Kinder Than Solitude (34 page)

Ruyu’s anger baffled Moran. It was useless to go on arguing. Moran stood up, and realized that her legs were shaking.

“Where are you going?” Ruyu asked.

“I’m going to talk to the grownups,” Moran said. “Are you coming with me?”

There was something unreadable in Ruyu’s eyes, a mixture of pity, derision, and curiosity. In the years to come Moran would return to this moment to study Ruyu’s face, searching for panic or guilt or remorse or fear—anything that would make Ruyu comprehensible—yet once and again Moran would see none of those, only a chilling tranquility, as though Ruyu had foreseen all that would come. But how could she have? To grant that prescience to a fifteen-year-old was to give her a mystic power beyond her capacity. Still, in every revisiting of the moment, that look had again manifested itself as Ruyu’s tepid effort to save Moran from taking a wrong turn; unseeing, unthinking, Moran had not heeded Ruyu’s admonition. Don’t tell, that look had said, warning more than pleading; stay still, that look had said; rehearse your lines before you put yourself on stage; those who have not the words for themselves will be the only ones found guilty.

Over the years Moran never stopped imagining that alternative of
not speaking
. It comforted her at times to think how things would have turned out: without the belated injection of the antidote—Prussian blue, a name belonging more to a painter’s easel than to a doctor’s cabinet—Shaoai would have died young, a heroine whose death could be explained only by fate, which was both unjust (letting a senseless tragedy befall a young woman already wronged) and merciful (it could’ve been worse, dragging on and making everyone suffer unduly, people would console themselves). A secret would have stayed alive between Ruyu and Moran for some time, though like other adolescent episodes, it would be put aside one day, presumed to be buried, and never let out to light again. Perhaps something good would eventually have come out of the love between Boyang
and Ruyu, or else it would have taken the natural course as all first loves do, blossoming and fading and leaving no permanent damage. Either way, Moran herself and Boyang would have remained friends, and one day, when things stopped mattering so much, she would tell him the secret. They would shake their heads then, baffled or resigned, but too removed from the tragedy to feel perturbed. Life had been kind to them, they would tell each other, even with its mysteries unsolved and unsolvable.

“Go ahead,” Ruyu said. “It’s your decision to talk, not mine.”

The moments and hours and days that followed became an elongated tunnel, in which Moran was the lone traveler, carried forward not by her own will but by the unforgiving current of time; if that tunnel had ever ended she would not have noticed it. One day, when she arrived in America, she would see a commercial for a local support group for autistic children, in which a girl in a lilac-colored dress sang and acted out a story about the futile battle of an itsy-bitsy spider against the rain. Moran was not the only person in the living room of Westlawn then; her housemates were around, waiting for the opening game of the football season between the Badgers and a visiting team. None of them would notice Moran’s tears, and she would never again sit among them to watch television. She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.

The blood tests confirmed Moran’s words and what had been taken from the laboratory, and Prussian blue saved Shaoai’s life but not her damaged brain. Ruyu must have stuck unwavering to her side of the story, which Moran could only piece together, over the years, by herself—she could not bring herself to ask others, and even if she had, no one would have told her anything: yes, Ruyu would say, she had stolen the chemical out of despair; no, there was not any concrete
reason for her despair, but only a passing mood; no, she wouldn’t call herself unhappy, though she wouldn’t say she was happy, either; she had not felt she needed to worry when the tube of chemical was gone, as she had thought someone might have tossed it out while cleaning the room. Again and again she had to answer the questions, asked by grownups in the quadrangle, the high school officials, the university security committee, the police: no, she did not know who had taken the poison; no, she had not had a plan to kill Shaoai; no, Shaoai had never spoken of suicide with her; had she spoken of that with Shaoai? no, though she had talked about it briefly with Moran; perhaps Moran had told Shaoai; perhaps Moran had rummaged through Ruyu’s things and looked for the tube, or Shaoai had done that; had Moran ever spoken of suicide, no, of course not; would Moran want to kill Shaoai, no, she did not think so, though she could only speak from what she knew, and she did not know anyone well in this city; no, she had no reason to want to harm anyone; no, she did not do anything to harm anyone.

Moran did not know how much the world had trusted Ruyu’s words; though people must have trusted her enough, as eventually the investigation stopped, leaving too much space for everyone to come up with his own conjecture: could it be that there had been two suicidal souls under one roof? Or could it be that the thought of suicide was like a virus—it did not matter how it had started, but in the end it had caught both girls, and by mere chance one was spared? There had been reasons for Shaoai’s despair, and evidence: her being expelled from the university, her uncertain future, her dark mood, her one drunken episode that many had witnessed; quite a change from the ambitious and outgoing girl she used to be, people would agree. Less sense could be made out of Ruyu’s situation, though she was an orphan sent to live with strangers, and she was at an age when hormones could easily induce untrustworthy moods; who knows, the neighbors sometimes thought—there was no way to find out how her
life had started: suppose there had been genes of madness to start with, in the parents’ lines? Their abandoning a baby girl could be more than being irresponsible; any orphan could be a host of dark secrets and unseemly history.

Ruyu’s grandaunts had been telegraphed and phoned; they, citing the inconvenience of travel at their age, did not come, though they did send a telegram, in which they said that they had raised Ruyu as a God-fearing child, and they believed that she would not lie. The telegram arrived in the middle of another crisis, when Grandpa was found unconscious; he was rushed to the emergency room, and never returned to the quadrangle.

Moran’s mother had signed for the telegram. Months later, when Moran found an excuse to stay home on a weekday—she felt sick, she told her mother, who let her skip school without further questioning—she looked around to see if her parents had saved anything related to the case, but the only thing she found was the telegram. Her mother must have conveyed the unkind message to Aunt and Uncle subtly, or did it matter even if she had not said anything? By then all was over: Boyang had been transferred to the high school affiliated with his parents’ university, and was allowed only to visit on weekends to see his grandmother; Ruyu, with Teacher Shu’s help, had become a boarder at school, and her stay in the quadrangle, barely four months, was never brought up by the neighbors afterward; Grandpa had passed away, and Shaoai’s family, having relocated to another district, had not come back for a visit again, though they were not forgotten: each year the neighbors pooled their money and sent a donation to Shaoai’s parents for her caretaking.

The vacated house had stayed empty for more than a year; bad feng shui, people would say, with two disasters hitting the family in a short time. Eventually a young couple moved in. They had been married for three years, but had been living in separate dorms assigned to them by their work units, which they had had to share with
others. They were so happy to have a place assigned to them that the neighbors could not bring themselves to ruin their mood. By and by, however, the story would reach their ears, as in this city no secret would stay a secret, no history could be laid permanently to rest in peace.

After the case was closed, Moran’s parents never spoke to her about it again. They must have learned how she had wept in front of strangers because unlike Ruyu, Moran could not answer the questions. Why had she not alerted anyone about the theft? people wanted to know; had it happened before that she had witnessed other illegal actions but had refrained from telling? Why had she not said anything to any grownup when her friend had talked about suicide with her? Had she worried about her friend’s safety? Had she considered herself a responsible friend?

Moran did not know if Ruyu had been suicidal, or murderous; could it be that a person could not be one without being the other? The more she tried to understand Ruyu, the murkier her own mind became. All the same she did not protest when, in the end, blame was laid on her more than on the two other girls, as her silence could not be acquitted as their potential madness would be. People were lenient not to say this to Moran—that is, all but Boyang, who, as always, came up with his quick conclusion, and did not hold back. “You never really liked Ruyu, did you?” Boyang said to Moran in their last real conversation. He had moved away by then, and had written and asked to see her on a Tuesday afternoon. She had skipped school and met him near the Back Sea.

But that was not true, she argued weakly for herself.

“Why didn’t you say anything, then? I understand your decision not to tell a grownup, but why not tell me?”

Nothing she could say would appease Boyang’s fury now, or ever. He had lost too much—his first love, two friends, and his childhood home.

“Did you think I would love you if Ruyu had been taken out of
the picture? Did you think if she killed herself we could go back to where we were?” Boyang asked.

When Moran broke into tears Boyang did not seem to soften his opinion. Angrily he sped away on his bicycle. Look at what you’ve done, a voice said to Moran, though she did not understand that it was her future self speaking: look at how you’ve destroyed everything.

17

“So,” Celia said the moment Ruyu entered the house. “What’
s
going on with you?”

“Nothing much.”

“Then who was this woman who died?”

“That,” Ruyu said, “is a long story.”

“Just as I thought, but the question is”—Celia paused and studied Ruyu’s face before handing her a clothes hanger for her raincoat; it was a drizzly morning, the fog dense, threatening to stay all day—“are you going to tell me the story? See, I knew something was up when you came over the other night. I asked Edwin, and he said he couldn’t tell. But you know how men are. Or you don’t know. In any case, they can’t see anything unless you point out to them where to look, and even then you can’t guarantee that they see what you want them to see.”

Edwin had indeed concealed part of his conversation with Ruyu from Celia, though for what reason? “Did you send him to check up on me again yesterday?” Ruyu asked.

“Yes, to look and to ask.”

Ruyu sighed. “You could’ve asked me without going to all that trouble.”

“You could’ve told me without my going to the trouble,” Celia said. “I didn’t want you to feel that I was intruding. On the other
hand, I wanted to know what happened, and I thought it’d be best to have Edwin ask.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d be okay if you didn’t tell him anything,” Celia said. “And since you know he doesn’t care much, you might have chosen to tell him the truth—and I’m saying this not only about you but about everyone. Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don’t you think?”

Celia, by simply being herself, was sheltered from doubt, and Ruyu admired Celia for that: anything concealed from her was done so because she cared too much. In life we have all met those like Celia, and sometimes we have befriended one or two, but never too many: if they are not the sole reason for the events around them, they at least have a part in everything that happens or does not happen. Their commitment to life is to be indispensable, a link between one thing and another; what they cannot connect to themselves—inevitably someone, something, will fail them by falling out of their range—will stop existing in their world. But was this a bad arrangement for Celia, or for those around her? Without Celia, Edwin, who had no tentacles of his own, would perhaps have had a less solid grasp on many things, though what did Ruyu know about Edwin’s marriage? What did she know about him while he had, at least for a few days, kept their conversation a secret?

The thought that at some moment she had been on his mind was alarming in itself. Ruyu’s ease with the couple relied on Edwin’s keeping an incurious distance and Celia’s having enough drama in her life for Ruyu to watch; as much as Celia enjoyed the attention, Ruyu enjoyed watching, and at moments did not stop herself from imagining, as all audiences do at one time or another, being on stage. Without difficulty, Ruyu could see herself in Celia’s position: at the hub of things, adding, expanding, until the bubble becomes the entire universe for its maker—a world as infinite as one’s ego will allow.

Ruyu did not regret not choosing that position. If she had ever felt
anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.

Ruyu had thought Celia, oblivious, would be safe from that erasing. Unlike Shaoai, who had deemed it both her right and her responsibility to teach Ruyu how to feel; unlike Moran, to whom Ruyu’s happiness and unhappiness had taken on a burdensome weight; unlike Boyang and the men after him, who saw things in her that she did not care about—Celia did not mind Ruyu’s being an anomaly. Or she had not minded before today. Impatiently, waiting for an explanation, today’s Celia had dragged Ruyu off the spectator’s seat. “I didn’t think the dead woman was relevant to anything,” Ruyu said.