Shira wears the dress Krystyna snuck in for her, outgrown by her niece, with its pretty checkered pattern and gray trim. It isn’t soft like the dresses in her closet at home, sewn by her grandmother, fitting just right, and almost as wonderful as the ones in the shop windows in Gracja. Her mother wears a pair of pants cinched at the waist and a wide-collared shirt—clothes for traveling, she says. Together, they lie silent in the hay, inhaling its layered scents—sweet, sharp, dank, and rotting—and listen to the sounds of the night. A screech and a whistle. A dog’s bark.

Shira met a dog as she and her mother crossed the pastures near Henryk’s barn. Her mother sought to shoo the dog away, fearful that he would bark. But Shira put out her hand. The dog tilted his head and sniffed, his nose twitching, his eyes flickering with golds and yellows, his felted ears dropping back. He seemed to understand, even to share with Shira this project of invisibility. Dodging to the side, he trotted off as if weightless, not even the slightest tap-tap as he padded along the road. Shira imagined him carrying a wordless message to her father.

Shira watches through a crack in the boards as Henryk plays with Łukasz outside, zooming him through the air. Łukasz squeals and reaches out a chubby hand to grasp at Henryk’s puckered lips, to rub his whiskers against the grain.

There had been evenings, after her mother unstraddled her legs from around her cello and set to tidying the kitchen, that Shira’s father lifted her on his lap and showed her how to form whole scales’ worth of notes by pressing different places on the violin strings. His voice, low and close, reminded Shira of water: creeks and rivers, the whisper of tides. Eagerly, she stretched her fingers across the strings, as far as they would reach, and he sounded out her notes with long, smooth bow strokes. Sometimes he let her try to hold the violin all by herself, clasping the smooth wooden neck between her thumb and forefinger, placing her chin on the big oblong rest. When she set her fingers to quivering upon the strings as she’d seen her parents do, to make a vibrato, her father laughed, the sound like a tumbling spring, his breath the scent of coffee, moist upon her cheek.