Bea's thumbnail stayed gray for eleven minutes, and Marta watched the clock on the microwave instead of the screen. The Rotary sticker on her phone case had started to peel at one corner and she pressed it back down with her thumb, the way she used to press bandages onto knees. When the little circle finally bloomed green she sat up straight and tucked her chin, the same pose she had held for every school portrait since 1987.
Bea's face filled the screen, fourteen years old and lit blue from below, and behind her left shoulder, half eaten by the frame, hung a poster. Two words in jagged red letters, TURNSTILE, over a blur of bodies that could have been a mosh pit or a fire. Marta didn't ask. Asking, she had learned, closed doors that watching left open. Instead she wrote the word on the back of the electric bill envelope, the one she'd been meaning to open for four days, and added two question marks and the word loud?? because something about the lettering felt like a shout. She slid the envelope under the fruit bowl, next to the clementines, where she would find it later when she went looking.
It was still there at Thanksgiving, the clementines long gone and a ring of dried juice where they had been. At the dinner table Bea said something about a Pale King and the three girls beside her collapsed sideways into each other laughing, a joke with a shape Marta couldn't find the edges of. She reached for the cranberry sauce and smiled the way she used to smile at foreign films, back before she understood they came with subtitles. On the drive home she found the envelope in her coat pocket and held it against the wheel at a red light, the two question marks looking up at her. She had meant to ask. She was always meaning to ask.
Instead, on a Tuesday in December, she pulled in under the canopy at the Sunoco on Route 9 and typed with her right index finger, one letter at a time, the way she addressed Christmas cards: hollow knight game explain. The first result gave her words she copied onto a napkin from the glove box, vessel, Hallownest, soul, and she sounded them out quietly in the yellow light, her breath fogging the window. A semi went by doing sixty and the car rocked on its springs, and the napkin slid off her knee onto the floor mat. She let it lie there and sat with the phone face-down on the passenger seat and the engine running, watching a kid in an orange vest drag a squeegee across the glass of the far pump, the same strip, back and forth, until it was clean. She knew exactly why he did it twice more after that. Some things you keep doing until they shine.
On the next call Bea's chair scraped and she vanished, then came back closer, her collarbone filling the bottom third of the screen. She held up a Nintendo Switch the way a teacher holds up a book, and her thumb found the right button without looking, the way Marta's hand finds the soft spot on a cantaloupe. The little knight on the screen was small and white and hollow-looking, exactly like its name, and Bea said see, it was made empty on purpose, and her hands moved apart in the air to show how big the emptiness was supposed to be. Somewhere below, a voice called Bea, dinner, twice, and then a third time with a different shape to it. Bea turned toward the sound, turned back, and kept talking. Marta had found a pen by then. On the back of the electric bill envelope she was filling in the space between the two question marks, made empty on purpose, and under that, so was the king.
The fruit bowl migrated to the counter by the toaster that winter, and the envelope migrated with it, stuck a little where something had dripped. Marta peeled it free and the paper came up soft at one corner, the question marks smeared but holding. She stood at the counter and read the word Turnstile three times, her thumbnail traveling along the bottom edge the way it used to travel along recipe cards. Then she folded the envelope on its existing crease and tucked it into the left pocket of her cardigan, the pocket without the tissues, which from that day forward was the pocket where Bea's world lived.
The Tuesday call in January dropped twice before it held. When Bea's face came back she was wearing headphones around her neck like a collar, and the poster behind her was gone, a lighter rectangle of wall where it had been. Marta's hand went to her cardigan pocket before she had decided anything, and she heard herself say, I looked up Turnstile, in the same voice she might have used to say I found your earring under the couch. Bea stopped moving. She leaned in close to the camera and said, wait, actually? and her voice did something it hadn't done in three calls. It went lower and more careful, the voice of someone about to hand over a thing they aren't sure you can hold.
She said the singer's name and then spelled it, letter by letter, the way you spell for someone who has the wrong picture in their head, and Marta wrote it on the soft corner of the envelope. Behind Bea, where the poster used to hang, a length of string was now tacked up with photographs clipped to it by wooden clothespins, the kind Marta still kept in a coffee can in the basement. She didn't ask whose faces those were. She looked at the string and the pins, two generations using the same wooden technology for the same purpose, keeping what mattered where you could see it, and she wrote the singer's name a second time underneath the first, pressing harder, and the pen went through the paper at the tail of the last letter.
The Thursday call was Marta's idea, which was new. She dialed before breakfast, the envelope in her left hand, a cup of coffee going cold on the sill. Bea answered in a gray sweatshirt with a name across it that Marta didn't recognize, some school or band or place, one more word for the envelope. Before Bea could say anything at all, Marta asked the question that had been sitting under the fruit bowl since October. Is it loud, the music. That was what the two question marks had always meant. Bea looked at her for a second the way you look at a door you didn't expect to open, and then she laughed, the real laugh, and said yes, actually, that's kind of the whole point, and reached back and unclipped one of the photographs from the string and held it up to the camera. Three kids in a crowd, all of them blurred, all of their mouths open. Marta held her envelope up too, without thinking, soft corner and smeared ink and the hole where the pen had gone through. For a moment they each looked at what the other one had been keeping, two pieces of paper pressed toward two cameras, and the distance between them, whatever it measured in miles, had never had less to do.
