Kinder Than Solitude Read Free Page A

affected.”
    What others, Boyang wanted to say to his mother, would be worth a moment of her thought? The chemical found in Shaoai’s blood had been taken from his mother’s laboratory; whether it had been an attempted murder, an unsuccessful suicide, or a freak accident had never been determined. His family did not talk about the case, but Boyang knew that his mother had never let go of her grudge.
    “Do you mean your career went to waste?” Boyang asked. After the incident, the university had taken disciplinary action against his mother for her mismanagement of chemicals. It would have been an unpleasant incident, a small glitch in her otherwise stellar academic career, but she insisted on disputing the charge: every laboratory in the department was run according to outdated regulations, with chemicals available to all graduate students. It was a misfortune that a life had been damaged, she admitted; she was willing to be punished for allowing three teenage children to be in her lab unsupervised—a mismanagement of human beings rather than chemicals.
    “If you want to look at my career, sure—that’s gone to waste for no reason.”
    “But things have turned out all right for you,” Boyang said. “Better, you have to admit.” His mother had left the university and joined a pharmaceutical company, later purchased by an American company. With her flawless English, which she’d learned at a Catholicschool, and several patents to her name, she earned an income three times what she would have made as a professor.
    “But did I say I was speaking of myself?” she said. “Your assumption that I have only myself to think of is only a hypothesis, not a proven fact.”
    “I don’t see anyone else worthy of your thought.”
    “Not even you?”
    “What do you mean?” The weakest comeback, Boyang thought: people only ask a question like that because they already know the answer.
    “You don’t feel your life has been affected by Shaoai’s poisoning?”
    What answer did she want to hear? “You get used to something like that,” he said. On second thought, he added, “No, I wouldn’t say her case has affected me in any substantial way.”
    “Who wanted her to die?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You heard me right. Who wanted to kill her back then? She didn’t seem like someone who would commit suicide, though certainly one of your little girlfriends, I can’t remember which one, hinted at that.”
    In rehearsing scenarios of Shaoai’s death Boyang had never included his mother—but when does any parent hold a position in a child’s fantasy? Still, that his mother had paid attention, and that he had underestimated her awareness of the case, annoyed him. “I’m sure you understand that if, in all honesty, you tell me that you were the one who poisoned her, I wouldn’t say or do anything,” she said. “This conversation is purely for my curiosity.”
    They were abiding by the same code, of maintaining the coexistence between two strangers, an intimacy—if their arrangement could be called that—cultivated with disciplined indifference. He rather liked his mother this way, and knew that in a sense he had never been her child; nor would she, in growing old, allow herself to become his charge. “I didn’t poison her,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Why sorry?”
    “You’d be much happier to have an answer. I’d be happier, too, if I could tell you for sure who poisoned her.”
    “Well then, there are only two other possibilities. So, do you think it was Moran or Ruyu?”
    He had asked himself the question over the years. He looked at his mother with a smile, careful that his face not betray him. “What do you think?”
    “I didn’t know either of them.”
    “There was no reason for you to know them,” Boyang said. “Or, for that matter, anyone.”
    His mother, as he knew, was not the kind to dwell upon sarcasm. “I never really met Ruyu,” she said. “Moran of course I saw around, but I don’t