Does It Hurt

"There are questions a mother asks that no one has ever answered truthfully, because the truth is smaller than the fear and larger than the language."

Mrs. Carver opened the door before they knocked.

She stood in the narrow lit hall of the Flushing apartment in her quilted jacket, with a dish towel in her hand, and she looked at Lauren's face for a long time. She did not ask anything. Then she stepped aside, and put out a hand, and touched Lauren's sleeve once, very lightly, as one touches the arm of a person standing at the edge of a platform.

"She is in the kitchen," she said quietly. "She has been waiting since noon. I told her it might be tomorrow. She said she would wait in the kitchen."

The kitchen was warm and small, and smelled of ginger and steam. A pot sat on the back burner with its lid slightly askew. On the table, under the lamp, there were four cups laid out in a row, empty, and a plate of sesame buns that no one had touched since Thursday. Mrs. Jiang sat in the wicker chair by the window, in her navy cardigan, with her white head very straight and her hands folded on her closed umbrella.

She had been looking at the door. When it opened she did not stand up.

Lauren had done this seventy times. She knew the form of it as a surgeon knows the incision. You sat down. You did not hover. You said the word found or the word died in the first sentence and not the fifth, because the fifth sentence was a cruelty. You held a hand if it was offered and did not offer it if it was not. She had been taught all of it, in a gray conference room, by a woman with a laminated card, and she had done it well enough that the families sometimes thanked her.

She sat down opposite the old woman. She did not hold out her hand.

"Mrs. Jiang," she said. "We found Yingying yesterday afternoon. She is dead. I am so very sorry."

She said it slowly, in plain English, and then she stopped. Mrs. Carver, standing at the stove with her back turned and her shoulders rigid, said it again in Mandarin. It took her a long time. Twice she paused. The second time she put the towel to her face and held it there.

Mrs. Jiang listened to all of it without a movement. She sat as she had sat in the office in Boston, straight-backed, expressionless, with her flat dark eyes on Lauren's face, and Lauren thought she saw the words arrive one by one and take their places in her, like stones laid in a wall.

The kitchen clock ticked. In the pot, the water muttered.

Then the old woman spoke. Her voice was very low, very level, and the single word that came out of it was so soft that Lauren, who knew no Mandarin, understood it before Mrs. Carver turned.

"She says," said Mrs. Carver, "Where?"

"In Sullivan County. In the Catskills. She was found on Monday, by a hunter."

A pause for translation. A short answer.

"She says, Was she alone?"

Lauren opened her mouth to say I don't know and found that the sentence would not come. She could not have said why. It was an honest answer. It was the form's answer, the answer on the laminated card. But she was looking at the old woman's hands on the umbrella, at the thin brown knuckles and the wedding ring worn nearly through, and she thought of a girl who had told her mother, every Sunday for two years, I am fine.

"I think she was alone at the end," she said. "I don't know. I'm going to find out. I give you my word that I will find out."

Mrs. Carver translated. The old woman nodded slowly, once, as though a bill had been paid.

And then Mrs. Jiang asked the third question, and it was a short one, only two words, and Mrs. Carver stopped with her mouth open and her hand pressed flat against her chest.

"What did she say?" said Lauren.

"She says..." The teacher's voice broke. She wiped her face, and swallowed, and began again, in a small thread. "She says, Did it hurt?"

Nobody in the kitchen moved or breathed.

It was the question Lauren had been asked in other rooms by other mothers, and every time, she had given the form's answer, which was We don't believe she suffered, which was a kind lie, and which she had, on the long drive up from the Catskills, with the heater roaring and the wipers going, privately resolved that she would never tell again.

She looked at the old woman. The old woman looked at her.

"We don't know yet," said Lauren. "The doctors could not tell from what was found. I won't say that she didn't suffer. I don't know it, and I don't think you want me to say a thing I don't know." She drew a breath. "I can tell you that whoever did this took a very long time and was very careful. That is all I can say. When I know, I will tell you the truth. Whatever it is."

When Mrs. Carver had finished, the room was silent for so long that Lauren thought the old woman had not understood.

Then Mrs. Jiang inclined her head, with exactly the slight, grave dignity with which she had bowed on the first day, and said something short and dry.

"She says that is the first honest thing anyone has said to her in two months," said Mrs. Carver, "and that she will go now and lie down."

She rose. She took her umbrella. She crossed the little kitchen to the door, and paused there, and her hand rose to the frame, and for a moment, just for a moment, her small frame leaned into it with the whole of her weight, as a thing leans that has been standing against the wind for a very long time and has just been told it may stop. Then she straightened. She went out. A door closed softly down the hall.

Lauren sat quite still.

"I will be with her tonight," said Mrs. Carver. She was still wiping her face with the dish towel, with large, impatient, furious strokes. "I will sit by the bed. I have done it for the dying before. I taught school for twenty-two years in a city where I buried three friends, and I have never in my life met a woman like her." She hiccuped. "Go, Captain. Go home. I know it is not your fault."

"It is a little my fault."

"Yes," said the teacher gravely. "That is what makes you good at it."

…

The call from Calloway came at nine the next morning, and it was not a call at all.

She was standing in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel. She had flown down on the first shuttle, with a cardboard cup of coffee and her raincoat buttoned wrong, and she had the gray, rigid, public face she wore for commissioners and cameras. She did not say hello. She walked across the lobby, through a group of Japanese tourists with rolling suitcases, past the front desk and a rack of brochures for the Statue of Liberty, and stopped in front of Lauren, and looked her up and down.

"You look like hell."

"Thank you."

"I mean it as a compliment. A woman who looked well this week would be a fool." She jerked her head toward the revolving door. "Walk with me. I do not wish to speak in a place with a bar."

They walked west along Thirty-Third Street in a thin cold wind, between delivery trucks and hot-dog carts and men in suits. Ethan had stayed behind to take a call. Calloway walked fast, with her hands in her pockets, and did not speak until they had reached the corner of Eighth, where the traffic roared across the avenue and nobody could hear a word.

"I've got three letters," she said.

She did not take them out. She counted them off on her fingers.

"The first is from the Office of the Governor of Connecticut. It expresses concern about the harassment of a private citizen who has been found by a court of competent jurisdiction to be incapable of standing trial. It does not mention your name. It mentions an officer from another state. The second is from the senator's office. It is two lines. It says that the Hale family is grateful for the discretion of the Boston Police Department. The third is from a lawyer named Ames." She spat the name. "It is eleven pages. It begins by listing every letter that Detective Raymond Miller wrote to the Hale family over seven years. There are nineteen. It says that Detective Miller was a man with an obsession, that he had been repeatedly counseled by his superiors, and that his disappearance should be regarded in light of his known instability."

"Ray wasn't unstable."

"Ray was a decent, tired man who had his name on a bad piece of paper." Calloway's voice cracked a little. She turned her face aside to the wind. "I read it in the commissioner's office at seven this morning. I would have given a month's pay to hit that lawyer. And then, Lauren, I sat down, and I said to myself, Ruth. You have a dead foreign girl, and a missing police officer, and the most powerful family in two states writing letters to your boss. And I thought, Well. There is only one reason in the world to write eleven pages."

"They're afraid."

"They are not afraid of you. They are afraid of the question." She looked back. Her eyes were bloodshot and fierce. "I am ordering you home, Captain."

Lauren said nothing.

"On paper. In writing. By Friday. The Boston Police Department is withdrawing its seconded officer from the New York inquiry, in the interests of interjurisdictional courtesy. I have signed it. It will reach the commissioner's desk this afternoon." She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets. "You have until Friday to be on a train."

"And Ethan?"

"Your brother is not on my payroll."

"Ruth."

"He is a private consultant who has been engaged by the family of the deceased to assist in the identification of her remains." The superintendent's face did not change by a muscle. "I have it in a letter. Mrs. Jiang's signature. Dated yesterday. I have no idea how it got on my desk. If I were to inquire, I imagine I should find that it was typed in a hotel business center in Manhattan by a woman who teaches English."

Lauren stared at her.

"I did not say this," said Calloway. "You will not repeat it. If you are asked, I will say that I ordered you home and that you obeyed. And that on Saturday morning, at your own expense, on your own time, as a private citizen, you happened to be walking in New York City with a consultant." She turned. "I never did get you a body, Lauren. Or a witness. Or a reason. I'm giving you the other thing instead."

"What's that?"

"Three days," said Ruth Calloway, "of not being my problem."

She went away down the avenue, small and heavy and straight-backed, into the crowd, with her raincoat flapping, and did not look back.

…

Ethan was waiting for her on the sidewalk outside the hotel.

He had a paper bag in one hand and a crumpled piece of paper in the other, and he looked, in the cold morning light, thin and tired and unexpectedly young. She told him about the letters. She told him about Friday. When she came to the part about Mrs. Jiang's signature he closed his eyes and said, with the ghost of a grin, "I'll have to send Mrs. Carver flowers."

"She'll hate them."

"She'll put them in water and keep them for a month." He opened his eyes. The grin had gone. "Laurie. I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it before you say what you're going to say."

"Go on."

"I'm not sure I'm steady enough for this."

He said it quite calmly, looking at the paper bag. A bus went by in a long hiss of exhaust. "I thought I was. When I came back to the work, I thought, That's over. I have been through the worst of it. I can look at anything now. And then on Tuesday, in that sheriff's office, I looked at the photographs for six seconds and put my hand on them, and I could not feel my fingers." He turned the bag over. "I'm afraid that I'm going to be a liability. I'm afraid that one day I am going to look at a thing and not be able to stop."

She put out her hand and took the bag from him. She looked inside it. It held two sesame buns, still warm, in grease-spotted paper.

"Where did you get these?"

"Mrs. Carver, at six this morning. She said, Give them to your sister, she won't eat." He shrugged. "She's right."

Lauren took out a bun. She tore it in half, and gave him the larger piece, and stood on the sidewalk of Seventh Avenue, among strangers, with the traffic going by, and ate.

"I need you," she said.

It came out rough. She did not look at him.

"I've been doing this for twenty years, and I have never needed anyone. I told myself it was strength. It was not." She swallowed the bun. "You saw the nose in that house before I did. You saw Hale for what he was before I did. You read his cook. I can find a room with my face, Ethan, but you can read what's in it. I don't know how to do this without you. And if you tell me you need to stop, I will drive you home myself, and I won't say a word. But I'm asking."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he took a bite of the bun, and chewed it slowly, and swallowed.

"Sesame," he said.

"Yes."

"Slightly stale."

"Yes."

"It's the best thing I've had all week." His voice shook a little. He looked away, up the avenue, at the gray sky and the steam rising from a grating. "All right, Laurie. I'm not stopping. But I would like it noted that I said I'm not sure, and not I'm fine."

"It's noted."

"I'm alive," he said, so quietly she barely heard it.

She looked at him.

"It's what I say now, when I can't say I'm fine and mean it. Since the ship." The ghost of the grin came back. "You've noticed. You've never remarked on it. It's a more honest sentence, that's all. Fine is a thing people say to end a conversation. Alive is a thing you say to begin one."

She did not answer. She had the feeling that she had been handed something small and breakable, and she turned it over carefully in her mind as she walked.

…

Mrs. Jiang's text came that evening, at nine, while they sat in a booth at the Starlite, over pancakes.

Mrs. Carver had sent it with a photograph. It showed the old woman's telephone lying on the pillow of a narrow bed, with the screen lit, and on the screen an old message, from the spring, with a link beneath it. The headline was in English. The Woman Who Listened to the Monster.

Underneath, in Yingying's careful capitals, in Chinese, with a translation in Mrs. Carver's small round hand beneath it, a line.

Mama. This is the woman I work for. She is the best person I have ever met. I am so lucky.

Lauren put the phone down on the table very carefully.

Across from her, Ethan had stopped eating. A bead of syrup ran down his fork and fell onto the plate, and neither of them noticed.

"She sent it in June," he said at last. "The first week."

"Yes."

"She sent it to her mother on the day she started." He pushed the plate away. "And two months later she was dead on the floor of that woman's house. Or dead somewhere. By her hand." He stopped. "I'm sorry. I said her hand."

"You did."

"I didn't mean to say it aloud."

They sat in the booth under the framed photograph of the Greek island, with the neon buzzing in the window and Rosa the waitress wiping the counter, and the thing that neither of them had named stood between them, silent and enormous, like a third person who had slid into the seat.

"We don't know that," said Lauren.

"No."

"We don't know anything. We have a smell, and a lie about a doorman's log, and a girl who wrote a nice thing to her mother." She put her hand over the phone. "We will not say it until we can prove it."

"No."

"But we will find out."

"Yes," said Ethan. And he picked up his fork again, slowly, as if it weighed more than it had, and began to eat.