I am just now realizing: The reason we make soup when there is a crisis is because soup is a creative act that engages your imagination, allowing you to work through the tangles of a problem and connect new, heretofore unseen dots. MAKING SOUP IS LIKE EINSTEIN PLAYING THE VIOLIN.

He was always carrying around “Lina,” as he called all his violins, and Dad wrote a whole paper once on the connection between musical theory and quantum theory and showed that part of why Einstein’s mathematical equations are so elegant is because, when he was stumped, he’d play music, which would open up new channels in his brain. New pathways to work the problem. Dad joked that we should give partial credit of E=mc2 to Bach and Mozart.

Maybe because none of us play instruments, Mom found another way to open up all those channels in our brains. And how sneaky of her, as usual, not to tell us she’s doing it.

I miss her.

It’s the middle of the night on what is now technically day five, and I left Hannah asleep on Mom’s side of the bed, her head resting on Micah’s chest. His arms are around her like he can shield her from the world, and maybe he can. Maybe love can do that sometimes. Hide you. I wonder if Riley would be here if he hadn’t had to move a million miles away. Then again, he returns seventeen percent of my emails, so I suspect he would not, in fact, be here.

The kitchen is chilly, but I open the window anyway to let in the salty smell of the air and Mom’s garden scents: basil, rosemary, lemon. I pull the big soup pot out of the cabinet. It’s after two in the morning, but that never stopped Mom. I press PLAY on the old stereo Dad installed on top of the wine rack, and suddenly I am back in the only church I ever liked being in. The Tallis Scholars, singing in Latin, a cappella. I remember Dad putting the CD in here just a few days before they left for Malaysia. He’d been making his famous egg bake, a breakfast casserole that Mom says will give all of us heart disease. There’s half a tray of it still in the freezer. He’d made extra so we could eat it while they were gone. Knowing that egg bake is here when he’s not scoops something out of my insides.

I close my eyes and hug the soup pot against my chest as dozens of voices swoop around me, high then low.

I time travel: back to the Cloisters, back to New York City last fall. Just Dad and me, walking through a medieval museum on a hill after doing a tour of Columbia, even though we both knew my heart was set on Annapolis.