The one-hundred-person audition round was livestreamed starting at six in the evening. Behind the stage were 1,200 people and 200 chairs. Anyone who arrived late had to sit on the floor.
Mook sat on the floor in the corner closest to the wall, eyes closed, running through the order in her head. Don’t follow the drums. Make the drums follow you. Open your throat wider than feels necessary. Raise the second section by a half step.
Three sentences from three people who had died in different places, in different years, and had never known one another at all.
She arranged them into the structure of a single song.
“Bitch.” Auntie Phai squatted down beside her and held out a bottle of water. “You look pale as a ghost. Have you eaten anything?”
Mook heard only the words Have you eaten anything? She took the bottle and nodded, which happened to be the correct answer.
The staff called Group Eleven.
Onstage, the lights were more intense than anything she had ever encountered in her life, hot against her scalp. Three cameras rolled along tracks. Every seat in the auditorium was filled. The judges sat in the fifth row, in the center. The same white-haired judge was seated at the very end.
And in the center of the stage, about three steps from where she stood, was the spot where Mom had collapsed.
Mook didn’t look that way. She knew that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to get a single word out.
The music began.
What happened in the first ten seconds was something she had prepared herself for but had never experienced on a big stage—the entire band’s sound vanished. It simply disappeared, as if someone had turned a knob all the way down. All that remained was the sound of her own breathing and the blood pulsing in her ears.
Then the voices that came in to replace it were the voices of people who had died in this theater.
A worker in the parking lot talked about scaffolding ropes. A woman on the sixth step of the staircase said not to turn off the lights yet. An old man in the upper section said, “I’m so tired.” They all spoke at once, over and over, for as long as she stood there.
Mook caught the beat from the drummer’s hands, visible in the corner of her eye, and entered the first section.
Don’t follow the drums. Make the drums follow you.
She came in a fraction later than usual—late enough to ruin everything if a beginner did it, but late in the way a singer who knows exactly what she’s doing can pull the entire band along with her. And the band really did follow. The drummer glanced up at her once, then eased his stick down half a beat to match her.
Open your throat wider than feels necessary.
She didn’t hear a single word of the sound that came out. She knew it had left her because she felt it in her breastbone and at the base of her tongue. She knew it had reached the audience because everyone in the front row lifted their heads at once.
Raise the second section by a half step.
When the song ended, the applause reached her ears a full second after the hands clapping in front of her—like seeing lightning and waiting for the thunder.
The short-haired female judge said something she couldn’t hear. The second judge continued at length. The audience laughed, and she smiled along with them.
An assistant raised a sign.
Pass.
From 1,200, only 100 remained, and she was one of them.
After coming offstage, she had to stand in the backstage corridor for more than two minutes before the sounds in her ears settled enough for her to walk straight. Auntie Phai came running up with a handkerchief, talking at length. Mook heard only the words you and I, alternating back and forth. Finally, Auntie Phai stopped, looked at her, pulled out her phone, and typed in huge letters. She held up the screen for Mook to read:
I’m proud of you.
It was the first time Auntie Phai had spoken to her in writing, even though they were standing less than an arm’s length apart.
That night, the three-minute clip of her was shared 70,000 times within six hours. People commented that it gave them chills. That it was obviously Daoruang’s voice. That the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Auntie Phai sat reading the comments and laughing until two in the morning, then complained, “Not one of these people knows your name. They only know your mother’s.”
Mook heard that entire sentence perfectly, which was the funniest thing that had happened all night.
Before she left, the white-haired judge came to find her in the backstage corridor, holding a cup of coffee that had already gone cold.
“I’ve been judging this stage for twenty-seven years,” he said. “The first year I sat here was the year your mother won.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know your mother withdrew that year?”
Mook looked up at him.
“One day before the finals,” he said. “She walked into the production office and said she wanted to withdraw. She didn’t give a single reason. The people in charge spent two hours trying to talk her out of it, but she stood firm. Then, the next morning, she arrived before anyone else, walked to the center of that stage, and sang in a way no one has ever been able to sing since.”
“Did she tell you why she came back, sir?”
“She said one sentence.” The white-haired judge looked down at the coffee in his hand. “She said, ‘This year, I’m going to sing with what I borrowed one last time.’”
Mook stood frozen there for thirty seconds after he had walked away.
“And what happened after that?” she called after him, her voice louder than she intended. “Where did my mother go the following year?”
He turned back with the smile of someone who thought it was an ordinary question.
“She disappeared from the industry for the entire year. People in the business said she went to recover somewhere in the provinces,” he said. “Then the year after that, she came back with a newborn.”
Mook remained in that corridor longer than she should have.
The year Mom disappeared from the industry. The year she booked a recording studio every Tuesday for three months straight without turning on the mic even once. The year she returned those earrings to the man in the brown shirt.
That was the year she was born.