Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six: Oranges

Snow fell on the day she went to see Celeste.

It had been falling since dawn, soft and thick and windless, the big slow flakes of deep January, and by noon the whole of Halbrook lay under it like a sleeper under a quilt. The roofs were white. The hedges were white. Even the long gray wall of the correctional facility on the hill had been gentled by it, its razor wire furred with frost, its watchtowers capped with white like the hats of small, stern gnomes.

Lena stood at the foot of the visitors' path with her collar turned up and a paper bag in her gloved hands, and she looked at the building for a long moment before she went in.

Three months had passed since the signing.

They had been, by any ordinary measure, a very strange season. The newspapers had been full of it for a fortnight, a headline each morning, CROSS MERIDIAN SCANDAL, TRUST FORGERY, ASSISTANT CHARGED. Then, as such things do, the noise had faded. The cameras had gone away. The company had survived. Eleven hundred and sixty people had been paid on a Friday morning in October, quietly, at nine o'clock sharp, and not one of them had ever known how close it had come.

And yet nothing was the same.

Halloran had stepped down as chairman in November, with a short, plain letter that he had written by hand. Ingrid Voss had been named interim head of the board. Brandt and Peele had resigned within the week. Damian Cross had remained as chief executive for exactly thirty-one days after the signing, and then, one wet Monday morning, he had walked into a meeting of the new board and tendered his own resignation, without fuss or explanation. He had not been asked. He had simply said, in a quiet and level voice, that he did not think he should be trusted with a company until he had learned something about trust.

The board had not accepted it. They had made him a different offer. Lena had heard about it, afterward, from Ruth: a post as director of community investment, a smaller office, a smaller salary, a seat at the table with no vote. He had thought about it for a week. Then he had taken it.

She had not spoken to him since the night on the roof.

She had received two letters. She had not answered either. They sat in a drawer in Ruth's spare room, unopened, tied with a ribbon. Not yet, she told herself, but perhaps one day.

"Miss Hartwell?"

A uniformed guard stood at the door of the visitors' center, stamping the snow from his boots. He was a young man, round-faced and cheerful, with a ginger mustache that did not quite suit him. He consulted a clipboard.

"You're here to see Aldine? Inmate four-one-seven?"

"Yes."

"You're on the list. Right this way. Mind the ice."

They searched the paper bag and found, in the bottom of it, a single clementine.

The guard turned it over in his hands, frowning. "I can't let her have this, ma'am. Policy. No food from outside."

"Of course." Lena nodded. "I only wondered, as it's the sort of thing that doesn't keep. Might I peel it here? And leave the segments on the table, in the open?"

He considered. He looked at the clementine. He looked, with some uncertainty, at her face.

"Is it important?"

"I think so."

"Well," he said, awkwardly, after a moment. "I don't see the harm in that, if I watch."

It took her a quarter of an hour to get through the checks. A metal detector. A pat-down. A long corridor painted the color of weak tea, a heavy steel door that buzzed and clanked, another corridor, another door. At last she was shown into a long, low, brightly lit room with rows of plain tables bolted to the floor and chairs on either side. A few other visitors sat scattered here and there, murmuring over their separate islands of plastic. A child laughed somewhere, high and sudden, and was shushed.

"Number nine," said the guard. "She'll be out in a minute."

Lena sat. She laid her gloves on the table. She peeled the clementine slowly, with careful fingers, pulling the rind away in a single long spiral, and the sharp bright smell of citrus rose into the stale air like a small defiant flag. She laid the segments in a neat circle on a paper napkin.

A door clanked. Footsteps.

Celeste came in between two officers, in a plain gray jumpsuit that hung a little loosely on her narrow frame.

She was thinner. That was the first thing. The lovely hollows beneath her cheekbones had deepened into shadows, and her wrists, below the short cuffs, looked as slender as a child's. Her dark hair had been cut short, to the nape of her neck, and without its gloss and its elegant knot she looked younger, plainer, and much more tired. There was no makeup. No scent of jasmine. Only a scrubbed, pale, wary face, with eyes that were still very dark and very large.

She stopped at the end of the table.

"You came," she said.

"I said I would."

"People say a great many things."

"I know." Lena nodded toward the chair. "Please. Sit down."

Celeste sat. The officers stepped back to a discreet distance and folded their hands. For a moment, neither woman spoke. Between them, on the napkin, the little orange crescents gleamed in the fluorescent light.

Celeste's eyes dropped to them.

She did not move. She did not breathe. Her face, which had been stiff with a careful, defensive blankness, changed with startling suddenness. The mouth softened. The eyes went wide and wet and very young, and for an instant she looked, to Lena's startled heart, exactly like a small girl in a red dress, sitting cross-legged under a desk with a box of crayons.

"Oranges," she whispered.

"I thought you might like one."

"He used to peel them for me. In a spiral." Celeste's voice cracked. "He'd say, if you can keep it all in one piece, you get a wish. I never could. He always did it for me."

"I couldn't either," said Lena. "I broke it twice."

"You did it anyway."

"Yes."

Celeste put out a hand. It trembled badly. She lifted a single segment, held it a moment in her palm, and then, very carefully, as though it might shatter, she placed it on her tongue and closed her eyes.

For a long time she did not open them.

"They have set the sentence," Celeste said at last.

It was ten minutes later. The clementine was gone, every crescent. Celeste had folded the napkin into a small neat square and tucked it into her sleeve, and her voice, when she spoke, was low and quite steady.

"Seven years. With the possibility of review at four."

"I heard."

"The judge said it was the most unusual case he had ever tried. He said it with an expression of great distaste." A faint, dry flicker crossed her mouth. "He was not at all impressed with me. But he said the plea had saved the court a good deal of time, and that certain mitigating circumstances had been drawn to his attention."

"Detective Quill told me."

"Did she?"

"She told me you cooperated fully. That you gave her the name of every account, and every cash transfer, and every contact. That you told her about the truck driver and the courier, and a man called Hobbs who handled your payments." Lena paused. "She said it was the cleanest confession she'd ever taken."

"I thought it best."

"She also said," Lena went on, evenly, "that a victim statement was submitted to the court, describing the effect of the offense. And that the statement made no demand for a particular sentence. It only asked the judge to consider the history."

Celeste's eyes came up.

"That was you."

"Yes."

"You asked for leniency."

"I asked for the truth to be heard. It's rather different." Lena folded her hands. "The judge was a sensible man. I think he understood."

"Why?"

It was the same question she had asked in the boardroom, and on the thirty-first floor, and, Lena thought, a hundred times in the dark of a hundred lonely nights. The question of a person who has never been given anything without a price.

"Because you were six years old," said Lena, "and nobody came."

Celeste looked at her.

She did not weep. Her face, in the hard white light, did something far stranger, a slow collapse, a loosening of every muscle, as of a person who has held a heavy door shut for twenty years and has just been told she may let go. She put both hands flat on the table. She bowed her head until her forehead nearly touched them. Her shoulders shook, once, twice, in a long, silent, shuddering spasm.

Lena sat very still, and let her.

"Ruth wrote to me," Celeste said, some time later.

She had lifted her head. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her voice was thick, but a little color had come back into her face, and she looked, for the first time since the boardroom, almost peaceful.

"Four letters. One a week. I did not answer the first three."

"She said you might not."

"She told me about my father. Not what he did. Who he was." Her mouth trembled. "She told me he used to leave a little paper bag on her desk every Friday with an orange in it. And that she never once ate one without thinking of him."

"She's kept the notebook," said Lena, gently. "The original. The board has made a copy for the court. But she keeps it by her bed."

"Is that allowed?"

"I believe the lawyers have decided to look the other way."

A short, cracked laugh escaped Celeste.

"And the other thing," she said, after a moment. "The thing in the newspapers."

"The exoneration."

"Yes."

"It was entered on the eighth of December, by the Court of Appeals. Posthumously." Lena kept her voice quiet. "There was a very short hearing. The judge read a statement from Mr. Halloran, and another from Miss Delaney. And then, at the end, a third, from the new chairman of the Cross Family Trust."

"Damian."

"Not Damian. The new chairman is Ingrid Voss. But she read out a letter that Damian had written." Lena paused. "It was one page. It said that Edmund Cross had committed the fraud for which Henry Aldine was convicted, and that his son had inherited the benefit of that lie without knowing, and had spent eleven years defending it without asking. It said that Henry Aldine had been the finest man in the building, and that the Cross family owed him a debt that could never be paid."

Celeste said nothing.

"The court has ordered that his name be struck from the record. A plaque has been placed in the lobby of the Cross Meridian tower." Lena took a small folded paper from her pocket and slid it across the table. "Ruth thought you might like to see a copy."

Celeste unfolded it with shaking hands.

It was a photograph. A simple brass plaque on a wall of pale marble, polished, new, with a vase of white lilies standing beneath it. The words were engraved in clear block letters.

IN MEMORY OF HENRY ALDINE. ACCOUNTANT. FRIEND. A HONEST MAN. WHOSE NAME WE FAILED TO KEEP.

At the bottom, in smaller letters, was a single line.

"Forgive us. We should have asked."

Celeste stared at it for a very long time. Her lips moved, soundlessly. Her thumb crept up to the edge of the photograph, and rested there, over the letters of her father's name, and did not move.

"It says a honest man," she whispered. "There's a typo."

"Ruth noticed. She says she will have it corrected."

"No." Celeste shook her head, slowly, and a tear slid down her face and fell on the glossy paper. "No. Leave it. He'd have liked it. He always said that English was a ridiculous language, and that there was no sense taking it too seriously."

She laughed. It was a ragged, helpless, shaking laugh, and it turned halfway through into something else. Lena reached out across the table, very slowly, and laid her hand over the other woman's. It was cold. It trembled under hers like a captured bird.

"Thank you," said Celeste. "I don't think... I don't know how to..."

"You needn't."

"I did such terrible things."

"Yes."

"Do you hate me?"

"No."

"I wish you did."

"People keep telling me that," said Lena, with a faint, wry smile. "I find it rather charming."

They talked for nearly an hour.

It was odd, afterward, how little of it she could remember. They did not speak of anything grand. Celeste described the food, which was awful, and the library, which was surprisingly good, and a woman named Dolores in the next cell, who had taken a liking to her and taught her to play a game of cards called spit. She talked about a book she was reading, a worn paperback of Jane Eyre, with half the cover missing. She said she thought Mr. Rochester was a fool, and that she understood Jane perfectly. She asked after Ruth. She asked after Tomas Reyes, and was visibly relieved to hear that his arm had healed and that his daughter had been accepted to the nursing program at the state university with a full scholarship, anonymously funded.

"By whom?"

"I couldn't say," said Lena. "But I believe it was a man who had recently sold a ring."

Celeste's mouth twitched.

"He is trying," she said.

"I know."

"Do you think he'll manage it?"

"I think he is the sort of person who does not manage anything until he has failed at it three times." Lena smiled. "But I think he will."

"And you?"

"And I?"

"Are you managing?"

It was a simple question. Lena considered it with the same gentle care she gave everything now, tilting it, turning it, looking at it from all sides.

"I think so," she said. "Some days, very well. Some days I stand in Ruth's kitchen at three in the morning, and I cry because the kettle whistles. Dr. Okoye says it's the memory returning. In pieces. Not all at once." She turned her cup on the table. "I remember being afraid, now. I remember what it was like to love him. It's strange. It doesn't hurt the way I'd expected. It's rather like looking at an old photograph of a house one used to live in."

"And Mr. Vance?"

Lena's cup stopped.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The one who sat on the steps." Celeste's eyes, red-rimmed and bright, held an unexpected, impish glint. "Inspector Quill mentioned him. She said he sends a car for you on Thursdays."

"He sends a driver. On Thursdays. Because I have my check-ups with Dr. Okoye."

"Of course."

"It is purely practical."

"Of course it is."

"He has been extremely courteous."

"I'm sure he has." The glint deepened. "Lena. I spent eight months studying a man. I know the look of one who has fallen. I saw it in the boardroom. It was written on his face from the minute you walked in."

"You're mistaken."

"I'm never mistaken about that." Celeste leaned back, and for the first time, she smiled, a real smile, small and shy and a little rueful, transforming her whole thin face. "It's the only thing I'm good at."

Lena opened her mouth. She closed it. Something very strange and warm was rising up her neck, and she did not entirely know what to do about it.

"I shall think about it," she said, with dignity.

Celeste laughed. It was the first real laughter Lena had heard from her, and it was a lovely sound, light and surprised and young.

The guard called time at half past three.

They rose together. For a moment they stood on either side of the little table, the two of them, in the bright white light, not touching, not speaking. Behind Celeste, the officers shifted. Somewhere in the room, a baby began to wail.

"Will you come again?" said Celeste.

"If you'd like."

"I would."

"Then I will."

"Not every week. I couldn't ask..."

"Once a month," said Lena. "On a Saturday. I'll bring oranges."

Celeste put out her hand.

It was a small, graceful, awkward gesture, a thing half learned. Lena took it. It was thin and cool, with a long pale scar across the palm. They held it for a moment, quite still, and then Celeste drew a quick, shaky breath, and pulled her close, and put her arms around her.

It was a short hug. It was clumsy and brittle and fierce. Lena stood with her arms at her sides for a moment, startled, and then, slowly, she lifted them, and held the other woman, lightly, as one holds something that has not been held in a long time.

"I am so sorry," Celeste whispered, against her shoulder. "I am so sorry. I am so sorry."

"I know."

"I won't ask you to forgive me."

"No."

"But I wanted to say it. Out loud. In a room without a lawyer."

"I heard you."

They stood so for a moment longer, in the humming white light.

Then the guard coughed, tactfully, and they drew apart. Celeste wiped her face with her sleeve. Lena smoothed her cardigan. One of the officers stepped forward, and with a gentleness that surprised her, touched Celeste's elbow.

"Come along, Aldine."

She went. At the door, she paused and looked back, and in the dim corridor behind her, the light caught her face. She looked very small, very tired, and, for the first time in twenty years, quite at peace.

"Lena."

"Yes?"

"There is someone waiting for you outside." Her mouth twitched. "And I do not mean Mr. Vance."

The door clanged shut.

The snow had thickened by the time she came out.

It fell in great soft silent flakes, and the whole hillside had disappeared into a dim, glowing whiteness, through which the lights of the car park glimmered like lanterns in a fog. Lena stood on the step for a moment, with her hood up and her hands in her pockets, and drew a long breath of the clean, cold, sweet-smelling air.

She felt light. She felt, absurdly, as if she had set down a very heavy bag.

I must tell Ruth, she thought. I must tell her about the plaque. About the typo. She'll laugh, and then she'll cry, and then she'll make soup.

She started down the path. She had gone perhaps twenty yards, with the snow squeaking beneath her boots, when she saw him.

He was standing at the far end of the car park, beside a long gray car, in a black overcoat that was already white on the shoulders. He had no hat. His hair was dark with melted flakes, and his hands were thrust deep into his pockets, and he was looking, not at the prison, but at the ground, with the stooped and weary posture of someone who has been waiting a very long time.

Lena stopped.

She had not seen him in three months. She had not spoken to him. She had almost, she realized, forgotten how very tall he was, how thin he had become, how lost he looked, standing there against the endless falling white.

He lifted his head.

For a moment, across the snowy car park, their eyes met. She saw his lips part. She saw him take half a step, and stop.

"Lena," said Damian.

End of Chapter Twenty-Six