Chapter 1

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The community center smelled like old coffee and floor polish and, faintly, like the chicken adobo somebody's mother had brought last week and nobody had ever quite managed to get out of the carpet in the lobby. Tomás Moreira-Lim noticed these things. He noticed most things. That was part of the problem, his mother said, though she never said it like it was a bad thing. She said it the way you might say a cactus had spines, as if it were simply the shape a person had grown into and there was no use pretending otherwise.

He noticed, for instance, that Lamont Thompson was wearing one red sock and one navy sock again, and that Lamont had stopped pretending it was a mistake about six weeks ago. He noticed that Hye-jin Kim had braided a tiny ribbon into her hair the color of a ripe plum, and that she kept touching it, the way people touched things they weren't entirely sure they were allowed to have. He noticed that the fluorescent light at the back of the room was flickering in the same exact pattern it had flickered since September, and that nobody had yet decided to fix it, and that if you listened hard enough the flicker made a kind of rhythm, a soft electric tick under everything else, like a metronome that had opinions.

Most of all, he noticed that the choir was loud.

It was always loud before rehearsal started. Thirty kids, ages eleven to fifteen, crammed into a room that had been designed for maybe twenty, with chairs that squeaked when you leaned back and a piano that was always slightly out of tune no matter how many times the piano tuner came. The noise was not one noise; it was many noises woven together and refusing to agree. Rohan Devi was arguing with Lamont about whether a superhero movie had a good third act. Yaffa Gold was telling Sina Taheri a story that involved her hands flying around like birds trying to escape. Three girls Tomás didn't know as well — new this year, he thought, from the Somali family that had moved in near the river — were singing part of a song under their breath, in a language that sounded to Tomás like wind moving over a wide and flat place.

And in the middle of it all, tuning a guitar she almost never actually played but carried around the way some people carried car keys, stood Conductor Martine Arias-Kowalski.

Conductor Martine was not tall. That was the first surprise, when you met her. Photographs of her from her opera days, which were pinned in a small clump to the wall by the sign-in sheet, made her look enormous — a woman in a crimson dress, her head thrown back, her mouth open wide enough to swallow the world. In person she barely came up to Tomás's shoulder. She was solidly built, with gray curls that she pinned up with pencils and forgot about, and dark eyebrows that did most of the work her voice didn't. She was in her middle forties, which meant nothing to Tomás except that she was the age of parents but not of grandparents, and she had a laugh that started in her chest and came out like a small earthquake.

She looked up. She didn't clap. She didn't whistle. She just looked up, and held the guitar against her hip, and lifted one eyebrow at the room.

The noise fell like somebody had pulled a string.

"Bom dia," she said. "Good morning. Sabah al-khair. Shalom. Anyeong. Nǐ hǎo."

"Bom dia," Tomás said, under his breath, with the others. His was one of maybe twelve "Bom dia"s. There were more "Good morning"s, and a scattered handful of each of the others, and one extremely loud "Jambo!" from Lamont, who was not Kenyan but had an aunt who was, and who enjoyed the word.

Martine grinned. "Jambo, Lamont."

"Jambo, Conductor."

"Everybody sit, please. Yes. Chairs. Those things with four legs. Fatimah, put your phone away or I will sing it a lullaby and it will sleep for a thousand years."

"It's my mom," Fatimah Hassan said, but she was already tucking the phone under her thigh. "I was just —"

"Tell your mother I love her. Tell her Martine said. Now, altos on my right, tenors and basses behind, sopranos on the left. Yes. Like civilized creatures. Rohan, that is not the tenor section, that is the coat rack. Thank you."

Tomás threaded his way to the alto section and sat down. He had been sitting in the alto section for three years now, ever since his voice, at ten, had refused to go up the way sopranos' voices went up, and had instead settled into a warm middle register that his mother called "your grandfather's voice," because her father in São Paulo had sung like that, though nobody had ever recorded him and there was no way to check. His father, who was an engineer from Singapore and who loved facts and disliked sentences that could not be verified, had pointed this out once, gently. His mother had said, "Some things you know by the shape of them, Wei," and that had been the end of it.

In the alto section Tomás sat next to Fatimah Hassan on one side and an empty chair on the other, which usually meant Yaffa was running late. Fatimah was tying her hijab a different way today; it was a soft gray with threads of silver running through it, and she had wrapped it so that it made a little peak at the back of her head. She caught him looking and raised her eyebrows.

"What," she said.

"Nothing. It's nice."

"It's new."

"Oh."

"My aunt sent it from Amman."

"Oh."

"You are bad at conversation, Tomás."

"I know."

She laughed. Fatimah had a big laugh, bigger than she was, and she was already taller than most of the eighth-grade boys. He had known her since second grade, when they had both been mildly suspicious of the idea of second grade and had bonded in the lunch line.

Yaffa banged through the door six seconds before Martine would have closed it and slid into her seat beside Tomás in a flurry of coat and curly hair and an apology directed at the room in general.

"Sorry sorry sorry, my little brother had a — never mind. Hi. Hi. I'm here. I exist."

"Yaffa," Martine said, without looking up from her music, "you will be on time one day and I will fall down dead from shock and my tombstone will read, 'She was killed by punctuality.' Do not do this to me. I have plans."

"Understood, Conductor."

"Warm-ups, everyone. Hm on a comfortable pitch. Not your favorite pitch. A comfortable pitch. Rohan, that is not comfortable, that is showing off. Down a fifth, please. Thank you. Good. Good. Now open it — ah — yes — no, Lamont, that is a yawn, not a note, I can hear the difference — yes, there you are."

The sound of the choir warming up was, to Tomás, one of the best sounds in the world. It was not a beautiful sound, not yet. It was a ragged, searching sound, the sound of thirty people trying to find the same note the way you might try to find the same star in a sky you didn't know well. But as it went on, as Martine led them up and down in slow, patient steps, something happened. The voices began to lean toward each other. They began to listen. The raggedness did not so much disappear as braid itself together, until the room was full of a single, wide, breathing hum that Tomás could feel in his chest and behind his eyes and in the soles of his feet through the thin carpet.

This was the part he loved. This was the part he didn't know how to explain, not to his father, not to the kids at school who thought choir was something you did because you weren't good enough to play basketball. The part where thirty people who otherwise had nothing in common — whose parents came from twenty-three different countries, whose lunches smelled like twenty-three different kitchens, whose weekends were spent in churches and mosques and temples and synagogues and in no place of worship at all — became, for a moment, one instrument with many strings.

He was not soloing. He was never soloing. He sat in the middle of the alto section and let his voice fold in with the others and did not try to stand out, and in that folding he felt something that was almost like being understood.

"Good," Martine said, when the hum finally unraveled. "Good. Better than Tuesday. Now. Before we begin today's music, I have an announcement."

Tomás watched her. She did not look like a person about to make a small announcement. She looked like a person about to lift a very heavy suitcase.

"At the end of April," she said, "as some of you have heard rumored, the city will hold its fourth annual Interfaith Festival at the park behind the library. Music, food, speakers. Very lovely event. You have perhaps been to it with your families."

A few hands went up. Yaffa's. Sina's. Rohan's. Tomás kept his hand down. He had been once, two years ago, and remembered it mostly as an afternoon in which he had eaten a falafel sandwich too quickly and been uncomfortable for the rest of the day.

"This year," Martine said, "they have asked us — they have asked this choir — to perform a new piece. A commissioned piece. Written for us by a composer named Eitan Wolf-Dabiri, who lives in this city and whose mother, by the way, I went to conservatory with in Buenos Aires a hundred years ago. The piece will be a medley. It will combine three short hymns from three traditions. I will say more about it next week, when the music arrives."

She paused. She looked around the room. Tomás, watching her, had the sense that she was taking a breath before a dive.

"The three hymns," she said, "are in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in Farsi."

There was a small silence. It was the kind of silence that comes not because people have nothing to say but because they have too many things to say and have not decided which one yet.

"Cool," said Rohan, loudly, because Rohan filled silences the way water filled holes.

"Cool," said Lamont, agreeing.

"Wait," said Yaffa. "Wait, sorry — Hebrew and Arabic and —"

"Farsi," Martine said. "Also called Persian. The language of much of Iran, and of Afghan Dari, and of many Bahá'í writings, which is where this particular hymn comes from."

"Oh," said Yaffa, in a voice that was suddenly much smaller than her usual voice. "Okay."

Fatimah was sitting very still next to Tomás. He could feel her stillness the way you feel somebody hold their breath.

"We will discuss it more," Martine said, gently. "There is plenty of time. For today, we rehearse the pieces we already know. The Brazilian lullaby, the Korean folk song, the English round. Yes? Yes. Papers out. Tomás, do you have your music?"

"Yes, Conductor."

"Good boy. Page seven, please, everyone."

They sang. They sang the Brazilian lullaby that Tomás's mother had recommended, whose melody Tomás had grown up inside the way a fish grows up inside water. They sang the Korean folk song that Hye-jin had brought in, and Hye-jin sang the high line with her eyes closed and her plum ribbon trembling slightly in her hair. They sang the English round in four parts, and Lamont came in three beats early on purpose and Martine pretended to faint, and the choir laughed, and Rohan made a joke about CPR that nobody quite understood, and the rehearsal ended, eventually, the way rehearsals always ended, with chairs scraping and music flying and Martine calling after them to drink water and to be kind to their mothers.

Tomás gathered his folder. Yaffa was already out the door, her coat half on, her phone in her hand, her forehead creased. Fatimah was folding her music slowly, slowly, as if slowing down the folding could slow down the rest of the week.

"You okay?" Tomás asked her.

"Mm," Fatimah said. Then, "I don't know yet. Ask me tomorrow."

"Okay."

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"You're a good person."

"Um," he said. It was not the kind of thing middle schoolers said to each other, and he did not know what to do with it. "Thanks?"

She shook her head like he had missed the point, which he had, but she did not explain. She just picked up her bag and left, and Tomás was alone in the alto section with the flickering light and the smell of old coffee and the faint, impossible ghost of chicken adobo, and in his hand the folder of music he had sung a hundred times, and in his head the three words Martine had said before she had said anything else.

Hebrew. Arabic. Farsi.

He did not know, then, why those three words felt heavier than the three words before them, or the three words after. He only knew that they did. He tucked his folder under his arm and went out into the cold afternoon, and the wind coming off the river bit his face, and he walked home thinking about languages he could not read, and wondering what it would feel like to sing them anyway.

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The music arrived on Tuesday.

Tomás knew it had arrived before he even walked into the community center, because he could hear Rohan in the parking lot, and Rohan in the parking lot meant Rohan had something he wanted to say and could not wait another thirty seconds to say it.

"Tomás! Tomás, dude, come see this, it has like — it has three alphabets on the same page, it's insane —"

"Rohan, stop yelling, there are old people."

"There is one old person and she is my grandmother and she does not care."

Rohan's grandmother, a tiny woman with a smile like a folded note, waved cheerfully from the passenger seat of the Devi family Subaru and said something to Rohan in Hindi that made him groan and close the car door.

"She says I have the manners of a goat. Come on."

Inside the community center, the music was piled on a long table by the door, in thick paper folders stapled down the spine. Martine had asked a volunteer parent, Mr. Kowalski — who was not related to her, though everyone thought he was, and who had stopped correcting them years ago — to hand them out. Tomás picked his up. It was heavier than the usual folders.

SONGS OF ONE SKY — a medley in three languages music by Eitan Wolf-Dabiri (2025) commissioned by the city Interfaith Council

He flipped it open.

The first page was a note from the composer. Tomás skimmed it. Words like harmony and reverence and bridge. Words like a chance to hear our neighbors sing their prayers. Tomás was thirteen, and he was suspicious of any sentence that used the word neighbors in a formal way; it usually meant somebody was about to ask for money or for a casserole. But the note was short, and at the bottom the composer had drawn a small doodle of a bird with three feathers, one blue, one green, one gold, and Tomás liked the bird.

He flipped the page.

Three hymns. Three alphabets. Three languages. One melody, it turned out, woven under all of them, so that at the end of the piece, on the last page, the three texts overlapped in a kind of braid, alto and soprano and tenor each singing something in a different language at the same time.

Tomás stared at it for a long moment.

Then he said, out loud, quietly, "Oh."

"Right?" Rohan said, behind him. "Right?"

"It's — this is a lot."

"It's like a puzzle. I love puzzles. Did I ever tell you about the thousand-piece puzzle my father and I did of —"

"Yes," said Tomás, and Lamont, and two girls they didn't know very well but who had apparently also been told.

Rohan shrugged, unoffended.

Tomás took his seat in the alto section. Yaffa was already there, for once. Her folder was open in her lap, and she was staring at the Hebrew on page one the way somebody might stare at a photograph from a house they used to live in.

"Hey," Tomás said.

"Hey."

"You okay?"

"It's weird," she said.

"What is?"

"Seeing Hebrew in here. Like — I've sung in Hebrew in choir before. Every year, that one song at the winter concert, the —"

"The one about the candles."

"Yeah. But that's like — everybody expects that. It's December, there's candles, it's fine. This is —" She waved her hand at the folder. "This is on purpose. This is like, we are putting these three languages together on purpose, and we are saying the thing we are saying by doing that."

"What thing are we saying?"

She looked at him. "I don't know yet. That's what's weird."

Fatimah slid into the seat on Tomás's other side and did not say anything at all. She just opened her folder to page three — the Arabic — and let her finger hover above the script without touching it.

Sina Taheri came in from the tenor-and-bass side of the room — though Sina was a soprano, she liked to visit the boys to argue with them about things — and dropped into the empty chair next to Yaffa with a huff.

"My grandfather," Sina announced, without preamble, "is going to cry when he hears about this."

"Good cry or bad cry?" Yaffa said.

"Good cry. Bad cry. Both cries. He cries when he sees a bird on a wire, Yaffa, he has many kinds of cry."

"Fair."

Martine called for attention, and the room quieted, and she walked them through the music.

She had them look at the shape of the piece first — the way it opened with a single voice, an alto actually, singing the Hebrew line alone; the way the sopranos joined with the Arabic a few bars later, and then the tenors and basses came in with the Farsi, each line staggered like somebody laying strands of thread across a loom. She had them clap the rhythm of each language, because rhythm, she said, was where languages most wanted to be understood. She had them say each transliterated line out loud, all together, slowly, and not be embarrassed about getting it wrong.

"You will all get it wrong," she said. "That is part of the work. Nobody in this room, including me, speaks all three of these languages. I have Spanish and Polish and English and a very bad Italian from the operas and a handful of Yiddish from my grandfather who is dead now and who would be thrilled to know we were singing Hashkiveinu in a community choir because he never thought such a thing was possible in his lifetime, so there, that is my answer to anybody who asks me why I am doing this."

She looked up. Her eyes were, Tomás noticed, a little shiny.

"Also," she said, briskly, clearing her throat, "we are doing this because it is beautiful music. That is actually the first reason. Let us not forget."

They tried to sing the first page.

It was not good.

Tomás had expected that. Tomás had sung enough new music to know that the first read-through always sounded like a box of knives falling down a staircase. What he had not expected was how self-conscious everybody was. Lamont, who normally sang with his whole chest, was muttering. Yaffa was not really singing at all; she was moving her mouth in the approximate shape of the words without letting any air through. Fatimah was singing, but very carefully, as if she were stepping across a creek on wet stones. And Sina — Sina was singing full voice, eyes closed, like she was the only one in the room.

Martine stopped them after twelve bars.

"All right," she said. "All right. Let us not pretend. Some of you are nervous about this music."

Nobody said anything.

"Some of your parents may be nervous about this music."

A slightly longer nobody-said-anything.

"That is all right. That is natural. I am going to ask you to do something, before our next rehearsal. I am going to ask you to take this folder home. Read the translations. Talk to your families. Not just your parents. Your grandparents, if you have them. Your aunts, your uncles. Ask them what they think of these words."

"And then?" Hye-jin asked.

"And then," Martine said, "we will talk about it. All together. Nobody has to sing anything they do not wish to sing. But we are not going to pretend we do not feel things. We are going to feel them out loud."

"Out loud in Hebrew?" Lamont said. "Or out loud in English?"

"Out loud in whatever language you have available to you, Lamont, thank you."

Lamont gave her a thumbs-up.

They rehearsed the English parts of the program — the Brazilian lullaby, a new round Martine had written herself — and called it a night. Tomás packed his folder carefully, as if the paper inside were slightly heavier than other paper. He put it into his backpack. He zipped the backpack. He unzipped the backpack to make sure the folder was still there. It was.

Outside, the sky had gone the color of an old bruise. His mother was waiting in the car, her face lit blue by her phone.

"Oi, filho," she said, when he slid in. "Como foi?"

"Foi —" He paused. Portuguese, tonight, felt like the wrong shape for what he wanted to say. "Foi diferente."

"Diferente good or diferente bad?"

"I don't know yet."

She did not push. She drove. The heater ticked. The windshield wipers made a soft thump against the light rain that had started while they were inside, and Tomás leaned his head against the cold window and thought about three hymns, in three languages, and about how the composer had drawn a bird with three feathers, and about how his mother had used the word filho and his father never did, because filho was a Portuguese word and in their house his father's words were Mandarin words and English words and occasionally Singlish words that nobody else in the choir would have understood, and about how Tomás himself had no language, no single language, the way Yaffa had Hebrew and Fatimah had Arabic and Sina had Farsi.

He had Portuguese. He had Mandarin. He had English. He had them all, and in some ways that meant he had none of them, because none of them were the language of a tradition he could point to. His mother's family in São Paulo went to a Catholic mass on Christmas and Easter, but that was more about his grandmother's cooking than about Jesus. His father's family in Singapore burned incense on certain days of the year for ancestors, but that was more about his grandfather's stubbornness than about Buddhism or Daoism, both of which his father had, at various times, described as "the religion of my relatives, which is not the same as my religion."

"What are you thinking about?" his mother asked.

"Languages."

"Ah," she said. "That is always a good thing to think about."

"Mm."

"Also a tiring thing to think about."

"Mm."

She reached over and smoothed his hair with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel, which she was not supposed to do but did anyway. "Tell me about it when you are ready, querido. I have all the time in the world."

He was not sure, yet, that he had the words for it, even in the three languages he had. But he nodded, because she had used querido, which was another of her words he liked, and because the rain was beginning to sound like a rhythm, and because somewhere under his jacket, inside his backpack, inside the zippered compartment, there were three scripts he could not read, waiting.

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The Moreira-Lim house was, strictly speaking, an apartment. It was on the fourth floor of a brick building that had once been a shoe factory, and the living room had the kind of tall, skinny windows that shoe factories have, and in the summer it was too hot and in the winter it was too cold and Tomás had lived there all his life and loved it in the way you love a thing that has always been there, which is to say without particularly noticing that you do.

His mother, Clara Moreira, was a music teacher at the public middle school across town — not his middle school; she had made a rule about that, early, that she would not teach in the same building where her son was a student, because, she said, nobody deserved to have their mother be their homeroom teacher, not even her son. She played the piano in the living room most evenings, after dinner, and sometimes the guitar, and sometimes she just sat on the piano bench and did not play anything, and that was also music, in a way Tomás had never managed to explain to anyone but understood anyway.

His father, Lim Wei, was an engineer for the transit authority. He designed the timing systems for the buses, which sounded boring and, Tomás had learned, actually was, though his father talked about it with the same kind of love Clara talked about music with. Wei was a thin man, taller than his wife, with glasses he pushed up his nose approximately once every three minutes, and hair that had begun to gray at the temples in a way Clara called distinguished and Wei called a nuisance. Wei had grown up in Singapore, in a family that had come from Fujian three generations ago, and he spoke Mandarin and English and Hokkien and Malay and Singlish which, depending on who you asked, was either a language of its own or English doing the cha-cha. He had met Clara in graduate school in Boston and followed her home to the Midwest when her mother got sick, and that, Tomás knew, was the shape of how his parents had come to be his parents.

Tomás let himself in with his key. The apartment smelled like feijão and ginger and something slightly burnt, which meant his mother had probably let the rice go too long again. She did that when she was reading. She was reading now, at the kitchen table, her legs tucked up under her, her hair in a loose bun held in place with a pencil, the way Martine did hers. She looked up and smiled.

"Filho," she said. "Wash up. Dinner in ten. Papai is on a call."

"With who?"

"The buses, I think."

"Always the buses."

"Always the buses."

He washed his hands. He set the table. His father emerged from the small room at the end of the hall that everyone called the office but was really just a corner with a door, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses.

"They are terrified of snow," Wei said, to the room in general. "The buses. They are terrified of snow."

"Hi, Papa," Tomás said.

"Hi, kiddo. How was the choir thing?"

"It was — I want to show you something. After dinner."

"Okay."

"This," he said, "is the music we got today."

His mother leaned forward. His father put his glasses back on, which he had taken off to eat.

Tomás walked them through it. Hashkiveinu. Tala' al-Badru 'Alayna. Ay ahl-e-'ālam. Hebrew. Arabic. Farsi. The braid at the end. The bird with three feathers. The composer's note about neighbors.

His mother was smiling a small, private smile before he had finished the second page.

"Meu Deus," she said, softly. "Isso é lindo."

"You think so?"

"Tomás. Yes. Yes, of course. Do you know how long people have been trying to do things like this, mijo? And here you are, thirteen years old, and somebody has written you a piece."

"Me?"

"Your choir. Which is you. You know what I mean."

"Mm,“TEACHING CAMPAIGNS ENTERPRISES OF INSTITUTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE PUBLICITY MEASURES PUBLICATION PROJECTS CELEBRATION PLANS RAPIDLY MULTIPLYING.”And the Hebrew is — Jewish, obviously. The Arabic is which?"

"It's — it's a song that's sung in Muslim tradition. Tala' al-Badru. It's supposed to be from when the Prophet Muhammad arrived at Medina. Like, the kids in the city sang it to welcome him."

"Mm," said Wei, again.

"Wei," said Clara, gently.

"I am only thinking," said Wei. "I am allowed to think."

"You are allowed to think. You can also think out loud. It is permitted in this house."

Wei sighed. He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and put them back on. Tomás had seen this maneuver many times in his life, usually before his father said something that his father had been thinking about for longer than his father wanted to admit.

"Tomás," Wei said. "Do the kids in your choir understand what they will be singing?"

"Understand how?"

"The words. The meaning. Do they understand that these are prayers? From three different religions?"

"Papa, they're — yeah. I mean, Martine said. She told us. We have the translations."

"Mm."

"What's mm?"

Wei looked at him. Wei had a way of looking that was not unkind but was very direct, like a lamp pointed at something that had been trying to stay in the shadow.

"I am thinking," Wei said, "that it is easy for grown-ups to say we will all sing together, and it is another thing for children to actually sing together. Words in a song are still words. Prayers in a song are still prayers. If you sing 'Lay us down, O God, in peace,' you are saying a thing about God. Do you understand what you are saying?"

"I —" Tomás said. "I — I'm singing what the composer wrote."

"Yes. But you are also opening your mouth and the words are coming out. Those are your words too, in that moment."

Clara had gone still. Tomás knew that stillness. It was not the stillness of agreement. It was the stillness of his mother choosing her next sentence carefully, which his mother did not always do.

"Wei," Clara said. "He is thirteen."

"I know how old he is."

"He is thirteen and he is in a choir, and the choir has been asked to sing a beautiful piece by a local composer, and you are asking him if he understands the metaphysics of —"

"I am not asking about metaphysics, Clara. I am asking a practical question."

"I am asking the metaphysics. Fine. I am asking the metaphysics."

"Wei."

"Clara."

They looked at each other. Tomás, who had watched this particular kind of look his whole life, understood that this was not actually a fight. This was the shape his parents' conversations took when they were disagreeing about something important. They went a little formal with each other. They called each other by their names.

"I am not," Wei said, carefully, "saying he should not sing. I am saying he should know what he is singing. There is a difference between a performance and a prayer. I worry — I am an engineer, I worry about things — that if you smudge that line too much, you teach children that words do not mean what they mean."

"Or," Clara said, "you teach them that words can mean more than one thing at once. Which is what a child who grows up in this house already knows, Wei. Your son speaks three languages. He knows that the word for grandmother in Portuguese is not the word for grandmother in Mandarin, and that both of them are still grandmother. Words have always meant more than one thing to him."

"Martine? She — she told us to talk to our families. That was kind of the assignment. To bring it up."

"Good," Wei said. "Good. She is doing something right, then. Tell her I said so."

"I'm not telling my conductor that my dad approved of her."

"Why not?"

"Because that's weird, Papa."

Wei smiled, for the first time since the folder had come out. It was a small smile, but it was real.

"Tomás," he said. "I am not forbidding anything. I am not even discouraging anything. I am asking you to think. Do you think about what you sing?"

"Yes."

"Good. Keep doing that."

"Okay."

"Also, your mother is right that this is beautiful music."

"Obrigada, meu amor," Clara said, dryly.

"De nada, meu amor," Wei said, which was two of the only Portuguese words he used regularly, and which he pronounced with great care, and which always made Clara smile.

Tomás went to his room after the dishes. He sat on his bed and opened the folder again. He looked at the Hebrew. He looked at the Arabic. He looked at the Farsi. He tried to hear, in his head, what his father had said. Words in a song are still words. He tried to hear, in his head, what his mother had said. Words can mean more than one thing at once.

Both of them, he thought, were right. That was the trouble. Both of them were right, in the way that his mother's beans and his father's bok choy were both right, on the plate, at the same time, even though they came from opposite sides of the world.

He looked at the Farsi line. Ay ahl-e-'ālam. O people of the world.

He said it out loud, quietly, to his empty room.

"Ay ahl-e-'ālam."

The letters on the page did not change. They were still shapes he could not read. But the sound his mouth made was a real sound, and it had been sent somewhere, and it had not come back empty.

He closed the folder. He turned off the light. He lay in the dark a long time before he fell asleep, thinking about three languages he did not speak, and about how his father had said keep doing that, and about how the word for father in Portuguese was pai and the word for father in Mandarin was bà, and how both of them meant the same man, sitting at the kitchen table, worried and loving and asking a practical question that was not actually practical at all.

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Wednesday at school, Tomás did not see Yaffa at lunch.

This was unusual. Yaffa always sat at the same table, at the end by the window, with him and Rohan and a rotating cast of other kids who drifted in and out depending on who was fighting with whom that week. Yaffa had her own chair, or rather, her own preferred chair, which was the one that wobbled slightly on its back left leg and which she had claimed the first week of sixth grade because, she said, it was the only chair in the cafeteria with personality. Today her chair was empty.

"She is in the library," Rohan said, with his mouth full of what appeared to be a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich, because Rohan's lunches were a form of experimental art.

"Why?"

"I don't know. I saw her go in. She had her hood up."

The hood-up thing was the giveaway. Yaffa wore her hood up only when she was very cold, which she never was in the overheated middle school, or when she was very unhappy, which she sometimes was. Tomás ate his sandwich quickly -- his mother had made him a Brazilian-style pão de queijo with ham, which was the best kind of lunch -- and went to the library.

Yaffa was in the back corner, at the little carrel with the scratched wooden top, pretending to read a book about whales. He knew she was pretending because the book was upside down.

"Yaff," he said.

She looked up. Her eyes were a little red, and her hood was pulled so far forward it looked like she was peering out of a small purple cave.

"Hi."

"Your book is upside down."

"I know."

"Okay."

He sat down across from her. He did not say anything else, because he had learned, over several years of being Yaffa Gold's friend, that Yaffa Gold did not need you to fill silence for her. Yaffa filled her own silence, in her own time, once she had decided what to say.

She turned the book right side up. Then she closed it. Then she said, "My parents don't want me to sing in Arabic."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"You've sung in Arabic before."

"I know."

"You sang that thing at the spring concert last year, the --"

"I know, Tomás, I was there. I know I have sung in Arabic before."

"Okay. Sorry."

She rubbed her eyes under the hood. "They say this is different."

"Different how?"

"They say --" She paused. "Okay, I don't know if I can explain this right. So, you know my mom is -- my family is Israeli. My mom was born there. Her parents were born there. Before that they were from Poland and Yemen, and before that -- I don't know, whatever. The point is, my mom has --"

She stopped. She looked at the whale book.

"My uncle Eitan died in the army," she said. "A long time ago. Before I was born. My mom doesn't talk about him much but there is a picture in the hallway. And my grandmother -- she is still alive, my grandmother, she lives in Tel Aviv -- she lost a sister in -- she was a kid when -- it was a bombing, like a bus, a long time ago."

"Yaffa," Tomás said. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not asking you to be sorry. I'm trying to -- I'm trying to explain what my parents said, okay?"

"Okay."

She took a breath.

"My dad said it is not about the song. He said the song, Tala al-Badru, is actually fine, it is a beautiful song, lots of people love it. He said it is about the idea of it. He said -- what did he say -- he said, 'Your choir is asking you to sing a Muslim prayer next to a Jewish prayer as if they are the same thing, and they are not the same thing.'"

"Huh," Tomás said.

"And my mom -- my mom was more complicated. My mom said she is glad the choir wants to do it. She said she thinks it is a good idea, actually. But she said she was worried about the, like, audience. About who might be there and what they might say. She was worried that if people saw me -- saw a Jewish kid -- singing a Muslim prayer, that somebody might -- I don't know. That somebody might be mean about it, online or something. She said, 'You don't know who films these things, Yaffa.'"

"Oh."

"And then they argued, the two of them, and then they said we should talk about it again as a family, and then my little brother came in and spilled orange juice and the conversation ended."

"Orange juice is very dependable that way."

"Yeah."

"So -- are you going to do it?"

She looked at him. She pulled her hood down, finally, and her curly hair puffed out around her face like an explosion.

"I don't know," she said. "I think -- okay, here is the thing. My grandmother called me last night. My Tel Aviv grandmother. She called me on the phone. She almost never calls me, she is not a phone person, she likes to write letters. But she called me."

"What did she say?"

"She said my mother told her about the concert. She said -- she said this thing in Hebrew that I can't really translate. But it was like -- she said, 'Yaffa, I have lived long enough to hear many songs. I have heard songs that wanted to make me afraid. If a song is not trying to make you afraid, sing it.'"

"Huh," said Tomás.

"Yeah."

"That is -- that is a good grandmother."

"She is the best grandmother."

"So does that mean you're going to sing it?"

"I don't know, Tomás. My grandmother lives in Israel. She does not have to go to middle school in this city next week. I do."

"Yeah."

"And my parents are my parents. My dad, especially. He -- he is not a bad person, Tomás. You know my dad. He just -- he worries. He worries so much. He has lost people. It is not nothing, that he worries."

"I know."

"I don't want to hurt him."

"No."

"But I also don't want to -- I don't want to be the kid who doesn't sing. You know?"

He knew. He did not have her reasons, but he knew the shape of the feeling.

They sat together in the library for a while longer, until the bell, and then they went back to their lockers and to afternoon classes, and Tomás could not concentrate in pre-algebra because he was thinking about Yaffa's grandmother, and the phrase a song that was not trying to make her afraid, and the picture of a young man named Eitan in a hallway he had never seen, and about how it was possible for a song to feel heavier in one person's mouth than in another person's mouth even though the notes were the same.

After school, Yaffa waited for him by the bike rack.

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"Could you -- I mean, if it is not weird -- could you come over, maybe, after dinner? My parents want to talk to me again. I think -- I think it would help. If my parents saw you."

"Why me?"

"Because they like you. And because -- because my dad is an engineer, like your dad, and they went to college together, actually, did you know that? And I think -- I don't know. I think if he sees you he will -- I don't know what I think. I just think maybe it wouldn't be the two of them and me."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll ask my mom."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I didn't mean to drag you into my family."

"Yaffa."

"What."

"It's fine."

"Okay."

His mother said yes, because his mother almost always said yes to things that involved other people, and because she and Yaffa's mother, Leah Gold, had met at a school open house four years earlier and had liked each other immediately in the way that certain mothers like each other immediately, the way water finds a level.

Tomás walked to the Gold house after dinner. It was only three blocks. The Golds lived in a small white house with a maple tree in the front yard, and a mezuzah on the doorpost that Yaffa had once, when they were in fourth grade, explained to him at great length and with great enthusiasm and several diagrams. He rang the bell. Yaffa's little brother Noam answered; he was seven and was carrying, for reasons that were not explained, a plastic alligator.

"Hi, Tomás."

"Hi, Noam."

"Yaffa is upstairs."

"Okay."

"This is Mr. Bingles."

"Hi, Mr. Bingles."

"He is a crocodile."

"I thought alligators and crocodiles were different."

"He is both."

"Ah."

Noam wandered off. Yaffa came down the stairs.

"I see you have met Mr. Bingles."

"He is a complicated creature."

"Come to the kitchen."

The Gold kitchen was bright and warm and smelled like something with dill. Leah Gold was at the stove, stirring. David Gold was at the table, his laptop open but not currently being looked at, his glasses pushed up on his forehead. Both of them smiled when Tomás came in, and Leah came over and hugged him -- Leah was a hugger; she had hugged him the first time she had ever met him -- and David stood up and shook his hand, which was the serious-father handshake, the one that said you are being treated as more adult than you actually are, which Tomás had started to get more often this year.

"Tomás," David said. "Thank you for coming over. How are your parents?"

"They are good. Busy. My dad is still fighting with the buses."

"The buses are a formidable enemy. Tell him I said good luck."

"I will."

"Sit, sit. Do you want tea? We have tea."

"Sure."

Leah poured tea. Nobody said anything for a minute. Then David cleared his throat.

"Yaffa has told us she asked you to come over. I hope that is all right."

"Yeah. Of course."

"We have been having a -- a family discussion. About her choir piece."

"Yeah. She told me."

"We wanted to ask you -- if you are comfortable -- what do you think? About the piece."

Tomás had not expected this. He had expected, somehow, that he would be moral support, a chair-shape in the kitchen, not a person who got asked a question. He looked at Yaffa. She looked back at him with an expression that was somewhere between apology and please just be honest.

"I --" he said.

Everyone waited.

"I think," he said, slowly, "I think it is a hard piece. I think my dad is -- my dad is worried too. He asked me if I understood the words. He wanted me to think about them. I am still thinking about them. I don't -- I don't think anybody in the choir is, like, secretly up to something. I think Martine wanted to pick a piece that was beautiful, and she also wanted it to be -- I guess --" He struggled. "She wanted it to be true. Like, if we are really a choir from twenty-three countries, we should sing like we are."

David and Leah exchanged a look. It was not quite the look his own parents had exchanged, but it was a cousin of that look.

"And what do your parents say?" Leah asked. "If you don't mind."

"My mom thinks it is beautiful. My dad thinks -- my dad thinks we should know what we are saying. He didn't say I shouldn't do it. He said I should think."

"That is a good father," David said, quietly.

"Yeah."

"Tomás," Leah said. "I want to ask you something, and I want you to be honest. Do you think -- if Yaffa sings this piece -- that anybody might, you know, post something online? Or say something? About her, specifically?"

Tomás thought about it. He thought about the kids at his school -- not in the choir, just in the hallways. He thought about the boy in eighth grade who had once said something stupid in the lunch line about Fatimah's hijab and had been hauled into the principal's office within the hour. He thought about the parents he had seen at the last interfaith festival, two years ago, who had not been kind. He thought about his own instincts, which were not always reliable but which were something.

"Maybe," he said. "I mean -- maybe. I don't know. But -- I think there will be people who say stuff no matter what. Like, there is going to be somebody who thinks the whole festival shouldn't happen. That person exists. That person is -- that person is not really about Yaffa."

David nodded, slowly.

"We are not," he said, carefully, "trying to keep our daughter from doing something brave. I want to be clear about that. I was a boy who sang in a choir, too. I remember what that was like. I --" He paused. He looked at his hands. "There are things in my family, Tomás, that you don't need to know about tonight. There are memorials. There are names on a wall. When I look at -- when I look at my daughter and I think about her standing on a stage and singing in a language that, in my lifetime, I have associated with -- with the voices of people who wanted me dead -- it is not a reasonable feeling, but it is a feeling. And I have to live with it being a feeling."

"Abba," Yaffa said, quietly.

"I know, I know. I know the song she will sing is not one of those voices, Yaffa. I know this. I am telling Tomás the truth about why this is hard for me."

Tomás did not know what to say. He sipped his tea. The tea was strong and a little sweet. Leah had put honey in it.

"Mr. Gold," he said, finally. And then he stopped, because he did not have the next part of the sentence ready.

"Tomás," David said. "Call me David. You are old enough."

"Um. David. I --" He took a breath. "I think. I think if Yaffa doesn't sing, the whole piece will still happen. Some other alto will sing her part. Or soprano, sorry, I meant -- someone else will sing it. And it will sound different, because it will be missing Yaffa's voice. I don't -- I don't know how else to say that. I'm sorry, this is a weird thing for me to say in your kitchen."

"It is not weird," Leah said, and her eyes were, Tomás noticed, the same slightly shiny as Martine's had been on Tuesday. "It is the right thing to say."

"I thought about --" Yaffa said. "I thought about what Grandma said. Grandma called me last night."

"I know she did," Leah said. "She called me afterward. She was very pleased with herself."

"She said -- Mom, she said, 'If a song is not trying to make you afraid, sing it.'"

Leah laughed, a short wet laugh, and put her hand over her mouth.

"That sounds like Ima."

David was quiet. He stared at the table for a long time. When he looked up, his eyes were tired but not angry.

"Yaffa," he said. "I am not going to tell you that you have to sing this piece. I am also not going to tell you that you cannot. I am going to tell you that you are thirteen, and that you have a mother and a father and a grandmother in Tel Aviv, and that when you make this choice, you are making it with all of us standing behind you, whether we agree or not. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Abba."

"Think about it a few more days. Talk to your conductor. Talk to Tomás, since apparently Tomás is our family's advisor now."

"Papa, he is thirteen."

"He is a very serious thirteen. Look at him."

Tomás, who was trying to drink tea, nearly choked. David reached over and clapped him on the shoulder, which was another one of those adult-handshake gestures, and said, "Thank you for coming, Tomás. Tell your father the buses will win eventually. They always win."

"I will tell him."

When Tomás left, an hour later, Yaffa walked him to the door. On the porch, in the cold, she hugged him briefly, the kind of hug that middle schoolers give each other when they think nobody is watching.

"Thank you," she said.

"I didn't do anything."

"You sat at the table."

"That is not a thing."

"It is a thing. Believe me."

He walked home under the streetlights, and it had begun to rain again, a thin cold rain that smelled like metal, and Tomás thought about names on a wall and songs that were not trying to make anybody afraid and little brothers with alligators named Mr. Bingles who were also crocodiles, and about how a family was not one thing, ever, but many things, overlapping, like three lines of music on a page.

============================================================

Mr. Hassan called Martine on Thursday morning, which Tomás did not know until rehearsal on Thursday evening, when Fatimah told him.

"My dad wants to meet her," Fatimah said, before rehearsal. She was sitting on the edge of the stage in the community center, swinging her feet. Her new hijab -- the silver one from Amman -- caught the light of the bad fluorescent above her.

"Like, meet her? Why?"

"Because he has things he wants to say about the piece."

"Oh."

"They are meeting next Tuesday, before rehearsal. She invited my mom too, but my mom has to work. So it is going to be him and Martine and me."

"You?"

"Yeah."

"Fatimah, are you -- I mean, are you okay?"

"I don't know yet. Ask me Tuesday."

"You keep telling me to ask you Tuesday. And Tomorrow. And next week."

"That is because I don't know until I know, Tomás. I am sorry I am not a faster person."

"Sorry. Sorry. I was -- I was being --"

"I know. It is fine."

She looked at her feet for a while, and then she looked at him.

"My dad isn't mad," she said. "I want to tell you that. He is not mad at Martine or at you or at the choir. He is -- I don't know how to say it. He is being careful."

"Okay."

"Because he -- okay, you know my dad is from Ramallah, right?"

"Yeah."

"And he came here when he was twenty. He has been here, like, twenty-five years now. But he still -- he still watches the news in Arabic. Every night. He sits at the kitchen table and he watches on his phone and sometimes he cries and sometimes he gets angry and sometimes he just sits there and doesn't do anything, and my mom and I -- we have just kind of learned that at nine p.m. it is Dad's time with the news."

"Yeah."

"He -- he has cousins who are still there. He has -- he has a brother who is there. He worries about them. When he sees people who are not Palestinian talking about Palestinian things, or -- or Muslim things -- he gets -- he gets kind of protective. He is not wrong to be. He is just -- he is sensitive to it. You know?"

"I know."

"And this piece is -- this piece is asking me to sing Arabic, in public, in a choir that is not a Muslim choir, in a concert where there is also Hebrew and Farsi. He wants to know who decided that. He wants to know why. He wants to know what Martine will say to people who have questions."

"That is fair."

"I think so too. But I am a little nervous, for Tuesday."

"Why?"

"Because I don't -- I don't know yet what I want him to decide."

"Oh."

"Like, I don't know if I want him to say yes, go ahead. Or if I want him to say no, don't do it. I don't know what I want from my own father, Tomás. And that is -- that is a weird thing to say, but it is true."

Tomás had never thought of it that way before, that you could be unsure what you wanted your own parent to say. He had assumed that most of the hard work of being a kid was figuring out how to talk to your parents, not figuring out what you wanted them to tell you. But Fatimah was right. It was a different kind of problem.

"What does your mom think?" he asked.

"My mom. My mom is a different story."

"How?"

"My mom is -- my mom is Syrian, but she also grew up in this country, mostly. She came when she was six. So her Arabic is more -- it is softer, somehow. She sings with me sometimes, in Arabic, little songs. She thinks the piece is good. She said --" Fatimah made a small face, as if trying to remember her mother's exact words. "She said, 'Fatimah, the world is full of people who want to tell you your prayers are not beautiful. Do not add your father to that list by being afraid for him.'"

"Your mom is tough."

"My mom is tough. My mom says that her job in this family is not to be tough but to be honest, which is a scarier job, she says."

"Mm."

"Will you come on Tuesday?"

"Huh?"

"To the meeting. Just to be there. Martine said I could bring someone if I wanted. Like a -- a support person."

"Fatimah, I can't be a support person. I'm thirteen."

"You were a support person at Yaffa's last night."

"How did you know about -- Yaffa told you?"

"Yes. We talk. We are in a small group chat. It is called Alto Drama."

"What."

"Hye-jin started it. Do not ask."

"I -- yes, I can come on Tuesday. If your dad is okay with it. You should ask him first."

"I will ask him."

"Okay."

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

"Stop thanking me. You are going to run out of thank-yous and then when I do something big you will have nothing left."

She laughed. It was a short laugh, but a real one.

On Tuesday, Tomás got to the community center a full hour before rehearsal. Fatimah and Mr. Hassan and Martine were already in the small office off the main room, the one with the leaky radiator, and Fatimah had texted him to just come in when he got there. He knocked. Mr. Hassan opened the door.

Mr. Hassan was a tall, thin man with a neat gray beard and kind eyes that were, at the moment, tired. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a cardigan, which was the uniform of pharmacists everywhere, which was what he was. He ran a small pharmacy on the south side of the city. Tomás had been in it a few times with Fatimah, and remembered the way it smelled of mint and paper and, somehow, cardamom.

"Tomás," Mr. Hassan said. "Ahlan. Come in. Fatimah said you would come."

"Thank you, Mr. Hassan."

"Sit, sit."

Martine was sitting behind a small desk that she had obviously borrowed for the occasion. She had tidied herself for the meeting -- her curls were more carefully pinned, her guitar was nowhere to be seen -- but she was still Martine, and she nodded at Tomás with warmth.

"Tomás. Good. It is good you came. Fatimah has told me you are -- how did she say -- a helpful presence."

"Um. Okay."

"Sit, please."

He sat. Fatimah was next to her father on a small couch. She was not looking at Tomás; she was looking at her hands.

Mr. Hassan cleared his throat.

"Conductor Arias," he said.

"Martine, please."

"Martine. Thank you for meeting me. I want to say, before anything else, that my family has been very happy with this choir. Fatimah has been happier in this choir than she has been in many things. I am grateful for this. I want you to know this."

"Thank you, Mr. Hassan. That means a great deal."

"I also want to say that I am not here because I am opposed to the piece."

"All right."

"I am here because I have questions. I would like to ask them. I would like my daughter to hear me ask them. Is this all right?"

"It is more than all right. It is what I would want, in your position."

"Thank you."

Mr. Hassan folded his hands in his lap. Tomás watched him. There was something in the way he sat that reminded Tomás of his own father. Not the look, exactly -- his father was Chinese-Singaporean, and Mr. Hassan was Palestinian -- but the posture. The way a man who had traveled a long way to live in this country sat in a borrowed office and spoke carefully in a language that was not his first language, about a subject that mattered more than the language had room for.

"My first question," Mr. Hassan said, "is this. Why this piece. Why now."

Martine nodded. She took a breath.

"It is a fair question. I will try to answer it honestly. The Interfaith Council asked us. Eitan Wolf-Dabiri -- the composer -- agreed to write for us. I read his draft. I liked it. I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was honest. I thought it did not -- it did not smooth over the differences. It let each language be itself. This is why I agreed. I could have said no. I did not say no."

"And you were aware that some of the children in your choir come from families for whom these languages are not -- are not decorative."

"Yes. I was aware. I am aware every day. I am Polish-Argentinian. My grandfather was Jewish. My grandmother's family was Catholic. I have not, in my life, been allowed to think that languages and prayers are decorative. I know they are not."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

"My second question. What will you do if people are unkind."

Martine did not answer right away. She looked, for a moment, down at the desk. Then she looked up.

"I do not know in advance what they will say. I can tell you what I will do. I will speak calmly. I will defend the choir. I will not let a child stand alone in front of a question she should not have to answer alone. If someone is unkind in the audience, I will say so. If someone is unkind online -- I cannot stop them. But I will not pretend it did not happen. I will speak with the children, afterward. We will talk about what we heard. We will not hide it under a rug."

Mr. Hassan nodded slowly. He looked at Fatimah.

"Fatimah," he said. "Are you afraid?"

Fatimah looked at him. Her face was calm.

"A little, Baba."

"What are you afraid of?"

"That I will -- that I will sing the words wrong. That I will not sing them like they deserve."

"Mmm," he said. "Not of what other people will say?"

"I am afraid of that too. But not as much as the first thing."

Mr. Hassan was quiet for a long time. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the window. He looked at his daughter.

"When I was your age," he said, "I sang in a school choir in Ramallah. Did you know this?"

"You sang?"

"I sang. Not very well. Altos, like you. But yes. We sang in Arabic, mostly, and a little English. Once, when I was -- I think twelve, maybe -- our teacher taught us a song in Hebrew. A simple song. A peace song. She said, 'You should know what our neighbors sing. You do not have to agree with them. You should know.'"

He smiled, a small dry smile.

"Our parents were not happy, some of them. There was a meeting. It was a different kind of meeting. At the end of it, we sang the song. Then we went home. Then nothing happened, which surprised me. I thought something would happen. I was a boy. I thought singing a song in another language was -- I don't know what I thought. But I remember her, that teacher. Her name was Mrs. Abu-Khalil. I have not thought of her in many years."

Fatimah was looking at her father. She was not quite crying, but her eyes were bright.

"I am telling you this," Mr. Hassan said, "because I do not want to be the kind of father that my parents were, that day. I also do not want to be a father who pretends his fears are not real."

"Baba --"

"Let me finish, habibti. My question is not whether you should sing this piece. My question is who is standing next to you when you do. That is my question, Martine. When my daughter stands on that stage -- who stands next to her."

Martine leaned forward. "Her section, Mr. Hassan. Twenty-nine other children. Me. Every parent in the audience who has raised a child in this choir. And I will tell you honestly -- if things go badly, if we need to cancel the festival, I will cancel it. I will not put your daughter in harm's way for the sake of a piece of music. But I do not believe we will have to. I believe we will be heard."

"Inshallah," said Mr. Hassan. "If God wills."

"Inshallah," said Martine, in her softer voice.

There was a long silence. Then Mr. Hassan stood up.

"Fatimah," he said, "you may sing this piece."

Fatimah closed her eyes.

"Thank you, Baba."

"Do not thank me. Thank your mother, who is wiser than I am, and who has been telling me for three days that I am being foolish. I am being a little foolish. I admit it. I am also a father."

"You are a good father."

"I am a father. That is all I can promise. Tomás -- thank you for coming. Your presence has been -- I was going to say, it has been a reminder that my daughter has good friends. It has been that. Thank you."

"You're welcome, Mr. Hassan."

Mr. Hassan left. The door closed. Fatimah sat on the couch and put her face in her hands, and Martine came around from behind the desk and sat next to her and put an arm around her without saying anything, and Tomás sat on the other side of her and did not know what to do with his own arms and finally just put one hand on her shoulder, carefully, the way you might touch a bird. Fatimah laughed a small laugh into her palms.

"You guys are the worst at comforting people," she said.

"We are trying," Martine said.

"I know. That is what makes it funny."

After a while, Fatimah sat up. She took a tissue from Martine's desk. She blew her nose.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Let's go sing."

They went back to the main room. The choir was arriving, noisy and cold and full of after-school gossip. Yaffa was there, early for once, and she caught Fatimah's eye across the room and raised her eyebrows, and Fatimah nodded once, and Yaffa's whole face changed, and she made a fist with one hand, and Fatimah made a fist back, a small one, a little tired, but a fist.

Tomás watched them. He did not know what exactly he had watched happen in the office, but he knew it had happened, and he knew it was bigger than one song, and he knew, walking back to the alto section with a folder whose pages he still could not read, that he was paying attention now, really paying attention, for the first time in his life as a member of this choir, and that paying attention, it turned out, was its own kind of music.

============================================================

Martine had warned the choir she was going to do it, so when they came into rehearsal the next Thursday and found the chairs arranged in a large circle instead of the usual sections, nobody was surprised. Surprised would be the wrong word. Wary, maybe. Resigned, possibly. Lamont Thompson, who had opinions about circle arrangements in general, groaned when he saw it.

"Conductor, are we doing feelings?"

"Lamont, we are doing feelings."

"I was afraid of that."

"You will survive. Sit down."

Tomás had never before seen anybody bring a real problem into the circle. Usually the circle was about small things. Whether to change the dress code for the spring concert. Whether somebody was being mean in the tenor section and if so who and what to do about it. Whether the choir was going to allow energy drinks at rehearsal, which Martine had banned the year before and which a group of mostly-eighth-grade boys was still protesting.

Today was different. Today, when Martine sat down and folded her hands in her lap, the room went quieter than usual. Even Rohan, who had been in the middle of a story about his uncle's car, stopped talking.

She looked around. Nobody raised a hand. She smiled a little, because she had expected this.

"I will start," she said. "I feel -- let me try. I feel two things at once. I feel that this piece is a gift that was given to us by a composer and I do not want to refuse the gift lightly. And I also feel afraid. I am afraid I did not think carefully enough about what I was asking you when I agreed to it. I am afraid some of your parents have been hurt. I am afraid that if I change course now, I will be teaching you that difficult things are not worth finishing. I am afraid that if I do not change course, I will be teaching you that feelings are less important than performances. These fears are in my chest. They are not making me sleep well. So that is my feeling."

She looked up. A few of the younger kids looked startled. They had perhaps never heard an adult speak like that in a meeting.

"Anybody want to go next?"

Silence. Then Sina Taheri raised her hand.

"Sina. Go."

Sina folded her hands very neatly in her lap. Sina was fourteen, the oldest of the seventh-graders, and she had a way of speaking that was slow and precise, as if she had gotten in the habit of translating between languages in her head before speaking. She had Iranian-American parents, and her grandparents had come from Iran in the 1980s, and her family had a quiet reverence about how they spoke of where they had come from.

"I want to sing this piece," Sina said. "I want to sing it very much. My grandfather, my babaji, was born in Iran. He is Bahá'í. His father was a teacher, and he was imprisoned for his faith when my grandfather was a boy, and my grandfather and his mother and his sisters had to leave the country when he was a teenager. He has not been back. He will never go back. He keeps the tablet that is in this piece -- he has a copy of it on the wall of his kitchen. He reads it in Farsi every morning. When I told him that our choir was going to sing a piece of it -- a small piece of it -- he was quiet, and then he cried. He does not cry often. He said, 'They will sing it? Kids from all over? In America?' I said yes. He said, 'And the other kids -- the Muslim kids, the Jewish kids -- they will sing it too?' I said yes, and they will sing their own hymns, and we will all sing together. He said, 'This is something I did not think I would see.'"

She stopped. She looked at her hands.

"I am not telling you this to make you feel sorry for my grandfather. He does not want anyone to feel sorry for him. I am telling you that when I sing this piece, I am singing for him. So that is what I feel."

Hye-jin, next to her, wiped her eye with her sleeve. Lamont cleared his throat.

"Thank you, Sina," Martine said. "Who else."

Yaffa raised her hand.

"Yaffa."

"I feel -- okay. I feel nervous. Not about the music. I'm fine with the music. I feel nervous about -- about what happens if somebody films us and it gets weird online. That is the thing that is actually in my chest, if I'm being honest. My parents are worried about that. I am worried about that. I had a long talk with them, and I think -- I think I am going to sing it anyway. Because my grandmother called me from Tel Aviv and said some things. And because -- because I don't want to be the kid who doesn't sing. But I am not going to pretend I am not scared of the weird internet thing. I am scared of it."

"That is useful information," Martine said. "We can work with that. Thank you."

Fatimah raised her hand next.

"Fatimah."

"I want to sing this piece too. I also think it is hard. My baba -- my father -- came to the rehearsal on Tuesday and talked to Martine. He was worried. He is not worried anymore, or he is less worried. He said when he was a boy in Ramallah, his teacher taught them a Hebrew song, and his parents were upset, and he sang it anyway, and he still remembers it. He said he does not want to be the kind of parent his parents were that day. He said that in front of me, and I -- I don't know. I just. I wanted you all to know that my baba is a good man. Some of you have -- have maybe heard me talk about him and thought he was not. I want you to know that he is."

She was crying a little by the end of it, and did not seem embarrassed. Next to her, Yaffa reached over, without looking at her, and took her hand, and Fatimah squeezed it and kept talking.

"I am Muslim," Fatimah said. "I am proud of being Muslim. When I sing the Arabic song, Tala' al-Badru, I am singing a song that is important in my tradition. It is a song of welcome. Some people sing it when a new teacher comes, or a new family moves to a neighborhood. It is not a scary song. It is a welcome song. I want to sing it for this choir because this choir has -- has welcomed me. That is what I feel."

"Thank you, Fatimah."

Rohan raised his hand.

"Rohan."

"I'm -- okay, I feel weird about this conversation because nobody is Hindu in this piece and I'm the only tenor who is Hindu and also my family is kind of complicated, my mom is Hindu and my dad is not really anything, he says he is, quote, a bad Hindu, so -- but I want to say -- I want to say that I like this piece, I think it is cool, I think the way the three lines overlap at the end is genuinely a very good musical idea, I am not an expert but I have listened to a lot of music, and I think what Eitan Wolf-Dabiri did is hard to do without sounding fake and he did not sound fake. Also I feel like -- like I want to say this -- if anybody in this room is going to say something like, 'Well, why isn't my religion in the piece,' I am telling you now I do not feel that way. I want my friends to get their moment. I will have my moment another time. That is what I feel."

Lamont was laughing quietly.

"Lamont?" Martine said.

"I am laughing because Rohan is being a better person than I thought he was capable of being. Sorry, Rohan. I respect you."

"Lamont, I am a very good person, you simply have not been paying attention."

"Lamont," Martine said, "do you want to say something?"

"Okay. I feel -- I am Black, and I am Baptist, and my family goes to church on Sundays, and I grew up singing gospel with my uncle when I was little. When I sing, I sing -- I sing like I mean it. That is how I was taught. My mama says, if you are not singing with your whole chest, why are you bothering. So when I see this music, my first thought is, okay, are we going to sing this with our whole chest, or are we going to fake-sing it so nobody gets offended. Because I am telling you right now, if we fake-sing it, I am out. I don't fake-sing. But if we are going to actually sing it, like it matters, then I am in."

"That is fair," Martine said. "We will sing it like it matters. If we sing it at all, we will sing it like it matters."

"Good. Then I'm in."

"Thank you, Lamont."

Hye-jin raised her hand. Hye-jin was twelve, and she was small, and her voice was small, and Tomás was always a little amazed at how loud she could sing when she wanted to.

"I don't have -- I don't have a big story," she said. "My family is Korean. We are Methodists, actually. My halmoni -- my grandmother -- is very religious. She would think this is a good thing. She would think it is a very good thing. I just want to say -- I want to say that I am a little new to this choir, I have only been here a year, and I was -- I was scared when I first came. Because I am shy. And because I thought maybe I would not fit. And everyone was nice to me. Everyone. When I sing this piece, I am going to sing it for the people who were nice to me. Which is everyone. Which is why I am going to sing it."

"Thank you, Hye-jin."

A few more kids spoke. A boy named Paul, who was Filipino-Catholic, said he was going to sing it, because his priest had told him that the best kind of prayer was one that other people could hear and not be afraid of. A girl named Adaeze, who was Nigerian-American and Pentecostal, said her pastor had specifically told her family that this kind of thing was okay, actually, as long as Adaeze kept praying to Jesus in her own heart while she sang, which she said she planned to do, and which Martine said was a beautiful way to think about it. A boy named Danny, who was not really religious at all and whose family was Chinese and Jewish and who had grown up celebrating Passover and Lunar New Year with equal enthusiasm, said he wanted to sing it because his grandfather had been a refugee and his grandmother had been a refugee from a different country and they had met in this country, and singing a song in three languages felt like the kind of thing his grandparents would have clapped for.

Martine looked around the circle. There was one hand she had been watching for, and had not yet seen.

"Tomás," she said, gently. "Do you want to say anything?"

Tomás had, in fact, been hoping she would not ask him. He had been sitting in the circle feeling small, not in a bad way, just in a -- in a spectator way. The way he usually sat. He had been listening. He had been listening very hard. But he had not prepared anything to say.

"I --" he said.

Everyone waited. The choir had, over the course of this conversation, learned the particular rhythm of waiting, and they were good at it now, thirty faces patient and kind.

"I don't have a tradition in this piece," he said.

"Okay," Martine said.

"Like -- I'm not Jewish and I'm not Muslim and I'm not Bahá'í. My mom is kind of Catholic but not really, and my dad is kind of, like, ancestor stuff, but not really, and we don't go to any religious place, we just -- we just eat dinner."

"Okay," Martine said.

"So I was -- I have been thinking, this whole time, that I don't have a stake in this piece. That I am kind of a -- a bystander. I get to vote on whether we sing it or not but it is not really my question. That is what I have been thinking."

"All right."

"But listening to everyone -- listening to Sina and Yaffa and Fatimah and everybody -- I think that is not right. I think -- I don't know. I don't have a tradition but I have a choir. Is that a tradition?"

He looked at Martine.

Martine smiled. It was a slow smile. It went all the way up into her eyes.

"Tomás," she said. "I think a choir might be a tradition. Yes."

"Okay."

"Is there more?"

"Just -- if we do this, I want to -- I want to sing it as well as I can. That is all."

"Thank you, Tomás."

There was a small silence. Then Rohan said, "Can I add a thing?"

"Go."

"If we are doing a vote, like an actual vote, I am voting yes."

"This is not a vote," Martine said, "but I appreciate the enthusiasm."

"What is it if it is not a vote."

"It is a conversation. We will keep having it. At the end of next week, I will make a decision, and I will make it knowing what you have all said. That is the deal. Does anybody object to that deal?"

Nobody did.

"All right. Now. We are going to get up, we are going to move the chairs back into sections, and we are going to sing. Because we are, in fact, a choir, and we cannot spend all our rehearsals talking about our feelings, or we will never make it to the spring concert, or any concert. Move. Move. Yes. Rohan, that is not the tenor section, that is the coat rack. Thank you."

They rehearsed for another hour. They sang the English pieces first, to warm up. Then Martine asked them to open Songs of One Sky. Not all of it. Just the first twelve bars.

They sang.

It was still rough. It was still self-conscious. But something had changed. The raggedness this time was different. It was the raggedness of a thing being tried, not the raggedness of a thing being avoided. Fatimah sang her line in Arabic, carefully, like she was placing a fragile glass on a shelf. Sina sang the Farsi line, her eyes half-closed, her voice shining. Yaffa, in the alto section, sang her part of the Hebrew line with Tomás beside her, and her voice did not shake, not once, though her hand was shaking a little where it held her folder, and Tomás, without thinking, put his own hand under the corner of her folder, quietly, so that she wouldn't have to hold it up alone.

When they stopped, Martine did not say anything for a long moment. Then she said, "All right. That is enough for today. I will see you on Tuesday. Drink water. Be kind to your mothers."

Everyone began packing up. Yaffa leaned over to Tomás.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"You had a long turn in the circle, for you."

"I know."

"I'm proud of you."

"Shut up."

She laughed. He laughed. They shouldered their bags and went out into the cold parking lot, where their mothers were waiting in two cars, side by side, their headlights on, and Leah Gold rolled down her window and waved at Clara Moreira, and Clara waved back, and Tomás thought how strange it was that his mother and Yaffa's mother knew each other now, had always known each other, sort of, and that this was maybe a kind of choir too, mothers in cars with headlights on, leaning across steering wheels to say hello to each other in the winter dark.

============================================================

It was Tomás's mother who had the idea first, and his father who was surprised by it, and both of them who told him, carefully, that they were going to do a thing that was maybe larger than a normal family thing, and that he was allowed to not participate if he did not want to.

"We could have," Clara said, over Friday dinner, "a meeting. A gathering. Some of the families from the choir."

Wei paused with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth. He set them down.

"What do you mean by 'meeting'?"

"I mean -- I have been talking to Leah. And Leah has been talking to Hanan -- Fatimah's mother. And Hanan has been talking to Sina's mother. And apparently the mothers of this choir have been gossiping for a week, which is information I did not have. And one of us -- I think it was Hanan -- said, what if we just all got together. What if the families came to one house and talked, not about the decision, but just about -- you know. The whole thing. The feelings."

Wei raised an eyebrow.

"At one house."

"Yes."

"Whose house."

"Ours."

"Mm."

"I know, I know. It is a lot of people. I know."

"How many people."

"I -- if everyone comes, and not everyone will -- maybe four families. So eight adults. Eight kids, if they all bring their choir kid. Sixteen."

"Sixteen."

"I know."

"Clara. We do not have sixteen chairs."

"We have six chairs and a couch and two floor cushions and the ottoman and if we move the piano bench we have another two spots. That is eleven. We can borrow chairs. Hanan said she would bring chairs. Leah said she would bring food."

"Ah. Food."

"Yes, Wei, it is a dinner. We are doing a dinner."

Wei sat back. He took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes. He put his glasses back on.

"When."

"Sunday evening."

"This Sunday?"

"Yes."

"Clara. It is Friday."

"I know it is Friday. I know. I am sorry. Hanan called me three hours ago. These things, they happen fast or they do not happen at all, you know this."

Wei looked at Tomás. Tomás looked back, carefully neutral, the way he had learned to look in these moments, when his parents were approaching some kind of small decision they would make together without really appearing to consult each other.

"Tomás," Wei said. "Do you want this in our house."

Tomás thought about it. The idea of sixteen people in their apartment, on a Sunday evening, with the furniture rearranged and strangers' coats on the piano bench -- it was overwhelming. He was not a party person. He was not even a four-people person. He was a two-people person on a good day.

But.

But there was something in his chest that felt like -- like Sina talking about her grandfather. Like Fatimah saying my baba is a good man. Like Yaffa's grandmother on the phone from Tel Aviv. Something in his chest that was too big for any one of those things.

"Yes," he said. "Yeah. We should do it."

Wei looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded.

"All right. Clara, what do I need to do."

"You need to clean the bathroom."

"Of course I need to clean the bathroom."

"I will get the living room. Tomás, you will help with both. We will order pão de queijo from Nara's bakery and Leah is bringing a challah and Hanan is bringing something she did not specify and apparently Sina's mother is bringing a rice dish and we will do drinks. That is the plan."

"Who else did you invite?"

"I invited the Hassans and the Golds and the Taheris. That is the three. I also invited the Thompsons, because Lamont's mother is a friend of a friend of mine, and because I thought it would be -- I thought it would be good to have Lamont there. He is sensible. And because Rohan's mother is already coming, she said she would come even if her kid had nothing directly at stake, because she has views on what she called community meetings and apparently she is very good at them."

"Mrs. Devi is coming."

"Yes."

"That is good. That is eight adults."

"Eight adults. And six kids, because Noam is coming with the Golds and he does not count, he is seven, he will go under the piano and stay there, that is Leah's actual promise. She said, 'Noam will be under the piano.'"

"All right."

Sunday came. Tomás helped clean. He helped move furniture. His father borrowed four folding chairs from the building super, Mr. Kowalski -- who was, to everyone's continued amusement, not related to Martine Arias-Kowalski, but who had, over the years, started attending one or two choir concerts a season out of what he called solidarity. He had lent the chairs cheerfully, and had asked to be invited to the meeting, and Clara had, a little surprised, said yes. So it was nine adults, in the end. Plus the kids. Plus Noam.

They came in slowly, in clumps. The Hassans first -- Mr. Hassan in a blazer, which Tomás had never seen him wear before, and Fatimah's mother Hanan in a long gray dress, and Fatimah herself in her silver hijab, looking a little shy. Then the Golds -- David and Leah, and Yaffa, and, as promised, Noam, who immediately asked Tomás for directions to the piano and then disappeared under it. Then the Taheris -- Sina's parents, who were tall and quiet and warm, and Sina, and Sina's grandfather, who was short and bent and had the brightest eyes Tomás had ever seen in a human face.

"This is babaji," Sina said. "He wanted to come."

"Of course," said Clara, and reached for his hand, and he took it in both of his own, and he said something to her in Farsi, and Clara laughed and said, "Tomás, your Farsi is better than mine, go translate."

"Mãe, I do not speak any Farsi."

"I know. I was joking. Invite babaji to the couch. The good cushion."

Then Mrs. Devi arrived with Rohan, apologizing for being late, and Mrs. Thompson and Lamont arrived a minute after that, and Mr. Kowalski shuffled in last, in the same sweater he wore to everything, with a foil-wrapped pan that he explained, a little embarrassed, was his late wife's pierogi recipe, and he hoped it would be all right.

"Mr. Kowalski," Clara said, "you are an angel."

"I am not an angel, Mrs. Moreira. I am a man who does not trust himself to come to a potluck empty-handed."

They ate first. That had been Clara's idea. "Nobody can have a conversation on an empty stomach," she had said, "and especially not this conversation." So they moved the borrowed chairs around the long table and the coffee table and the piano bench, and they ate. There was pão de queijo, hot from the oven. There was the Golds' braided bread, which Leah broke into pieces and handed around. There was Hanan's mystery dish, which turned out to be maqluba, rice and chicken and eggplant flipped upside-down onto a platter with a great theatrical flourish. There was Mrs. Taheri's tahdig, crispy rice from the bottom of the pot, which Sina's grandfather insisted on handing to each of the children personally, and which Noam, emerging from under the piano for the first time, pronounced "the best thing he had ever eaten in his life." There were pierogi. There were bowls of dal that Mrs. Devi had brought "just in case anybody wanted a second plate." There was a vegetable stir-fry that Wei had made at the last moment, in a small act of pride, because he did not want the Chinese-Singaporean side of the house to be unrepresented on the table.

Nobody talked about the piece yet. They talked about work. They talked about the buses. They talked about whether Mr. Kowalski should finally fix the fluorescent light at the community center or whether its flickering had become, at this point, a cherished feature. They talked about schools and children and the best place to get lamb in the city. They talked about an uncle in Beirut, and a grandmother in Seoul, and a cousin in Buenos Aires who had once sung on a cruise ship. They laughed. Noam tried pierogi and then tried tahdig and declared, solemnly, that his life had changed.

Then, after everyone had eaten, Clara stood up.

"Okay," she said. "So, I am going to try to do this the way Leah's grandfather used to do things, which is, he would clear his throat. Like this. Ahem."

Leah laughed.

"I would like us to talk now. About the piece. I would like us to go around the table, one at a time. I would like each adult to say how they feel. And then each child. And I would like us to listen to each other. Is that all right with everybody?"

Nobody disagreed. Mr. Hassan nodded. Leah Gold made a small gesture that Tomás interpreted as go ahead. Mrs. Devi, who was by far the most formally dressed of the adults, in a crimson kurta with small silver thread in it, put down her napkin.

"Before we start," Mrs. Devi said, in her precise, slightly British-accented English, "I would like to say something about how to do this well. I come from a community, in India, where we did this sort of thing often. We call it consultation. It is an old word. It is not a vote. It is not an argument. It is a way of speaking that assumes each person brings a piece of the truth, and that the goal is not to win but to put all the pieces on the table and see what shape they make. There are a few rules. Would you mind if I shared them?"

"Please," said Clara.

"One," said Mrs. Devi. "Speak for yourself, not for your group. You are not representing all Jews or all Muslims or all Bahá'ís or all Indians or all Brazilians. You are one person with one perspective. Two. Once an idea has been spoken, it belongs to the table, not to the person who said it. Nobody has to defend their idea. We just look at it. Three. We listen before we respond. Four. If we disagree with an idea, we disagree with the idea, not with the person. Five. At the end, we may or may not come to a decision. If we do not, that is all right. Sometimes the purpose of consultation is to listen well, and to leave the decision to a later time. Does this sound reasonable?"

Mr. Hassan was smiling. "These are, Mrs. Devi, very close to the rules my grandmother used at her own kitchen table in Ramallah. She would be pleased to meet you."

"I would be pleased to meet her, Mr. Hassan."

"She is gone, unfortunately. But she would be pleased."

"Then I am pleased to meet you, who knew her."

Wei cleared his throat, from the head of the table. "May I start?"

"Please, Mr. Lim."

Wei took a breath. He laced his fingers together. "I have been thinking about this piece for two weeks. I am an engineer. I like things that have clear purposes. When I first heard about this piece, I was suspicious of it. I was suspicious that the grown-ups who designed it were perhaps using my son to make a political statement. I want to say this honestly because it is what I was thinking. I would prefer not to be used. I prefer for my son not to be used.

"But. I have listened. I have listened to my son, who is sensible. I have listened to my wife, who is often right. And I have listened to what I can hear from the other parents, through Clara and through what I have read in the music. And I have come to think that this is not a piece that is using anybody. This is a piece that is asking everybody to do something hard, including the adults. Including the composer. Including the conductor. That is different from a piece that uses children for its effect.

"So my feeling tonight is that I am less suspicious than I was. I am still a worrier. I will worry until the concert is over and my son is home in bed. But I am willing. I am willing for him to sing. I wanted everybody at this table to know that."

Clara reached under the table and squeezed his hand. She thought nobody saw. Tomás saw.

"Thank you, Wei," Hanan Hassan said. "I will go next, if that is all right. I am Hanan, Fatimah's mother. I want to say that my husband and I, we do not always agree on things. He has heard difficult things in his life. I have heard difficult things in mine. Our things are not always the same. I said to him, about this piece, that the world is full of people who want to tell our daughter that her prayers are not beautiful, and that we, her parents, should not be one more voice in that chorus. He agreed with me. He came to me later and said, 'Hanan, you were right.' This does not happen often. I wanted to tell everybody that in front of him so he could not take it back."

Mr. Hassan laughed, a short, embarrassed, warm laugh, and said, "Hanan, you are brutal."

"I am honest. It is a scarier job."

Sina's grandfather spoke next, through Sina, who translated from Farsi, a little shyly. He said his name was Javad. He said that in his life he had seen his prayers become a reason that people were afraid of him. He said he had never imagined that he would live to see his granddaughter sing a phrase of Bahá'u'lláh's writing in a public choir in an American city. He said, through Sina, that he was not here to tell anybody what to decide. He said he was here because he wanted to sit at the same table as other families who were having the same conversation, because he had spent too much of his life on the outside of such tables.

When Sina finished translating, there was a long silence, and then Leah Gold, very quietly, reached across the table and put her hand on his, and he did not pull his hand back, and neither of them said anything, and Mrs. Devi began, very gently, to ask if anybody else wanted to speak.

David Gold did. He repeated, more briefly, what he had said in his own kitchen -- that he had fears in his body that were not reasonable but were there, and that he was learning to live with them being there, and that he was proud of his daughter for making her own decision. Leah did. She said she was grateful to Yaffa's grandmother in Tel Aviv for being, as she put it, a phone call that nobody could argue with. Mrs. Thompson did; she said that her family had raised Lamont to sing with his whole chest, and that she trusted this choir, and that she trusted Martine, and that if anybody was worried about their child getting any blowback at school, she wanted to volunteer to be a parent contact, since she was, quote, 'an extremely large woman with a very loud voice and a long history of telling off principals.' Everybody laughed at this, and Lamont groaned, and his mother patted him on the head.

Mr. Kowalski spoke last, among the adults. He cleared his throat. He folded his napkin.

"I am not a father of a child in this choir," he said. "I am not religious in any strong way. I came to this country sixty years ago, as a boy, on a boat. My family was Catholic, more or less. In my building, over the years, I have had tenants who were Jewish, and tenants who were Muslim, and tenants who were Buddhist, and tenants who were Hindu, and tenants who, like me, did not pay much attention to any of it. I was asked to come tonight because I lent chairs. I am glad I came. I wanted to say -- I wanted to say -- it is very nice, at my age, to be in a room where people are trying, hard, to listen to each other. It is a nice thing. I do not have much more than that to add. Please do not stop on my account."

"Thank you, Mr. Kowalski," Clara said. "It is very nice to have you."

"Thank you, Mrs. Moreira. Your pierogi -- if I may -- I think they would have pleased my wife. She would have said the dough was good."

"That is the highest compliment you could give me."

The children went next. Yaffa said what she had said in the circle at rehearsal. Fatimah said what she had said. Sina spoke for longer than she had in the circle, because her grandfather was listening, and at one point she slipped into Farsi for a sentence or two, and her grandfather put his hand to his mouth and shook his head as if he could not believe it, and Tomás understood, without understanding the words, that she had said something very small and very enormous.

Lamont said he was voting yes -- that it wasn't a vote, okay, but he was yes. Rohan said a long, complicated thing about sonic architecture that went on a little too long and which Mrs. Devi gently interrupted to remind him about rule one, and he apologized, and said, more simply, that he thought they should sing it. Noam Gold emerged from under the piano, holding Mr. Bingles, and said that he thought they should sing it because Mr. Bingles was a Jewish and a non-Jewish crocodile at the same time and he had no problems, and this, the whole table agreed, was possibly the wisest contribution of the evening.

And then it was Tomás's turn.

"I want to say thank you to everybody for coming. And I want to say -- I was thinking earlier this week that I did not have a language to defend. In this piece. Because I am not Jewish or Muslim or Bahá'í. But I think -- I think maybe I do have a language. I have my choir. And I have my parents' languages, both of them. And I think, when I sing this piece, I am going to sing it for everybody at this table. That is what I was going to say. I hope that is okay."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Mr. Hassan reached over and clapped him gently on the shoulder, and Sina's grandfather nodded, and Leah Gold said, a little damply, "That was perfect, honey."

Mrs. Devi smiled. "I think," she said, "that we have done what we came here to do. We have not made a decision. We did not come here to make a decision. The decision belongs to your conductor and to each family. But I think we have looked at the pieces. I think we have put them on the table. That is a good evening's work."

They stayed another half hour. Noam made Mr. Bingles dance on the piano. Sina's grandfather, encouraged, sang a few quiet lines in Farsi, unaccompanied, and the room went very still, and when he finished, Clara said, "I think that is the first time this apartment has heard Farsi. Thank you."

Then people gathered their coats. Mr. Kowalski retrieved his empty pan. The Taheris helped wash dishes, even though Clara protested. Fatimah, on the way out, hugged Tomás briefly, and said, "Your house is nice." Yaffa, on the way out, punched his arm, which was the same thing.

When everyone had gone, and Clara and Wei and Tomás were standing in the wreckage of the living room, all the cushions out of place, a small bowl of tahdig forgotten on the piano, Wei looked at his wife.

"Clara."

"Hm?"

"That was a lot of people."

"I know."

"I think it was a good idea."

"I know. I am very smart."

He kissed her on the forehead. Tomás pretended not to see. He picked up the tahdig bowl, and carried it to the kitchen, and thought about Sina's grandfather's voice, which had been the oldest voice in the room and also, somehow, the lightest, as if it had been waiting a very long time to be let into the air.

============================================================

For two days after the consultation, Tomás felt like he was walking around in a house with the lights on, seeing rooms he had not noticed before.

He noticed his mother humming, in the kitchen, a phrase from the Brazilian lullaby they had been rehearsing. He noticed that she had always hummed it, probably, and he had simply not been listening. He noticed his father, in the evening, scrolling through a transit-authority planning document and, without looking up, asking Tomás how the choir had been that day. He noticed that his father had, probably, always asked, and that Tomás had gotten in the habit of answering with a single word.

He noticed, at school, how Yaffa walked past the trophy case in the main hallway without looking at it, the way you walk past a thing you have decided is boring. He noticed that Fatimah had started wearing her silver hijab more often, as if it were a small shield she had figured out how to put on. He noticed that Sina carried herself differently on the days her grandfather had come to the choir house -- a little taller, a little lighter.

And he noticed, for the first time in maybe a year, that he was unhappy in a specific way that he had not had words for before.

He did not have a tradition.

He had said this in the circle, and again at the consultation, and each time he had said it he had meant it more. It had started as a shrug, a factual observation about his own family; it had become, by the second saying, something closer to a complaint. His choir friends all had traditions. Sina had her babaji reading the tablet in the kitchen every morning. Fatimah had her mother and father disagreeing about something important, in Arabic, at the dinner table. Yaffa had a grandmother in Tel Aviv who called with advice. Lamont had a Sunday service that he sang in with his whole chest. Hye-jin had a halmoni who would like anything spiritual. Even Rohan, who complained about being a "bad Hindu," still had a Diwali at home every year with a thousand small lights on the porch railing.

What did Tomás have.

He had a mother who sang. He had a father who worried about the buses. He had three languages he could speak and none of them was the language of a faith. He had a grandfather named Rubens Moreira in São Paulo who had sung in a warm middle voice that nobody had ever recorded, and a grandfather named Lim Kok-Wai in Singapore who had lit incense for ancestors on certain days and had died when Tomás was five. He had memory, he had music, he had dinner at a table. Was that a tradition?

On Tuesday night, after dinner, his mother was playing the piano. She was not playing anything in particular; she was just -- playing. Small fragments. A little of Chopin, a little of Jobim, a little of something Tomás did not recognize. Wei was at the kitchen table, with his bus document. Tomás sat on the arm of the couch, watching his mother's hands.

"Mãe."

"Mm?"

"Can I ask you something."

"Sempre, filho."

He was quiet for a minute, while she played. Then he said, "I don't have a language to defend."

She stopped playing.

She put her hands in her lap.

"Tell me more," she said.

"I just -- at the consultation. I said I would sing for everybody at the table. And I meant that. But afterward I was thinking. Everybody at the table had -- had a thing they were bringing. Sina had her grandfather. Fatimah had her father. Yaffa had her grandmother. I was just -- I was just sitting there."

"You were there."

"Yeah, but --"

"You were there, Tomás. That is a thing."

"Mãe. Come on."

"What."

"You know what I mean."

Wei had put down his bus document. He was listening, from the kitchen. Tomás could tell because the room had gotten a particular kind of quiet, the kind that happened when his father was paying full attention.

"I know what you mean," Clara said. "I think. Let me make sure. You feel like you do not have a -- a specific inheritance. A specific faith. A specific language of prayer. And so when the question is about prayers and inheritances, you feel empty-handed. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Mm."

She looked at the piano for a moment. Then she patted the bench next to her. Tomás came over and sat down.

"Meu filho," she said. "I am going to tell you something that I have not told you before. Not because it was a secret. Only because I did not know how to say it. I grew up Catholic, in São Paulo. My mother took me to mass. My grandmother told me stories about saints and crossed herself when she heard sirens. My father -- your avô Rubens -- he was not Catholic, exactly. He was -- I do not know what he was. He sang in the church choir for the music. He did not take communion. When I was your age, I asked him why. He told me something. I am going to try to say it in English. I have not tried before.

Tomás was watching his mother's face.

"Your avô," Clara said, "was a man who did not have a tradition either. Not a specific one. He had many traditions. He was -- he was, in my memory, the person who invited everybody to dinner. He was the person who asked everybody what they believed and did not try to argue with them. He was the person who, when my grandmother died, sang at her funeral in Portuguese, and then went to the back of the church and sang a little, to himself, in Yoruba, because a friend of his who was Candomblé could not come to the mass and had asked him to. He did not ask anybody's permission. He just did it."

"I never heard that story before."

"I know. I should have told you. I am telling you now."

"Was -- was he a good man?"

"He was a very good man, Tomás."

"Mm."

"You are asking what your tradition is. I am telling you that maybe it is older than you thought. Maybe you have inherited something from your avô after all. Maybe the tradition you come from is the tradition of deciding that the table is bigger than the church. Maybe that is the shape of it."

Tomás did not say anything for a while. His mother did not press him. She turned back to the piano and played a small thing, very softly, so as not to crowd his thinking.

From the kitchen, Wei spoke.

"Clara."

"Hm?"

"I have something to add. If that is permitted."

"Permitted, husband."

Wei came into the living room, glasses halfway down his nose. He sat on the arm of the couch.

"Tomás. I grew up in Singapore. My father, your yéye, lit incense. He was not religious, exactly. He was -- he was a man who thought that there were many houses in the world, and in each house some things were done a certain way, and when you were in that house you did things that way. This was not because he believed in the ancestors. I do not think he did, not in the way our relatives did. It was because he wanted his father, and his father's father, to know that they were remembered. He did it as a kind of music. A thing with a rhythm. A thing that happened on certain days.

"When he died, I lit incense for him. I still do, sometimes. Not often. A few times a year. I do not know if he is anywhere. I do not know if my incense reaches him. But when I light it, I am a person who had a father, and who remembers his father. And that is not nothing. That is a tradition. Small. Quiet. But real.

"You are my son. You are also your mother's son. You have my small tradition. You have your mother's larger tradition, which, I think, is what she has just described. You have -- because you are thirteen -- the right to take these things and to arrange them in your own way. You are not empty-handed, Tomás. You may feel empty-handed. That is not the same thing."

Tomás looked down at the piano keys.

"So when I sing this piece," he said.

"When you sing this piece," Wei said, "you are singing as the son of a man who lights incense and of a woman whose father sang at his wife's funeral in two languages. You are singing as yourself. I do not think there is a smaller tradition or a larger tradition, Tomás. I think there are people, with their specific inheritance, singing in a room. You are one of those people."

"Okay."

"Is that okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it is. Thank you, Papa."

"Mm."

Clara pressed a chord. It was a warm one, a Brazilian one, something with a minor seventh that wanted to resolve and was in no hurry.

"You have a choice to make, mijo," she said, softly. "You think you do not have a language to defend. That is one way to look at it. Another way is that you have many languages, and that the choice of what to sing with them is actually yours. That is different, don't you think? It is not the same as having no language. It is the same as having too many and having to choose."

"Yes."

"That is a kind of luxury, actually. It is also a kind of responsibility. I am sorry, mijo, to load your shoulders this way."

"You are not loading me."

"I am a little."

"Okay. A little. It's okay."

He leaned his head against her shoulder, the way he had when he was younger and did not do anymore, not often. She stopped playing. She put one arm around him and rested her cheek on the top of his head.

"Querido," she said.

"Mm."

"You will sing this piece very well."

"I don't know."

"I know. That is enough."

He went to his room after a while. He did not open his folder right away. He sat on his bed and thought about his grandfather Rubens, who he had never met, singing at a church in São Paulo in two languages for a friend who could not come, and about his grandfather Kok-Wai, who he barely remembered, lighting incense for a father who had died before he had learned to write. He thought about what it meant to come from people like that. He thought about the table, larger than any church. He thought about rhythm, as a thing that happened on certain days.

Then, later, he opened the folder.

The Hebrew, the Arabic, the Farsi. The bird with three feathers. The braid at the end.

For the first time, they did not look to him like other people's inheritances that he had been asked, politely, to carry for the evening. They looked like -- they looked, he thought, like gifts he had been given by people who trusted him to carry them. And that was not the same thing at all.

He touched the Farsi script with his fingertip.

"Ay ahl-e-alam," he said, to his empty room, and the letters did not change, but something inside his chest did.

============================================================

Sina Taheri caught up to Tomás on the sidewalk after rehearsal on Thursday.

It was a cold, bright evening, the kind where your breath showed up in little puffs and the street-lamps made small pools on the sidewalk. Tomás was walking home alone because his mother was running late at the school, and Sina usually went the other direction, so when she appeared beside him, her hands shoved into her pockets, her breath clouding, he was a little surprised.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"Can I walk with you? I'm going to the coffee place on Third."

"Sure."

They walked for half a block without saying anything. Sina was not a person who rushed. Tomás had figured that out this year, as he had gotten to know her better. She was not slow, exactly. She was just a person who moved at the speed of her own thoughts, and her thoughts took their time.

"I wanted to thank you," she said, eventually. "For at your house. For letting my babaji come."

"Of course. That was not, like -- anybody could come."

"I know. I am still thanking you."

"Okay."

"He has not been in a room like that for a long time."

"Like my apartment?"

"Like a room where people -- people from other traditions -- asked him about his prayers like they were interested, and not like they were trying to convert him, and not like they were trying to catch him saying something wrong. He has mostly lived in rooms where people are a little afraid of him. He is a harmless person, but he has one of those kinds of faces, and he has a heavy accent, and he has stories from Iran that some people do not want to hear. He is used to small rooms."

"Mm."

"It was a big room, Tomás. Your mother's living room was a big room for him."

"I'm glad. Sina -- tell me about him. About your babaji. If you want to."

Sina smiled a small smile.

"What do you want to know?"

"I don't know. Whatever you want to tell me."

They crossed a street. The walk signal ticked. Sina considered.

"Okay," she said. "He was born in Tehran in 1945. His family was Bahá'í. His father was a teacher. In a school. He taught small children. He was very gentle, my babaji says -- my great-grandfather. He taught the children to read. He also, on the side, held little gatherings at his house for Bahá'í friends. Prayer gatherings. Study gatherings. This was sometimes dangerous, even back then. At various times, in Iran, Bahá'ís have been allowed to be Bahá'ís, and at various times they have not. In 1955, there was a wave of -- of persecution. Bad things happened to a lot of Bahá'í families. My great-grandfather was arrested. He spent some time in prison. He was not -- he was not killed. That is important to say. Some Bahá'ís were. He was not. He was released. He came home. But he was -- he was different, afterward. My babaji was ten, at the time."

"Oh."

"When my babaji was a teenager -- this was in the 1960s, things were calmer for a while -- he went to school, he studied engineering, sort of, he did not finish. Then in 1979 there was the revolution, and it was bad for Bahá'ís again. Very bad. Some of my babaji's friends were killed. His cousin was hanged. His teacher was hanged. He left, in 1981, with his wife and my father, who was a baby. They went to Turkey first. Then they came here."

"That is a lot."

"It is a lot. It is a lot even by Iranian-American standards, and that is saying something. But -- here is the thing, Tomás, that I wanted to tell you. He is not a sad person. He is not a bitter person. He is the happiest person I know. He has the happiest eyes."

"I noticed."

"He said something to me, once. When I was twelve. I asked him how he was not angry. At people. Because I was angry, at people, about things that had happened to him that he had told me about. I was being twelve. He said, 'Sina, jan, I am angry sometimes. But I am not mostly angry. Mostly I am grateful. Grateful is bigger than angry. Anger takes less space when gratitude is in the room.' And then he said, 'Also -- if I were angry at everyone, I would have to be angry at people who had been kind to me, because some of them were from the same countries as the people who hurt me. I am not going to do that. That would be stupid.'"

"He said 'that would be stupid'?"

"He said it in Farsi, but yes. He did not say it in a mean way. He said it like -- like somebody stating a practical fact about engineering."

Tomás smiled. He could hear it, even though he had never heard Sina's grandfather say more than three words in English.

"This piece," Sina said. "Tomás. I want to sing this piece for him. I said that in the circle. I want to say it again to you, because you -- because you seemed to be thinking a lot, in the circle. And at our consultation. I have been watching you. You are a thinker. I respect that."

"Thanks."

"When I sing the Farsi line -- 'Ay ahl-e-alam' -- I am singing it for my great-grandfather, who was arrested for his faith, and for my babaji's cousin, who was killed, and for my babaji, who carried all of that to this country and managed, somehow, to still be a man with happy eyes. I am singing it for them. I am also singing it for the Jewish kids and the Muslim kids next to me, who are singing their own lines. Because that is, I think, what the Bahá'í Writings actually say. The Writings -- do not quote me on this, I am not a scholar -- the Writings say that humanity is one family. Not that we should all be the same. That we are already one family. That is different. Do you see?"

"I think so. Yes."

"When I sing this piece, I think my babaji will hear the three voices together and he will think, that is what my faith was trying to tell me about, my whole life, and that is what my cousin died for, and there it is, in a church basement choir in a Midwestern town in America, and it is actually happening. I think that is what he will hear. That is what I want him to hear."

They walked in silence for a little while.

"Sina," Tomás said, finally.

"Yes?"

"I am going to try to sing it well. The Farsi line. It is not my line, technically, but at the end when everything comes together -- I want to know I did my best on it. Could you -- could you help me with the pronunciation? Just me. Like, outside of rehearsal?"

She looked at him, surprised.

"You want me to tutor you in Farsi?"

"Just -- just the line. Just that one line. I want to say it properly. I don't want to -- I don't want to mumble it."

"Tomás."

"What."

"That is -- that is very kind."

"It's not kind. I just --"

"No, Tomás. Let me do this. Let me tell you it is kind."

"Okay. It is kind."

"Good. I will bring a little handout on Tuesday. I will write it out phonetically, with the syllables marked. And we can work on it a few minutes before rehearsal. You can do the same with Fatimah, you know, for the Arabic line. She will do it. She loves to teach."

"Okay."

"She may bring her mother, who is worse. Just a warning."

"That is fine."

"And Yaffa would do it, for the Hebrew. She would pretend to be annoyed but she would do it."

"Okay."

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"I am glad you are in this choir."

"Me too."

"I think that is what you have been figuring out. That you are glad."

"Mm."

They reached the coffee place on Third. Sina waved at somebody inside through the window -- her mother, who was waiting to pick her up and had apparently come in for coffee, because the Taheri household was a family that believed coffee was a solution to most things. Sina turned.

"I will see you Tuesday," she said.

"See you Tuesday."

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for asking about my babaji."

"You're welcome. Tell him -- I don't know. Tell him hello from me."

"He will like that. He will tell you 'hello from me' back. He will also tell you to eat more, because he tells everybody to eat more. You should prepare yourself."

"I will prepare myself."

She smiled and went inside. Tomás stood on the sidewalk for a moment, his breath pluming in the cold, thinking about a gentle teacher in Tehran in 1955 who had been arrested for holding a study group in his house, and about the great-grandson of that teacher, still alive, with bright eyes, sitting on his couch in Chicago reading a tablet in Farsi every morning, and about a thirteen-year-old girl who was going to sing one line of that tablet on a stage in the spring because, she said, of him.

He walked the rest of the way home. When he got to his apartment, he took out his folder, and he looked at the Farsi line again. He had stopped seeing it as a decoration. He had started, he realized, to see it as a responsibility, which was a bigger thing.

He also saw it as a gift. That was the new part.

============================================================

"So. I have been thinking. I have been talking to your families. I have been listening to all of you. And here is what I would like to propose.

"In two weeks, on a Thursday evening, I would like us to do a small performance. Not the festival. Just the families. At the community center. We will sing the piece for each other. That is all. Our parents. Our grandparents. Whoever wants to come. No cameras -- I will ask everybody to leave their phones in their pockets. No news. No festival. Just us. Just to hear it. Just to see."

She looked around.

"If, after that evening, we all -- kids, families -- feel that we want to do it for the city, we will do it for the city at the interfaith festival. If we do not -- if any of us do not -- we will not. Nobody will be angry. Nobody will be called a coward. We will sing it once, for ourselves, and then we will decide. Is that a reasonable plan?"

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Lamont said, "Yes, Conductor. That is reasonable."

"Good. Rehearsals this week and next will be -- how should I put this -- a little more focused. We will actually sing the piece. We will actually work on it. We are going to stop tiptoeing, yes? We are going to sing it."

"Yes, Conductor," said about ten voices at once.

"Good. Now. Papers out. Page two. Let us go."

And they went.

They sang it, really sang it, for the first time. Sina's Farsi line rose over the alto Hebrew and the soprano Arabic and the tenor and bass responses like an answer coming up out of a well. Yaffa's voice did not shake. Fatimah's Arabic was careful and full. Lamont sang with his whole chest, exactly as he had promised. Rohan, in the tenor section, did something unexpected with the dynamics that made Martine stop the choir and say, "Rohan, that was actually very good, do it again," and he flushed and did it again, even better. Hye-jin's small voice found the high note at the end of the soprano Arabic line and floated there, and the whole choir, hearing her, held their own notes a little longer, unconsciously, to make a cushion for her.

Tomás sang in the middle of the alto section. He did not try to stand out. He did not try to be quiet. He sang his line, the way Martine had taught him, the way his grandfather Rubens would have sung it in São Paulo, with a warm middle voice, woven in. When they reached the braid at the end, and the three languages came together, the alto Hebrew and the soprano Arabic and the tenor Farsi overlapping like strands of thread, he felt, for a moment, that the languages were singing through him rather than out of him -- that he was not the one producing the sound but simply the place where the sound happened to pass.

When they stopped, nobody said anything for a long second.

Then Martine said, very quietly, "Again."

They sang it again.

This time was better.

"Again," Martine said.

This time was the best yet.

"All right," Martine said, when they had finished the third time. Her voice was a little thick. "All right. That is enough for today. Go home. Drink water. Be kind to your mothers. I will see you on Tuesday. We will keep working. You are -- you are doing the work, my friends. You are doing the work."

They packed up slowly. Nobody ran out the way they usually did. There was a kind of quietness in the room, a settled quietness, the quietness of a thing that had been tried and had not broken.

Yaffa and Fatimah were whispering to each other by the door. Fatimah, it turned out, had invited Yaffa over for dinner on Saturday, and Yaffa had invited Fatimah over for dinner on Sunday, and they had decided between them to bring Sina to one of these dinners, and had not yet decided which one. Tomás overheard this and smiled and did not say anything.

Sina pressed a folded paper into Tomás's hand as she left. It was a handout, as promised, with the Farsi line written in Latin letters with syllables broken up and stress marks and little pronunciation notes in the margins.

"Tuesday," she said. "Ten minutes before. We will work on it."

"Thank you."

"Also -- babaji says hello."

"Tell him hello from me."

"He also says you should eat more."

"I will eat more."

"Good boy."

She grinned and left.

Tomás was last to leave, as he often was -- he liked to let the room clear out, liked to walk past the chairs and the music stands and the flickering fluorescent in his own quiet. Mr. Kowalski was starting to sweep up at the back.

"Mr. Kowalski."

"Tomás."

"That was a good rehearsal."

"It was. I listened for a moment from the hallway. I am sorry to say I eavesdropped. I was pretending to look at the bulletin board."

"It's okay."

"You all sounded -- you all sounded like you meant it."

"Thank you."

"Tomás."

"Yes, sir?"

"When I was a boy, in Poland, I sang in a children's choir. Did I ever tell you this?"

"No."

"It was a long time ago. Before my family came here. We sang -- we sang a song in Ukrainian once. The choirmaster taught it to us. Some of the parents were angry. There had been -- there had been troubles. You know. Always troubles. But we sang it. We sang it well. And I have remembered that all my life."

"Yeah."

"I am glad you are doing this. Tell your mother and father I said so."

"I will."

He walked out of the community center into the late afternoon. The sun was setting, and the sky was the color of a good peach. His mother was in the car across the parking lot, waiting.

"Como foi?" she asked, when he got in.

"Foi bom, Mãe. Foi muito bom."

"Muito bom?"

"Muito bom."

She looked at him carefully. Whatever she saw, it made her smile.

"Then let's go home, mijo."

At home, after dinner -- after Wei had laughed at a story Tomás told about Rohan doing the unexpected thing with the dynamics, after Clara had sung a few bars of the Brazilian lullaby over the dishes to see if she could still remember it, after Tomás had helped load the dishwasher and taken out the trash and said goodnight to both of his parents -- Tomás went to his room and sat on his bed and opened his folder again.

He turned to the last page. The page where the three languages came together. The page where the bird with three feathers was drawn, at the bottom, in the composer's pencil.

He looked at the Hebrew. He looked at the Arabic. He looked at the Farsi.

He did not know how to read any of them. He had learned, over two weeks, to say a few of the words. He had learned a little more, when he paid attention, than he had been able to a month before. But he could not read them, not really. The letters on the page were still shapes he had no key for.

Except.

Except they had started to feel, in his hands, like letters he knew. Not because he had suddenly learned Hebrew and Arabic and Farsi in a fortnight. He had not. But because -- because of Yaffa's grandmother, and Fatimah's baba with his teacher in Ramallah, and Sina's babaji with his bright eyes, and his own father with his incense, and his own mother with her father at the back of a São Paulo church, and Mr. Kowalski with a Ukrainian song from his childhood, and Noam Gold with his crocodile that was also an alligator. Because of all of that, and also just because of the choir, which was thirty kids who had decided to show up in the same room on Tuesdays and Thursdays and to try to become one instrument with many strings.

The Hebrew letters looked to him, now, a little like Yaffa. The Arabic letters looked, a little, like Fatimah. The Farsi letters looked, a little, like Sina. Which was silly. Letters did not look like people. But his eye kept doing it anyway. His eye had learned to love the shapes because it had learned to love the voices that would sing them.

They begin, he thought. To feel like mine.

He closed the folder, gently, as you close a book that you plan to reopen. He put it on his desk. He turned off the light.

In the dark, he thought about the small performance in two weeks -- just families, just the community center, just the piece, sung by thirty kids from twenty-three countries. He thought about his father in the audience, and his mother in the audience, and Sina's babaji in the audience, and Mr. Kowalski sweeping up afterward. He thought about his own line in the alto section. He thought about the braid at the end.

He thought, I am going to sing it for everybody at the table.

Then he thought, Sleep, Tomás. You are thirteen. You have homework tomorrow. Sleep.

He slept.

Outside, in the cold, the city went on with its evening, buses running almost on time, fluorescent lights flickering in community centers, people in windows laughing and arguing and loving each other in many languages. Somewhere -- on the north side of the city, in a small warm apartment full of books -- Sina's babaji was reading aloud, softly, in Farsi, a tablet he had been reading for most of his long life, and he was thinking, as he read, about his granddaughter, and about the other children of the choir, and about a piece of music that was about to be sung in three languages by thirty children he had seen with his own eyes.

He smiled, by himself, in his chair.

He turned the page.

The city around him breathed, the way cities do, and somewhere among its many rooms a boy named Tomás Moreira-Lim slept, and a boy named Rohan Devi stayed up too late reading a comic book, and a girl named Yaffa Gold was already asleep with her phone on her chest, and a girl named Fatimah Hassan was sitting on her bed copying out the Hebrew line in pencil because she had decided she wanted to try to learn to write it, and a girl named Hye-jin Kim was practicing her soprano part very softly into a pillow, and a girl named Sina Taheri was writing, in a notebook, a letter to her cousin in Tehran she had never met, saying Dear Shirin, I wish you could hear what we are going to sing.

One week to go.

[END OF PART 1 -- TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2 FOR FULL BOOK]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

He got up and dressed and went to the kitchen. His mother was already there, drinking café com leite from the blue mug she had brought from São Paulo a long time before he was born. She had her phone in her hand, and she was frowning at it, and Tomás knew the frown meant she was reading news from home.

"Good morning, querido," she said, without looking up.

"Mom," Tomás said, "I want to understand what I'm singing."

She put the phone down. "Tell me."

He sat down across from her and tried to explain. He said he knew the notes. He said he could sing all three lines now without looking, without stumbling over the vowels, without missing a beat. He said he could even do the breathing Martine wanted, the breath that was not just for air but for shape. But he did not know what the words meant. Not really. Martine had given them translations, but translations on a page were like photographs of a person you had never met. You could see the outline but not the voice.

His mother looked at him for a long time over the rim of her mug. She was good at looking. When Tomás was small and had done something wrong, he had feared that look more than any punishment.

"Then find out," she said. "Go to the library. Go to the internet. Ask people. Ask Martine. Ask your friends who know."

"That feels like cheating," Tomás said. "Like I'm supposed to already know."

"Quem te disse isso?" she said, which meant, Who told you that, and the Portuguese made it feel like a real question and not a rhetorical one. "Nobody is born knowing anything, Tomás. Not you, not me, not the rabbis, not the imams, not the mothers of all those saints. Everybody has to learn. That is not cheating. That is the work."

She put her hand over his. Her hand was warm from the mug.

"Go learn," she said.

So he did.

He started with the library. The community library was two blocks away, a squat brick building that had been a bank once upon a time; the old vault was now the children's reading corner. The librarian at the reference desk was a tall woman named Ms. Ofoegbu, who had known Tomás since he was eight and had been the one to show him how to use the microfilm reader one rainy afternoon when he was nine. He walked up to her desk with his folder of music tucked under his arm.

"Mr. Moreira-Lim," she said. "You have a scholarly look today."

"I need to find out about three things," Tomás said. "A Hebrew song, an Arabic song, and a piece from the Bahá'í Faith."

Ms. Ofoegbu did not blink. That was one of the things he liked about her. Whatever you asked, she did not blink.

"What are the texts?" she said.

He showed her the first pages of his music. She studied them, murmuring to herself in the way she did when she was thinking. She moved her finger across the Hebrew line and said the syllables softly, the way a person tests whether a floorboard will hold. She did the same with the Arabic.

"The Hebrew," she said, "is from the Book of Psalms. That one I recognize. Psalm one hundred thirty-three. Hinei ma tov u-ma naim, shevet achim gam yachad. It means, behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity. You might know it as a round. Many people grow up singing it in summer camps."

"Oh," Tomás said. He had sung a round that went Hinei ma tov in fourth grade music class, with Mrs. Hartmann, who always wore red shoes. He had not known what the words meant. He had thought they were made up, the way lots of song words seemed made up when you were eight.

"The Arabic," Ms. Ofoegbu continued, "I am less sure of. I do not read Arabic myself. But the Latin letters beneath it look like a devotional line. We have a scholar who comes on Tuesdays. Dr. Khalil. You could ask him."

"And the third?"

She studied it. "This is from the Bahá'í writings, yes? I have a small section on the Bahá'í Faith in the seven-hundred shelves. Come, I will show you."

She took him to the religion section and pulled out three books. One was a thick encyclopedia of world religions. One was a slim introduction to the Bahá'í Faith, with a photograph of a nine-sided temple on the cover. One was a collection of prayers and devotional readings, translated into English.

"Start with the introduction," she said. "Read the first two chapters, and then look at the prayers. The Bahá'ís believe that all the major religions come from the same source, revealed by different teachers at different times. They have a particular emphasis on unity — the unity of humanity, of religions, of nations. I am oversimplifying. But that is the beginning."

He thought of Sina and her grandfather. He thought of the way she had told him, in her quiet voice, that her grandfather had written poems in prison.

He read for almost two hours.

When he finally closed the book, he found that Ms. Ofoegbu had set a glass of water at his elbow at some point without him noticing. He drank it.

Then he walked home and called Martine.

"Tomás," she said. Her voice on the phone was the same as her voice in person, only smaller. "Is everything all right?"

"I want to ask you about the Bahá'í line," he said. "I read some. But I still do not feel like I understand what I'm singing."

He heard her exhale — not impatient, more like a person sitting down in a chair she had been meaning to sit down in. "Tell me what you've read."

He told her. He told her about the oneness of religion, and consultation, and the nine-sided temple, and the persecution. He told her that the line in the medley, according to the translation she had given them, was about the Earth being one country and mankind its citizens.

"That is the gist," Martine said. “He, verily, can afford to dispense with all creatures. – XXXVI – Know thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping.”

“From their contents it became known that in Cleveland the hearts are afflicted by the murky breaths of the Covenant-breakers and harmony hath decreased among the friends.”

"Bahá'u'lláh," Martine said. “Similarly, although the primary responsibility for supporting the family financially is placed upon the husband, this does not by any means imply that the place of woman is confined to the home.”

"So it's important."

"Yes."

"And we're singing it in an arrangement."

"Yes."

"Is that okay? Are we allowed?"

There was a little pause. Tomás thought he could hear Martine smile, the way a smile sometimes comes through a phone if you are listening for it.

"I asked Sina's mother," Martine said. "Before I chose the piece. She told me that Bahá'ís do not have rules against their writings being set to music by others. She told me that some Bahá'ís would be happy to hear it. She told me some Bahá'ís might wish we had chosen differently, because no arrangement can carry the full meaning. She asked me to promise that we would sing it with care and without theatrics. I promised."

"And the Hebrew? The Arabic?"

"The Hebrew is Psalm one hundred thirty-three. Very old. Sung for centuries in many communities. The Arabic is a line from a devotional poem, not scripture but a piece of the devotional tradition, and I consulted with a friend who teaches Arabic and who recommended this particular text because it is sung in many interfaith settings. I asked her the same question. She said to sing with care. So we will."

"Okay," Tomás said.

"Tomás."

"Yes?"

"You are doing the work of a singer. Understanding the text is the work of a singer. Thank you for calling."

After he hung up, he went to the piano in the living room. It was an old upright his father had bought used from a retiring piano teacher in Flushing when Tomás was seven. It was out of tune and one of the pedals squeaked, but Tomás loved it. He sat on the bench and played the Bahá'í line from memory, slowly, picking out the melody with his right hand, letting the notes fall and sustain.

The Earth is one country, and mankind its citizens.

He played the line a third time, and this time he sang the syllables under his breath, and when he got to the end he did not lift his hands from the keys for a while.

Then the phone buzzed. It was a text from Sina.

Are you free? I'm walking to the community center for individual practice. Come?

He grabbed his folder, kissed his mother on the cheek on the way out, and took the stairs two at a time.

The afternoon light on the sidewalks of his neighborhood was the particular late-fall gold that he thought of as fried-onion-colored, warm and a little browned. He found Sina at the corner of 34th Avenue, wearing the gray hoodie she wore too often and a pair of jeans too long for her, so that the cuffs dragged. She looked up and smiled when she saw him.

"I'm trying to get the solo right," she said, as they started walking. "But every time I sing the first line I cry a little. Which is ridiculous."

"It's not ridiculous," Tomás said.

"It's not efficient," Sina said. "I can't cry for thirty minutes every day for three weeks."

"Maybe you'll cry less as you go."

"Or maybe more."

They walked for a block in silence. Then Tomás said, "I asked Martine about the Bahá'í line."

"Oh?"

"I wanted to understand it. I read some. But I also wanted to tell you. I don't want to sing it without knowing what I'm singing."

Sina looked at him from the side, and he felt her look, and he kept his eyes forward on the sidewalk because he was suddenly self-conscious.

"Thank you," she said.

"I'm not converting," he said quickly. "I don't mean that. I mean — "

"I know what you mean."

"Okay."

"It matters to me," Sina said. "That you asked. It matters to my mom too. Not because we need anybody to approve of our faith. But because care is care. When you sing something somebody loves, and you try to understand it, the love reaches."

They walked on. The community center came into view at the end of the block, a squat building with a clock tower and a banner that read WELCOME in seven languages. Tomás recognized four of them. The other three he would learn, he thought. Some day. When he could.

At the center, they found a practice room with a battered spinet piano. Sina opened her folder. She breathed in and out twice. Then she began to sing the solo line, and Tomás sat in the corner and did not make a sound.

The first time through, she cried a little.

The second time through, she did not.

The third time through, Tomás played the melody softly on the piano behind her, and the notes and her voice found each other in the middle of the room.

When she finished, she looked at him and said, "Let's go home."

"Yeah."

They went home. On the walk, she told him about her grandfather. She told him his name — Farhad — and how he had been a pharmacist before he had been arrested, and how in the letters he sometimes wrote about the cat that lived in the prison courtyard. She told him the cat was orange and was called Narenji, which meant "orange" in Farsi, because nobody in the prison had much imagination for cat names, but they loved him anyway.

She told him that her grandfather had been arrested when her mother was still a young woman, that he had been out of prison for a while, then arrested again, and then again, the way Bahá'ís in their country often were. She told him that her mother had left for America when she was twenty-two, with a suitcase and a small amount of money and the phone number of a cousin in Los Angeles. She told him that her mother had worked two jobs for many years, had learned English from library books and from the radio, had eventually met Sina's father at a community gathering in San Francisco. She told him that her father had died when Sina was eight, from an illness, and that her mother had moved them to New York a year later, looking, her mother had said, for a fresh start.

"I was little when my dad died," Sina said. "I remember him but not as much as I would like. I remember him singing to me. Not Bahá'í songs. Songs about — I don't know. Ducks. Trains. Silly songs. He had a terrible voice. He knew it was terrible. He sang anyway."

"That's the best kind of singer."

"I think so too."

She told him that her mother prayed every morning, for her father's soul, for her own father in prison, for Sina, for the world. She told him that her mother's prayers were in Farsi, and that Sina did not always understand every word, but that she recognized the rhythm, and the shape, and that when her mother was done praying her mother always looked at her with a particular softness that was not quite a smile but was close to one.

"Your mother sounds like my mother," Tomás said.

"My mother is like a lot of mothers."

"Yeah."

"But she is mine."

Tomás listened. The late afternoon sun was behind them now, throwing their shadows long and thin onto the concrete.

He did not say much. He did not think he needed to.

That evening after dinner, Tomás sat at the kitchen table with the slim introduction to the Bahá'í Faith open in front of him and a notebook at his elbow. He had brought both books home from the library with Ms. Ofoegbu's permission. His mother was on the phone with her sister in São Paulo, laughing at something in Portuguese. His father was watching a soccer match on the small television on the counter, the sound turned low.

Tomás read slowly. He underlined nothing — they were library books — but he made notes in his own notebook, in his own careful handwriting, of the things he wanted to remember. He wrote down the names that came up. He wrote down the years. He wrote down the principles, in the order they appeared in the book. Oneness of God. Oneness of religion. Oneness of humanity. Equality of men and women. Independent investigation of truth.

That last one caught his eye. Independent investigation of truth. The book said that Bahá'ís are encouraged to find out for themselves what is true, not to accept a teaching simply because it has been handed to them. Tomás thought about that. He thought about how easy it would be, at thirteen, to carry only what he had been given by the adults in his life — the opinions of his parents, the attitudes of his teachers, the assumptions of his neighborhood. He thought about how much of what he believed was really his, tested and kept, and how much was just lying in his pockets because somebody had put it there.

He turned the page. The book talked about the equality of men and women. He thought about Martine, whose authority over the choir he had never questioned, and who was, he realized, the only female conductor he had ever worked with. He thought about Sina's mother, who had come alone to the parents' meeting because Sina's father was dead, and who had spoken with a kind of steady grief that had filled the whole room.

When his mother got off the phone she came over and looked at his notebook.

"Study," she said.

"Homework," Tomás said.

"For what class?"

"Choir. Kind of."

She kissed the top of his head. "Boa noite, meu filho."

"Boa noite, Mom."

His father looked up from the game. "Who is winning?"

"I do not know. I am reading."

"You are always reading," his father said. It was not quite a compliment. It was not quite not a compliment. It was the kind of thing his father said when he was proud and also a little worried, and could not say either thing straight on.

Tomás smiled at his notebook. "I will tell you about it sometime."

"Good," his father said. He turned back to the game.

Tomás read for another hour. Then he closed the book and went to bed and slept deeply, without dreams that he remembered.

On Monday after school, Tomás went to the deli at the corner of Broadway and 35th Street because his mother had asked him to pick up a loaf of sourdough and a package of sliced turkey for dinner. He stood at the counter and waited for the man at the slicer to finish with an older customer, and while he waited he looked out the window.

He saw two girls crossing the street.

Yaffa and Fatimah.

They were walking together. Not hurrying, not talking fast, just walking, with their arms free at their sides and their faces turned toward each other as they spoke. Fatimah was saying something that involved her hands doing a little circular gesture, like she was winding something up, and Yaffa was nodding and smiling, a small smile, not a big one, the kind of smile that is more for thinking than for performing.

They passed the deli without seeing Tomás, and they turned down the next block, toward the community center.

He paid for the bread and the turkey and stood on the sidewalk for a moment with the paper bag in his arm.

He did not know what to do with what he had seen. It was not a dramatic thing. Two thirteen-year-old girls walking three blocks in a city, together. That happened a thousand times a day in every neighborhood. But he knew what they had been like in the first rehearsal. He remembered Fatimah refusing to look at Yaffa when Martine had introduced them. He remembered Yaffa's shoulders set tight as a wire when Fatimah had sung her first solo line, and Fatimah's jaw clenched the first time Yaffa had.

And here they were, walking. With their arms free. Talking about something with hands.

He walked home slowly.

At home, he put the groceries away and then he went to his room and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He thought about what he had seen. He thought about what he had not seen, which was an enormous thing too. What conversation they had been having. What had happened to make it possible for them to have it.

He did not know. He could not know. They had not told him. They did not owe him that.

That was maybe the thing he was thinking about, he realized. That the work was not always his to see. That some things happened out of his view and would never come into his view, and that was not a mistake and not a tragedy but a fact.

He picked up his phone and opened the group chat they had for the choir. He scrolled up. He read some of the old messages. He saw the ones from the first week, when Martine had told them to introduce themselves. Yaffa had written a paragraph. Fatimah had written a paragraph. They had not replied to each other.

Then, a week after that, Fatimah had posted a question about the rehearsal schedule. Yaffa had answered it. That was the first interaction. Tomás had not noticed at the time.

Tomás had not noticed. He had probably scrolled past it, thinking about his own problems, his own music, his own feelings about his own voice.

He lay on his bed and thought about how things change slowly and you do not notice. Like how his own feet had grown three sizes in two years and he had only noticed when his shoes pinched. Like how the tree outside his window had gotten fifteen feet taller in the decade he had lived in this apartment, and he had only realized it when he looked at an old photograph and saw, in the corner behind his four-year-old self, the same tree at half its current height.

At rehearsal on Wednesday, something was different.

It was not one big thing. It was small, the way a room is different when somebody has opened a window a little. Yaffa and Fatimah did not sit next to each other. They did not do anything obvious. But when Martine asked the alto section to come forward for a passage, Yaffa, who was an alto, stepped up, and Fatimah, who was also an alto, stepped up beside her, and they sang the passage together, and when they both finished they looked at each other for a half-second and both of their mouths moved at once, like maybe they were about to say, that was good, or, that worked, or nothing, just a twitch, a tiny shared thing, and then they looked forward again and kept on.

Tomás saw it. He was watching for it now.

After rehearsal, he was packing up his folder when Yaffa came over. She stood beside him for a moment without saying anything, adjusting the strap of her bag. Then she said, "Tomás. Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Do you think I should ask my mother to come to the preview?"

Tomás thought about the question. He did not know exactly how to answer it. He knew that Yaffa's mother had been against the medley from the beginning. He knew Yaffa had had at least two arguments with her about it, because Yaffa had mentioned it once, in the way you mention something without really mentioning it.

"What would happen if you did?" he asked.

"She'd say no."

"And if you didn't?"

Yaffa chewed the inside of her cheek. "She'd find out I sang it anyway, and she'd be upset I didn't ask."

"Then you might as well ask."

Yaffa nodded slowly. "Yeah. Okay. Thanks."

"Why are you asking me?"

Yaffa looked up. Her eyes were brown, and there was a tiny scar at the edge of her left eyebrow, which Tomás had never noticed before.

"Because you're not in any of the parts of this that matter to my family. So you can answer without — without it being a thing."

"Oh," Tomás said.

"No offense."

"None taken."

Yaffa almost smiled, but did not quite. "I'll ask her. Tonight."

She walked away.

Tomás finished packing up. Fatimah was across the room, talking to Hye-jin. Sina was in the corner with her folder open, not singing, just reading, with her finger moving along under the words as if she were checking something she had memorized against what was actually there.

He walked home under the streetlights, and when he got home his mother asked how rehearsal went, and he said it was good, and it was.

The next day was a Thursday. After school Tomás had a free period before rehearsal, and he decided to walk to the bakery near the community center and buy a sesame roll, because he had not quite eaten enough lunch and because he liked to walk alone sometimes after a long day of being a student.

He took the route past the community center, and as he passed the side door he saw Fatimah come out carrying a covered baking dish. The foil on top of the dish was still warm; you could see the way the steam rose, just a little, in the cold afternoon air.

"Tomás," she said.

"Hi."

"Are you going to rehearsal early?"

"No, I have two hours still. I was going to the bakery."

"Walk with me?"

"Sure. What's in the dish?"

"Za'atar flatbread. My aunt made it. She makes too much, always. I told Yaffa I would bring her some."

Tomás looked at the covered dish. "Rohan is going to want some too."

"Rohan," Fatimah said, with a small smile, "will get what is left."

They walked. The bakery was a block past Yaffa's building, so Tomás walked with Fatimah to Yaffa's front steps. Fatimah texted Yaffa from the sidewalk, and Yaffa came down in a sweater and jeans and slippers with little ears on them, which Tomás had not seen before.

"Hi," Yaffa said.

"Hi."

"Hi."

Yaffa took the dish. She looked at Fatimah for a long moment, and Fatimah looked back, and something passed between them that Tomás could not read, but that he did not mind not being able to read.

"Thank you," Yaffa said.

"Tell me if it's not enough."

"It's plenty."

"My aunt sends her — " Fatimah paused. "My aunt says to tell your mother hello."

Yaffa's face did something complicated. "Tell her hello from my mother too. My mother does not know I will tell her. But I will. I will tell her tonight."

Fatimah nodded.

They stood on the steps for another moment. Then Yaffa looked at Tomás.

"Want some flatbread for the road?"

"I will not say no."

She peeled back the foil and broke off a piece the size of his palm. It was warm. It smelled of thyme and olive oil and sesame. He took a bite standing there on the sidewalk and the flavors unfolded in his mouth in layers, the bread soft and the topping salty and herby and a little bright with sumac.

"This is — " he said, with his mouth full.

"I know."

"Your aunt is a genius."

"I know."

Yaffa disappeared inside with the dish. Tomás and Fatimah walked the rest of the way to the bakery together, not saying much, finishing the piece of flatbread in small bites.

He bought his sesame roll. She said she had to get home. They parted at the corner.

He walked on to rehearsal with flour on his fingers and the taste of za'atar still in his mouth, and he thought, again, that things were changing and you did not notice, and that you should try to notice more often if you could.

His mother had been organizing things since before Tomás was born, in Portuguese and English and the beginnings of Mandarin, and when she decided that the parents of the choir members needed to meet before the preview, she made it happen with two phone calls and a Friday afternoon of setting out chairs in their living room.

"I am not taking sides," she said, when she told Tomás about it. "I am making food and I am making chairs. Whatever they want to say, they say. Whatever they do not want to say, they do not say."

"Mom," Tomás said, "that is taking sides. That's taking the side of talking."

"Yes," his mother said. "That side I am always on."

The parents came on Saturday evening. Tomás's father was off duty from the restaurant that night, and he had cleaned the whole living room to a kind of unusual tidiness that made Tomás feel like a guest in his own home. There was a tray of pão de queijo on the coffee table, a plate of sliced pineapple and mango, a big thermos of hot water for tea, and mugs of various sizes which did not match. His mother said the mismatched mugs were a strategic choice. If everything matched too much, she said, people thought the hostess was trying to impress them, and they went quiet.

Tomás was banished to his bedroom for the duration of the meeting, but he could hear almost everything if he sat against the wall with the door cracked a quarter of an inch. He sat against the wall with the door cracked a quarter of an inch.

They came in twos and threes. Sina's mother, a tall woman with graying hair pinned back with a single clip. Fatimah's parents, both of them tall, her father in a suit jacket that looked like he had come straight from work. Yaffa's mother, alone, a small woman with dark eyes and a blue scarf wrapped twice around her neck. Rohan's mother. Hye-jin's father. Lamont's mother and grandmother both, the grandmother walking carefully with a cane.

Tomás's father took coats. Tomás's mother offered tea. For a while there was only the sound of coats being hung and tea being poured and mugs being distributed.

Then his mother said, in the voice she used when she meant it, "Thank you for coming. I know everyone is busy. I wanted us to meet because our children are working on something together, and it is a beautiful something, and also it is a complicated something, and I thought we should sit in the same room at least once before the preview, even if we say nothing."

"We will say something," said Fatimah's father, dryly. There was a small ripple of quiet laughter.

"Okay," Tomás's mother said. "Then we will say something. Who wants to begin?"

A longer silence. Tomás pressed his cheek to the wall and listened to it.

Then Yaffa's mother spoke.

"I will begin," she said.

Her voice was careful. She was not shouting and she was not apologizing. She was a person who had thought about what she was going to say and was going to say it.

"My daughter is thirteen years old," she said. "She is singing in this choir. I have not wanted her to. I have said so to her. I have said so to the conductor, politely, by email. I have been told that many families feel the same way and many families feel the opposite, and I respect this. But I want to be honest, because I think there is no point in being here if we are not honest."

Pause. A mug set down on a coaster.

"I cannot let my daughter sing about peace," Yaffa's mother said, "when we do not have peace. I have family in Israel. My sister lives in Tel Aviv. Her son is a soldier. My cousin, a dentist, his neighbor was killed last fall. I have nightmares. I have — I have a hard time sleeping. I look at my daughter singing in Hebrew and Arabic and Farsi, as if singing in three languages fixes anything, and I feel I am asking her to lie. To lie for me. Do you understand?"

Another silence.

Fatimah's mother spoke. Her voice was quieter. "I understand. I have my own nightmares. My family is in the West Bank. My uncle lost his home two years ago. My cousin, his daughter — I cannot even say."

The two women, Tomás thought, behind his wall. They were in the same room. Neither of them was yelling.

Fatimah's mother continued. "I have also told Fatimah that she should not sing. I have told her that our grief is too big for songs. But she has told me that she wants to sing. She told me she wants to sing next to a girl whose family is like Yaffa's family. And I — " Her voice caught. "I did not know what to say. I am a mother. I want to protect my daughter. But from what, exactly?"

Silence.

Sina's mother spoke next. She had a softer voice than the others, Tomás thought.

"My father is in prison in Iran," she said. "He has been there for nine years. He is a Bahá'í. That is the only reason. When my daughter told me she wanted to sing a Bahá'í line in this medley, in public, I was afraid. I was afraid of attention. I was afraid that someone would hurt my daughter because of our faith. But I said yes. Do you know why I said yes? Because my father, when he writes to us from prison, writes about singing. He writes that the prisoners sing together, when the guards will let them. He says that singing is a way to remember that we are human. I could not tell my daughter not to sing."

Tomás's mother's voice. "Thank you. That means a lot."

Rohan's mother spoke. She was quick and practical. "My son is singing because he loves to sing. I am less political than all of you, perhaps. Or perhaps the politics of my family are in a different part of the world. But I want to say something. When I was a girl in Mumbai, my school had Hindus and Muslims and Parsis and Christians and a few Jews. We sang together every morning. National anthem. Then a prayer, rotated among the traditions. When my grandfather heard I was going to a school like that, he was proud. He said, this is the future. He was old, and he had lived through Partition, and he still said this is the future. So. I believe in this choir. I want to say that, since we are being honest."

Silence.

Yaffa's mother spoke again. "I hear you. All of you. I am not — I am not going to tell my daughter to stop singing. I have decided that. Tonight. Sitting here. But I want to tell you all that I am still — I am still where I am. You are asking me to be a different person than I am, and I cannot be, at least not yet. I may not come to the preview. I do not know."

"You do not have to come," Tomás's mother said, gently. "Nobody has to come. But you are welcome if you want to."

Yaffa's mother did not answer for a long time.

Then she said, "I will think about it."

Lamont's grandmother spoke next. Tomás had to strain to hear her. Her voice was like paper when it is being folded.

"I am old," she said. "I marched with Dr. King when I was a young woman. I know a little about singing for peace when there is no peace. I will tell you something I have learned. You do not wait for peace to sing about it. You sing about it because there is no peace. The song is the way you remember what you are working for. My son, Lamont's father, he died before Lamont was born. He was a police officer. He was killed on duty. When Lamont was small, I sang to him. I sang 'Lift Every Voice' because it was the song I needed. It did not bring his father back. It reminded me what his father had wanted for him. Let these children sing. We will hold their singing, and they will hold ours, and that is the deal. That is the only deal there ever was."

Tomás, against the wall, closed his eyes.

They talked for nearly two more hours.

Some things were hard. Yaffa's mother cried, once, quietly, and Fatimah's mother passed her a tissue across the coffee table, and that was its own kind of speech. Hye-jin's father spoke about how his church had been vandalized last year, and how he had told Hye-jin that the only answer was to keep singing in the church, and to let the neighbors hear them. Sina's mother read a letter from her father, just two sentences of it, about the prison cat.

Nobody agreed about everything. Nobody agreed about anything political.

But by the end, when they stood and pulled on their coats and finished their cooling tea, every single parent in that room, including Yaffa's mother in her twice-wrapped scarf, said they would come to the preview.

Yaffa's mother was the last to say it. She said it at the door, with her hand on the knob.

"I will come," she said. "I do not know how I will feel. But I will come. I will sit. I will see my daughter."

Tomás's mother put a hand on her arm.

"That is enough," she said.

When they were gone, Tomás came out of his room.

His parents were in the kitchen, washing mugs. His father was drying. His mother was scrubbing.

"You heard," his father said.

"Yeah."

"Sorry."

"Not sorry," his mother said. "He was supposed to hear."

"Oh," Tomás said. "Okay."

His father set a dry mug on the shelf. He looked at Tomás for a long moment. Then he said, "Your mother is right. She usually is."

"I know," Tomás said.

His father laughed, a short little laugh. Then he said, "Tomás. Go to bed."

Tomás went to bed. He lay there with the sounds of the kitchen, of mugs being set on the shelf one by one, of the water running, of two voices murmuring in Portuguese and English and sometimes both at once. It was a sound he had heard his whole life. Tonight it sounded like the end of something and the beginning of something else.

He did not sleep right away. He thought about the voices he had heard behind the wall. He thought about Mrs. Gold's careful, clear sentences. He thought about the way Fatimah's mother had said, "From what, exactly?" and had not finished the thought, because there was no finishing it. He thought about Sina's mother reading a letter from prison about a cat.

He thought about his own parents. His mother, the organizer, who believed in talking, and who would not let people sit too long in silence. His father, the cook, the quiet one, who did not speak much but who had set chairs all afternoon in his own living room and had put out the sliced pineapple and mango and had not asked a single question about why any of it needed to happen.

He thought about Yaffa. He thought about what she would do tonight, in her own bedroom, with her mother at home, neither of them speaking of what had been said. Or maybe they would speak. He did not know. He hoped, in a dim tired way, that whatever happened in that apartment tonight would be gentle.

He thought about Fatimah. He thought about the way her mother had cried quietly, and the tissue Yaffa's mother had passed across the coffee table. The tissue. He thought about that tissue for a long time. It was such a small thing, and it was not small.

He thought about Martine. Martine was not his mother and not his father and not a teacher exactly, but something else, a fourth kind of adult in his life, a kind he did not yet have a word for. She was the kind of adult who stood at a door for forty-five minutes greeting each family. She was the kind of adult who said, "You are doing the work of a singer," as if she meant it, because she did.

He thought about himself. He thought about the boy he had been in August, three months ago, who had not yet held the Bahá'í line in his mouth, who had not yet walked home with Sina and learned her grandfather's name, who had not yet sat at his piano and played the melody alone on a Saturday afternoon.

He was thirteen. He was still thirteen. But he had grown three months older, and three months was not nothing, and he was different.

Finally, he slept.

The preview was scheduled for a Thursday evening in the first week of November. The community center gave them the smaller of the two halls, the one with folding chairs and the old piano whose middle C had a slight buzz if you hit it too hard. Martine had asked the families to come a little early so that she could greet them personally. She stood at the door for forty-five minutes, shaking hands, bowing to the grandmothers, squatting down to make eye contact with the littlest siblings.

Yaffa was tying her sash. It was saffron. Fatimah's was indigo. Sina's was terracotta. Tomás's was also saffron, but the saffron of a different fabric lot, a little browner, a little less bright.

Lamont was making jokes. Lamont was always making jokes before a performance. Tonight his jokes were about the cardboard chef.

"Look at him," Lamont said. "Tomato Man. Tomato Man has never had a day of stage fright in his life."

"Tomato Man is not alive," Rohan said.

"That," Lamont said, "is the secret of his confidence."

The younger girls laughed. Tomás caught Sina's eye. She smiled. She was calm tonight, he thought. Or she was doing a good imitation of calm.

Martine came in. She shut the door behind her and stood for a second with her hand on the knob, as if to see whether anybody would speak, and when nobody did, she smiled the small smile that meant she was proud of them.

"Mis cantantes," she said, which was how she sometimes addressed them. My singers. "Listen. Before we go out."

They gathered around.

"I am not going to say much," Martine said. "I have said it all in rehearsal. Tonight you will sing for your families and for the two or three guests they have brought. Sixty people, perhaps. You have sung in front of more than that. You will sing in front of many more at the festival. Tonight is small. Tonight is a try."

She looked at each of them in turn, and her look was like a hand on the shoulder.

"Remember that the music knows where to go. You have done the work. Trust the work. Breathe. Listen to each other. Listen for Sina's solo. Listen for the silence before the third movement. If something goes wrong, keep singing. If everything goes right, keep singing. Keep singing. That is all."

She clapped her hands once, softly, as if to close a book.

"Let us go."

They went.

The hall was full. Tomás could see it from the side, as they lined up. Every folding chair had a person in it. Some people were standing in the back. He saw his parents in the third row, his mother with a little crocheted purse on her lap, his father in his white button-down. He saw Sina's mother, upright and composed, her hands folded. He saw Fatimah's parents, her mother holding her father's hand. He saw Rohan's mother, Lamont's grandmother leaning forward on her cane.

He saw Yaffa's mother. She was in the second row, on the aisle. She was wearing the twice-wrapped blue scarf. Her hands were in her lap. Her face was still.

Martine stepped to the front. She made a small speech.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "Tonight we will sing for you three hymns in three languages, arranged together, with the permission and blessing of three traditions. The choir has been working on this piece for many weeks. They have learned not only the notes and the words but also what the words mean. You will not hear perfect musicianship tonight. You will hear young people who are trying to say something they believe is worth saying. That is what I ask you to listen for."

She stepped back. She raised her hands. The pianist, a young woman named Nora whom Martine had borrowed from the music school, placed her hands on the keys.

Martine's hands came down.

The first chord opened like a door.

The Hebrew began. Psalm one hundred thirty-three. The altos carried it first, then the sopranos, the tenors, the basses. Hinei ma tov u-ma naim, shevet achim gam yachad. How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.

Tomás sang. His voice was small in his own ears, but Martine had taught him that this is how a singer always hears himself. The sound you think you are making is not the sound the audience is hearing. Trust the audience. Trust Martine's ears.

He sang the Hebrew. He watched Martine's hands. He breathed where she asked him to breathe.

The second movement began. The Arabic. A melody that rose and fell like something being rocked. Tomás could not see Fatimah from where he stood, but he heard her. She had a solo line at the opening of this movement, and she took it, and her voice did not shake.

The chord under her was held by the rest of them. Tomás kept the chord. His lips held the shape.

He thought about the deli window. He thought about the way Yaffa and Fatimah had walked. He thought about the parents in the living room, Fatimah's mother passing a tissue to Yaffa's.

He held the chord.

The chord resolved into the bridge, and the bridge led into the third movement, the Bahá'í line, with Sina's solo.

The three beats happened.

Sina stepped forward one step. She had done this in every rehearsal. She did it now.

She began to sing.

Her voice was not loud. It was clear. Tomás had heard her a hundred times by now, but tonight was different. Tonight she had her grandfather's photograph pinned to the inside of her folder, which she was not looking at, because she did not need to look at it, because she had memorized the line. She was singing for him. The line was about the Earth being one country and mankind its citizens. Tomás knew what the line meant. He had known what it meant for weeks now. But tonight, hearing it in Sina's voice, with the choir humming under her in a soft open chord, he felt it again as if he were hearing it for the first time.

The Earth is one country, and mankind its citizens.

He saw, from the corner of his eye, that the second row, on the aisle, had moved.

Yaffa's mother had stood up.

She was walking, quickly, down the aisle toward the back of the hall. She did not run. She did not stumble. She walked. The twice-wrapped blue scarf moved with her. She reached the back. She pushed the door. She was gone.

The door clicked shut.

Tomás kept singing. The choir kept singing. Sina finished her solo, and the choir rose under her in the final chord, and the chord ended, and Martine held her hands up for a long three-count of silence.

Then Martine lowered her hands.

There was an instant of not-knowing, an instant that felt to Tomás like standing on a diving board waiting for gravity. Then the audience applauded. Not big, roaring applause. A kind of thick, dense applause, the applause of a small crowd of people who were very moved, who did not quite know what to do with their feelings, who wanted to do something so they clapped.

Tomás looked at Yaffa.

Yaffa was looking at the empty chair on the aisle, second row.

Her face was still. Her hands were at her sides.

She was not crying. Not yet. But she would.

Martine's hands came up one more time, for a bow. The choir bowed. The applause, which had thickened into something almost rhythmic, did not stop even when they straightened. Tomás watched his mother, in the third row, clapping with her palms flat and her eyes on her son. His father, beside her, clapped with one hand rested briefly on his wife's forearm. His father was clapping without looking at Tomás at all; he was looking at the emptied aisle seat in the second row, his face careful.

They bowed again. Martine gestured to the pianist, Nora, who also bowed. They walked off.

Backstage, Tomás did not look at Yaffa right away. He made himself look at other things. He made himself look at the clock on the wall. Eight-oh-seven. He made himself look at the Tomato Man, still smiling his cardboard smile from the corner. He made himself look at his own hands, which were shaking a little.

But his eyes kept coming back to the door of the hall, which was still closed, and through which Yaffa's mother had gone, and did not return.

The backstage room was louder than it had been before the concert. Everyone was talking at once, pulling off sashes, packing up folders, laughing and joking the way people do after the wave of stage fright has broken and left them back on dry land. Lamont was doing an impression of the Tomato Man. Rohan was trying to steal a pão de queijo out of a plate that Tomás's mother had brought. Martine was moving through the crowd with her arms spread a little, as if she were scooping the children together to carry them.

Yaffa was in the corner. She was sitting on a folding chair with her back against the wall, her folder on her knees, her sash still on. She was staring straight ahead. Her eyes were wet but she was not crying; it was the phase before the crying, when the body has decided what it is going to do but has not yet begun.

Tomás saw her. He started to go to her. Then he stopped. He did not know what to say.

He stood in the middle of the room. He looked for Fatimah. Fatimah was putting her folder into her backpack. She looked up and saw him and saw where he was looking, and she followed his look to Yaffa in the corner, and her face did a thing that was not quite any single expression.

She walked past him, to Yaffa, and sat down on the folding chair next to her. She did not say anything. She set her backpack down at her feet. She put her folder on top of her backpack. She folded her hands in her lap.

Tomás moved toward them, carefully, the way you approach a deer in a park, and then he stopped at a distance where he could see them and they could see him, and he made himself become part of the furniture, busy with his own folder, his own sash, his own zipper.

For a while nothing happened. The room was loud. Martine was hugging Hye-jin's father. Sina was showing her mother the photograph she had pinned to her folder. Lamont was giving the Tomato Man a fist bump.

Then Fatimah spoke. Tomás heard her voice because the rest of the room had begun to empty, families drifting out toward the lobby.

"I saw her leave," Fatimah said. She was speaking low, not whispering, not performing.

Yaffa did not answer for a long time. Then she said, "Yeah."

"Where did she go?"

"Home, probably."

"Did she say anything before the concert?"

"She said she would try to stay."

Fatimah absorbed this. She took a breath. "My mother almost left too," she said. "During the Hebrew. I saw her. She was rubbing her temple with her finger, like this." Fatimah demonstrated, with her own finger at her own temple, a small rubbing motion. "She does that before she makes a decision. I thought she was going to get up. She did not."

"Why not?"

"I do not know."

They were both quiet. Somebody laughed from the lobby, a high child's laugh that did not fit the mood of the backstage room.

Then Fatimah said, "I am sorry your mother walked out."

"It's not your fault," Yaffa said, quickly.

"I know it is not my fault. I am sorry anyway. Sorry is not always about fault. Sometimes you are just sorry."

Yaffa did not answer. But then, slowly, she leaned a little sideways, and her shoulder came to rest against Fatimah's shoulder, and she left it there.

Fatimah did not move.

They sat like that.

Tomás was still fiddling with his folder. His folder was fully packed. He unpacked it and repacked it.

Sina came over. Sina was in some ways the oldest of them, by one year and also by the thing inside her. She squatted down in front of the two girls and put a hand on Yaffa's knee, gently. She did not speak.

Yaffa began to cry. Not loudly. The tears started and she did not fight them. They ran down her face and she did not wipe them. Fatimah passed her a tissue from her pocket. Yaffa took it. She did not thank her, because thank-yous were not what the moment was for.

Martine came over. Martine had seen from across the room. She did not squat or kneel. She stood, tall and still, and she let her presence be the thing.

"Yaffa," she said.

"She left," Yaffa said. She said it with her face still wet.

"I know."

"Why did she come if she was going to leave?"

"Because she loves you."

Yaffa looked up at Martine. "That doesn't make sense."

"It does not," Martine said. "And also it does. She came because she loves you. She left because what we sang was too much for her tonight. Both things are true. The second does not erase the first. It is hard. It is not fair. It is what is."

"I feel like she was rejecting me."

"I know you feel that."

"Was she?"

Martine thought. Then she said, "No. She was not rejecting you. She was — she was managing what she could manage. She could come. She could sit. She could listen to one movement and part of another. Then she could not anymore. She got up before she broke down. That is not rejection. That is survival."

Yaffa stared at the floor.

"Can I tell you something, Yaffa?" Martine said.

"What."

"When I was your age, my father walked out of a choir concert too. I was singing a solo in a language he did not want me to sing in. I was in Warsaw. My mother was from Poland. My father was from Argentina, and he had his own reasons for not wanting Polish music in our house. He walked out. I saw him go. I did not finish my solo well. I cried afterward for a long time."

"What happened?"

"We talked. Eventually. Not that night. Not for a week. But eventually. He told me what he had been carrying. I told him what I had been carrying. Neither of us convinced the other. But we stayed in the same room. We had dinner together the next Sunday. He came to my next concert."

"He did?"

"Yes."

"And did he walk out again?"

"No. He stayed. He did not smile, exactly. But he stayed."

Yaffa wiped her face with the back of her hand. She looked at Fatimah, and at Sina, and at Tomás, who had finally stopped pretending to pack, and at Martine.

"Okay," she said.

It was a small okay. It was not an okay that fixed anything. It was an okay that accepted where she was.

Martine stood up straighter. "Go home," she said. "All of you. Have something warm. Sleep. Tomorrow we will meet. I have something I want to say to the group. And Yaffa — "

"Yes?"

"Your mother may want to talk to you tonight. Or she may not. Either way, be kind to her. She is also somewhere right now."

Yaffa nodded.

Tomás and his parents walked home with Sina and her mother, because they lived near each other. Nobody talked much. The cold air felt good on Tomás's face. His mother was holding his father's hand, and they were walking a little slower than usual.

At their building, they said goodnight to Sina and her mother. Sina's mother hugged Tomás's mother for a long time.

Then they went upstairs.

In his room, Tomás sat on the edge of his bed and took off his shoes. He thought about Yaffa's mother. He thought about the exit door clicking shut. He thought about Yaffa's face in the backstage room. He thought about Fatimah's shoulder.

He was not going to sleep quickly tonight, he thought. But he lay down, and he did.

Before he slept, though, he lay looking at his ceiling for a while, and he thought about the idea of being brave.

He had always thought being brave was a loud thing. A thing that looked like standing up in a movie and shouting a speech. A thing with a drumroll under it. He thought now that maybe being brave was also the quiet thing that Yaffa's mother had done by coming, and the quiet thing she had done by leaving, and the quiet thing Yaffa had done by letting her shoulder lean against Fatimah's shoulder, and the quiet thing Fatimah had done by not moving.

He thought that there were probably many kinds of brave, and he was only just starting to notice them.

He thought, also, about his father. His father, who had watched the whole preview from his seat in the third row, and who had not said a word afterward. His father, who had walked home with one hand on Tomás's mother's back. His father, who would not talk about this tonight, maybe not for days, maybe not until some surprising moment when he would be chopping something and he would say, without looking up, "That song you sang — I am still thinking about that song." His father had ways of saying things that took time to arrive.

Tomás was glad, in a way, that his father would not say anything tonight. Tonight did not need words from his father. Tonight needed only the sound of dishes being washed and of his parents' voices moving softly through the wall.

He closed his eyes.

He slept.

Martine had called a short meeting for Saturday morning. She had not said why. She had sent a group text, brisk and businesslike. Community center, ten AM, forty-five minutes, please be there.

Tomás came early. Lamont was there already, drinking a carton of chocolate milk. Hye-jin came in a moment later, with Rohan. Sina was already seated in the back row, her folder on her lap, though they had not been told to bring folders.

Fatimah came in. Then Yaffa.

Yaffa looked tired. She looked like a person who had slept some, but not well. She sat two seats away from Fatimah. They nodded at each other.

The door opened and another person came in.

It was Yaffa's mother.

Yaffa looked up sharply. Her mother did not look at her. Her mother walked to the front of the room and stood next to Martine. She was wearing the same blue scarf as the night of the preview, but it was wrapped only once today, looser.

Martine cleared her throat.

"Good morning," she said. "Thank you for coming. Mrs. Gold asked if she could speak to you. I said yes, because I thought it would be good for you to hear her. She will speak, and then she will leave, and then we will keep going. All right?"

"All right," said Lamont, who often answered for the group when nobody else did.

Martine stepped back.

Yaffa's mother, Mrs. Gold, looked at the carpet for a moment. Then she looked up.

"My name is Rivka Gold," she said. "I am Yaffa's mother. I know most of you have met me. I know some of you have not. I would like to say something to you. I will try to be brief, because you all have things to do on a Saturday, and also because I have a doctor's appointment at eleven."

Lamont snort-laughed, then put his hand over his mouth.

Mrs. Gold smiled, very briefly.

"Good," she said. "You are allowed to laugh. I meant that as a joke. I do have a doctor's appointment. But the brief is the important part."

She took a breath.

"Last night I walked out of your concert. I want to tell you why. Then I want to tell you what I have decided."

Yaffa was looking at her mother very carefully.

"I walked out," Mrs. Gold said, "not because of any of you. Not because of your singing. Not because of the words you sang. Not because of your conductor, or your families, or the way the chairs were arranged, or the color of the curtain. I walked out because of me. Because I am carrying a thing. And last night, at the end of the second movement, the thing got too heavy, and I could not hold it anymore, and I did not want to be in a public place when it — when I could not hold it. So I left."

She paused. She adjusted her scarf.

"I want to be clear. I was not rejecting you. I was not rejecting my daughter. I was not rejecting peace, or unity, or any of the beautiful words that were being sung. I was rejecting my own limits. Or I was accepting them. It is hard to tell the difference sometimes."

The room was very quiet.

"I told my husband last night. I told my sister this morning, long distance. And I told my daughter, when she came home. Yaffa, I hope you will forgive me for embarrassing you in public. I did not know until I felt it that I would have to go."

Yaffa was holding both her hands together very tightly in her lap.

"I also want to tell you this," Mrs. Gold said, and now her voice was steadier, as if she had crossed into a different room inside herself. "I am not able to come to your festival performance. I am not able yet. I need more time. I am telling you now because I do not want my absence to be a surprise, or to be a weapon that anyone uses. I am not boycotting your choir. I am not protesting your choir. I am a mother whose heart is in a bad place this season, and I am taking care of it the way you take care of an injured leg. You do not run on it. You rest it."

She stopped. She looked directly at the group.

"But I want you to know," she said, "that I am proud of my daughter. I am more proud of her than she knows. I am proud of her for singing. I am proud of her for singing with all of you. I am proud of her for making her own choices even when they were not the ones I wanted her to make. She is a better person than I am. You are all better people than I am. I mean that."

Her voice did not shake, but something in the air did.

"Yaffa," she said, "I love you. I will see you at home. I will come to your choir when I can. I am not promising when. But I am promising that I will."

Yaffa stood up. She walked to the front. She hugged her mother.

Her mother hugged her back. Then her mother held her at arm's length for a moment, looked at her face, kissed her on the forehead.

"I have to go to the doctor," Mrs. Gold said.

"I know," Yaffa said.

"Sing well at the festival."

"I will."

Mrs. Gold left.

Yaffa stood at the front of the room for a moment, her face wet, her hands at her sides. Nobody clapped. Nobody spoke. Martine, at the side, had not moved.

Then Fatimah stood up.

She walked to the front. She did not hug Yaffa. That was not what was needed. She took her hand. They held hands for the length of one breath.

Then they walked together back to their seats.

Martine cleared her throat.

"Thank you, all of you," she said, "for holding that. Now. Let us talk about the festival."

They talked about the festival for forty minutes. Martine had set lists to go over, logistics, warmup times, a minor question about the order of the speakers before them, whether they would have a proper sound check, who would bring water bottles. The logistical talk was, Tomás thought, a gift. Their bodies needed ordinary things to do. Their minds needed numbers and lists. Martine, who was wise, let them have it.

Martine nodded.

"That is plenty," she said. "Go. Rest. Eat. Sleep. I will see you Wednesday."

They went.

On the way out, Yaffa caught Tomás by the sleeve.

"Thank you for the thing you said the other day," she said. "About asking her. She said it mattered that I asked."

"She said that?"

"Yeah. She said if I had not asked she would have hated herself for not coming. And she said if she had not come she would not have learned that she could not sit through it yet. And she said if she had not learned that she could not sit through it yet, she would not be able to work toward being able to sit through it later."

"Oh," Tomás said.

"Yeah."

"That is a lot of clauses."

Yaffa laughed. It was the first laugh she had laughed since before the preview. It was not a big laugh. But it was a laugh.

"My mother likes clauses," she said.

"My mother also likes clauses."

"Probably all the mothers like clauses."

"Probably."

They walked out into the cold together.

On the sidewalk they stood for a moment. The wind had picked up. Yaffa pulled her jacket tighter. Tomás blew on his fingers, which he had not put in gloves yet for the season.

"I should get home," Yaffa said.

"Yeah."

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"Do you ever feel like — " she started, and then she stopped.

"Like what?"

"Like we are too young for this."

Tomás thought about it. He thought about the pão de queijo in his mother's living room, and about Mrs. Gold's speech, and about Fatimah's shoulder against Yaffa's, and about his father standing at the piano.

"Yes," he said. "Sometimes."

"Me too."

"But also — "

"I know. Also not."

"Yeah."

She smiled. It was a tired smile, but it was a smile. "My dad says that is how you know you are doing something real. When it feels both too big for you and also exactly your size."

"Your dad sounds like my dad."

"Our dads should get coffee."

"Your dad drinks coffee?"

"He drinks coffee like it is a full-time job."

"Mine drinks tea. They would fight about it."

"That would be a good fight."

They laughed, a small laugh, and then she waved and walked off down the block toward her building. Tomás watched her go for a second. Her slippers — she had been wearing slippers earlier in the week, on the steps with the flatbread, but today she had her proper boots, black, scuffed. The boots made a small crunching sound on the leaves that had blown onto the sidewalk.

He turned toward home.

On Monday morning, Tomás was late leaving his apartment because he could not find his math textbook, and so he was walking to school a different way than usual, past the community center, rather than his normal route through the park. He was looking down, thinking about where the textbook might be (the bathroom? under his bed?), when he heard somebody say, loudly, a word he did not immediately understand.

He looked up.

There was a police car in front of the community center. Two officers were standing at the front door, looking at it and making notes. A small knot of adults had gathered on the sidewalk. The building superintendent, Mr. Kolev, was standing with his arms crossed, his breath making short puffs in the November air.

Tomás crossed the street.

He could see it now, the thing the officers were looking at. On the front door of the community center, somebody had spray-painted a word, in red. It was a slur. It was ugly. Tomás did not know, exactly, which of the several groups that used the community center the word was aimed at, because it was an old and versatile word that people had used to hurt many different people over the years. But it was there, and it was aimed at somebody, and it was meant to make them stop.

Tomás stood on the sidewalk and stared at it.

An officer came over. She was young, maybe twenty-five, with a kind face and a notebook.

"You all right, honey?" she said.

"Yeah."

"You know this building?"

"I sing here."

"Oh. With the choir?"

"How did you know?"

"Your conductor is inside. She called us this morning. We have been taking statements."

"Can I go in?"

"Sure."

Tomás went in. Past the reception desk, past the corkboard with all the flyers, into the main hallway. He found Martine in the small office off the hallway, sitting across from Mr. Kolev. Martine was drinking coffee from a paper cup. She did not look panicked. She looked very serious.

"Tomás," she said.

"I was walking past. I saw."

"I assumed many of you would see, on your way to school."

"Is anybody hurt?"

"No. The building was closed last night. Mr. Kolev found it when he opened at six this morning. He called the police. The police called me because my name was listed as a user of the building this week. I came over. I have been here since seven."

"Who did it?"

"We do not know. The building has a camera at the back door but not the front. So we have a shot of an empty sidewalk, and that is all."

"What do we do?"

Martine looked at him. She looked tired, and also steady. "Go to school, Tomás. Then come to rehearsal this afternoon. We have a decision to make, and I will not make it alone."

He nodded. He walked to school.

He could not concentrate. He sat through first period and second period and lunch and the rest of the day with the red word in his head. He thought about whether people would want to cancel the festival performance. He thought about whether anybody would get hurt. He thought about Sina's grandfather, who was in a prison on the other side of the world because people had decided that his faith was wrong.

After school he went straight to the community center. The word had been painted over. You could see the faint outline of it, if you looked closely, but somebody had put a coat of gray primer over it, and Mr. Kolev had put up a sign that said, temporarily, FRESH PAINT. The choir, arriving one by one, looked at the door and then looked away.

Inside, Martine had pulled the folding chairs into a circle.

Everyone came. Even the youngest kids, who had probably been told what happened on the way over by their parents. They sat in the circle with wide eyes and very still hands. Tomás sat between Sina and Lamont. Yaffa sat across from him. Fatimah sat next to Yaffa. Nobody was making jokes.

Martine did not stand at the front. She sat with them in the circle.

"You all know," she said. "You all saw, or heard. Yes?"

Nods.

"I want to tell you what I know," Martine said. "It is not much. Someone spray-painted a slur and a threat on the door of this building, sometime between ten last night and six this morning. Mr. Kolev found it. The police have been here. They have taken statements. They are investigating. They do not know who did it. They do not know if the person was specifically angry at this choir or at another group that uses the building. The community center hosts many groups. A youth group, a senior group, a women's reading group, three different religious communities on different days. The word on the door could have been aimed at any of them, or at all of them. We do not know."

She paused.

"I have spoken with the directors of the community center. I have spoken with the festival organizers, who know about this and are themselves saddened. I have spoken with each of your parents. I have told them that I would talk with you this afternoon, and that we would decide together whether or not to go forward with the festival performance on Saturday."

She looked around the circle.

"This is the decision. I want to be clear that it is yours. Not mine alone. Not your parents' alone. We are going to consult. Do you all know what I mean by consult?"

Sina nodded.

"Good," Martine said. "Then Sina, help me. Tell the others what consultation is."

Sina looked surprised. Then she gathered herself. "It is a way of talking," she said, "where everybody speaks honestly, and everybody listens. Nobody holds on to their own opinion too tightly. If somebody changes my mind, I say so. The goal is to find the truth together, not to win."

Tomás sat with that question in his chest for a moment. He looked around the circle. He saw Sina's hands, folded carefully in her lap. He saw Fatimah's shoulders, held very still. He saw Yaffa's mouth, pressed into a thin line. He saw Lamont's jaw, tight in a way Lamont's jaw rarely was. He saw the younger kids — Mei, Kenji, little Priya, and a boy named Oliver — all of them looking at Martine, waiting.

Martine did not push. She did not repeat the question. She sat with her own hands in her lap, and she waited.

The room was quiet for a long time.

Tomás looked at his hands. He had a hangnail on his left thumb. He had been picking at it on the way over.

Finally, Rohan spoke.

"I'll start," he said. His voice was a little shaky but he kept going. "My mom said I could decide. She said she would support me either way. My first thought was, we should cancel, because if somebody is mad enough to spray-paint a door, they might be mad enough to do something worse at the festival. I am scared. I am not going to lie. But I am also mad. I don't want to cancel because somebody sprayed a word on a door. That feels like letting them win. I don't know. I am split."

He looked down.

Lamont went next. "My grandmother told me this morning, 'baby, if we had canceled every time somebody sprayed a word on a door, we'd have never gone outside.' She is not wrong. But she also told me to be careful. So I don't know. I want to sing. But I want us to think about whether it's safe."

The circle moved along. The smaller kids were largely quiet. One of them, a ten-year-old named Kenji, said, "I don't want to not sing. I have been practicing every day."

Fatimah spoke. She had been waiting. She put her hands flat on her knees.

"I have a thing to say," she said, "that is maybe not about whether to sing. But it is about how I feel."

"Go ahead," Martine said.

"I have seen words like this before," Fatimah said. "On my uncle's shop. On a wall near my mosque. I have seen them my whole life. My mother and father have seen them their whole lives. The word on the door is not new. The feeling of seeing the word is not new. What is new, to me, is — " She paused. She looked across the circle at Yaffa. "What is new is that when I saw the word, one of the first things I thought was, I hope Yaffa is okay. I did not know if the word was aimed at her family or my family. I thought maybe it was aimed at both. And I thought, if it is aimed at both, then we are in this together, and I want to sing with her on Saturday. That is what I thought. So — I vote yes. I want to sing."

Yaffa was looking at her. Her eyes were wet again but she was not crying.

"I vote yes too," Yaffa said. "The same reason."

Sina spoke next. "I vote yes," she said. "My grandfather is in prison for his faith. I think of him every time I walk into a room where people can speak about their faith without being afraid. I do not want to stop singing about peace because somebody wrote a word on a door. I want to sing louder."

There was a pause. Martine looked at Tomás.

"Tomás," she said. "Have you spoken?"

Tomás shook his head.

"Speak."

Tomás was not ready. But he tried.

"I want to sing," he said. "But I want to be honest about something. It is easy for me to say I want to sing. The word on the door is not directly about my family. I am Brazilian and Chinese-Singaporean. Those people have had words sprayed about them too, and my parents can tell me stories, but the word today was not for us. So when I say I want to sing, I want to be careful, because I am not the one most at risk. I want to know what Yaffa and Fatimah and Sina want, and I want to follow their lead in some way, because this is more their fight than mine."

Martine nodded slowly.

"But," Tomás said, "I also want to say this. I keep thinking. If we stop singing, does the person who sprayed the door win? Maybe. I think yes. But also I want to say — " He paused. He was trying to find the thought. "We are kids. Is singing the safest way to be brave? I do not mean, is it safe. I mean, is it a thing we can do. Adults have to do harder things. They have to write laws. They have to run for office. They have to go into the streets with signs, or not. But we are kids. And kids can sing. And when we sing, people who are afraid of singing maybe have to listen. It is the thing we can do. So if we can do it, should we?"

He stopped. He did not know if he had been making sense.

The room was quiet.

Lamont, across the circle, was looking at him. Lamont spoke. "Yeah," Lamont said. "That. What he said."

"So you vote yes," Rohan said.

"I vote yes. But I wanted to tell the story first, because I think sometimes stories are more important than votes."

Martine nodded slowly. "Stories are votes too."

Kenji, ten years old, raised his hand timidly. Martine saw him and gave him the floor.

"I have a question," Kenji said. "Not a vote. A question. Can we have somebody with us backstage? Like a parent? So if somebody tries to come backstage and is not supposed to, there is a grown-up there?"

"That is a good question," Martine said. "Yes. The festival organizers already have security staff backstage. And I will make sure there is a parent volunteer. Two, probably. Mr. Kolev has also offered to come. So you will not be alone."

Kenji nodded, satisfied.

Priya, who was eleven, spoke next. She had not spoken up much in rehearsals. Her voice was small.

"I want to say," Priya said, "that my grandmother always says, the world is big and most people are good. She says we forget because the news shows us the bad ones. She says for every one person who sprays a wall, there are a thousand who walk past it the next day and feel sad for the person who was hurt. She says we should sing for the thousand, not the one."

Lamont nodded. "Priya, your grandmother is a wise woman."

"I know."

The group laughed, gently.

Martine let the quiet stretch for a moment.

"Does anyone think we should not sing?" she asked. "Is there a voice in this room that is saying, no, we should cancel? I want that voice to speak if it is there."

Silence.

One of the younger kids, Mei, who was eleven, raised her hand timidly.

"Mei," Martine said.

"I am a little scared," Mei said. "That is all. But I will sing."

"Being scared and singing at the same time is allowed," Martine said. "That is called most of life."

A little laughter.

"Anyone else?" Martine said. "Any concerns we have not heard?"

Nobody spoke.

"Then we have come to a decision," Martine said. "We will sing at the festival on Saturday. We will sing with the security that the festival has arranged. We will sing with our families present. We will sing aware that some people may not want us to sing. And we will sing anyway, because you, this group, have decided. I agree with your decision. I will stand with you on Saturday."

She looked around the circle.

"Does anyone want to say anything else before we close?"

Sina raised her hand.

"I want to say thank you," she said. "For listening. For the way we just talked. This is how my community talks when things are hard. I did not know if it would work with this many people who are not Bahá'í. It worked. It worked because you listened. So. Thank you."

Martine smiled.

"That is consultation," she said. "It is not magic. It is people listening. And also, Sina, thank you. For teaching us without teaching us."

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Then Martine stood.

"Go home," she said. "Rest. Eat. On Saturday we will sing. Wear warm layers under your uniforms. It is going to be cold."

They went home.

On the way out of the community center, Tomás stopped at the front door and looked at the patch of gray primer. You could still see, if you looked carefully, the ghost of the red word underneath. The primer had not been quite enough. Somebody, Tomás thought, would need to put on a second coat soon. Mr. Kolev, probably, or some volunteer with a spare afternoon.

He thought about how a word on a door was a kind of ghost even after you painted over it. It stayed, in a way. Not for everyone, and not forever, but it stayed for the people who had seen it, and it stayed until the day somebody else painted over it with a color they actually wanted the door to be.

He thought he might ask Martine, sometime later, if the choir could help. Maybe they could paint the door together, the whole group. A color they chose. A color that was not gray primer, and not red, but some third color, some color that was theirs.

He would ask her. Later. Not today.

He walked out.

On the walk home, Tomás did not have much to say. Sina walked with him for a while, because they lived the same direction. The afternoon sun was low. The trees were bare. The wind was the kind that got into the cuffs of your sleeves.

At the corner where Sina would turn off toward her apartment, she stopped.

"Thank you for what you said," she said.

"I do not know if I said it well."

"You said it enough."

"Okay."

She looked at him for a moment. "My grandfather would have liked you," she said.

"I think I would have liked him."

"Yeah. He would have asked you a million questions. He was like that. He asked everyone questions."

She walked away down her block. Tomás stood on the corner for a moment, watching her go, then he walked the rest of the way home.

At home, his parents were in the kitchen. His mother had the pressure cooker going, which she only did when she was cooking feijoada, which she only did when she felt something large. His father was at the table, not reading the newspaper, which was unusual. The newspaper was folded closed at his elbow.

"You are home," his mother said.

"I am."

"How was rehearsal? How was the meeting?"

Tomás hung up his jacket. He sat down at the table across from his father. He put his folder on the floor beside him.

"We decided to sing," he said.

His mother stopped stirring. She turned around with the wooden spoon in her hand. "Together?"

"Together. Martine called it consultation. Sina taught us about it first. Everybody got a chance to speak. Nobody yelled. We said what we were afraid of, and what we wanted. And we — we all said yes. Even the little ones."

His mother came over and sat down at the table. She set the spoon on a paper towel.

"Tell us," she said.

So he told them. He told them about Fatimah saying, when I saw the word I thought, I hope Yaffa is okay. He told them about Sina saying she wanted to sing louder. He told them about Rohan saying he was scared and also mad. He told them what he himself had said — the thing about kids, and whether singing was a way of being brave. He got a little embarrassed telling them that part, because he was not sure it had been right.

His father listened. He did not say anything until Tomás was done.

Then his father said, "You said that? Out loud? In the room?"

"Yeah."

"To them?"

"To them."

His father nodded slowly, one nod, like a person confirming a thing he had suspected but had not yet known.

"Good," he said.

That was all he said. But his mother looked at Tomás across the table with a look that was more than her usual mother look, and Tomás understood that his father's "good" was a bigger word tonight than it usually was.

His mother served the feijoada when it was ready. They ate together. They talked about small things, because they had already talked about the big thing, and you have to let big things rest sometimes.

After dinner, Tomás helped with the dishes. His father dried. The radio was on, softly. His father was not a singer, but he hummed, sometimes, when he dried dishes. Tonight he was humming something Tomás did not recognize, a melody that looped and did not quite resolve.

"What is that, Dad?" Tomás asked.

"Hmm?"

"The song you're humming."

His father paused. He listened to himself, as if trying to catch what he had been doing.

"Oh," he said. "I do not know. Something my grandmother used to sing. In Hokkien. I do not remember the words."

"Can you teach it to me?"

"I do not remember it well."

"Whatever you remember."

His father thought for a moment. Then he began to hum it again, more deliberately, and after a phrase he gave Tomás a syllable, and another, and another. They were not words Tomás knew. His father did not seem entirely sure they were the right words, either, but he was trying.

They stood in the kitchen, a dish towel in his father's hand and a plate in Tomás's, and they traded the syllables back and forth until Tomás had the first phrase.

"That is enough for tonight," his father said. "I do not remember more."

"Ask your sister."

"I will email her tomorrow."

"Thanks, Dad."

His father put the dish towel on the hook. "Good night, Tomás."

"Good night, Dad."

Tomás went to his room. He sat at his desk with his notebook open and he wrote down the syllables his father had given him, as best as he could spell them, so he would not lose them.

The interfaith festival was held in Flushing Meadows Park, at the small amphitheater near the pond. On Saturday morning the sky was gray but not raining, the temperature cold but not biting, the kind of November weather where everyone wore hats but nobody shivered more than a little.

Tomás arrived with his parents at nine. The festival began at ten. The choir's slot was eleven-fifteen, and they would be singing between a Muslim spoken-word poet from the Bronx and a rabbi's klezmer ensemble from Queens.

The park was filling up. Tomás had not expected so many people. There were families with strollers, groups of teenagers from various religious youth groups, old people on benches with thermoses of coffee. There were booths with literature from synagogues, mosques, churches, temples, gurdwaras, Bahá'í centers, Buddhist centers, humanist organizations. There were tables with food, with flags, with candles, with pamphlets about peace.

Tomás noted something else, too. On a low rise about thirty yards from the amphitheater, behind a rope line the police had set up for any counter-demonstrators, there was a single man. He was holding a sign. The sign had words on it that Tomás did not want to read, and he did not read them, not closely. He let his eyes slide past it. The man was alone. He had a winter coat and a red hat. He stood in the cold and held his sign.

The festival had asked the police to keep counter-demonstrators behind the rope line. They had asked performers and attendees not to engage. That was the policy. Tomás's mother squeezed his shoulder as they walked past the rope.

"Do not look at him," she said.

"I am not."

"He is one," she said. "We are hundreds."

That was true. Tomás looked at the crowd, at the amphitheater filling up, at the booths, at the families, at the vendors selling hot chocolate. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. One man with a sign on a hillside, and a thousand other people.

He walked on.

Backstage at the amphitheater was a small white tent that the organizers had set up for performers. The choir assembled inside. Martine was there already, looking crisp in a black coat, directing people with small gestures, making sure Sina's sash was straight, adjusting Hye-jin's hair, asking Lamont to take off his gum, which he did, with a wink.

Tomás's parents hugged him and went to find their seats. His father stopped at the tent flap before leaving.

"Tomás."

"Yeah."

"Sing loud."

"Okay, Dad."

"I mean it."

"Okay."

His father squeezed his shoulder and left.

In the tent, Martine gathered them.

"I will be short," she said. "We have done the work. We have sung the music many times. We have made a decision together to be here. We are here. In seven minutes, we walk out. When we walk out, you look at the audience, you see them, you see all those faces, you take them in. They are your neighbors. They came to hear you. You sing for them. You sing with me. You sing with each other. You sing for the people who could not come. You sing for Sina's grandfather, who is far away but is close today."

She paused.

"There is one thing I will say that I have not said. If you feel fear on that stage, let the fear be behind you, like a coat you have hung up. Walk away from it. The music is ahead of you. Walk toward the music. Fear is a coat. The music is a room."

Tomás breathed. Coat. Room. Good.

They walked out.

Before they walked out, though, there was one more moment. Yaffa caught Tomás's sleeve at the tent flap.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"Look."

She pointed out through the gap in the tent flap. Tomás looked. In the third row, next to Yaffa's father, a seat that had been empty a minute ago now had a person in it.

Yaffa's mother. Mrs. Gold. In her blue scarf, wrapped once today, her hands folded tight in her lap, her face very still.

"She said she could not come," Yaffa whispered. "She said not yet."

"She came."

"She came."

Yaffa's eyes were bright. She pressed the heel of her hand to her eye, hard, for one second, and then let it go.

"Do not tell anyone," she said. "I want to sing first. I want to be a person who sings. I will cry later."

"Okay."

"Thanks, Tomás."

"For what?"

"I don't know. For being in this."

She went back to her spot in line.

Tomás looked one more time through the tent flap. Mrs. Gold had her hands flat on her own knees now, and she was taking a deep breath, the kind of breath you take before going under water.

The amphitheater was packed. The front rows were reserved for families of the performers. Tomás saw his parents, in the third row center. He saw Yaffa's father, alone but proud-looking, beside an empty chair. He saw Fatimah's parents. He saw Sina's mother, and beside her, a framed photograph on her lap. Tomás knew without being told that it was Sina's grandfather. Sina's mother had brought him to the festival, in the only way she could.

The choir took their places on the risers.

Martine stepped up. She bowed to the audience. The audience applauded.

Martine turned, raised her hands.

Nora at the piano. The first chord opened.

The Hebrew came.

Tomás sang. He sang with the others. He sang Hinei ma tov u-ma naim, the psalm about brothers dwelling in unity, and he let the words roll off his tongue with the shapes he had practiced for weeks. He watched Martine. He watched her hands. He watched her face, which was calm and attentive and a little joyful.

He glanced, once, at the crowd. He saw faces. He saw a woman in a headscarf with a hand over her heart. He saw an old man with a kippah nodding along. He saw a young couple holding hands. He saw a teenage girl with her mouth slightly open. He saw a little boy on his father's shoulders. The amphitheater was full of faces, and the faces were listening.

The Hebrew ended. The bridge began.

The Arabic came in. Fatimah's solo line was first; Tomás heard her voice rise, clear, the way it had been in rehearsal, the way it had been at the preview. He held the chord underneath her. He did his work.

Fatimah finished her line. The choir came in. The Arabic continued, the melody rising and falling in the way that had felt foreign at the beginning of the fall and felt now like breath.

The third movement approached.

Three beats of silence.

Sina stepped forward.

Tomás could see, from his spot in the tenor section, the photograph in Sina's folder. She had pinned it inside the front cover. It was a photograph of a man with white hair and a mustache, in a gray jacket, smiling at someone outside the frame. His face was a kind face. Tomás had not seen it before.

Sina did not look at the photograph. She did not need to. She had seen it every day of her life.

She opened her mouth.

She sang.

The line was the one Tomás had been living with for weeks now. The Earth is one country, and mankind its citizens. Bahá'u'lláh's words, shaped to a simple melody, sung by a fourteen-year-old girl in a park in Queens on a gray Saturday, with her grandfather's photograph pinned to the inside of her music, while behind her the choir hummed an open chord, while in front of her a thousand people listened, while behind all of them, on a hillside, one man with a sign stood silent.

Tomás sang the chord under her. He held his part. He watched her.

Sina's line rose, held, and resolved. The choir came in behind her, all of them together, the three languages braided now into a single fabric, Hebrew and Arabic and Bahá'í, and they sang the final chord together, and Martine held them for the long held beat that closed the medley, and then her hands came down, and the song was done.

For two full seconds there was silence in the amphitheater.

In the third row, Mrs. Gold was still in her seat. She had not walked out. Her hands were in her lap. Her face was wet. She was not making any sound. She was looking at her daughter. Yaffa's father had his arm around her shoulders. They were both, in that moment, looking at the same girl, and that girl was their girl, and she had just sung.

Then the applause.

It was not polite applause. It was the kind of applause that is a crowd shouting with its hands. People stood up. People whistled. Somebody up front was crying; Tomás saw her wiping her face. Sina's mother was crying too, and she was holding the photograph up in both hands, so that Sina's grandfather could see his granddaughter, in the only way.

Tomás looked at Yaffa. Yaffa was looking at her father in the third row, who was clapping with his hands above his head, who was nodding, whose face had a look Tomás would later describe to his mother, trying to get the word right, as lit.

He looked at Fatimah. Fatimah's mother had her hands pressed to her mouth, both of them, not from horror but from something like awe. Fatimah's father, beside her, was beaming, openly, his face split.

He looked at Sina. Sina was looking at her own mother, and her own mother was holding the framed photograph of Farhad up a little higher, tilted toward the stage, as if the photograph could see, as if Farhad could see, through the glass and the miles and the walls. Sina had one hand over her own heart, a small gesture, barely visible from the risers.

He looked at Lamont. Lamont was, of all people, crying. Lamont, who made jokes before every performance, who had given the Tomato Man a fist bump, had tears running down his face and was not wiping them.

He looked at Yaffa, one more time. Yaffa was looking at her mother, and her mother was looking back, and the distance between them — the distance that had been the size of a small war, the size of family history, the size of nightmares and headscarves and cousins killed — had collapsed, for one moment, to the distance of a third-row seat and a riser, a distance of ten yards, a distance a person could cross in a few seconds if they wanted to.

Martine turned and bowed to the choir. Then she turned and bowed to the audience. Then she gestured for the choir to bow. They bowed.

They walked off the stage.

In the white tent, there was a kind of quiet collective laughter, the laughter of people who have been holding their breath and are now releasing it. Lamont, who had been entirely serious on stage, let out a whoop. Hye-jin hugged Rohan. Sina stood with her folder closed and her face wet, not speaking.

Martine came in.

"You did it," she said.

"We did it," Lamont said.

"You did it."

They stood for a moment.

They went.

Tomás found his parents at the side of the amphitheater, where his mother had worked her way through the crowd with her particular combination of politeness and elbows. She hugged him hard enough to lift him a little. His father clapped him on the shoulder and did not speak, which was how his father said big things.

They walked through the festival for a while. They bought hot chocolate. They stopped at a booth selling simit and bought four. They stood at the edge of the pond and watched a family of ducks be slowly and deliberately grouchy toward each other.

On their way out, they passed the rope line where the counter-demonstrator had been. The man with the sign was gone. The police officer on duty told Tomás's mother, without her asking, that the man had packed up after about an hour and gone home. "He was tired," the officer said. "And cold. And nobody was paying attention."

Tomás's mother nodded. She said, "Thank you for your work today."

The officer smiled, a small, real smile. "Thank the kids," she said.

They walked to the subway.

The subway platform was crowded with people leaving the festival. Tomás saw Rohan and his mother on the far end of the platform, Rohan giving Tomás a thumbs-up across the crowd. He saw Hye-jin with her father, who was bowing slightly to an elderly woman he must have just met. He saw Lamont being lifted off the ground briefly by his grandmother, who was a small woman but who could, apparently, still lift a thirteen-year-old boy when the spirit moved her.

He did not see Yaffa or Fatimah on the platform. They had gone in a different direction with their families, probably, or had taken a bus.

He saw Sina, though. She and her mother were standing near the stairs, her mother still holding the photograph in both hands, her mother's eyes closed. Sina caught Tomás's look and gave him a small wave. He waved back.

The train came. It was crowded. Tomás's father put a hand on Tomás's shoulder as they squeezed on. His mother got a seat. His father gave up his seat for an old man with a cane, and then stood, holding the pole, swaying with the train.

Tomás watched his father's face. His father's face, in the fluorescent light of the subway car, looked older than Tomás usually let himself see. There were lines around the mouth. There was gray at the temples. But the face was also, tonight, lit up in a way Tomás had rarely seen. His father was smiling a little to himself, and Tomás realized his father was probably going over the concert in his head, note by note, the way a person goes over a meal they have just eaten and is still tasting.

The train rocked. The lights flickered. An announcement crackled about a delay at some station further down the line. A toddler across the aisle began to cry, and the toddler's mother rocked the stroller gently, and the toddler stopped. The city did its usual small human things.

They got off at their stop. They walked home through the park, which was emptier now than it had been in the morning. The ducks, or relatives of the ducks Tomás had seen earlier, were still being grouchy to each other, on schedule.

At the corner before their building, Tomás's mother stopped.

"I want to stop here," she said, "and say one thing."

Tomás and his father stopped.

"I am proud of you," she said. She was looking at Tomás. "I am proud, and also I am tired, and also I am hungry for a small second lunch, and also I am thinking about all those other children and their parents and the whole long day we just had. I am saying it now so that I do not lose it in everything else that will happen this evening."

"Okay, Mom."

"I am proud of you."

"I heard you."

"Sometimes you have to hear things more than once."

He smiled.

"And you," she said, turning to her husband. "I am proud of you too."

"I did not do anything," his father said.

"You sat in a chair with your hand on my hand for forty-five minutes, and you watched your son, and you did not make a sound, and you listened with your whole body. I know the difference between a man who listens with his whole body and one who does not. I was proud of you for the whole hour."

His father cleared his throat. He looked down at the sidewalk. Then he looked up at her.

"Obrigado," he said. He said it rarely, in Portuguese. He was not fluent. But he had the word.

She nodded.

They walked the rest of the way home.

On the walk home from the subway, Tomás's father did a thing Tomás did not expect.

He stopped walking.

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, three blocks from home, and he turned to face Tomás, and he said, "I want to say something."

Tomás stopped.

His father was not a speechmaker. His father was a cook, a father, a man of short sentences. He did not often stop on the sidewalk to say something.

His mother, also, stopped. She stepped a half-step back, because she understood that the thing he was about to say was not for her.

"I was wrong to doubt," his father said. "I want you to know that. When you first told us about this medley, in August, I thought — I thought, why are a bunch of kids singing about peace in three languages? Nobody listens to kids. Nobody listens to anybody. I thought it was a nice thing that would not matter. I thought your mother was being too — " He paused. "I thought, it will be nice, and nothing will come of it, and Tomás will move on."

He shook his head.

Tomás did not know what to say.

"Papa," he said, which was not a name he usually used.

His father put a hand on his shoulder. Squeezed.

"Do not forget," his father said.

"I won't."

"Good."

They walked the rest of the way home.

In the apartment, his mother made lunch. She made arroz, feijão, a small piece of fish with lemon. His father sat at the table and read the newspaper, which was his Saturday habit, except today he read it with the radio off, which was not his habit.

After lunch, his mother did the dishes. His father went to the couch and closed his eyes for what he called a small rest, which usually lasted an hour. Tomás wandered the apartment for a while, restless, the way a person is restless after a large thing has happened and they do not yet know what to do with the rest of their day.

Eventually, he sat down at the piano.

He played scales for a while. He played a piece he had been working on for his piano lessons, a Chopin prelude in A minor. He played a pop song he had been messing with, a thing by an indie band his mother liked.

Then he played the Bahá'í melody.

He played it slowly, the way he had been playing it for weeks now. The Earth is one country, and mankind its citizens. The line rose, held, and resolved. He played it again.

His father stirred on the couch.

"What is that?" his father said.

"The line from the festival. Sina's solo."

"Ah."

His father sat up slowly. He scratched the back of his neck. He came over to the piano and sat down on the bench beside Tomás. The bench creaked.

"Play it again."

Tomás played it.

His father listened. Then he said, "Teach it to me."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"It is simple. It is not hard to play."

"Good. Teach a man who is not hard to teach."

Tomás laughed. He moved over so his father could sit in the middle of the bench. He put his father's right hand on the keys.

"This finger, here. Then this one. Then this one. Then this one."

His father, who was a man whose hands had spent twenty-five years with a cleaver and a ladle, was a surprisingly patient student. He made the notes, one by one. He forgot a note. Tomás corrected him. He forgot another. Tomás corrected him again, more gently. He got the whole line through once.

"Oof," his father said.

"You did it."

"Barely."

"Do it again."

He did it again. This time more smoothly.

"Again."

"Tomás, I am an old man."

"You are fifty-three."

"Which is old."

"Which is not old. Again."

His father played the line again. By the third time, it was almost a melody.

His mother came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. She stood in the doorway.

"Are you teaching your father to play?" she said.

"He asked me to."

"You asked him to?" she said, to her husband. "You? You of the radio-only hands?"

"I am expanding my hands," his father said, with dignity. "They have been to many places. Now they come to the piano."

She laughed. She set the dish towel on her shoulder.

"Play it again," she said. "I want to hear."

His father played it again. His mother listened. Her eyes were a little wet, which she would deny later if asked.

When he finished, she came over. She leaned on the back of the bench and put her chin on her husband's shoulder, and she said, "Boa noite, mundo."

Which meant, good night, world.

They stayed like that for a while.

Outside, it was getting dark earlier than it had a week ago. The building across the way had its lights coming on, window by window. Someone in the apartment next door was playing a clarinet, a scale, a tentative slow scale, a child practicing after dinner. A train passed, a far distant train, its horn a soft long note.

Tomás thought about the day. He thought about the amphitheater and the thousand faces. He thought about Sina's grandfather's photograph. He thought about the red word on the door, gray-primed now. He thought about Yaffa's mother, who had not come today, but who had said she would, some day, and who had meant it. He thought about the man with the sign, tired and cold and gone home. He thought about the song, which had lived in his body for months and which would live there, he realized, for the rest of his life. He would be able to sing the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Bahá'í line, when he was an old man, when he had gray hair, when he had children of his own. He would sing them, probably, to his children, if he had them, when they were small and needed to be rocked.

He thought about what his father had said. Do not forget.

He played the Bahá'í line one more time, alone, his father's hand now withdrawn to rest on his knee.

The Earth is one country, and mankind its citizens.

The line rose, held, and resolved.

Outside, the clarinet was still going. The train was gone. The lights were coming on.

Tomás closed the piano lid.

"Dinner soon," his mother said.

"Okay," Tomás said.

But tonight is enough.

He got up. He went to set the table.

His mother was at the stove again, stirring something. The smell of onions and garlic and something else, maybe ginger, was filling the apartment. His father was back on the couch with his eyes closed but his mouth curved in the slightest smile, the smile of a man pretending to nap but not quite napping.

He thought about the word home. He had always felt at home in this apartment, with these three chairs at this table. He thought, though, that home was a larger word than he had let it be. The community center was a home of sorts. The amphitheater was, for an hour today, a home. Sina's apartment, which he had visited twice, with its smell of saffron rice and the photograph of Farhad on a small table near the door — that was a home. Yaffa's apartment, which he had not yet been inside, was a home. Fatimah's, which he also had not yet been inside, was a home.

The Earth is one country, the line said.

The Earth, thought Tomás, is a lot of apartments.

He set the glass with the chip at his own place, because he did not mind it.

His mother called them to dinner. His father rose from the couch with a stretch and a small groan. They sat.

They ate. They did not talk much, because the day had been so full that quiet felt like a gift. At one point his father laughed, softly, at nothing in particular, and said, "That line. Sina's line."

"Yeah."

"It is in my head now."

"Mine too."

"You taught me the notes. But the line is in my head. I do not even know the words. I just know the shape."

"I can teach you the words."

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Okay."

They finished dinner. His mother had made arroz doce for dessert, with cinnamon on top in the shape of a cross because she was old-fashioned like that. They ate it in bowls, with small spoons, at the kitchen table, while the last of the light went out of the sky.

After dinner, his mother put on music. A record, because she liked records. It was a record of bossa nova from the sixties, recorded in Rio, a woman's voice and a guitar and a very quiet brush on a snare. The apartment filled with the sound of it.

His father took his mother's hand and they danced, for three-quarters of a song, in the tiny space between the kitchen table and the couch. They did not dance dramatically. They swayed. His mother had her head on his father's shoulder. His father had his hand in the middle of her back.

Tomás watched from the piano bench.

When the song ended, his mother said, "I am going to bed. It is nine and I feel like it is midnight."

"I will come in a bit," his father said.

She kissed Tomás on the top of the head, and then his father on the cheek, and she went to bed.

His father sat down on the couch. Tomás stayed on the piano bench.

"Dad."

"Hmm."

"I want to ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"Are you going to come to the next concert? When we have one?"

His father smiled. "When will there be one?"

"Martine said probably in the spring. A whole concert, not just the medley. She wants us to build a bigger program."

"Then yes."

"Even if Mom is busy?"

"Even if your mother is busy."

"Good."

"Were you worried?"

"Not worried. Just — checking."

"Good checking."

They sat in the quiet for a moment. Outside, the clarinet next door had stopped, and another neighbor, further down the hall, was running a dishwasher. The steam pipe in the corner clanked once, a little metallic sigh, and then settled.

"Dad."

"Hmm."

"Tonight when we were walking home, and you said — you know. That thing. About how us kids did something you don't know how to do."

"I remember."

"I wanted to say. It's not true that you don't know how. You know how."

His father looked at him.

"You know how," Tomás said. "You just have not done it in a while. You set chairs in our living room for a meeting you did not think would work. You came to the preview. You came today. You danced with Mom just now to a song she likes more than you do. You are doing it. It looks different than what we did, but it is the same thing."

His father did not answer for a moment. Then he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap.

"Okay," he said, softly. "Okay. Maybe."

"Not maybe."

"Okay. Yes."

"Good."

His father stood up slowly. He patted Tomás on the shoulder as he passed on his way to the hallway.

"Goodnight, Tomás."

"Goodnight, Dad."

His father went to bed.

Tomás stayed on the piano bench a little longer. He opened the lid again, quietly, and laid his fingers on the keys without pressing them. He thought about the syllables his father had given him in the kitchen earlier in the week, the Hokkien phrase from his father's grandmother, and he thought about the Hebrew and the Arabic and the Farsi in his folder, and he thought about the Portuguese his mother spoke on the phone with her sister, and he thought about the English that was the language of the city around him. He thought about how many languages were in his life already, without him having chosen a single one of them. They had simply come to him, because he had been born where he was born, to the people he was born to.

But I will keep trying.

He played one soft chord, so soft that he barely pressed the keys.

He closed the lid.

He stood up.

He went to bed.

In his bed, with the lamp off, with the city small and distant through his window, with the familiar ticking of the radiator and the familiar smell of his own room, Tomás lay on his back and looked up at the ceiling.

Tomorrow would be Sunday. Tomorrow his parents would sleep late. Tomorrow he would eat toast and read a book and maybe text Sina to see how she was feeling. Tomorrow there would be no choir, because Martine had given them Sunday off. Tomorrow would be an ordinary day.

The week after that, rehearsal would start again, for the next thing. Spring concert. New pieces. New work. Maybe new friends in the choir. Maybe hard conversations. Maybe good ones.

He let his thoughts settle.

He thought, as he fell asleep, of the photograph in Sina's folder. Farhad. A kind face, somewhere behind walls, in a country Tomás had never been to and did not know. Farhad, who had written letters about a prison cat, who had written poems, who would never hear his granddaughter sing in an amphitheater in Queens. Or perhaps he would. Perhaps somebody had recorded the performance, somebody with a phone, and perhaps it would travel, in the strange ways that things travel, and perhaps somewhere, in some cell, with a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil, or with nothing at all but the memory his daughter would send him through whatever letter they allowed her, he would know.

Tomás hoped he would know.

That was Tomás's last thought before he slept.

Outside, the city was quiet. A siren somewhere, the way there was always a siren somewhere in a city. A train far off, its horn soft. The wind moved a plastic bag along the sidewalk below the window, a small dry sound.

The Earth, one country.

The apartment, one home.

The boy, asleep.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

"The Choir of Many Languages" is a work of fiction, but the practice at its heart — people of different faiths and nations singing together — is as old as faith itself and very much alive today. Around the world, interfaith choirs and musical gatherings bring together voices in Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, English, Sanskrit, Mandarin, and many other languages. This book is a small salute to them.

I wrote this story for young readers who are, like Tomás and his friends, thirteen or so, standing at the beginning of a life in which they will be asked, again and again, to decide how they will live among neighbors who are different from them. The answers in real life are rarely easy. Songs do not solve conflicts. Tomás knows this. His parents know it. His friends know it. But singing, and listening, and sitting in the same room, are things people can do. They are not everything, but they are not nothing, either.

One of the faith traditions represented in this story is the Bahá'í Faith, which teaches the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity. Bahá'ís hold that the great faiths of the world come from the same divine source, revealed at different times and places to meet the needs of each age. They also practice consultation, a way of making decisions together in which honesty and humility are held in balance. I have tried to represent these ideas through the lives of Sina and her mother, and through the choir's own hard decision near the end of the book. I have not put words into the mouths of the Central Figures of any faith. Out of respect for the Bahá'í community and for all traditions represented here, I have tried to let the characters, rather than any speech or sermon, carry the story's meaning.

The choir in this book is invented, but the people like them are real. They are singing right now, somewhere, in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples and parks and community centers and school cafeterias and subway platforms. They are children and teenagers and grown-ups and old people. They do not always agree. They do not always get along. But they keep coming back, week after week, because the music asks them to, and because the work is long and there is no quick way through.

If you are a young person reading this, and if any of the things Tomás and his friends went through feel familiar to you — the weight of a family's history, the fear of being seen, the courage to keep singing — please know that you are not alone. There are people who love you. There are songs waiting for you. There are rooms with folding chairs and folders with your name on them.

Keep singing. Keep listening. Keep showing up.

— Crimson Ark Publishing