第1章 第3節 二十年の沈黙
Twenty Years of Silence
As a child, Nora used to fall asleep to the sound of her mother recording.
Marion would carry a small machine everywhere, catching voices, rain, and bells.
She used to say that a sound, once saved, could never truly die.
After the drowning, Nora's father had thrown most of those machines away.
The house that used to be full of noise became painfully quiet.
Nora has never forgotten the grey morning of the by the sea.
The whole town had come, and yet no one would meet her eyes.
She remembers the , the flowers, and the cold wind from the water.
Only now, twenty years later, did one return to trouble her.
There had been a , but there had never been a body inside it.
The sea, people said, had taken Marion and would not give her back.
As a girl, Nora had accepted this the way children the sky.
She used to imagine her mother sleeping somewhere beneath the waves.
No one has ever shown her a with her mother truly in it.
A without a body is a story, not a fact, she realised.
She has attended that in her memory a hundred times since.
Never once had she asked the question that now felt so .
Why would a town bury an empty box and call it goodbye?
Her father used to end every conversation about it with the same words.
"The sea keeps what it takes," he would say, and then fall silent.
For years those words had sounded like to her young ears.
Tonight, in the dark, they sounded like something arranged in advance.
She has spent her life restoring the voices of strangers with great care.
Yet she had never dared to question the around her own mother.
The tape had asked her to find a town, and now she understood why.
Some silences, she thought, are not empty; they have been carefully built.