The Last Course

"When you cannot move your hands, you learn to use your questions the way a swimmer uses his legs."

She did not take the knife to him.

That was the first thing Ethan noted, and he held on to it with the whole of his mind, the way a man in a flood holds a rail. Sophia Lindqvist crossed the plank floor with the long black-handled blade held loosely at her side, point down, as one carries a thing from one room to another, and went by his chair without a glance and set it on the cloth at the far end of the table, parallel to the edge, beside a folded linen napkin and a small silver bell. Then she went back through the arch to the kitchen. He heard the clink of a lid. He heard her say, in a low absent voice, to no one, "Not yet."

She was setting the table.

It took her a quarter of an hour. She moved with an economy that he found unbearable to watch, because it was so plainly the economy of a person who finds this restful. She brought out plates of white china, thin as eggshells, and laid three of them. She brought out forks, and knives with ivory handles, and heavy crystal glasses that rang when she set them down. She laid a place at the foot, a place on his left, and a place on his right, and at each she set a folded napkin and a small card.

He could read them from the chair. Her handwriting was clear and slanting and beautiful.

Ethan.

Lauren.

And at the foot of the long table, beneath the black windows, in the place of honor, a card that said only: Raymond.

"He won't come down," said Ethan.

"No. I know. But it seemed wrong to leave him out." She straightened a fork. "I've made it a habit, these past few months, to set one extra. It's an old custom. In Sweden, my grandmother left a plate for the dead on the night of St. Lucia." She smiled at the plate. "I've found that it keeps one honest."

…

His tongue was coming back. He could feel it, thick and heavy and then gradually obedient, and with it his hands began to answer, a tremor in the fingers, a slow pulse in the wrist. He did not let her see. He kept his palms flat on the leather and his face in the loose mild attitude of a man who has been given a sedative. It was a trick he had learned in a Virginia hospital in the winter he was thirty, from a man who had spent eleven hours with a knife to his neck, and who said afterward: They watch the hands, Ethan. They always watch the hands. Give them something else to look at.

"You've set the table well," he said.

She turned her head.

"Thank you."

"It's the same one, isn't it? The long walnut. Highgrove." He looked down the length of it. "I thought so as soon as I opened my eyes. It's not a cabin table. It's far too fine."

"I had it copied." Her pleasure was childlike. "A cabinetmaker in Troy, from the photographs in the magazine and my own notes, to the half inch. He used black walnut from a barn in Vermont. It took him five weeks, and he thought it was for a wedding." She ran her fingers along the grain. "I'd have liked the real one. But the real one is in a house with a man in it, and I find I can't go back. If one is going to do a piece of work properly, one must have the right materials."

"What piece of work?"

"The book."

"The Margin."

"Yes." She sat, in the chair at his left, and folded her hands, and looked at the candle. "You've read a hundred and twenty pages. I wanted to ask you what you thought of the ending. I know you haven't got that far. But I've been wondering whether a reader would see it coming."

"The ending of the novel?"

"The end of the cook." She said it with perfect composure. "I haven't decided how he should go."

He felt it pass over his skin like the touch of a cold finger, and he made himself breathe slowly.

Keep her talking. Keep her talking about the book. It was the one door that was ever open to her, and he stepped through it like a man stepping out onto thin ice. "I'd have to see the structure," he said. "A cook in a novel is always a symbolic figure. He's the one who feeds the others. The question is what he's feeding them. I'd say that depends on whether you want the reader to love him."

"I want them to understand him."

"That's a different thing."

"Is it?" She gave him a swift, bright, interested glance. "Tell me how."

"You can understand a man without ever wanting to sit at his table."

She was silent for a moment. Then she laughed, a short and rueful sound. "Yes. That's what Margaret said." She stroked the cloth with her thumb. "She read the first chapters, you know, in May. She said it was my best work, and that I should be careful. She said that when a writer is this good about a feeling, one begins to wonder where she got it."

"Where did you get it?"

She looked at him, and for a moment the green eyes were quite naked, clear and tired and surprisingly young.

"From a girl who came in on Tuesdays," said Sophia.

…

She told him.

He had not expected it to be so easy, and he would think afterward that it was the least easy thing he had ever heard. She did not tell it in order. She told it as a witness tells it who has gone over it in the dark so many times that the sequence has crumbled, and only the pieces remain, each smooth with handling. She told him about the Hawthorne medal, and how heavy it was. She told him about a bell that rang in the writing room, once, as she stood in the hall. She told him about the exact color of Yingying's sweater, a faded blue cardigan with a button missing at the cuff, which the girl had been worrying with her thumb while she listened to the end of the tape.

"She was so polite," said Sophia. "That was the thing I couldn't bear. She had listened to me beg. She had heard what I was. She had every right to be disgusted. And she was only sorry for me. She sat on my sofa and cried for me." Her hands lay quiet in her lap. "I think if she had screamed at me I should have let her go. I think I should have wept, and we would have gone to the district attorney in the morning, and I'd be in a very different room."

"But she was kind."

"She was kind. And it made me so angry." She said it wonderingly. "It made me hungry. I don't know how to say it. It was as though the whole of me had been hollowed out, and she was the only thing in the room that was full."

He said nothing.

"I took them through to the kitchen," said Sophia. "I told them it would be tea. I put on the music, because I always put on the music. And then I closed the door." She raised her eyes to the beams. "I cannot tell you what happened in the kitchen, Mr. Vance. I mean that literally. I have tried, in my notebook, a dozen times, and the page will not take it. I remember the light, which was very white. I remember her glasses. I remember that she said something at the end, and that I did not understand it, because it was in Chinese, and that I have been trying for three months to remember what it sounded like."

"A prayer," said Ethan quietly. "Perhaps."

"I don't think so. I think it was a name."

"Her cousin's."

Sophia turned her head.

"Su Mingyu," he said. "Her cousin. The girl in Paris. Yingying took the internship to get close to the book, Sophia. She never meant to listen to your tape. She meant to find the man who killed Mingyu, and ask him why." He kept his voice very low. "She found you. And in the end I think she said her cousin's name because she was telling her Here is another one. Here is another girl he made."

He watched it go in.

It was the cruelest thing he had said in ten years, and he said it with the precise, patient, loving malice of a man who has been taught to find the soft place in the wall and put his thumb in. A deep tremor passed over her face. The calm cracked. Behind it, for one half-second, he saw something young and awful and lost, a face like a child's at the bottom of a stair.

"I didn't make her," said Sophia.

"No?"

"I didn't, I only..." She stopped. "Desmond made her. He made all of us. He made the book." Her voice rose. "I was only the one who finished it."

"That's what the candle is, isn't it?" said Ethan. "It's not Hale's. It's yours. You put it in the room. You've been finishing his sentences from the beginning."

…

The clock to his left struck eleven.

He had been listening for it. It was an old brass mantel clock on the chimney, with a soft cracked chime, and it struck once, and then again, and he counted the strokes with the whole of his attention, and she did not seem to hear them. She had risen. She was walking the length of the room with her hands pressed together, up to the windows and back, through the lamplight and out of it, and her shadow fell across the table and the cloth and the three white places.

He moved his right hand. It was a very small movement. The strap on the wrist gave a quarter inch.

Eight minutes. Maybe ten. He tried not to look at the arch. She will go to the stove soon. She said, until noon, but she has no clock in her head. She is not a person who has anywhere to be.

"Sophia."

She stopped in the middle of the floor.

"Did you take a laptop?" said Ethan.

It was a guess. It was a pure invention, out of the thin air, pulled from the single detail he had carried with him for three weeks and never been able to place: Phone offline, 8:40. A girl who had come to a stranger's apartment with a policeman, and sat on a sofa for an hour in the lamplight listening to a dead tape, and whose telephone had gone dark at twenty minutes to nine, when she was still safe, still among friends, still twenty-four. He thought of the yellow note. Compare w/ tape 17!! A girl who wrote everything down.

"A laptop?"

"She had one. She always had it in her bag. Her mother told us, a gray one, with a sticker of a panda." He watched her face. "It wasn't in the apartment. It wasn't in the room in Jackson Heights. Yingying had been a typist for two months, Sophia. You made her one. She sat with a policeman for an hour while a tape played, and what do you think she did?"

Sophia did not answer.

"She typed it."

"No."

"Every word. Forty minutes of tape. Hale. You. The candle, the knives, the book. The four seconds." He was speaking very softly now, in the voice that he had once used in rooms of gray paint and metal tables. "She was a girl who would not let a thing go unrecorded. She couldn't have. I think she typed the whole of it and saved it somewhere safe, before she ever stepped into your kitchen. Somewhere you don't control."

"She couldn't," said Sophia.

Her face had gone the color of paper.

"She was on my sofa. She was on my..." She put her hand to her mouth. "There wasn't a, there was no network. The building has a, the writing room doesn't..."

"Doesn't it?"

"I took the laptop. I took the telephone. I've got them both, they're in a box in the, I put them in the..." She stopped dead. Her eyes went wide and then wider, fixed on nothing. He saw the whole thing go through her: the sofa, the bag, the polite girl with her notebook on her knees, the little gray machine, open to a white page, at a time when the world had still contained a button marked save.

She has not thought of it, thought Ethan. In three months, with all her care, with every sentence cut and every seam sewn, it has never once occurred to her.

The thing on her face was something he had seen on perhaps three people in his life. It was the look of a writer who has just been shown a copy of her own text, uncorrected, in a stranger's hand.

"The uncut one," whispered Sophia. "She typed the uncut one."

"I don't know," said Ethan, truthfully. "I'm only guessing."

"You're lying."

"I am guessing."

It did not matter. He saw that it did not matter. She stood in the middle of the long room, in the light of a candle she had lit eleven inches from the edge, and looked at the fire, and the knife on the cloth, and the empty place at the foot of the table, and he knew that he had done exactly what he had set out to do and that he would never entirely forgive himself for it. The calm was gone. In its place was a terror so enormous and so intimate that she seemed to shrink inside her sweater.

And outside, from beyond the black glass, far off through the hemlocks, came the sound of tires on gravel.

They both heard it.

It was a car, a single car, coming fast on the rough road, slowing at the gate, and then the dry snap and crunch of a latch being forced. A beam of light swung across the ceiling and was gone. A door slammed.

Sophia turned her head, slowly, like a woman in a dream, toward the windows.

"She's early," she said.

And Ethan, who had not yet got his hands free, who could feel the strap giving by the merest fraction at his left wrist, who knew in his body that it was not noon and that his sister had broken every promise she had ever made him, closed his eyes for a moment and said, to no one at all, in a voice that shook:

"Of course she is."