The Taste of Silence

"The one thing a confession can never do is give the listener back what it took out of him."

They held her at the state police barracks in Ray Brook, in a gray cinder-block building at the edge of a pine forest, and the room they put her in had been built in 1974 to hold the kind of men who do not talk.

It had a steel table bolted to the floor and three plastic chairs and a mirror along one wall, and a clock with a wire cage over its face. The air smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee. Lauren stood on the other side of the mirror at two in the afternoon on Tuesday, with her hands in her coat pockets and a hospital's cold still in her bones, and watched a woman in a borrowed gray sweatsuit sit at the table with her wrists folded in front of her, perfectly straight, looking at the clock.

She had been awake for thirty-three hours. She had not slept in the cell. She had eaten none of the sandwich they gave her. She had asked the matron, courteously, if she could have a pen and a pad of paper, and been told no, and had thanked her.

"Her lawyer's on the way," said Sergeant Okafor, behind her. He was holding two cups of coffee, one of them out toward Lauren. "Foley. He's chartered a plane out of Teterboro. He'll be here by four."

"Did she ask for him?"

"She says she doesn't need him." The sergeant's heavy face was sad. "She keeps saying she'd like to make a statement. I told her we'd have to wait. I read her the rights again. She said, I know them by heart."

"She does."

"The DA wants her kept on ice until the lawyer comes. It's the right call. Anything she gives us before that, a jury will see, and a judge will wonder." He paused. "But I'll say this, Captain. I have been in this barracks for nineteen years, and I have never had a prisoner who sat like that. She's not waiting. She's composing."

Lauren took the coffee. She looked at the woman through the glass.

"Give me ten minutes," she said. "Alone. No recorder."

"That's not, ma'am, I can't..."

"Ten minutes." She did not turn. "I have something that belongs to her. It's not evidence. I was asked to pass it on."

…

She sat down opposite, and put her hands flat on the steel.

Sophia lifted her eyes. They were swollen and red, and the lids had a bruised, tender look, as if she had pressed her fists into them in the night. She had been given a comb. Her hair lay in two gray-gold wings on either side of her face. She smiled a little, a slight uncertain smile, and said, in a hoarse voice, "I had hoped it would be you."

"I'm not here to take a statement."

"No. I suppose not."

"Ray Miller died at ten minutes to seven this morning."

It was said very quietly. Lauren watched her face as she said it, and she did not look away, because it was the one thing she had promised herself on the drive to Ray Brook: that she would watch.

Sophia did not move. For a long moment nothing happened at all. Then she closed her eyes, and the long hands, folded on the steel, tightened until the knuckles stood out like beads, and a sound came out of her that Lauren had not expected: a small high breath, drawn in and held, like the breath of a child who has been struck and has not yet decided whether to cry.

"I'm sorry," said Sophia.

"Don't."

"I mean it. I know that it isn't, I know you can't..." She opened her eyes. They were full. "I read to him every night. Did he tell you? I read him the whole of it. Three hundred pages. I thought that if I could get to the end, if I could finish it with him in the room, then it would have been, I don't know. A thing that was worth something." Her voice broke. "He was so patient. He never once asked me to stop."

"Because he couldn't."

"Yes."

"Because you'd done what you'd done to his legs."

"Yes."

"Say what you did."

The green eyes met hers, and there was in them a long unbearable moment of recognition: the look of a woman who has been asked, at last, for the one thing she wanted to give, and has discovered that it is not what she wanted.

"I would rather not," said Sophia. "Not to you. Not like this."

"Then I won't ask."

"Thank you."

Lauren took her hand from the table and reached into the pocket of her coat.

…

She laid it on the steel between them.

It was a small plastic container, wrapped in a faded blue dish towel, tied at the corners. It had ridden in the trunk of the rental for a week, past a motel and a gate and a lake and a night in a hospital parking lot, and it had a dent in the lid. She had found it that morning at five, when she went out to the car to look for a charger, and sat for some time with her forehead against the steering wheel, holding it.

Sophia stared at it.

"It's soup," said Lauren. "Barley and mushroom. It is long past eating. I should have thrown it out."

Something went across the white face. It was not a flinch. It was slower, and worse. The mouth opened a little, and the eyelids shivered, and the whole body seemed to lean toward the object on the table, drawn against its will, as iron filings turn to a magnet.

"Nathan," she whispered.

"He gave it to me on the twenty-second. At a diner in Brooklyn. He said he always makes too much." Lauren kept her voice flat. "He asked me to give you a message, if I found you. I told him I would. I didn't think I'd keep the promise. I didn't think I'd be able to."

"Tell me."

"He said he still has the key." She looked at the dish towel. "And the soup is on the stove."

It was a very small sentence. It was said in an ordinary voice, in a gray room, over a steel table, and it went into Sophia Lindqvist like a long thin knife. She did not cry out. She put her hands over her face, and her whole body folded forward, slowly, from the waist, until her forehead was down on the steel beside the little blue bundle, and she made, for a long, long time, a sound that was not a sob and not a moan but something between them, low and steady and raw, like the sound of a thing being torn along a seam.

Lauren sat and listened to it.

She did not touch her. She did not speak. She kept her eyes on the clock with its wire cage, and counted the seconds in the way her father had taught her to count them in a cold back room, and when she had reached two hundred and eleven, the sound stopped.

…

"It had no taste," said Sophia.

She had lifted her head. She sat very upright, with her damp hair behind her ears and her hands on the table. The red-rimmed eyes were calm. Her voice had a hollowed, level, final quality, like the voice of a person reading aloud from a long way off.

"I want to tell you that, because you'll ask. Everyone will ask. They'll sit in rooms and say, Did she? Did she really? And they'll want me to say a thing so awful that they can look at me and feel clean." A faint tilt of the head. "I'll say it to you, and you can decide. I never ate her. Yingying. I want that understood. I could not have done it. I've thought about it a great deal, and I believe I could not. I wrapped her, and I carried her, and I took her to the place I'd chosen, and I laid her down as I'd written, in the order I'd written it. I put the music in her hand. But I did not eat her."

"The pot."

"The pot was for Ray." She said it in the same tone. "Or rather, for me. I had a theory. It's absurd, it's so absurd, and I'd like you to know that I knew it was absurd even as I did it. Desmond told me, in February, in the glass house, over the omelette, what it was he'd tasted. He said it tasted of silence. He said, It tastes of the moment after a sound. And I wrote it down. I wrote it in the book. It's on page forty-seven." She smiled bleakly. "It's the best sentence in the whole thing. And one night in the middle of August, in the cabin, alone, with a man asleep upstairs, I thought: I wonder if it's true."

"Sophia."

"I wanted to know if he'd told me the truth. That's all it was. It wasn't hunger. It wasn't, I'm not mad, Captain. I was a writer. I'd put something in a book as fact, and I could not bear that I hadn't checked." She drew a long breath. "I cooked a small piece. Very simply. In butter. I sat at the table, with the candle. I put on the music. I took a bite."

Lauren said nothing.

"It tasted of nothing."

The words fell onto the steel with a little dry click.

"There was no revelation. There was no, I thought there would be a door. That something would open in me, as it opened in him, and I'd see the whole shape of what he saw. And it was only meat. It was warm, and salt, and slightly sweet, and utterly ordinary. It was no more than a bad chicken." She stared at the table. "I sat there with my mouth full of it, and I understood that Desmond Hale had never in his life tasted anything. That the whole of it, the beautiful terrible lie, was a hunger for a thing that wasn't there. That there was nothing at the bottom. That there never had been."

"And you ate it anyway."

"I finished the plate."

"Why?"

"Because it was the only way I could think of to be sure." The voice cracked and steadied. "And then I did it again. And again. Because I couldn't believe it. Because a sentence that good has to be true, Captain, it simply has to, and I kept thinking that I'd got the wrong cut, or the wrong day, or the wrong, the wrong person." She put her palms flat. "I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like a woman who has been looking for a sound."

Sophia raised her eyes.

"In the silence after," said Lauren slowly. "That's what he said it tasted of. The moment after a sound. You couldn't find it, so you went on making the sound."

The woman across the table looked at her for a long time. Her lips moved. She put her hand to them, as if to stop a word from leaving.

"Yes," she said, at last. "That is exactly what I did."

…

The door opened.

It was Sergeant Okafor, and behind him a short plump silver-haired man in a camel coat who carried a leather briefcase and a look of well-bred horror. He stopped on the threshold, and took in the table, the dish towel, the two women, and the open face of his client, and a muscle worked in his jaw. "Sophia," said Hugh Foley, in a voice like a closing door. "You will say nothing further."

"I've said nothing," said Sophia. "I've only been told a thing by a friend."

"Captain Vance, this is a flagrant..."

"I haven't taken a statement, Mr. Foley. I've delivered a message from her husband." Lauren rose. "You can ask the sergeant. There was no recorder."

"There is always a recorder," said Sophia, with a faint smile. "It's the first thing I learned."

She did not look at the lawyer. She was looking, past him, at the blue dish towel. Her fingers had crept across the steel and rested lightly on the knotted corner, as one lays a hand on a sleeping animal.

"May I keep it?" she asked.

"It's not mine to give."

"Sergeant?"

Okafor glanced at the lawyer, and at the DA's assistant who had come up behind him, and at Lauren's face, and sighed through his nose. "It'll be inventoried," he said. "She can have the towel."

"Thank you."

She untied it, with slow fingers, and drew the cloth out from under the container, and folded it once, twice, in her lap. It was blue-and-white check, faded, soft with a hundred washings. She put it against her cheek.

At the door, Lauren paused.

"There's one thing I want to know," she said. "And I'd like you to tell me, with your lawyer standing there, so that you cannot say afterward that I tricked you."

"Please."

"When you took the laptop. When you took Yingying's things, her phone, her bag, and put them in the box. Did you look at the screen?"

Sophia lowered the cloth.

"No," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I was afraid of what it would say." She smiled, a thin, bright, terrible smile. "I'm a writer, Captain. Do you know what we fear more than anything in the world? More than death, or poverty, or the loss of a husband? It's finding that someone else, quietly, in another room, has written the true version. And that it's better."

Lauren said nothing. She opened the door.

"Sergeant Okafor," she said. "Where is the box?"

"Evidence locker. We logged it at four yesterday. The tech hasn't opened the laptop. It's password-protected, a girl's password, and we've been trying to..."

"Have her mother try," said Lauren. "Have her try the day."

"The day?"

"She's a woman who writes the Sundays down." She stood in the cinder-block corridor under the buzzing tube light, and her eyes were very bright. "Try every Sunday since the fourth of August."