Kinder Than Solitude

11

Three days passed, but the conversation Ruyu had begun to dread, in which Celia would request an explanation as to why Ruyu had told Edwin but not Celia about the death of a friend, had not occurred. The person who’d died wasn’t close, Ruyu would have said, but that would not have sufficed. For Celia, any death, be it that of a stranger she’d read about in the newspapers, a passing acquaintance’s distant relative, or an aged neighborhood pet, was relevant, the grief she felt on other people’s behalf leaving her constantly bruised yet acutely alive. To deprive Celia of an opportunity to mourn was to deny her the right to feel.

Wickedly Ruyu wondered if she should have told Celia about the death: no other stranger would feel the waste of Shaoai’s ambitions and desires or imagine her imprisonment in her body for twenty-one years as unreservedly as Celia would. Why not be lenient and let the loss of Shaoai be acknowledged? Who else would do that for Shaoai if not Celia? Certainly Shaoai’s mother must be suffering. Boyang had not mentioned Aunt in his email, but Ruyu knew she was alive: when Uncle had passed away a few years earlier, Boyang had emailed with the news. All mothers, though, mourn the deaths of their children, and a mother’s grief, like a mother’s love, offers little redemption. The world would be a kinder place if mothers, and mothers alone, were the judges of their children. Everyone would be absolved of her sins before her heart repents, everyone but you, Ruyu thought with a sudden rage: you — lonely, vicious, remorseless orphan.

Shaoai’s death had not taken Ruyu by surprise. Had she not been, by keeping an email address available to Boyang and by checking it regularly, waiting for Shaoai to die all along? Had he been waiting too, she wondered; had Moran? Little had bound them together but the waiting, which, all over now, would finally release them into a void, where even the keenest ears could not discern that they, like three unconnected music phrases, had once been in the same piece. Ruyu wondered what ripples the death had left in the other two hearts, but perhaps they had become immovable over the years, which she hoped, for the sake of their happiness, was the case.

Ruyu had not seen Moran or Boyang since she had left the country, but instinctively she knew that they had not forgotten her. Would it be a solace to them that they had not been forgotten by her, either? Other people in her past — her grandaunts, her two ex-husbands, Eric — she did not think about often. When she did, she thought of them incuriously, their lives, and in the case of her grandaunts, their deaths, affecting her little. But at least she had enough mercy for Moran and Boyang: sometimes she allowed herself to wonder about their current lives. It was their bad luck to have met her, their bad luck to have stumbled onto a battleground where they had had no reason to be. But to whom had the battleground belonged? Once upon a time Ruyu had thought that the battle was between herself and Shaoai, but the latter had not deserved to be her equal; it could have been between Ruyu and God, but she had been unwilling — was still unwilling — to grant him that position.

Suppose one could head into a battle without a definite enemy, and one could, with a blind resolution, leave a trail of corpses behind. If that were her lot Ruyu saw no point questioning it now. Moran and Boyang had been her casualties, yet in some way their lives must have been enhanced by her, too. This view, no doubt heartless to the world, comforted Ruyu: they had not been extraordinary people to start with. Years of living — quarreling with the surroundings, making do with small triumphs — would have worn out their innocence in the most banal way. Though it wasn’t innocence betrayed that made them interesting — innocence is always betrayed — but that neither Boyang nor Moran understood how to carry a burden as enduring as Shaoai, or why it was theirs.

God should have had mercy for Moran and Boyang, Ruyu thought; God should have let Shaoai die a long time ago. Willfully, wishfully, he changes his mind and adjusts a few minor details, but revision of the script — of any script whose creator is cursed with all-seeing eyes — must amount to little gratification. Does that make him feel lonely, abandoned even? Or bored, and enraged by his boredom?

You, Ruyu said in her heart to the god she had long stopped believing in, you have my sympathy.

Only once in her life had Ruyu been surprised — by Shaoai’s fingers and tongue, probing where they had no right to; and by her own paralytic silence, which must have been interpreted by Shaoai as acquiescence. Had that been in God’s script, too? If he’d intended other schemes for Ruyu, she had not let herself be caught again. He had beaten her that one time because he was God, and she had been young.

The bells on top of the door jingled. Ruyu tried to suppress her vexation — a customer was coming into the store, wanting something, or worse, not knowing what he or she wanted, demanding recommendations and later approval from Ruyu. Yet when she looked up it was only Edwin, who, both hands occupied with take-out bags from a nearby deli, walked sideways into the shop. Jamming his foot between the door and its frame, he let the door close gently so that the bells would rattle less.

She should have stood up to greet him, but for a moment Ruyu did not move, watching the door close behind Edwin in slow motion and wishing that someone would rush in, instantly bursting the bubble of stealthy quietness that was now enclosing the two of them.

“Hello,” Edwin said.

“Oh, it’s you,” Ruyu said. Why would anyone mute a bell that was supposed to ring?

“Are you closed?”

“No,” Ruyu said, trying to recover from her momentary frustration. “Did Celia send you not only to buy dinner but also to get treats?” she said. It must be one of those days when Celia couldn’t find enough inspiration to cook a dinner both aesthetically and nutritionally satisfying.

They were celebrating a coworker’s fiftieth birthday the following day, Edwin said, and he thought he would bring some sweets. Ruyu nodded at the display and told him to take his time. She should have been more accommodating, making recommendations, chatting about the children and their schoolwork, but the silenced bell had come back to her — not from this cozy boutique in the suburban town center that looked like a quaint Old West main street, but from the Beijing quadrangle half a lifetime ago. More often than not, the bell above the door to Shaoai’s house did not have a chance to jingle before Aunt hurried to cover it with an anxious hand. What was the point of having a bell if one had to constantly prevent it from ringing, Ruyu had thought then. Had she asked Uncle, he would have said that it was Aunt’s nature to want to save the bell from unnecessary wear, or that she did not want to disturb the bedridden Grandpa, but Ruyu knew Uncle only wanted to believe his answers. To have or not have a bell in the house: neither seems wrong, but to mute one that has been given a place is an act of inconsistency, to want comings and goings to be known and yet remain unknown at the same time. The furtive eagerness with which Aunt raced to reach the bell when she heard someone’s steps approach the door — Ruyu remembered it now, and shuddered with a violent resentment — was it not a kind of greediness, to be there, always there, to be the first person to greet those who came and the last person to say farewell to those departing?

“What do you think, Italian or French?” Edwin asked, studying the truffles. “Or you recommend neither?”

“Belgian,” Ruyu said, knowing that anything Edwin chose would, in the end, bear signs of poor judgment in Celia’s eyes. “How’s Celia?” she asked.

Concerned, as always, that their Thanksgiving dinner would not be a smooth success for her visiting parents, Edwin said. Ruyu nodded with sympathy. Last year Celia had been hurt when her parents decided to spend the holiday with her sister’s family. Two years in a row, Celia had said; not that she wanted the hassle of hosting them, but shouldn’t they give an explanation?

Edwin placed two boxes on the counter and watched Ruyu ring them up. “How are you feeling these days?” he said, his tone too casual to sound natural.

Ruyu looked up. Really, she thought, spending unnecessarily on two beautiful boxes of truffles just to ask a question like that? She placed the golden stickers with the shop’s logo on top of the boxes and smoothed them with her fingertips. That Edwin had refrained from relating their conversation to Celia could have been an oversight on his part; at least that was what Ruyu preferred to believe. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“I remember you said your friend died,” Edwin said. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

Why on earth had she slipped and told him something so irrelevant? Worse, why had Edwin, who seemed a sensible person, chosen not to forget a conversation that should not have happened in the first place? To turn something into a secret — the way Edwin had with Shaoai’s death — is like inflicting a wound on one’s own body. To let the harm be known — to walk into the shop and ask about the death again — is to thrust the wound into someone else’s sight. A secret that never heals makes a person, however close, a stranger, or worse, an intimate, an enemy.

“I’m doing just fine,” Ruyu said. “Thank you for asking.”

Edwin mumbled something, and his face turned beet-colored. Ruyu sighed. As a shop assistant, she was neither impatient nor untalented when it came to small talk. People came into the store out of idleness, and idly they studied the pretty objects on the shelves: imported toffees and chocolates in exquisite wrappings and packages, handmade mugs bearing witty or cloying or nonsensical images and words, flimsy china teacups arranged around a teapot like well-behaved orphans perpetually begging to be filled with love, tin windup toys that were neither sturdy nor attractive to children today but nevertheless gave the store an old-world feeling. None of the objects for sale was essential to anyone, but because of their non-essentialness they continued to be, and continued to be cherished: much of life’s comfort comes not from the absoluteness of happiness and goodness but from the hope that something would be good enough, and one would find oneself happy enough. Perhaps it was for that reason people would walk in — La Dolce Vita was one of those stores one entered without knowing what one wanted, thinking that it would provide a clue, a solution, or at least a moment of distraction. It was Ruyu’s job to convince a customer that someone — be it a friend or a family member or even the customer herself — deserved decadence. That she spent part of her time in a store that mattered little to anyone did not bother Ruyu; these places — the shop, Celia’s kitchen, the soccer field where once in a while she drove Ginny’s son to practice and waited among a group of women who watched their children with tireless love — allowed Ruyu both to be among people and to treat them as though they were the pair of kissing Dutch dolls next to the cash register. Given enough distance, she could even let herself feel a fondness toward these men and women and children; yet out of that obliterating mist had come Edwin, who, for whatever reason, insisted on his right to be regarded as real and indispensable. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh,” Ruyu said. “I just don’t want to make a fuss about something trivial.”

“A friend’s death is not trivial.”

Ruyu looked at Edwin, uncertain as to whether she despised or pitied him, a man foolishly falling victim to his own kindness. The concern in his voice was that of a needy soul; acting as though he was agonized by her loss, he was asking her to acknowledge his right to feel her pain. “She was not a close friend,” Ruyu said, trying hard to maintain the evenness in her voice. It was his bad luck to have stepped onto that old battleground, but today she saw no need for another casualty.

“I thought you looked sad the other day.”

“Then I’m afraid you made a mistake,” Ruyu said. “She was one of those people I would not want to see or hear about ever again, and I feel no pain whatsoever about her death. No, let me take that back. The only pain I feel is that she didn’t die soon enough. Now, are you reassured that I’m going to survive just fine?”

Edwin flinched, trying to find words, and Ruyu, her mercy for him gone, stared at him, not offering any assistance in his struggle. Time, be it old or new, lived or yet to be lived, was merely a body she carried inside her heart, its weight growing less conspicuous by the day, its coldness more acclimated to, and its possessiveness easily taken, or mistaken, for composure. And then there was Celia — all the Celias of the world — who made it easy for Ruyu to be who she was: their eyes looked neither at nor through her, but looked instead for themselves in her face. Hadn’t Edwin learned anything from his marriage? Why would he come here trying to resurrect what was beyond revival? “Are you religious?” Ruyu asked.

Edwin shook his head. Baffled, he explained that his grandparents and parents had been, and they had raised him according to their faith — but no, he was not religious now.

“Then don’t try to be good to strangers,” Ruyu said. “It’s pointless.”

“I don’t understand.”

“An easy example: at this moment, shouldn’t you be worrying more about your family’s dinner getting cold than about a dead person you’ve never met?”

Edwin’s face turned red again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have intruded.”

Something softened in Ruyu’s heart. The urge to embarrass and the urge to humiliate were as treacherous as the urge to be kind, as any sentiment granted another person the status of being less hypothetical. “Let’s forget this altogether. The person has no place here, and let us not complicate life with death,” Ruyu said, gesturing to the door, where the bells were dutifully waiting to bid farewell to Edwin. “Do send my love to Celia and the kids.”

Later Ruyu walked home in the moonlight. The fog from the bay had drifted inland, and across the canyon, orange lights lit up people’s windows, just smudged enough to appear dreamy. Three nights a week Ruyu stayed at the shop until closing. The walk uphill, if she’d shared it with another person, would have been beautiful in people’s eyes; but companionless on these walks, she must cut a lonesome figure to those who knew her by sight. But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others — a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.

All her life Ruyu believed she was able to fend off love and loneliness, her secret being that the present would be let live only its allowed duration. The person who dusted the shelves at the shop was as solid and real as the person who nannied two Pomeranians when their owners went to southern France or Italy for the holidays, or the person tutoring an unmotivated teenager in Mandarin. A born murderess, she had mastered the skill of snuffing out each moment before releasing it to join the other passed moments. Nothing connects one self to another; time effaced does not become memory.

Crickets chirped in the bushes, pausing with the approach of Ruyu’s steps, so that, at any given moment, she could hear only those in the distance. These autumn lamenters, even in chorus, were slyer than nightingales, bleaker than owls. It was nearly Thanksgiving, but the season was a particularly mild one, even for northern California. In Beijing, the last of the autumn crickets would be frozen now by the first cold front from Siberia.

Certain things come unannounced, like crickets, like the darkness of the season: by the time one notices them, one has already fallen victim to their wicked charm. Ruyu watched as her shadow was turned by a nearby bush into something too strange to belong to her. Instinctively she stepped back and hid from the sole street lamp behind a tree. Something slid into the bushes behind her, a squirrel or a raccoon. Nature makes one look for one’s own species, but what would one’s species do but make one lonelier?

Half a block before she reached her cottage, her cell phone rang. It was Celia, and Ruyu picked up the call: one should not neglect the mortal.

“Where are you?” Celia said.

“About to open my door.”

“Edwin said you looked unwell. What’s wrong?”

Was belated honesty a form of deception? “Nothing is wrong,” Ruyu said.

“Did you catch a cold?” Celia said. “Your voice sounds funny.”

“Maybe it’s the signal.”

“Or maybe not,” Celia said. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me, but if talking it out helps, I’m all ears.”

“All ears for what?”

“Edwin seems to think that someone important died,” Celia said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I would’ve told you if it had been someone important,” Ruyu said. “The fact that I only randomly mentioned it to Edwin but forgot to tell you — shouldn’t that be enough to prove that nothing is the matter?”

“Was it a woman? Edwin thought it might be one of your exes’ lovers?”

Perhaps there was nothing but true compassion in Edwin’s curiosity, but Ruyu could not help feeling resentful: passive-aggressively, he had enlisted his unsuspicious wife to ambush Ruyu. She sighed. “Let’s talk about this later, Celia.”

“Can you come for coffee tomorrow? Before you go to the shop?”

Ruyu looked at her watch. She had fewer than twelve hours to come up with something reasonably good to stop Celia from pursuing the topic. Yes, Ruyu agreed. She would come after Celia dropped the kids off at school.

But by the time Ruyu had settled in for the night, she could no longer follow through with her resolution to prepare a tale for Celia. Any planning required her to imagine the future — a day or a month to come — but the moment she set such a task for herself, her mind stubbornly vacated itself. People went to yoga studios and meditation retreats to achieve the same effect; too bad she could not share her secret with the world, Ruyu thought, feeling already lethargic. She had noticed that since the news of Shaoai’s death arrived, she had become more prone to feeling tired. All that arguing with a god from the past must have affected her more than she had expected.

Ruyu had long ago realized that her grandaunts, religious and pious as they had believed themselves to be, had only held on to a faith that had been more of their own creation, and the god they had given her, too, had not been the god in other people’s prayers. But what did it matter if they had given her the wrong faith, now that she had gone astray from that faith? All the same, Ruyu knew that she had to credit her grandaunts: by giving her a god they had given her a position of superiority, when an orphan like her could easily be devoured by the world; by leaving them and their god behind, she had gone beyond destructibility.

Ruyu filled the bathtub and then turned on the CD player, which contained the piano concerto she had been listening to earlier, by whom at the moment she did not care to remember.

In the warm steam, she drifted off a little; here and there a phrase from the concerto caught in her head, and she seemed able to see it printed clearly on a music sheet before the notes swam away like tadpoles. One easily lost tadpoles, as one could lose anything. Once, at eight, Moran and Boyang had gone to a nearby pond to catch tadpoles, which they had carried in wax paper tubes filled with pond water and secured on both ends by vines; they thought of running back to the quadrangle and depositing the tadpoles in the giant barrel in which Teacher Pang kept two koi fish, but for one reason or another, they took a detour to visit a classmate, and for a while the three of them bounced up and down in the classmate’s bed, the tadpoles completely forgotten by their captors.

They never dared to ask the classmate about his bed, Moran had said when she told Ruyu the story. The poor tadpoles, Boyang had said guiltily; and the poor friend, Moran had added, the voice so clear and close to Ruyu’s ears that she opened her eyes abruptly. The steam had not dispersed. She must have dozed off for only a moment, yet she felt confused; she thought she had seen and heard Moran and Boyang, not only as the teenagers retelling the story, but also as eight-year-olds, carefree children who should have been strangers to her, yet they had looked familiar in her dream, if, in fact, it was in her dream she had seen them.

Why they had told her the story Ruyu had no recollection. They had told her all sorts of things, but little remained in her memory. The last thing she would ever want to dwell upon was other people’s childhoods, yet Moran and Boyang had seemed, a moment ago, so vivid that she could almost feel their astonishment at losing the tadpoles.

Ruyu did not remember what she had looked like at that age; of course she remembered her grandaunts well: their voices and gestures, their neatly plucked eyebrows and well-combed buns, which never blurred when she saw them in her mind’s eye. But she could not see herself then, or at any age when she had been in their care. Had her grandaunts had a mirror in their apartment? Ruyu remembered an oval one, not larger than a hand mirror, standing on a metal stand on top of a tall dresser, which her grandaunts would consult before leaving home. Had she ever been handed the mirror, Ruyu wondered, and she could not answer with any certainty. The dresser, she remembered, was extraordinarily tall, with eight levels of drawers, two on each level. It was one of the few of her grandaunts’ possessions that had survived multiple visits by the Red Guards: unlike the smaller items, the dresser could not be hidden, yet the revolutionary youths had spared the heavy furniture, perhaps deeming it too heavy to move downstairs and throw into the fire, or not having the right tools to ax it apart. By the time Ruyu could reach an object on top of the dresser, she must have been nearly ten, she calculated. No, she did not remember looking into a mirror; there must have been times when she had been allowed to do so, but what difference would it have made? She had already missed the opportunities — no, she had not missed them, because they had never been granted her in the first place — for a normal childhood. There was no disappointment in that: disappointment is for those who begin with a plan, those who sow seeds and refuse to accept the barrenness of life.

Much more had been planned for her, much more expected from her at one time or another, and her achievement — could this be her only one? — was to have sabotaged everyone’s good script. But why not? She had never asked to be part of anyone’s interior life, but people, with too much confidence or perhaps too little, seemed ill at ease unless they found some way to change that.

Ruyu’s first marriage had ended when the man to whom she had been married for two years had lost control and beaten her. She had not defended herself other than to shield her face from his fists, and afterward she had watched with equanimity as the man broke down and cried, calling her a monster who had turned him into a wife beater like his father. What had she done but remain the same person he had seen only twice before marrying her, she had thought later, studying her bruised body in a mirror so that she could have a better sense of the pain she should feel. When she had, through an acquaintance, met the man nine years her senior, it had not been for the prospect of a good life or a happy marriage in America, but for an exit from her grandaunts’ charge and her own Chinese life. When he, with only two weeks of vacation time and the goal of finding a wife, had decided to marry a stranger, a girl not yet twenty, shouldn’t he have prepared himself for all that could possibly come? Surely he had thought of practicalities: his bank account he had never shared with her, each week allocating her an allowance of twenty dollars on top of the grocery money; he had given her the choice of pursuing a degree in either accounting or biostatistics, both of which would allow her to find a job easily and make a substantial contribution to the household; he had, at the beginning of each university semester, registered her for her classes, so that he would know her exact whereabouts at any moment of the day, and he never enrolled her in evening classes, because in the evenings she was expected to waitress at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, which hired immigrants on student visas who had no legal right to work and would work for less than minimum wage. If their marriage was a transaction, Ruyu had accepted his terms, offering, in return for lodging and food and tuition money, her consent to be wifely. To be wifely, to sign over her future for a one-way plane ticket: she had never agreed to love, and had not expected his love; yet it was in the name of love he had raged, and called her the coldest person he had ever met. Even a chunk of ice would have melted after his two years of trying, he had said, calling her names she had not imagined him able to. She wondered if his father had used the same names for his mother.

When he finally calmed down, Ruyu said that she would not call the police — with his PhD almost finished and a job offer from a former colleague of his advisor’s, he could not afford a criminal record, which would eliminate his dream of obtaining a green card in this country. In return, she said, she wanted a divorce and enough money for the next two years of tuition and living expenses. He did not have that kind of money, the man said, and Ruyu replied that she lived simply and did not need much; if he would not agree, she said, she would have to take care of matters by other means.

Scheming, he had called her in an email after their divorce, listing all the things she had done to ensnare him. The sincerity of his fury made Ruyu wonder about the difference between what one was and what one appeared to the world. She had not thought of herself as a calculating person, not because she was better than that, but because she did not find anything in life worth scheming for. She had asked little and would have been fine given less, but to want less, to want nothing, was, in the end, a kind of greediness her husband could not live with.

Ruyu had not thought of marrying again after that. She had gone on to finish her degree in accounting, as she had seen no need to change course. When she graduated, it became clear that she would either have to be ambitious and find a job with a big firm that supported a working visa, or find a legal way to stay in the country so she could work at a job that was less demanding.

Sometimes Ruyu wondered if her second marriage could have lasted longer, even forever, if circumstances had worked out for them. If anyone had the right to complain about her scheming, it could only be Paul, whom Ruyu had met before graduation and had decided to date wholeheartedly for her future stay in this country: the wedding had taken place before her one-year post-degree stay in the country expired.

Paul had grown up in North Dakota, and had on a whim transferred to a state university in California after two years at a local college; he’d wanted to see a bigger world than his hometown of two thousand people. After graduation, he had found a job at the height of the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley, but, neither brilliant nor ambitious enough, he had been unable to find another job after the bubble burst. By then, Ruyu had gotten her green card through the marriage and was working part-time as a bookkeeper for a few local businesses. Unlike her first husband, Paul had never considered her work essential to household finances; his dream was to make a decent amount of money when his company went IPO, and then to have three or four children to keep Ruyu busy at home. But when that dream had broken, he could not build another dream. And then there were his parents, always there, always hoping that one of their children — all four had gone away, all to big cities — would come back to be part of the family business, which sold kayaking equipment and managed tours for adventurous vacationers.

It was a painful decision for him, too, Paul said; he hoped that she understood in the long run it would be the best for them.

Homecoming of any sort struck Ruyu as a sad comedy. Her first year in America, her ex-husband had brought her to see the university’s homecoming parade, and one float, with a group of older men dressed up in matching suits and waving and grinning under the school banner, made her feel embarrassed for both the men on the float and those who had to watch them with cheers. Human beings are bad actors, but the worst are those who offer more than is required of them: heroes in the shoes of extras. But perhaps that is what people cannot stop doing — inventing consequences because our smallness is too heavy for us to bear. Afterward, in class, Ruyu would sometimes study her classmates and wonder who, among those boys who did not take off their baseball caps and did not stop chewing gum when the professor spoke from the podium, would grow up to be the men on the float.

Ruyu had flatly refused to join in Paul’s homecoming. His picture of their future was claustrophobic for her. There would be the creeks he had waded and fished when he was young, the ice cream stand where he had bought a cone for a high school girlfriend; Ruyu did not mind that he had a past, but she refused to be absorbed into his, or anyone else’s, history.

Compared to her first divorce, the second was more subdued, less dramatic. She had been fond of Paul, even if she had not loved him; she had learned to be among people — his friends and colleagues — and to dress in a way that made him proud, and to be witty, even flirty at times. If anything, the five years of marriage had taught her that she could fit into any role if she made an effort, though nothing satisfied her more than staying at a distance, watching people until she could see through them. Paul’s dream to become a millionaire, unrealized, had not saddened her. She had not minded seeing his folly confirmed; she felt pleased, even, as she would feel when she saw any mortal’s falling.

The water in the bathtub had turned lukewarm, and reluctantly Ruyu pulled herself out of it. The concerto had long since ended, but she had not noticed the quiet until then. In the vast world out there, those who had crossed paths with her were living in their safe cocoons; and those who had died — her grandaunts, for instance, or Uncle, or Shaoai — what had become of them?

Ruyu did not miss her grandaunts in the sense she had never missed her parents. The four of them had taken enough from her; what had been left was to be either cherished or else discarded with an insensitiveness that matched theirs. Uncle’s death had caused, however transient, a ripple of melancholy in Ruyu’s heart, followed by relief: Uncle had been one of those whose lives were saturated by unwarranted sadness, and what could be a kinder antidote to sadness than death itself?

Shaoai’s death, granted mercifully at long last, must be an antidote, too. Despite sounding ruthless, Ruyu had meant it when she told Edwin that Shaoai’s death had come too late, not only for the one waiting for death but for those around her. With each year’s passing Ruyu was a year older than Shaoai, whom she had known only as a young woman. A strange feeling stirred in Ruyu when the thought occurred that Shaoai had been young at the time; innocent even, but was it real innocence when it could be — and had been — used to taint another person? And then, the worst battle, Ruyu thought, is fought between the innocent: not knowing how to spare themselves, they don’t for a moment feel mercy for the other.