The ritual had no name that explained it. Nadia's mother had called it the sitting, and her grandmother had called it the sitting, and Nadia, now that she was the one who arranged the chairs in the living room every third Sunday, called it the sitting too. Twelve people. Chairs in a circle. Hands open on the knees, palms up. Silence for as long as it lasted.
Her daughter Petra, who was nine, had been attending since she was old enough to sit still. She had never asked what it was for. She asked this year.
They were setting out the chairs when she asked. Nadia had a folding chair under each arm.
"What are we mourning?" Petra asked.
Nadia set down the chairs.
"No one knows," she said.
Petra considered this. She had her mother's habit of going quiet when she didn't understand something rather than asking again.
"Then why do we do it?"
Nadia had thought about this for years. She had asked her own mother once, and her mother had said: because it needs to be done. She had found this unsatisfying. She had read what she could find. There was very little. What she found was that no one knew, not fully, and that this was not a failure of the practice. It was the nature of the thing being practiced.
"Because something is gone," she said. "We don't know what it is. But we can feel the place where it was. The sitting is a way of saying: we know."
"Saying to who?"
Nadia looked at her daughter. "Maybe to whatever is gone. Maybe to ourselves."
Petra picked up one of the chairs and carried it to the circle without being asked.
The others arrived: the Vásquez family from down the street, who had practiced this since before they moved here; old Tomás, who came alone and always sat with his eyes closed; the twins from the apartment above, who had found the group six months ago and still came every time. Nadia knew some of their reasons. Most of them she did not. Some of them she suspected did not know their own reasons, only that not coming felt like a worse absence.
They sat. Hands open. The room was quiet in the specific way of a room full of people who are not performing silence but simply inside it.
Nadia kept her eyes open. She always did, from the year she became the one who arranged the chairs. She felt it was her job to hold the container while the others went somewhere inside it. She watched her daughter, who had her palms up and her eyes on the middle distance, and she could not tell what Petra was doing in there. Looking for the shape of it, maybe. The same way Nadia had at nine. The same way she still was, at forty-three, though she had learned to stop expecting the shape to resolve into something she could name.
The sitting lasted twenty-three minutes. It always did, though no one counted.
Afterward the Vásquez children played in the yard while the adults stood in the kitchen with cups of tea and talked about ordinary things. Tomás left without eating. He always did.
Petra found her mother at the window.
"I think I felt something," she said. "I don't know what."
Nadia looked at her daughter. Outside, the light was doing what late afternoon light does: turning the garden gold and a little sorrowful and almost, but not quite, like something she had seen before.
"That's it," she said.