The Mirror

"In the end every writer is left with the same reader: the one who has stopped asking to be entertained."

The following October

They gave her a mirror of polished steel.

It was bolted to the cinder-block wall above the sink, a plate the size of a hardcover book, and it did not so much reflect as suggest. A face in it was a pale oval with dark pits for eyes, wavering, slightly bent, as a face is in the bowl of a spoon. For the first month she had not looked. She washed in the dark with her eyes shut, feeling for the tap, and combed her hair by touch, and in the morning when the officer called the count she stood at the end of her bunk with her gaze fixed on a point at the level of the woman's collar. It was a thing she had learned in the courthouse. It cost nothing, and it asked nothing, and it kept the self at a manageable distance.

Then, one day in the second month, she had seen herself without meaning to.

It was a Thursday, in the shower block, at six in the morning. The steel over the sink in the corridor was wet. A little light from the barred window struck across it. She had caught the movement at the edge of her eye and turned her head and seen a gray-haired woman in a faded green jumpsuit, with sunken cheeks and a long jaw, who looked back at her with a quiet, startled, ordinary dread.

She had thought: Who is that?

And then, quite clearly, in the same reasonable voice in which she had once said the clerical error, the loophole, I've been cooking a lot: That is the woman the book was about.

She had not looked away. She had stood in the cold wet corridor and let the water drip from her hair and looked, with great attention, at the stranger, until the officer came and told her to move along.

…

Bedford Hills was a gray place in a green country.

It lay in the hills of northern Westchester behind a double fence topped with wire, a cluster of brick and concrete buildings in a landscape of oaks and old stone walls, so that on a clear day from the exercise yard one could see over the razor coils a long slope of meadow, with a barn, and a flock of crows going down on a plowed field. She had never been so near the country in her adult life. She had lived in cities. She had mocked, in print, the kind of writer who goes to a farmhouse in Vermont to find her soul. She stood in the yard on the first afternoon in October, a year and two months after the night of the Hawthorne Prize, with her hands in the pockets of her jumpsuit and her face turned to the weather, and it came to her with a slow astonishment that she had not smelled grass in eleven months.

She smelled it now. It was damp, and sweet, and a little rank, and it came from nowhere and went through her like a chord.

"You gonna stand there all day, Professor?"

It was Dee. She was a tall, broad, fifty-year-old woman from the Bronx with a gold front tooth and arms like a stevedore's, who was serving twenty-five to life for a thing she had done to a man in 1999 and who had adopted Sophia, in the first week, with the casual proprietary air of a big dog taking a stray under its wing. She carried a paper cup of sugary coffee in each hand. She held one out.

"I'm admiring the view."

"It's a field."

"It's a very good field."

Dee sniffed. She looked out over the wire at the crows. "I guess," she said. "I used to hate it. All this green. Made me feel like somebody'd forgot to tell me the world kept going." She shrugged her big shoulders. "You get used to it. You start to think, Well. Somebody's gotta look at it."

"Yes," said Sophia.

She took the coffee. It was lukewarm, and too sweet, and scalded the roof of her mouth, and it was, in that cold bright October air, with the crows and the long green hill and the sound of a distant tractor, one of the best things she had ever drunk.

…

Nathan came on Sundays.

He had come every Sunday since the first week of April, on the early train from Grand Central to Katonah and then in a taxi, in the same corduroy jacket, with the same horn-rimmed glasses and a book to read on the way. He did not bring food. They did not permit it. He sat across from her in the long fluorescent visiting room, at one of forty low gray tables bolted to the floor, with a vending machine humming in a corner and a child crying somewhere behind them, and for an hour he held her hands in both of his, across the table, as the rules allowed, and did not say much.

She had thought at first that he would not come. She had written to tell him so, in the second week, a long careful letter, in her best hand, on the lined prison paper, explaining that he was not obliged, that she did not wish it, that she had destroyed his life and would not be the author of another page. She had read it over four times. She had mailed it. And on the following Sunday he had appeared at the door of the visiting room in his corduroy jacket with the letter folded in his breast pocket and had sat down at the table across from her and said, in his slow deep voice, with a smile that nearly undid her: You've got a split infinitive in the third paragraph.

They did not talk about the crime. They never did. They talked about the weather, and the train, and the new tenants in the brownstone, a young couple with a baby who had painted the front door yellow. They talked about the buildings he was designing, now that he was working again, a library in Providence, a pavilion in a park. He did not say that the firm had asked him to take his name off the letterhead. He did not say that a man had spat on him in the supermarket. She learned it from Margaret, who wrote to her once a month in a hand that grew shakier each time, and who was still, at fifty-nine, running a house that no longer printed the name Lindqvist on any title it owned.

"I read that you've been in the library," he said.

"I've been teaching. A little."

"Teaching."

"There are eleven women in the Tuesday group. They can't read, most of them. Not properly." She looked at the table. "I'm not good at it. I have no patience. I keep trying to improve their sentences."

He laughed. It was a startled, wet, helpless sound. "God," said Nathan. "Of course you are."

"They don't mind."

"No. I don't suppose they do."

His thumb moved on the back of her hand. It was a big hand, scarred across the knuckles by old small cuts, and it was warm, and she looked at it as she might have looked at a house she had once lived in.

"I've kept the soup," he said.

She raised her head.

"I make it every Sunday. Before I come. Barley and mushroom. I put it on the stove and I leave it low, and when I get home it's still there, and I eat it." He did not look away. "I don't know why. It isn't forgiveness. I want to be quite clear. I don't think I'll ever, I think there are things that don't get forgiven, they just get carried. But I find that I'd rather carry them to a pot of soup than to an empty room."

Her eyes had filled. She did not look away.

"You shouldn't come," she said.

"I know."

"You should find a woman who doesn't, who can sit in a kitchen."

"I know," said Nathan. "I'll see you next Sunday."

…

The night was long.

The cells at Bedford Hills had a way of being quiet that was not silence. There was always something: a pipe knocking in the wall, a toilet flushing, a woman muttering in her sleep in the next block, the far slow tramp of an officer's rubber soles on the tier. The lights went down at ten to a dim blue wash that came from nowhere. She lay on her narrow bunk with the gray blanket drawn to her chin and listened to all of it, as she had once listened, in a bathtub in Brooklyn, to a tape. She no longer needed the red light.

She had asked for a pencil in the first week and been told she might have one. It was a stubby yellow thing, soft, with a pink eraser, which they counted in the morning and counted again at night. She had written nothing with it for eleven months. She kept it in the drawer of the little steel desk, beside a single sheet of paper on which, in her tidy slanting hand, she had once begun a sentence and abandoned it.

The girl came up in the elevator at nineteen minutes to eight...

She had not finished it. She did not think she would. She had read in a newspaper in June that The Margin had been published after all, in an edition with a black cover and a foreword by a judge, its entire proceeds assigned to a scholarship in the names of two women, one of whom she had killed and one of whom she had never met. It was the only manuscript she had ever written without a single improvement. Margaret had decided that. She had printed it as it lay, with the typographical errors, and a note on the title page that said Nothing has been cut.

She had thought she would hate it. She had read it twice, in the dim blue light, with her finger under the line. It was not good. It was the work of a clever woman who did not know what she was saying. It had passages of real beauty, and passages of unbearable falseness, and it carried, in every paragraph, the faint cold smell of a person arranging flowers around a hole.

It would be a better book if I were sorry, she thought. It would be a worse one if I tried.

…

She got up at two.

She did not know why. She had slept a little. She had dreamed, as she did every few weeks, of a long white table and a candle, and had woken without a sound, with her hand on her throat. She sat on the edge of the bunk, in the blue dark, and put her feet on the cold floor, and for a time she did nothing at all. A pipe knocked. A woman coughed. Far down the tier an officer's keys jingled.

Then she crossed the cell in three steps and stood at the sink.

The steel mirror hung above it, dark and dim. She laid her palms on the cold porcelain. She lifted her head.

A face looked at her out of the metal.

It was a tired face, narrow, shadowed, with a long jaw and a mouth that had learned, in the course of the year, to be still. The hair was gray and cropped close. The eyes were set deep. They looked back at her without defense, and without charm, and without any of the cold bright craft that had once made them famous, and she saw in them a thing she did not at first recognize, because she had not seen it in her own face since she was a girl. It was attention. It was the plain open undisguised attention of a person who has stopped composing herself.

She waited for the smile.

She waited for it as she waited, now, every night, with a kind of dry curiosity, the way a woman waits for a visitor who has stopped coming. The small bright professional stranger's smile, the one that had arrived on her face in a dark window on the fifth of August, uninvited, like a stain. She held her breath. She stood very still. She looked into the steel, and the steel looked back.

It did not come.

There was nothing there but a woman in a prison jumpsuit, at two in the morning, with her hands on a sink. She thought of an old gray-haired woman in a navy cardigan, holding a small black fruit in her palm. She thought of a girl with a braid who had typed through the hour with her tongue between her teeth. It is not for me to forgive her. It is for the record to be true.

Do not blink.

She did not.

She stood there for a long, long time, in the cold, with her eyes wide open, and the silence settled round her, the real silence, the one beneath the pipes and the keys and the far-off cough. She had been afraid of it all her life. She had spent forty-two years and a great many pages filling it. She had gone looking for it, in a house by a black lake, with a knife and a pot and a candle, and had not found it, because she had been making too much noise.

It was here. It had been here all along. It lay on her tongue like a held breath, vast, and gentle, and entirely without mercy.

She tasted it, at last.

It tasted of nothing. It tasted of the moment after a sound. And she stayed in it, and did not look away, and the woman in the steel stayed with her, until the blue lights brightened toward morning and, somewhere beyond the wire, in the first gray of the day, a crow began to call across the field.