The Ninth Dish

She was awake a long time before she could get her eyes open. Her head came first — packed too full, and a hum in it she could not put anywhere. Then the rest of her, arms and legs sunk and heavy, the way a stone sits at the bottom of a pot. Then the voices, two of them, moving back and forth above the bed, the woman's pitched high enough to go through her skull like a wire. "Caleb, you have to calm down. It was an accident. Nobody planned for this." "If I hadn't gone by the apartment today, I don't think anybody was going to bring her in at all." "That isn't fair. It took us a minute to understand, that's all. I've watched that girl grow up." A short breath from the man. Almost a laugh. "Shut up," Nora said. It came out thin. Less than a voice, barely more than air, but it landed, and the room went quiet on top of it. Then a chair scraped back and the man was at the side of the bed, close to her ear. "Nora? Nora. You're awake. Okay. I'm getting the doctor." She frowned and worked her eyes open. The ceiling was white and bright enough to sting; she squinted, and by the time the blur had come together into a room there were more people in it — five or six of them in white coats, moving around the bed with instruments and small bright lights — and the man and the woman had stepped back to let them through. None of them meant her any harm. That was clear. So she lay still and let them work — let them pry at her eyes and press at her wrists and ask their questions — and while they did it she looked at the room. Everything in it was strange. The bed, the clothes, the little humming machine with its climbing lines, the clipboards, the paper cups, the plastic pitcher. Her heart was going in her ears, so she put her breath on it — in slow through the nose, out long and quiet, as she had done at a stove with six dishes going and somebody's temper on the other side of the door — until the pounding dropped back down to work. Then she looked some more. So there really were people living at the bottom of the cliff. "If she's awake, the worst of it is behind us," one of the white coats was saying to the man and to the woman, in the flat voice of somebody handing over a bill. "She'll need rest. She may be sick to her stomach for a few days. That's normal." He turned back to her. "How are you feeling?" Nora looked at him. Then at the others, one face at a time, all the way around the room. "Who are you?" Nobody answered. The doctor's mouth stayed open on whatever he had been about to say. One nurse looked at the other one. The woman's hands stopped moving on her skirt. The man who had said her name went the color of the wall. Then he said, very carefully, "You don't know me?" "No," Nora said. Somebody let out a breath, and nobody picked it back up. * It took a day and a half for the story to settle, and when it did it was a good one: she had fallen, she had hit her head, and what she had lost would come back when it came back. Nora let them keep it. It was better than anything she could have offered them, and its great advantage was that it belonged to them. By the end of the second week she had learned the shape of her days, which was this: she was bored, she was fed, and nothing bad happened to her. The man at the bedside turned out to be her brother. That was one of three or four facts anybody here had bothered to make plain. He came in every morning of those two weeks with a steel thermos in one hand and porridge in it. "Morning," he'd say, setting the little tray over her knees with the quick, careful hands of a man who had done this before. "Millet. Eat it while it's hot." The thermos was a good one. Sixty hours, the label said, and the porridge came out under a thick cap of rice oil that held when she broke it with the spoon instead of flooding, which told her something about her brother: that he had pulled the pot off the heat a little early and counted the hours into the thermos so the grains wouldn't go to paste on the way over. She ate all of it, every morning, and never said a word about it, and he seemed to take the empty bowl for thanks. On the fourteenth morning she was scraping the bottom of it when the door opened and the woman came in. She came in with a man behind her — gray suit, hands folded, the kind of man who carried other people's things and knew where all of them were — and she was talking before the door had finished swinging. "How's my girl? Is it still hurting? Oh, Nora. This is my fault, all of it. How did I let you fall? And who even knows when it'll come back to you, poor thing—" Corinne. She had that much by now, and she had gotten it sideways — off a nurse, off a chart, off the sound of a name. She finished the bowl, wiped her mouth, and watched. The distress was real enough, and none of it had anything to do with her. After a second or two it noticed that it wasn't landing. It stiffened. Then her face was all warmth again, brighter than before. "The doctor says she can go home today," she said. "I've taken care of everything. Alan, get her things together, would you?" "Yes, ma'am." "Caleb." She turned, warm as a lamp. "You don't need to worry about any of this. She's lived with us for years now. She's like my own daughter at this point. We'll look after her." Nora propped her chin on her hand and watched Alan pack. There wasn't much to pack. A hairbrush, a toothbrush, a change of clothes that somebody's maid had sent over in a plastic bag. The rest of it was her brother's — the thermos, the tray, the blanket off his own bed. Corinne had been to the hospital exactly once, on the first day; after that the clothes had started arriving by car. Caleb had stopped smiling when she walked in. He opened his mouth once, looked at her, and closed it again. She went on watching Alan fold her socks into the bag and made no move to correct what he was reading on her face. "All right, then," Corinne said. "Home we go. Caleb, we'll be off." Caleb capped the thermos and packed it and kept his head down. Alan reached for the duffel bag. The bag did not move. He pulled again, nothing, and looked down, and there was a hand on the other strap. Small, thin, still wearing the pale sticky marks of the tape they'd put the needle in with. It didn't look strong. It looked like it belonged to a girl who needed four more hours of sleep and another bowl of soup. Alan took his hand off the strap and stood there and did not seem to know what to do with either hand. Corinne was already at the door. "Alan? What's the hold-up?" Her eyes went over Nora and came back, and for half a second there was something under the smile that was not patient at all. "Ma'am, she—" He gestured. Corinne came back. "Nora, honey. What is it? The car's downstairs." Behind her, Caleb looked up. There was something on his face that he was trying to take off. "Caleb," Nora said. "Take my bag." She swung her legs off the bed and put on her own shoes — slowly, and she did it herself. Then she picked the thermos up off the tray, because there was still a mouthful of porridge in the bottom of it, and carrying it would make her hands look half full instead of empty. One bag, one thermos, everything else somebody else's job. Perfect. Caleb hadn't moved. He was standing there with his mouth a little open. "Bag," she said, and pointed at it, in case he'd forgotten which one. "What? Oh. Oh — yeah. Yeah." He got the duffel up onto his shoulder, and before he could stop it a wide foolish grin came up over his face and stayed there. He did not try to put it away. They were two steps from the door when Corinne got in front of it. "Nora, honey." She looked from one of them to the other and settled it into a smile. "What is this? You're not coming home with me? I had the kitchen make your favorite." There was no such dish. She did not know the girl's favorite, had never known it, had never had a reason to find out. She would text the cook from the car. Nobody would check. Nora kept her face exactly where it was. "Is it Caleb?" Corinne said, gentler. "Because he can visit, honey. Nobody's going to stop him visiting. It's only that you're weak right now, and you need looking after, and you've lived with us all this time — you're used to being looked after. And Caleb's—" She let it go there and shook her head, and the shake finished the sentence for her. "Don't do anything you'll regret." Nora stood and let her get all the way to the end of it with her face turned up and pleasant, and did not answer one word of it. Then she smiled. "See you around, Aunt Corinne." "Coming," Caleb said behind her. "Yeah — coming." He gave Corinne a nod and a thanks-for-everything that didn't mean anything, and followed Nora out. He talked the whole length of the hall — the fruit stand, the prices, a bakery two blocks over — and she let him. * Alan waited until the sound of them had faded. "Ma'am." Corinne was looking at the door. Her hand had closed on the strap of her bag and stayed closed. "Ma'am," he said again, quieter. "Should I go after Miss Nora?" She turned her head and looked at him until he found something else to look at. "Why?" she said. "Give her three days at her brother's. She'll be back." She smoothed the front of her coat. "Bring the car around." * Outside, the light was flat and hot, the air smelled like asphalt and exhaust, and there were more people in the first thirty seconds than she had seen in two weeks. Caleb took out his phone and tapped at it and said a car was coming. Nora watched him do it. Where she came from you sent a boy to the stable and then stood in the yard waiting, and if the horses were out that day, you walked. Here a man tapped a piece of glass and a carriage agreed to come. "Three minutes," he said, and it was three minutes. A car came up the drive and stopped at the curb. He put the duffel in the back, opened the door, held it, and put a hand out. Nora got in by herself, one slow leg at a time. He got in after her and shut the door, and the box of the car moved off without anyone having said anything to it. They passed under the white arm at the gate, which lifted by itself. Then the street: a flower shop, another one, a fruit stand, more fruit than she had ever seen gathered in one place outside a market, most of it foreign to her. Then the metal boxes, both directions, no horses anywhere. Caleb kept pointing things out — which fruit was good right now, which one you had to wait for, which stand he bought from and which one he only looked at. And then the lychees. A whole bucket of them, brown-red, on a folding table outside a shop, with a woman behind it and a plastic scoop in her hand. The emperor had loved lychees. Bringing them north was the worst work of the year. The fruit did not wait, the road was long, and for a few years the court paid for it in relays of horses and in villages taxed for the right to feed them, until the emperor saw the numbers on the page and stopped asking. After that a small crate came up every second or third year, enough to remind him what he was missing. And when he could not stand it any longer, he went south for the season, ate them under the trees until he had had enough, and took her with him to solve the problem of keeping some. She had tried sugar syrup, and sugared and dried, and the drying racks. All three came out ordinary. What worked in the end was wine. Most of the perfume held; the sweetness came back down to something a man could drink at night; three years or better in the jar without turning. The emperor tasted it once and asked for nothing else at his own table. So she had taken on the families from the villages along the orchards and built a wine house, and let the imperial private purse in for half the share — for the jars, for the roads, for the men to sit up with them at night. He drank. The purse filled. She came out of it with more silver in one hand than she had ever been paid for standing in a kitchen. And here the whole of it sat in a bucket, on a sidewalk, three blocks from a hospital, with a scoop in it, and anybody at all could buy some. Nobody in this city knew what she was. That was the first rule she had made for herself, lying in that bed with the humming machine beside her: not one word, not to anybody, until she understood what she had walked into. Somebody had pushed her off a cliff. That was all she intended to keep in mind about the other place. She did wonder how her apprentices were getting on. She had taken hers young and taken plenty of them, so there would be somebody left to hold the kitchens without her, and the unfinished work would fall to the old man — which served him right, since he had waited until he was thirty-eight to take a single student and had spent every year since behaving as if he had all the time in the world. He would have to get up off his stool and teach the youngest one himself now. He would not enjoy that. The thought put a small, private, unkind smile on her face. Her brother glanced over, saw it, and lit up as if she had said something nice to him. She looked out the window and started taking inventory. Item one: the thermos on her knees. Steel, sixty hours, no fire under it and no ice in it, and it had carried a bowl of porridge across the city still warm. In her kitchens heat was straw and a wool blanket and a boy sitting up all night to watch it, and even then you lost an hour of it. Item two: the lychees. A bucket on a sidewalk, sold by the scoop, and no horses involved. Item three: her hands. She turned them over. The nails short, the knuckles marked, the tendons still shaking from the walk down the hall. She had never once in her life failed to make something out of them. She did not have a number for them yet — in this city, in this money — and she was not going to ask her brother, because her brother would answer her, and then he would think about it, and then he would ask her questions she had no intention of answering. So she uncapped the thermos and finished what was left in it — cold now, thick, the rice oil gone flat — and watched the buildings go by. The car turned off the wide street onto a narrow one, and by then she had more than three items, and she had not asked her brother the price of anything.