I played the song again.
.The chair moved at exactly the same moment.
The voice was less convincing this time. It could have been an instrument. It could have been breath passing through a microphone.
I listened a third time.
Then I went to bed with the kitchen light on.
That night I dreamed of sitting beside my grandfather in a room much larger than his kitchen.
There were other people ahead of us, facing something bright. I couldn’t see their faces. Our coats lay folded on our laps, although I had no memory of arriving.
My grandfather held out his hand.
I took it.
That was the part that hurt when I woke: how easily I had taken it. How little it mattered, in the dream, that he was dead.
I lay very still, trying to keep the feeling of his fingers.
By breakfast, I could no longer remember what we had been watching.
When I was little, my grandfather told stories about a ship.
He never described its destination. I
remember asking him once whether it was coming home.
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table.
“Which home?”
I thought he was teasing me.
Years later, I tried to remember those stories. I could recall the room, the smell of his sweater, the little patch of pale skin where his wedding ring had been tightened. But the ship was gone. Every adventure had slipped away.
Only its name remained.
K‑17.
I had never told anyone that name. There had seemed so little to tell.
The first time I heard K‑17, I was washing a cup.
Nothing remarkable. Rain against the kitchen window.
One light above the sink. A song playing quietly in the other room.
Then someone in the recording moved a chair.
I knew that sound.
My grandfather used to lean back at the table until my grandmother told him he would crack his head open. He would laugh, lower the chair, and ask me where we had left off.
He had been dead for nineteen years.
I turned off the tap.
The music continued. Beneath it, so softly I almost supplied the words myself, a voice said:
“Are you still there?”
I stood holding the cup until the water in it went cold.
For several days, I left the song alone.
I went to work. Bought groceries. Replied to messages.
Once, while waiting for a kettle to boil, I found myself setting out two cups.
I put one back.
On Friday, I searched for K‑17.
The page opened on an observation room.
Rows of seats. A passage down the middle. A vast window filled with light.
I leaned toward the screen.
There was an empty chair near the front, with a coat folded across its back.
My grandfather had owned a coat like that.
So had thousands of other men.
I said this aloud.
At the bottom of the page were four words:
Press Play. Don’t look away.
I hovered over the button for a long time.
Then my phone rang.
My sister.
“Strange question,” she said. “Do you remember the stories Grandpa used to tell?”
I sat down.
“Some.”
“The ones about the ship.”
Outside, a car passed through the wet street.
“What made you think of those?”
She hesitated.
“My daughter’s drawn something. I’ll send it.”
The photograph arrived while we were still talking.
A child’s drawing in blue pencil. Rows of crooked chairs. A large window. Two small figures sitting together.
Above them, carefully printed:
K‑17.
“Did you tell her?” I asked.
“Tell her what?”
I looked back at the page.
At the empty chair.
At the coat.
My sister was saying my name.
I haven’t pressed play yet.
Sometimes I open the page and leave it beside whatever I’m working on.
I tell myself I’m studying the image, looking for something ordinary that will explain why it feels familiar.
But there are evenings when the house is quiet and I am tired of remembering him alone.
On those evenings, I move the cursor over the button.
I imagine the small scrape of a chair.
I imagine him turning toward me, making room.
And I worry that I will hear his voice.
And I worry that I won’t.