“FRIC WAS BORN ... ON A WEDNESDAY.”
In the white room behind the blue door, Ethan sat enraptured by the voice of his dead wife.
“Fric was born ... on a Wednesday.”
This was exquisite music to him, pure and thrilling. The effect of a much-loved hymn on a religious heart or of a national anthem on one deeply patriotic could not have elicited a fraction of the strong emotion that this voice wrenched from Ethan.
“Hannah?” he whispered, though a recording could not reply to him. “Hannah?”
The tears that blurred his vision were largely tears of joy, pressed from him not because he had missed her so desperately these past five years but because this curious message delivered in her voice meant that somewhere the essence of Hannah survived, that the hateful cancer had won a battle but not a war. His loss was no less crushing than ever it had been, but now he knew that it was not a loss eternal.
She had repeated the same six words twice. He played Call 56 three times before he could shift the focus of his attention from the miraculous sound of her voice to the content of the message.
[535] “Fric was born ... on a Wednesday.”
Although Hannah clearly judged this information to be important, Ethan couldn’t see why the day of Fric’s birth had relevance to the current situation.
Working from bottom to top of the log, he accessed Call 55. As before, he chose the audio option over a printout of the transcript.
Hannah again. This time she spoke but one word, twenty or thirty times. His name. “Ethan ... Ethan ... Ethan ...”
The poignant yearning in her voice matched that in Ethan’s heart. Listening, he could barely hold fast to what little of his composure he had not already lost.
By phone, by elevator speaker, perhaps by other means, she had struggled to reach him, but she had not been able to make herself heard. Ironically, behind that Ronzoni door, in this ridiculous white room, with the aid of all t............