Kinder Than Solitude Read Free Page B

remember her well. I don’t recall her being brilliant, am I right?”
    “I doubt there is anyone brilliant enough for you.”
    “Your sister is,” Boyang’s mother said. “But don’t distract me. You used to know them both well, so you must have an idea.”
    “I don’t,” Boyang said.
    His mother looked at him, rearranging, he imagined, his and the other people’s positions in her head as she would do with chemical molecules. He remembered taking his parents to America to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. At the airport in San Francisco, they’d seen an exhibition of duck decoys. Despite the twelve-hour flight, his mother had studied each of the wooden ducks. The colors and shapes of the different decoy products fascinated her, and she read the old 1920s posters advertising twenty-cent duck decoys, using her knowledge of inflation rates over the years to calculate how much each duck would cost today. Always so curious, Boyang thought, so impersonally curious.
    “Did you ever ask them?” she said now.
    “Whether one of them tried to murder someone?” Boyang said. “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “I think you’re overestimating your son’s ability.”
    “But do you not want to know? Why not ask them?”
    “When? Back then, or now?”
    “Why not ask now? They may be honest with you now that Shaoai is dead.”
    For one thing, Boyang thought, neither Moran nor Ruyu would answer his email. “If you’re not overestimating my ability, you are certainly overestimating people’s desire for honesty,” he said. “But has it occurred to you it might’ve only been an accident? Would that be too dull for you?”
    His mother looked into her tea. “If I put too many tea leaves in the teapot, that could be considered a mistake. No one puts poison into another person’s teacup by accident. Or do you mean that Moran or Ruyu was the real target, and poor Shaoai happened to take the wrong tea? To think, it could’ve been you!”
    “My drinking the poison by accident?”
    “No. What I’m asking is: what do you think of the possibility of someone trying to murder you?”
    The single calla lily—his mother’s favorite flower—looked menacing, unreal with its flawless curve. She blew lightly over her tea, not looking at him, though he knew that was part of her scrutiny. Was she distorting the past to humor herself, or was she revealing her doubt—or was the line between distorting and revealing so fine that one could not happen without the other? For all he knew, he had lived in her selective unawareness, but perhaps this was only an illusion. One ought not to have the last word about one’s own mother.
    He admitted that the thought had never occurred to him. “It’s a possibility, you know,” she said.
    “But why would anyone have wanted to kill me?”
    “Why would anyone want to kill anyone?” she said, and right away Boyang knew that he had spoken too carelessly. “If someone steals poison from a lab, that person intends to do harm to anotherperson or to herself. For all I know, the harm was already done the moment that chemical was stolen. And I’m not asking you why. Why anyone does anything is beyond my understanding or interest. All I would like to know is who was trying to kill who, but unfortunately you don’t have an answer. And sadly, you don’t seem to share my curiosity.”

2
    When the train pulled into Beijing’s arched station on August 1, 1989, Ruyu, adjusting her eyes from the glare of the afternoon to the shadowed grayness of the station, did not yet know that one’s preparation for departure should begin long before arrival. There were many things that she, at fifteen, had still to learn. To seek answers to one’s questions is to know the world. Guileless in childhood, private as one grows older, and, for those who insist on the certainty of adulthood, ignored when they become unanswerable, these questions form the context of one’s being. For Ruyu, however, an answer that