On the afternoon in question, however, before going home for the day, Leora had needed to drop off a form at the school nurse’s office, which was near the school’s front door, next to the phone booth. As Leora emerged from the office, she paused for a moment, looking at the phone booth. Not thinking, just looking. Still only looking, not thinking, she took a few steps toward the phone booth and opened its door.

She stepped into the phone booth and closed the door behind her, sitting down on its pathetic little ledge of a seat. Now she could see all the students milling around the front hall, heading for the buses, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying, and none of them even noticed her. It occurred to her that this might be what it would be like to come to a new country without knowing the language, looking at people all around you and not being able to understand them, and they not noticing you at all, as if you didn’t exist. Once, years earlier, searching for something in the dictionary, Leora’s eye had come to rest, by accident, on the word “translate.” One of its definitions, she remembered as she sat in the soundproof booth, was “to bring over to the afterlife, without causing death.”

Leora stared at the phone’s receiver out of habit, waiting for it to ring, but then she looked away. Stupid, she thought. Searching for a distraction, she picked up the phone book, which was hanging next to the phone on a thick red cord. She opened it, letting its heavy piles of pages heap up on her lap, and soon she found herself flipping through the L’s. There were four Landsmanns in the area, she noted, but only one of them, “LANDSMANN W,” lived at “413 Algonquin Dr.” Naomi’s family, under her father “LANDSMANN B,” was also still listed, even though her parents and two younger brothers had already moved away. The town would have to wait until the new directory came out, Leora observed, before Naomi would officially be considered dead. She scanned the names of the other Landsmanns, Landsmans, Lansmans, Lanzmans, and Lanzmanns on the page, wondering if any of them had ever met each other, or even heard of each other. It seemed likely that they had seen each other’s names before, and perhaps even been mistaken for one another, receiving one another’s packages and phone calls. But beyond their names, did they know anything about each other at all? Probably not, Leora thought.

That was when the phone rang.

Leora looked at the receiver and felt herself turn pale. The phone book slid off her lap like a man on a gallows when the floor falls below him, slipping into thin air and dangling, strangling on its thick red cord. When the phone rang a second time, Leora cowered in the corner of the booth, alarmed by the sound, as if the sound alone were a hand reaching out to slam her head against the wall. On the third ring, she shook her head again and again, trying to think straight, telling herself that it wasn’t what she thought it was, that it must be something else. On the fourth ring, she swallowed, asking herself: If it really wasn’t what she thought it was, then why should she answer it? But then, shaking her head again, she asked herself: If it really wasn’t what she thought it was, then why shouldn’t she answer it?