The Cousin Who Was Not There

"Grief is a language with no translators. The one who speaks it fluently is always the one nobody can ask."

Flushing in the morning smelled of fried dough and diesel, and from the window of the third-floor apartment where Mrs. Jiang was staying, Lauren could see a great flock of laundry hanging from a fire escape like a row of bright flags.

The apartment belonged to a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Eileen Carver, a round, brisk, talkative woman in a quilted jacket who had taught English in Chengdu for twenty-two years before coming home to Queens, and who still, by her own account, could not drink an American cup of tea without grief. She had met Mrs. Jiang as a young colleague's neighbor decades ago, and when she heard what had happened, she had gone to the airport herself. She had cleared the table for them, and laid out four cups, and a small blue plate with a pyramid of sesame buns, and it was understood, with the tact of two women who had once been neighbors, that she would translate and Mrs. Jiang would speak.

It was the first time, Lauren thought, that she had ever seen the old woman sit down properly.

She sat in a wicker chair, with her white head very straight and her hands on her knees, and for the better part of a minute she said nothing. Then she began to speak, in Mandarin, in a low, even, rather dry voice, like a person reading out the clauses of a will. Mrs. Carver listened with her lips pressed tight. Then she turned to Lauren and Ethan and began in English.

"She says that she wishes to tell you something she did not tell the consulate."

"Please."

"She says that she did not tell them because they would not ask the right question. They asked, Does your daughter have enemies? She says this is a foolish question, because her daughter has never had an enemy in her life. She had only ever had one dead person." Mrs. Carver paused, swallowed, and said gently, "She means her cousin."

Ethan leaned forward. "Mingyu."

The old woman's head turned toward him at the sound of the name.

It was a small movement, but Lauren saw it go through her like a current. She had not heard the name spoken aloud in the English mouth of a stranger. She had only heard it in her own house, in her own language, in the kitchen, at night, for seven years.

"Su Mingyu," said Mrs. Jiang, slowly, carefully, as one sets down a very full bowl. And then something more in Mandarin, and Mrs. Carver began to translate, a half-beat behind, her voice dropping.

"She was my sister's child. My sister Meilan, who is younger than me by six years, and was always the beautiful one. Mingyu was nineteen. She was clever. She had a scholarship to study in France. All of the street came out to see her go. My sister cried at the airport and said she would not cry, and I said, Meilan, you are crying, and she said, It is only the dust."

A pause. The old woman's voice never wavered. It went on, steady, level, as plain as a ruler.

"They sent a letter. A man from the embassy brought it, in a gray car. They said that Mingyu had been the victim of a terrible crime and that the French authorities were pursuing the matter. And then, a year after that, they said that the matter had been resolved. They did not say how. They said only that a man had been found unfit, and that he was in a hospital, and that it would not be appropriate to tell us more. They sent a box with her ashes. They did not send the notebook."

"The notebook?" said Lauren.

"Her diary. A small one, with a rabbit." Mrs. Carver repeated the word. "She wrote in it every day. My sister wanted it more than the ashes. She asked and asked. A man from the foreign ministry told her that it was a piece of evidence and it had been lost in the handover."

The sesame buns steamed gently on their blue plate.

Lauren said nothing. She was thinking of a gray cardboard box, tied with string, that she had never seen, and of the sentence that Ethan had read to her in the dark of the hotel room, from the first chapter of Inside the Gourmet. The notebook, which I admit I never read. It had seemed, on the page, a courteous omission. It had seemed like manners.

"My sister died three years later," said Mrs. Jiang. Her voice remained entirely even. "The doctors said it was her heart. I say it was the dust."

…

They sat for a while in the plain bright kitchen, and no one touched the buns.

"Yingying was seventeen," said Mrs. Carver, translating again, low and slow. "She loved Mingyu. Mingyu was two years older, and she used to take Yingying to the movies and let her eat all the popcorn. When the news came, she did not cry. She took her cousin's photograph from the shelf and went into her room and shut the door. For three days she did not come out. When she came out, she said that she was going to study books."

"Why books?" asked Ethan, softly.

"That is what I asked." And for the first time the old woman's face changed. It was nothing, a tiny crack at the corner of the mouth, like a hairline on a cup. "She said, Mama, it is the only place where the dead are allowed to speak."

Lauren found that her eyes had gone hot. She looked down at her hands.

"When I heard about the book, the one with that man's name on it," said Mrs. Jiang, "I did not read it. I could not. But Yingying read it. She read it in one night, in Beijing, on the telephone, and told me what was in it, and I could hear on the line that she was not crying. I thought that it was good, that she was strong. I did not understand." A silence. "A year later she said she had won a scholarship in America. In the same city where the book was made."

"Coincidence?" said Ethan.

The old woman looked at him for a long time. Then, with an air of faint, patient pity, as though addressing a very clever child, she said something short and quiet, and Mrs. Carver let out her breath.

"She says that nothing which a Chinese mother has been afraid of for seven years is a coincidence."

Then Mrs. Jiang took out her telephone, a small old model with a cracked corner, and scrolled with a stiff forefinger to the last message her daughter had sent. She held it out to Lauren across the table without a word.

The characters meant nothing to Lauren. But Mrs. Carver leaned in, adjusted her glasses, and read it aloud slowly, in the voice of a teacher dictating. "It is dated the fifth of August. Six forty-two in the evening, New York time. 'Mama, tonight I have to listen to one thing all the way to the end. Tape forty-one. I will call you Sunday.'" She frowned. "Forty-one is written with the numerals, not the characters. The consulate's summary only says that she was working late on a recording. They left out the number."

"Tape forty-one," said Ethan.

"It is a strange thing to leave out," said Mrs. Carver. "When a girl tells her mother a number, she wants it remembered."

…

The room in Queens was on the second floor of a narrow house in Jackson Heights, and the landlady, a tiny, careworn woman with a rosary around her wrist, unlocked the door without a word and stood aside.

It was a small room. A single bed with a gray blanket pulled tight. A desk under the window, with a lamp, a stack of paperbacks, a mug with a dried tea ring in the bottom. A suitcase on top of the wardrobe. A clean, narrow, ascetic space, like a cell.

And on the wall above the bed, floor to ceiling, from corner to corner, was the case.

Lauren stood in the doorway and did not breathe.

There were hundreds of pieces of paper. Newspaper cuttings, in French and English and Chinese. Printed pages from police reports, with passages highlighted in yellow. A map of Paris with a red circle on a street near the Sorbonne. A map of Connecticut, with a gravel road traced in green pen, and a cross at the end of it. A photograph of a smiling girl in a pink scarf, standing under a plane tree with a baguette, laughing at whoever held the camera. A photograph of a man with straw-colored hair. A photograph of a glass house.

And at the center of it all, pinned with a single red tack, in a plain white frame, a headshot of a tall woman with a silver-fair knot of hair and cold, clear, bottle-green eyes.

Underneath, in a neat small hand, in blue ink: S.L. read the notebook first. Why? Does she still have it?

"God," said Ethan, quietly.

He had come in behind her and stopped. He stood with one hand resting against the doorframe, and she saw that his face had gone very still, and that his eyes were moving across the wall in quick, precise sweeps, the way they used to move when he was reading a person.

"Look at the dates," he said. "They begin in June. The first week of the internship. See here? J1: S.L. very kind. Offers tea. Talks about her husband. J9: she asked me about my family. I said I had a cousin who had died. She went white."

"She knew."

"Not at first. But she suspected." He reached out and touched, without quite touching, a yellow slip beside the headshot. "J23. She keeps the notebook in a drawer. She thinks I did not see. A rabbit on the cover."

Lauren came forward and stood beside him, and read.

It was a diary in fragments, all along the wall, a young woman's careful, methodical, desperately secret account of what it was to sit eight feet away from a woman who had held your cousin's last words in her hands. She had been so small and so patient. Day after day, she had brought tea, and listened, and watched. She had kept a record of every phone call Sophia took in the corridor, and every time the door of the private office was shut, and every Tuesday and Friday on which the senior editor went out to Connecticut and came home looking, in Yingying's words, like she has been to church and does not know whether to be ashamed.

J34. Today S.L. said she cannot eat vegetables. She laughed. It was not a joke.

J40. She is lonely. I think she is also very frightened. I think she wants me to ask her to stop. I cannot ask.

J47. I have found someone. A detective. He is old, kind, tired, he wears a gray sweater. He says I am the third. I do not understand what third means. He says he will tell me if I come to the park on Sunday.

Lauren's hand had gone to her mouth.

She did not know she had done it. She stood there with her fingers pressed against her lips and her eyes fixed on one slip of yellow paper, one cramped line of blue ink, in the middle of a stranger's wall in Queens.

He gave me a butterscotch candy. I do not like butterscotch. I ate it anyway.

…

"Laurie." Ethan's voice was very gentle. "Sit down."

"I'm quite all right."

"You are standing on my foot."

She looked down. She was. She stepped off, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, and put her palms flat on her knees, and drew a long breath through her nose, which did not help. The air in the room smelled of old paper and cold tea and the fine dry powder of a chalk board. It smelled of nothing else. She had checked, as soon as she came in, and again just now, and the only note beneath the others was Yingying herself, a faint warm human trace on the pillow, living, ordinary, like a sleeping child.

Living. The smell of a person who was breathing in this room, two months ago, eight weeks, and who had gone out of it one morning to an office in the Flatiron and not come home.

"He told her he would tell her," said Lauren.

"Yes."

"He said she was the third."

"Third what?" said Ethan. "Third woman to ask? Third person to think that book was a trap?" He turned away from the wall, and pushed a hand through his hair. "He had a file, Laurie. He had a drawer, and a theory, and a pocketful of candy. He had seen two others before her. That is what the third means. He had been looking for years at something that he could not prove."

"And she gave him a reason."

"She gave him a face." He looked at the picture of the girl in the pink scarf. "Imagine being a policeman, and carrying a thing for years, and then a twenty-four-year-old with bitten fingernails walks in and tells you the same story from the other side."

Behind them, in the doorway, there was a soft dry sound.

Mrs. Jiang had come up the stairs. She stood on the threshold of her daughter's room with her closed umbrella, in her buttoned navy cardigan, and she did not enter. She looked at the wall. She looked at the photograph of the girl in the pink scarf, and the photograph of the man with the straw-colored hair, and the map with its green road to the glass house, and the long, patient, unfinished handwriting of a child who had told her mother she was going to study books.

For a very long moment, she did not move.

Then she crossed the little room in four small steps, and stood in front of the wall with her face a few inches from the paper. She reached up with one thin, steady hand and touched the smiling girl in the pink scarf. Not the picture. The edge of the picture. The place where the paper met the plaster, as one touches the hem of a garment.

She said something very softly in Mandarin. Mrs. Carver, who had followed her up the stairs and was crying openly, wiped her face with her sleeve and tried to translate.

"She says: You see, Mingyu? She came to find you."

Then Mrs. Jiang put her hand into her plastic bag, and took out a dried plum, and with great care, as one lays a flower on a grave, she set it on the narrow ledge beneath the picture. It rolled a little, and settled against the wall. The light from the window fell on it, small and dark and perfectly round.

Nobody spoke. Down in the street a truck rumbled past, and a woman's voice called a name, and was answered, and the afternoon went on in its ordinary way, as if nothing at all had happened in the world.

Lauren sat on the narrow bed, with her hands folded, and said to herself, silently, with great clarity and with all the force of twenty years, a thing she had said only once before in her life, over a coffin, with the Marine's flag across her knees.

I will find her.