The hidden truth(2)

The fifth dish was small, plain, almost nothing to look at — a thin slice of something pale, glazed, no larger than a coin.

Margo did not touch it for a long moment. She only looked at it, and then at Ottoline, and something passed between the two women that none of the others, watching, could have named.

"Bread," she said, finally. "Just bread. Butter, and a little honey." She glanced up. "This isn't a course. This is a child's plate. Someone cut it small on purpose, the way you cut a plate for — " She stopped herself.

"For someone who didn't eat much," said Idris, quietly, finishing it for her, because it seemed, somehow, easier coming from him.

Margo nodded, once, and did not say anything further about it, and Ottoline's hand, resting on the edge of the table, had gone very still.

The sixth was a small dish of stewed fruit, plain, unremarkable, and Margo named it without ceremony — comfort, nothing underneath it, for once, just comfort — and it was the first dish all morning that seemed to ask nothing further of anyone.

The seventh cloth came off to reveal a shallow dish, untouched, cold, the surface of it gone slightly matte the way food does when it has sat, uneaten, for some while.

Margo did not move toward it at all.

"That's not food anymore," she said. "That's — I don't know what that is. It's been sitting. A long time. Longer than a morning."

"A year," said Beatrix, quietly.

Nobody argued with her.

Ottoline stood over the seventh dish for a long moment, her hands no longer folded but pressed flat against the scrubbed wood of the table, her shoulders drawn up, and for the first time since the twelve of them had entered the kitchen, Neiman saw something in her that looked less like grief being carefully managed and more like grief simply happening, in real time, to a woman who had run out of ways to arrange her face around it.

She did not lift the eighth cloth.

"There is no eighth course," said Beatrix, some while later, once they had withdrawn from the kitchen and left Ottoline to whatever she needed the rest of that morning to be alone with. "There never will be. I don't think it's missing. I think it's the one she can't cook."

"What was it meant to be," said Sophia.

"I don't know," said Beatrix. "I don't think anyone does, except her, and I don't think she's ever going to tell us, because I don't think it was a dish at all. I think it was whatever would have come next, if the evening had gone the way every other evening in this house had gone before it. An ordinary dessert. A conversation afterward. Whatever a family does, once dinner is finished, that this family never got to do again."

Nobody said anything to that for a while.

It was Rafaela, oddly, who broke the silence, and she did it without her usual urgency, her voice gone flat and strange.

"I keep thinking about the bread," she said. "The small plate. Cut like that, for a boy who didn't eat much." She looked at her own hands. "I had a brother who didn't eat much either, near the end. You learn to cut things small, so it looks like less of a failure when half of it comes back." She stopped there, and did not explain the rest of it, and nobody asked her to.

She left the room not long after, and it was Adaeze who went after her, finding her at the end of the gallery with her forehead against the cold glass, her breath fogging a small circle that kept vanishing and reappearing.

"You don't have to tell me," said Adaeze, coming to stand beside her, not touching her, "and I won't ask again after tonight."

"There's not much to tell. He was nine. I was thirteen. I used to sit with him at the table for hours, moving food around his plate so it looked like he'd eaten more than he had, because our mother checked, and I didn't want her to see the real amount." Rafaela's breath fogged the glass again. "I got good at it. Cutting things small. Hiding the rest under a napkin, under a spoon, wherever it wouldn't be counted properly."

"That's not a failure," said Adaeze. "That's the kindest thing a sister could do."

"It didn't save him."

"No," Adaeze agreed, quietly. "It wasn't meant to. I don't think that's what it was for."

Rafaela did not answer that, and Adaeze did not press her to, and the two of them stood at the cold window a while longer, saying nothing further, which seemed, for once, to be exactly what the moment wanted from either of them.

Dr. Pryce found them himself, late that afternoon, in the small library, and he did not wait to be invited to sit; he simply stood in the doorway for a moment, looking older than Neiman had yet seen him look, and said, without preamble:

"Cassian told you. I know he did. I could see it on Rafaela's face at dinner last night, and I've been waiting since then for one of you to say something to me directly, and none of you has, and I find I'd rather you did."

Nobody spoke.

"Say it," said Pryce. "Any of you. I've had a year of people not saying it. I don't think I can bear a great deal more of that particular kindness."

It was Kenji who finally answered him, quiet, even, without flinching.

"You said wait."

"I did." Pryce came into the room at last, and sat, heavily, in the chair nearest the door, as though he did not trust himself to get any closer. "I'd like to tell you I don't remember why. That would be easier. I remember exactly why. I'd seen it before — a smaller version of it, resolve on its own, in another patient, another year, and some part of me believed, for three seconds, perhaps four, that this would do the same, and that moving too soon might do more harm than good." His hands, in his lap, were not steady. "Three seconds. Four. I've measured it a thousand times since, and it never once comes out the same number twice, and I no longer trust any of the numbers I give it, including the ones that would forgive me."

"Nobody here is asking you to forgive yourself," said Kenji.

"No," said Pryce. "I don't imagine you are. I've found, this past year, that the people least inclined to demand it of me are generally the ones who understand best why I can't manage it on my own."

He did not say anything further for a while, and nobody pressed him, and the fire in the small grate burned low and steady, and Neiman, watching the old man's still, unsteady hands, thought of nothing at all that seemed worth saying aloud.

"Does Ottoline know you've told us," said Vivienne, after a while.

"She's known since the morning she showed you the kitchen. I imagine she knew before that." Pryce looked at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else. "She's never said a word to me about it. Not one, in a year. I used to think that was mercy. I've started to think it's something closer to a verdict she hasn't finished writing yet."

"Have you asked her?"

"How would I." He almost laughed, the same joyless sound Rafaela had described from Cassian. "She doesn't speak. I've had a year to ask her a hundred different ways and I've never once found the nerve to actually try, because I think some part of me would rather not know the answer than hear it confirmed in whatever grammar she'd choose to confirm it in."

Idris, who had been quiet through most of this, looked up from his notebook, which he had not written in once.

"That's the same thing you did at the table," he said, carefully. "Isn't it. Waiting, because the not-knowing felt safer than finding out."

Pryce looked at him for a long moment, and something in his tired, lined face conceded the point without his having to say so aloud.

"Yes," he said, finally. "I don't suppose I've learned a great deal in a year, have I."

Nobody answered that, and after a while he rose, slowly, and thanked them, for reasons none of them quite understood, and left the library the way he'd entered it — unhurried, and considerably heavier than he'd arrived.

Lenore found Margo before dinner, in the corridor outside the dining room, and stood there a moment before she managed to say anything at all.

"Cassian told me what you found in the kitchen," she said. "The eighth cloth. That she wouldn't lift it."

"She didn't need to," said Margo. "We understood well enough without it."

Lenore's hands twisted together, the same tight knot Neiman remembered from the first night. "I used to be angry at her," she said. "For the silence. I thought it was — I don't know. Punishment. For all of us, for not moving fast enough, for not being the one who understood what was happening before it was too late. I never once thought it might be the same thing I was doing, only louder about it."

"What were you doing?" said Margo, gently.

"Blaming the doctor, where she could hear me do it, so I wouldn't have to ask myself whether I'd have moved any faster, if it had been my hand on the table instead of his." Lenore looked, for a moment, entirely undone, the careful composure she'd rebuilt after that first terrible dinner falling away again, though quietly this time, without the anger that had carried it before. "I don't know how to apologize to a woman who won't answer me. I don't know what that's meant to look like."

"I don't think it has to look like anything," said Margo. "I think you just keep showing up at the table. I think that might be the whole of it."

Lenore did not answer that, but she did not walk away either, and after a moment the two women went in together, and sat, for the first time since the twelve had arrived, beside one another rather than at opposite ends of the family's long, careful distance.

That evening's dinner was the smallest the house had yet offered them — a single course, simple, unadorned, no bitterness in it at all that Margo could find, no sweetness either, only a plain, warm soup, nearly identical to the one they'd first been served, five nights before, except that this time it came without ceremony, without eighteen places set, without any of the careful theater the table had carried since their arrival.

Ottoline ate it in the same small, even spoonfuls as always.

But partway through the meal, she set her spoon down — not at the precise diagonal she always used, but simply down, carelessly, the handle resting against the bowl's rim — and looked, for a long moment, at Margo, seated some way down the table, and Margo looked back at her, and neither of them said anything at all, because neither of them, any longer, needed to.

Then Ottoline picked her spoon back up, and finished her soup, and the dinner went on, quiet and small and entirely unremarkable, in a house that had just, for the first time in a year, let itself be exactly that.

Neiman sat that night at his cold desk a long while before he gave up on sleep altogether, Beatrix's torn page still somewhere in his thoughts, the two crossed-out lines he hadn't been permitted to read in full.

He took out paper of his own, eventually — there was a little in the desk drawer, old, slightly yellowed, clearly meant for a guest who had never come to use it — and he wrote one sentence, and looked at it for some time, and crossed it out, the  way she had crossed out hers, and did not write a second.

He did not know, sitting there, which of them that made him more like.