary sentence to find in a nursery book, and she sat with that thought a while at the kitchen table, the way you sit with a stone in your shoe you can’t be bothered taking off.

A lullaby with a certification date. Songs guaranteed to contain nothing missing. Verses that would be quietly reissued, every few years, forever, each edition a little emptier, each one current.

Senna put it on the shelf in the nursery, spine in, and was not proud of the spine, and left it that way.

Her father came on the Saturday to do the gutters, which did not need doing, which was how he visited.

Greer Thorne was sixty-five and had a bad shoulder he denied and he went up the ladder like a man carrying a hod of things he intended to keep carrying, and Senna held the ladder’s foot and passed him the hose, and they talked about nothing at all in the easy full way they had, which took years to build and looked from outside like silence.

The baby went down for her nap at two. Senna sang her down — first verse, second verse — with the window cracked for the mild day, and when she came out her father was not up the ladder. He was standing at the bottom of it with the hose in one hand, not running, looking at the gutter with enormous attention, the way a man looks at a thing when he is being careful not to look at a window.

So he had heard it. Senna worked it out without wanting to: she had been singing it in this house for eight months, naps and nights, and he came most Saturdays, and so he had probably heard it before, and had gone on visiting anyway, and had never once said. Which was him all over. Her father spent only what he could afford, and had, for as long as she had known him, been able to afford almost nothing in exactly one direction.

“Your gran sang it too,” he said, to the gutter. “Her mother’s, before that. Long line.” He turned the hose fitting in his hands, checked a washer that was fine. “She never would sing it in company, your mum. Room had one other soul in it, she’d stop. Only ever sang it for you.” He put the fitting down. “Walls were thin, the places we lived. You got the words right. All the — you got them right.”

“I know,” Senna said. “I checked them against nothing for twenty years.”

Her father huffed, which was his laugh. They stood there in the two o’clock quiet with the ladder between them.

“Dad. Do you think she still —”

The sentence reached the place where their sentences reached, and stopped, and her father looked at the gutter, and Senna looked at the hose lying quiet in the grass, and neither of them finished it, because there was nothing on the far side of that sentence you could check from here, with any instrument this family possessed.

“Gutters are done,” her father said at last. “They were done when I got here.” And he took the ladder down and stayed for tea.

That night the baby fought sleep again, on principle, with the joyless commitment of the very tired, and Senna walked the hall and passed the floorboard and stood at last at the window in the amber wash off the end of the street.

The Brody sky was burning: four thousand lamps in the shape of a night nineteen years gone now, a sky with a boy in it, the whole street knew, kept lit every winter by a man getting old now and, on the nights the ladder work needed doing, by half the block. Her daughter would grow up under that. Would grow up thinking, for a while, as the small ones on this street apparently all did, that part of the sky lived on a house, and would be told the way of it eventually, by some kid on a driveway.

And above the display, thin and washed by its glow, the actual sky: the one with the gaps that had been gaps since before she ever stood under this sky, the ones she had never missed because she had never had them. There was exactly one sky she grieved, and it was not this one, and it was not even a sky she had seen. It was four stars in a kitchen song, hanging over a place she could not check on, lit or unlit, like everything else from there.

Senna sang the first verse. The boat, the tools, the lamp.

Then the second verse, all four stars, in order, unrevised, uncertified, current against nothing, and the baby went still at it, as she always did, as perhaps small children always had, all the way back down the line of kitchens.

And then, because the song had never once in its life been finished — because somewhere back down the line somebody had added the Tin Rose, and somebody else the gate, the way you add a bead to a string, and because the rule of the song, which nobody had ever said aloud and her mother had not needed to, was that you could put in whatever your sky held and you could take nothing out, ever, for any reason, not even accuracy —

Senna sang one line more.

And down the street the Brody lights hold all the rest of night.

Rough. It scanned badly. She’d fix it, or she wouldn’t, and in forty years it would be worn smooth either way, and someone who had never met Toby Brody or Walt or any of them would sing a street they’d never stood on to a child who wouldn’t sleep, and would get the words right.

The baby slept. Senna stood a moment longer at the window. On the cot rail, clipped where it had been clipped every night since the rail went up, the small wooden dog sat facing the room, one corner worn down soft by a quarter-century of thumbs, and on her way out, in the dark, without deciding to, her own thumb found the smooth place, the worn place, the place it knew.

Out at the dark end of the street the lights held. Coreward, wherever it was, it was some hour of some day, and the song did not need to know which.