The Number 7 Read Free Page A

was fluent in English and French because she’d grown up in Montreal. Memory 11. She’d trained at L’École supérieure de ballet du Québec. Memory 115. She was a beautiful dancer. Memory 13. When she died, my mother’s parents flew in from Canada and told my dad my mother’s death was his fault and that he —not the cancer—had taken her away from them. They cried when they said goodbye to Greta and me. Dad never talked to them again after that. And I never asked about them, although there were times I had wanted to. We weren’t allowed to look back.
    I hummed along to the familiar tune remembering the way Mom’s tongue used to roll over her Ls and how she’d swallow her Rs. God, I missed that.
    I looked around at the memories of people I never knew. I wanted to map out my grandparents’ lives; I wanted to catalog these items, to discover my grandparents in every artifact. But it was too late now. Their voices—their stories—were lost forever. Before leaving the attic, I took a seat at the old, wood desk to study the old telephone once more. I inspected its base, searching for a label or logo, and found the name “Ericsson” embossed on the bottom. Twisting my finger through its rotary, I listened to it tick, tick, tick its way back into position. In vain, I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. No dial tone. No ringing. But there was something else, some familiar sound that I couldn’t quite make out. The low hush of white noise?
    I held the phone closer to my ear, cocked my head to one side, and closed my eyes to focus on the sound. What was it? A buzzing? A hum? No. It was the familiar shallowness. The steady beat. The inhale. The exhale. Someone was breathing into the other end of the phone. I launched myself from the desk in disbelief and the wheels under my chair screamed. There was no mistaking what I’d heard. I dropped and watched the black receiver swing lifelessly in the air like a heavy body from a wire noose. I steadied my shaking hand and gently replaced the telephone onto its base before darting across the room to slam the window shut. It was time to leave.
    I sealed the mystery into a wooden catacomb, and tried to convince myself there was some other way to rationalize it. Certainly , I thought frantically, there must be a plethora of explanations for what happened . Still, I felt safer leaving the phone locked away like the mad woman in the attic.
    I didn’t tell Dad what I’d heard. I didn’t really know how to explain it to him. I didn’t know how to explain it to myself . Better to just pretend it never happened, right?

IV.
    In an attempt to get some fresh air, Dad took me on a short drive outside the neighborhood. He pointed to homes with well-manicured lawns while relaying simple, one-sentence stories about people he used to know, friends who used to inhabit the old haunts. I just wanted to find dinner.
    We finally pulled into Weaver’s, the local grocery store, a simple mom-and-pop establishment. Their clientele was pure granola; they asked for local produce and fresh cuts of meat. They demanded organic, fair-trade, and farm-to-table. I was smitten.
    Dad veered for the butcher counter. I went for the veggies.
    The yams were ugly and lumpy. I turned one over in my hand, inspecting its knots and divots.
    â€œNice tubers, huh?”
    A boy about my age stepped close to me and winked. He carried a watering can in his left hand, and picked up a butternut squash from a pile of autumn vegetables with his right. He smiled broadly at me. He was tall and slender with a round face. Handsome, with short cropped brown hair, long, curled eyelashes, and freckles. He wore a green apron with “Gabe” embroidered in white thread. He tossed the squash in the air before replacing it back in the pile, making his way to a display of hay bales and pumpkins. Blooming mums sprouted from recycled aluminum coffee