A Bag of Oranges

"Grief is the only audience that cannot be performed to, and the only one that every performer secretly wants."

Lauren read it on his face before he was through the door.

It was a quarter to six on Wednesday, and she was sitting on the bed in the Rego Park Motor Inn with the yellow highlighter in her hand and the map of the Adirondacks spread across her knees, and the door opened, and her brother came in with a thick bundle of paper pressed against his coat like a man carrying a sleeping child. He shut the door with his heel. He leaned against it. For a moment he said nothing at all, and in the light from the parking lot his face was the color of candle wax.

"You went to Hudson Street," said Lauren.

"Yes."

"Alone."

"Yes."

She put the cap on the highlighter. She did it slowly, with great care, as a person sets down a glass she is afraid of breaking. She had rehearsed this moment for three days, and she had thought that she would be angry. She was not angry. There was a quiet clear space where the anger ought to have been, and in it, cold and small, a plain fear.

"Sit down," she said. "Tell me all of it. Start with the lie."

…

He told her.

He told it in his usual manner, in order, without softening it, and when he came to the part about the mirror he took the recorder out of his pocket and set it on the bedspread between them, and they listened to the whole of the first twenty minutes together with their heads bent. It was strange to hear her voice again, so soon. It had a warmth in it that was not on the television. It had a tremor that was not a performance. I lie to everyone I love, said Sophia on the little tape. It's how I know how.

Lauren turned it off.

"She knew you'd tell me."

"I think so."

"She wanted you to." She laid her palm flat on the machine. "That's what the mirror is. That's what the proof is. She is not hiding from us, Ethan. She is writing to us. She is putting the thing in front of our faces, in a form that she can deny, and she is waiting to see how long we need to read it."

"Yes."

"And you went in anyway."

"I went in," said Ethan, "because she asked for a reader, and for six years I did nothing but read men like her, and I thought I could." He looked at his hands. "And because I thought that if I did it alone, and it went badly, I would be the only one it went badly for."

Lauren did not answer. She took the proof from his lap, and turned back the cover, and read the first line, and the second. She read the paragraph about the girl in the borrowed coat and the man with the round glasses and the butterscotch candy. She read it twice. When she looked up, he had gone to the window, and was standing with his back to her and his shoulders very straight.

"Seven forty-one," she said.

"Yes."

"She's put it on page one."

"She has put it on page one of a novel that will be on every table in every airport in the country in March," said Ethan, "and if either of us says what we know, we will be the two people who read a book and went mad."

"I'm not going to say anything."

"No."

"I'm going to wait." Her voice shook once and steadied. "And in the meantime I am going to ask you for one thing, and I want you to say yes. No more alone. Not once. Not to a library, not to a corner shop. If you walk through that door without me, I will not speak to you again." She heard how childish it sounded and did not take it back. "I have buried enough of this family. I am not going to bury you for the sake of a good paragraph."

He turned. His eyes were bright.

"Yes," said Ethan. "I'm sorry. Yes."

She held out her arm and he crossed the room and she held his head against her shoulder for a long time, as she had done when he was seven and had fallen off a wall.

…

Mrs. Jiang asked on Thursday.

She asked at breakfast, in the lobby of the motor inn, with a cup of Mr. Bhatt's weak tea in front of her and a small paper bag of dried plums on her knee. She had been staying in the room next to Lauren's since the week of the culvert. She wore her navy cardigan buttoned to the chin. She had taken to sitting every morning in the lobby in the same armchair, beneath the television, with her hands in her lap, watching the screen with the courteous, unsmiling attention of a woman at a lecture in a language she does not know.

"That lady," said Mrs. Jiang, in Mandarin, and Mrs. Carver, who had come out from Flushing in a gray coat to translate, turned it into English in a low, flat voice. "The one with the green eyes. She wrote the book my daughter typed."

"Yes."

"I would like to meet her."

Lauren put down her coffee. She looked at Ethan, who was looking at the carpet.

"Mrs. Jiang," she said slowly, "I would like to be very honest with you. I don't think that would be wise. We don't yet know what part she has played in..."

"I know," said Mrs. Jiang.

She said it in English. It was the first English that Lauren had heard from her since she landed. It was thick, careful, clipped, as though each word had been pushed out through a narrow door.

"I am old," she continued, in Mandarin, and Mrs. Carver's voice followed hers like a shadow. "I am not clever. I did not go to the university. But I have raised a daughter, and I have buried a husband, and I have sat with my sister's body on a floor in Chengdu, and I know when a person is carrying something. I would like to look at her face. I would like to put my hand in hers. If she is a good woman she will cry. If she is not, I will know that too."

Mr. Bhatt, behind his desk, bowed his head over the register and kept very still.

"Please," said Mrs. Jiang. "It is the only thing I have asked."

…

It was Sophia, in the end, who made it easy.

Lauren did not call her. She called Hugh Foley's office on Friday morning, in a state of mingled reluctance and shame, and left a message with a secretary, and within forty minutes there was a reply, not from the lawyer, but from Sophia herself, in a text that was brief and warm and faintly breathless. Of course. Of course I'll see her. Anywhere she likes. I can't tell you how much I have wanted to. S.

They chose Mrs. Carver's office.

It was a small plain room above a bakery on Main Street in Flushing, with a green carpet and a window onto the elevated train, and a pair of vinyl chairs for clients, and a glass jar of hard candy on the desk. On Saturday afternoon at three, with the trains running by every six minutes and rattling the glass, the five of them sat in it, in a curious formal arrangement, like a small committee: Mrs. Jiang on the sofa with her bag of plums; Mrs. Carver beside her; Ethan by the window; Lauren in the corner, in the shadow of the filing cabinet, where she could see the door.

Sophia arrived at five minutes past.

She came up the narrow stairs alone, in a plain navy coat, with no jewelry, no makeup, and her hair pinned back, a woman who had not been to a hairdresser for a week. In her arms she carried a paper bag from a grocery store. She stopped in the doorway. Her eyes went over the room, quickly, taking in the faces. Then they went to the small gray-haired woman on the sofa, and her whole body changed.

It was the most perfect thing Lauren had ever seen. The shoulders came down. The mouth trembled. The green eyes filled and spilled over, and she did not lift a hand to wipe them. She crossed the floor in four long steps and went down on her knees on the green carpet in front of the sofa, and took both of Mrs. Jiang's hands in hers, and bent her head over them.

"I am so sorry," said Sophia. "I am so very sorry. I knew her for two months. She was the best thing in that office. I would have given anything."

Mrs. Carver translated, in a low, steady, unhappy voice.

Mrs. Jiang did not move. She sat upright, with her small hard hands held in the white ones, and looked down at the bowed head, and for a long time her face showed nothing. Lauren, in the corner, found that she was holding her breath. She was watching, with every faculty she possessed, the tall woman on her knees. She saw the tears. She saw the way they fell, evenly, one after another, onto the backs of the old hands. She saw the throat moving. She saw the thin gold band on the left hand, the ink-stained cuticle, the trembling of the mouth.

And she smelled it.

…

It came when Sophia lifted her head.

It was no more than a breath. It came off her skin as she bent forward, across a distance of ten feet, under the lavender, under the soap, under the cold clean smell of the October street. It was fainter than the penthouse. It was fainter than the culvert. It was the smell of something that has been worked into a person, slowly, over a long time, as the smell of tobacco is worked into a coat. Copper and milk, and the soft sweetish note beneath them that she had known since she was nine years old, in the cold back room of a funeral home in Worcester, with her father's big hand on her shoulder.

It is on her. Not in a room. Not on a floor. On her.

She looked at Ethan.

He had gone completely still. He stood with his back against the window and his arms crossed over his chest, and the elevated train went by behind him with a long iron shriek, and his face was gray. He lifted his eyes to hers and gave the smallest nod.

Yes, said the nod. I have it too.

"Mrs. Jiang," said Sophia, through the tears, "I brought you something. It isn't much."

She rose, with an effort, and reached for the paper bag, and drew from it a net sack of oranges. They were small, bright, thin-skinned, the kind that cost too much and are worth it. She held them out in both hands like an offering.

"She brought them every morning," said Sophia. "She said they were for the office. She said she couldn't work without something to peel. I thought you should have them."

Mrs. Carver translated. There was a pause.

"Yingying liked oranges," said Mrs. Jiang slowly.

"Yes."

"Since she was small. I would cut them in the shape of a flower." The old woman took the net bag. She held it on her lap, with both hands, looking at it. "She called me on the Sunday and said she had bought some. She said she would bring one to the lady."

Sophia did not move. Not a muscle in her face changed. But Lauren, who had watched four hundred suspects in the long room at Boston Police headquarters, saw the thing she was watching for, a stillness that came into the white skin around the mouth, like the stillness on a lake before the wind.

"Which Sunday?" said Sophia gently.

"The fourth of August."

"Ah."

"She said she was going to listen to a tape." Mrs. Jiang's voice had begun, very slightly, to tremble. "A special one. She said, Mama, tomorrow I have to hear tape forty-one all the way to the end. She said it was the one the lady kept in a drawer."

The train came and went. The window shook in its frame.

"I'm sorry?" said Sophia. Her head was a little tilted. Her voice was kind. "Forty-one? I'm afraid there was no such tape, Mrs. Jiang. We made forty. Desmond and I. Forty interviews. They are all in the archive at the press. Yingying transcribed every one."

Lauren closed her eyes.

She said it too quickly. She had said it with the soft apologetic weight of a lifelong truth, and it had come out of her in exactly the right shape, and it was a lie. She knew it as she knew her own name. It was a lie not because of what it said but because of the half-second beforehand in which Sophia Lindqvist, who had a mind like a lit switchboard, had paused to count.

"Perhaps she was confused," said Sophia sadly. "She was very tired by the end. She was working so hard."

Mrs. Carver translated. Mrs. Jiang sat quite still.

And then the old woman did a thing that no one had foreseen. She laid the oranges down beside her on the sofa. She opened her own paper bag, and took out one of the dried plums, small and dark and wrinkled, and held it out, between her thumb and forefinger, across the space between them.

"Eat," she said, in English.

Sophia stared at it.

"Please," said Mrs. Jiang. "My daughter's favorite. She would give it to people. I would like you to have it."

Nobody in the room breathed. Sophia looked from the plum to the old woman's face, and her own face did something that Lauren would remember for a long time: a flicker, a stripping, as if for one half-second a curtain had been drawn back from a window, and behind it was only a very tired woman who had not been hungry in a long while.

She took the plum. She put it in her mouth. Her jaw moved.

"It's delicious," said Sophia Lindqvist, and began again to weep.

And Mrs. Jiang, watching her, with her small hard hands folded in her lap, said very quietly in Mandarin a thing that Mrs. Carver, after a long pause, declined to translate, and that Ethan told Lauren afterward in the stairwell, in a voice not his own, that he had understood without help.

"You did not look away," she had said. "A good woman would have."