All the same, though, he was afraid there was one more stop that he could not possibly avoid. He thought he knew where he might’ve left his instrument.

But it meant going in the wrong direction.

It meant going back to Tupik.

—

What took Bluma by surprise was how wearying the sadness was.

When the crowd of guests and neighbors began to leak back out the front door, all the energy in the house seemed to go with them.

The food was left where it sat, laid out in half-eaten array on the front-room workbenches. The candles were allowed to gutter and smoke.

Slowly, her parents mounted the staircase.

Slowly, sighing, they climbed upstairs.

There was no chatting, no baking, no activity of any kind. It seemed as if the order of the day was just to sit and wait for the aroma of death to pass from their nostrils.

And it took its time in going.

But it wasn’t just the fatigue that weighed so heavily—it was the boredom, too.

No one had energy to do anything.

For a little while, Bluma thought she might pass the time in reading, and she flopped down atop her bedclothes in the late-afternoon twilight to do so, but her mind was slow and thick.

So instead, she just lay.

From time to time, someone would move. Around suppertime, her mother went downstairs to pick at the leftovers in the front room. Now and then her father would cry softly.

Before long, Bluma’s eyelids began to drift.

Sleep, it turned out, was the only thing that made any sense.

Bluma opened her eyes. Time had passed. One short, smoldering wick burned in a wide puddle of wax, and outside, darkness had fallen. In the next room, her mother and father were snoring softly.

And above, in the attic, there was nothing.

Her bubbe was gone.

Her bubbe was dead.

Nothing would ever be the same.

She had never meant to come to bed—she was still dressed there, atop the bedclothes, all the way down to her boots. And now it seemed as if she’d never escape the bed again. She couldn’t even muster the inclination to rise and change into her nightgown.

Grief and boredom pecked at her brain like a pair of starving birds.

She longed to sleep, but she had squandered her fatigue on the boredom of the afternoon.

The time scraped.

The time scraped slowly.

The time scraped slowly by.

And she had just finally begun to doze again when a familiar sound groaned out through the house.

The front door was opening.

Before she had time to remember why her heart was so heavy, Bluma was on her feet.

Bubbe has come home.

This, of course, was not true. If there is one thing that unites the multifarious dead, it is the fact that none of them ever come back.