1987

 

Brooke needs to rest. As soon as she’s passed the stench of stagnant water, and has reached the fragrance of honeysuckle, she sits on a bench in the shade of a maple. Her husband joins her and passes her a water bottle. Karl rests a hand on the bowling ball rolling around inside her belly, and indicates with his eyes a woman jogging toward them, pushing a stroller in which a baby sleeps. “That’ll be you next summer.”

 

Ha! As if she’ll be that slim and statuesque a few months after childbirth. Brooke smiles as the jogger passes, but her attempt to form a connection with the new mother goes unnoticed.

 

Her attention moves to a pile of dead cicadas at the base of the tree trunk. “Ugh,” she says.

 

Karl leans in for a closer look. “I remember the last time the locusts came out, my dad telling me about how they stay underground for seventeen years, then come out all at once. I think it blows my mind now as much as it did when I was ten.”

 

She places a hand on his shoulder. He’s been talking about his dad a lot lately, as he prepares to become a father himself.

 

A sonorous chitter rises up from the trembling ground. Karl says, “Think he can hear that?”

 

“I think she can probably hear that.”

 

“It sounds like aliens from outer space.”

 

Brooke closes her eyes for a moment, absorbs the vibration, and sees herself onstage, her belly half as round as it is now, taking a bow with a violin in her hand, wondering if this is to be her final performance. “To me, it sounds like applause,” she says.

 

2004

 

Brooke is impressed by the student guide’s ability to walk backward without tripping over anything or bumping into anyone. “We’re gonna go to the performing arts center next,” the young woman says. “It has a concert hall with over nine-hundred seats.”

 

Gracie’s eyebrows shoot up at this. Brooke and Karl exchange smiles, just as they always do while reveling in the applause that follows their daughter’s piano recitals.

 

A chorus of locusts reaches a crescendo.

 

Two girls on the tour complain about the little brown carcasses strewn along the path. “I keep almost stepping on them.” “I know! And their eyes are so creepy.”

 

Brooke remembers that when Grace was five or six years old, and the family was eating ice cream on a park bench, Karl told their daughter that she’d been born in the year of the cicada. “What’s the year of the cicada?” she’d asked, licking her chocolate beard. When he’d gone on to explain the lifecycle of the insect—that they survive for only a month or so after seventeen years of hibernation—their daughter had cried. “They miss out on everything,” she’d said.

 

Brooke still sees that sweet, compassionate face now, over a decade later, on the young woman walking alongside Karl.

           

Across campus, the chapel bells play a piece of music Brooke doesn’t recognize as anything she has played on the violin, nor as anything she’s heard her daughter play on piano.

 

“What is that?” Gracie asks, looking around.

 

The guide, still walking backward as she leads the tour group across the tree-shaded quad, tells Gracie the chimes are playing the university’s alma mater.

 

Karl takes Brooke’s hand. “She’s going to love it here.”

 

Brooke sighs. “I’m going to miss her.”

           

2021

 

“I miss her,” Brooke says, as she settles onto the bench beside Karl. “I know most of our friends’ve been apart from their kids for the past year, but…she’s so…far away.” She is half a world away.

 

“She’s living her life,” Karl says.

 

Brooke is about to say yes—she knows Gracie is living her life, but that doesn’t make her miss their daughter any less—and instead acknowledges the comment by squeezing his hand.

 

A year and a half ago, when the world abruptly shut down, Brooke and Karl cancelled their airline tickets, and reluctantly abandoned their plans to visit a continent they’d never been to before. They had looked forward to watching their daughter perform onstage for an international audience, to experiencing the life she had established for herself.

 

Gracie, like her parents, had been forced to recalibrate.

 

Brooke and Karl tried to compensate for the isolation they felt by taking daily walks around the lake. On an icy afternoon when they would’ve stayed inside even if there hadn’t been the threat of a deadly virus, Brooke took her violin out of its case, rosined the bow, and played the last piece of music she had performed onstage, during the second trimester of her pregnancy: “Winter” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. She played it the next day as well, and the day after that, and the score simultaneously haunted her and uplifted her throughout the weeks that followed. When the snow melted, she played “Spring” and hummed the joyful melody to herself as she went about her day and gradually resumed day-to-day activities that had been put on hold.

 

And now, seated on a bench beside her husband, the light notes of “Summer” glitter from the surface of the lake, until a deafening rattle emanates from every tree bordering the path. The sound is more forlorn this year, as if the cicadas are acknowledging that humans are also coming out of hibernation.

 

“At least she doesn’t have to listen to this,” Karl says. It takes Brooke a moment to realize he’s talking about Gracie, who—being on the other side of the world—has avoided this onslaught of the seventeen-year locust.

 

Their daughter is finally performing onstage again, finally giving piano lessons in-person again. “She’s living her life,” Brooke says.

 

“Maybe we should start thinking about living ours,” Karl says.

 

“Haven’t we been doing that all along?”

 

Brooke’s question is lost to the cacophony of the locusts. Karl rises from the bench, holds out his hand, and she takes it. A woman jogs toward them, pushing her baby in a stroller. The baby laughs, his mother propelled by the music of the cicadas, his cheek touched by a honeysuckle breeze. His laughter brings the two women together in a warm, shared smile.

 

Brooke continues along the path with Karl, turning back once to watch the young mother jog out of view.