At the afternoon camera test, the studio had covered its skylights for the broadcast. Vera could still see her heart in the monitors whenever a camera faced the street: an enormous, imperfect shape of colour behind the crowd, cut in half by the buildings. A silver thread ran from the thing in the sky to her physical heart. It showed through her dress as a fine, bright line just left of the buttons.
The first time she had come to this studio, her spirit heart had floated an arm's length above her, about the size of a melon. Her mother had put one hand over the pale green she had left in it and told Vera to stand still for the photograph. Now a camera needed its own dark hood to keep Vera's heart from tinting the lens. People watched it from bridges and apartment roofs. On clear nights, someone always posted a picture with a circle around a fleck of colour: That one's mine.
It was her first song's fifteenth anniversary. The television people had made the entrance look like a kitchen, though the studio kitchen was four floors down and windowless. There was a chipped yellow cup on the set, a basket of oranges, and a little radio of the kind Vera had never owned. On the worktable behind it sat the cassette player she had owned. Her assistant had found the machine in a box at Vera's mother's house and spent a week making it work. The tape itself was in Vera's bag.
She was going to play the whole recording tonight and put it on an anniversary edition of the song next week. She had said so in the advertisements.
At the stage door that evening, a woman stopped her with one hand raised, palm out. She kept her distance. She and the boy beside her wore blue audience passes; he gripped the strap of a schoolbag the same colour.
"You can go," the guard said to Vera.
"It's all right." Vera stopped. Above the woman's head floated a small spirit heart striped orange and brown. Its silver thread vanished into the collar of her coat. The boy's heart was almost entirely a thin, bright blue.
"We don't need a picture," the woman said. "I just wanted to thank you. When my father came back from the hospital, he couldn't get up the stairs to his room. My son played your song from his little speaker. We took one step each time the bass came in. It took an hour the first night." She looked at the boy, who pressed his lips together, embarrassed. "By the end of the month he could do it without the music. But we still hear those stairs when the song comes on."
Vera had heard extravagant versions of this sort of story. This one had a steepness and duration she could picture. She said, "I'm glad he got home."
"He's well now." The woman smiled. "My son wanted me to ask whether the girl at the beginning will be on tonight. The one who says, 'Again, from the middle.' He likes that part best."
The boy looked as if he would rather his mother had not told anyone what he liked best. Vera said, "I think you'll hear her."
The woman thanked her again. The boy gave a quick wave without letting go of his bag. The guard opened the door, and Vera went inside.
The phrase at the beginning of the song belonged to Iona. Vera's younger sister had said it into a kitchen tape recorder when they were seventeen and fifteen, after Vera missed a note for the fourth time. Vera had kept the count-in on the demo because the next take was the one where her voice stopped sounding as though it had borrowed another singer's throat. A producer kept it on the single. By the time Iona asked her to take it off, the single was everywhere, and Vera had answered as if its success were a technical difficulty nobody could solve.
For years, listeners had pictured a patient little girl directing a future star through her first song. They sent drawings of her. Some thanked Vera for letting them hear a childhood so gentle that they could live inside it for four minutes. Vera had said in interviews that Iona was the reason she began singing. It was an easy sentence to say aloud, and a hard one to retrieve.
In the dressing room, Vera set her bag on a chair. She could still see the woman and boy through the window, making their way toward the audience entrance under the heart. The woman stopped once and tilted her face up. Vera tried to imagine the stairwell: the boy waiting on one step with his speaker, his grandfather reaching for the next. The bit of Iona's voice that Vera had used without asking had helped them. Both things were true, and she wanted very badly for one truth to settle the other.
Her phone lit up. Iona had answered the message Vera sent three days earlier with the broadcast time. I'm downstairs.
Vera read it twice, then gave the door staff Iona's name.
The tape lay in her bag, inside a cracked plastic case. On its paper label Iona had written VERA TRYING IT in red block letters. The full recording began with the scrape of a chair and Vera asking if they could start at the chorus because the verse made her sound miserable. Iona said no, they needed to find the place where it went wrong. They went over three lines again and again. A kettle whistled. At one point Iona joined her, not to harmonize, only to show her where a vowel could open. Vera laughed so hard at the sound of their two voices that she could barely find the next note.
After the single came out, Vera learned to laugh away from microphones. She learned how to finish a verse even when she could no longer feel its words. On the tape, before either of them knew there was a right way to be heard, she could hear herself fail and try again. She had promised that voice to the audience. She had not mentioned to Iona that most of what she loved about it happened because Iona was there.
Iona arrived wearing a raincoat damp at the shoulders. She had cut her hair much shorter than in the last photograph Vera had seen. Her spirit heart floated beneath the low ceiling lamp, the silver thread crossing one wet shoulder. There was no camera in the room, but Vera felt the old instinct to arrange her face.
"Hello," she said.
"Hi." Iona left the door ajar. "I saw the trailer."
Vera touched the case. "They used the bit I sent them. Not the rest."
"Tonight is the rest."
Iona spoke quietly, without the great, injured voice Vera had prepared herself to resist. That made it harder to answer.
"I thought you'd like to hear it again," Vera said. "It's us, before all this."
"I listened to it when you mailed me the copy."
"And?"
"It's us in the kitchen. I can hear you breathing through your nose because you had a cold." Iona took the empty chair, but did not remove her coat. "I don't want them to have the kitchen too. No more of my voice on the anniversary release. And please stop telling them I made you. I was there while you learned a song."
Vera looked down at the tape. "You did more than that."
"I know what I did. I just don't want to hear it in another trailer."
The words landed too neatly. Vera felt herself push against them. "People have asked for the full recording for years. I wanted them to hear what I sounded like when I wasn't trying to sound like Vera."
Iona glanced at the yellow cup on the set, visible through the open dressing-room door. "I heard you."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know."
Vera had not meant to look up. A narrow strip of sky showed above the window frame, and somewhere beyond it was the yellow Iona had left in her heart when they were children. The sea of later colours had spread over it, but Vera knew its place. She had found it from a dozen hotel roofs. It was still there. Each time she found it, she could believe for a minute that something between them remained as it had been.
Iona followed her eyes to the window. "The tape, Vera."
Vera turned back. Iona's hands were folded on the wet raincoat; one fingernail had a dark mark at its edge. Vera did not know where she worked now, or whether she still hated getting caught in the rain. Iona had come in person to ask for a thing Vera could do.
"I'll tell them to cut your parts," Vera said.
Iona waited.
Vera opened the case and saw the handwritten label again. Without Iona's directions, the pauses between Vera's attempts were only silence. Without Iona singing the line beside her, Vera's laughter had no source. The recording could be shortened, but the girl Vera wanted to show the world had not been alone in that room.
"I won't play it," she said. "I won't put out the anniversary edition."
Iona took a breath. "Thank you."
Nothing in the room changed colour.
The floor director knocked and put his head around the door. "Five minutes. Playback's standing by."
"Strike the tape," Vera told him.
"The kitchen tape?"
"Yes. And cancel the anniversary edition. I'll speak to the label after the show."
He looked from Vera to Iona, then back at his clipboard. "We announced the uncut tape in the first segment. What do you want in that slot?"
The answer she wanted was on the cassette. She could feel its small weight in her hand. "Leave it empty for now."
"It can't stay empty," he said.
"I know."
He went away to find a minute of something else. Vera heard him speaking rapidly into his headset as he crossed the set. The yellow cup came off the table. Someone carried the player away by its handle, its loose cord dragging behind it. Through the window, the woman and boy were gone, and other people had taken their place on the square.
"You can keep the tape," Iona said. "I don't need it."
Vera snapped the case shut. She had expected Iona to ask for it, and had been ready to give it up. Keeping it was less simple. "I thought you might want a copy without me singing on it."
"Then it would be mostly kettle."
Vera laughed once. Iona's mouth moved, almost in answer, but the floor director called Vera's name before either of them said more.
Iona went out by the side door. Vera did not follow her. From the stage, she watched an assistant wheel the little radio away, leaving a bare patch on the table where the tape player had stood. The host turned the missing recording into a sentence about the surprises of live television. Three minutes of old interview clips filled its place. Vera sat and watched herself tell familiar stories with a face that knew when to smile. In the last clip she said, "My sister Iona made me. Everything good started with her."
The screen went dark. The boy from the stage door sat in the second row, his schoolbag tucked under his feet. He looked past Vera at the empty worktable. She had told him he would hear the girl on the tape.
"You've always said such lovely things about your sister," the host said. He turned his chair toward Vera and waited for the next one.
"I kept saying she made me," Vera said. The camera was close enough for her to see its red light. "That wasn't mine to say. I promised the rest of that tape. I shouldn't have."
The host looked down at his cards. In her ear, someone counted the seconds until the song. Vera could have filled them with the old story or with the recording she had wanted to share. Instead the camera held on her while she had nothing more to give it. The music began without a recorded count-in. Several mouths in the front row made the shape of Iona's four words. Vera entered on her own first note.
Afterward, people waited outside under her heart. There were fans with their phones held high, and strangers who had simply stopped to watch the colours travel across the clouds. Vera stood a moment inside the doorway before the guard cleared a path. She could pick out where Iona's yellow lay, far up in the crowded light. She did not know whether Iona had stayed to hear the song, or had ridden home through it. Her phone was in her hand. She typed, Did you get home dry? and sent it. No answer came while she waited.
She put the phone away and went out. Light from the heart lay across the wet pavement in a dozen colours. Vera stepped into it; the silver thread came with her.