Free Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li

person’s heart ?” Moran said. “I think by and by you will know Sister Shaoai better.”
    Ruyu smiled. Why would I, the thin smile said, want to know Shaoai better? Moran’s face turned red: the wordless dismissal, not of herself but of someone she respected and admired, made her more diffident in front of Ruyu than ever.
    “When are we going back?” Ruyu said, indicating the setting sun.
    Moran was disappointed with herself. She knew Ruyu did not trust her. Why should she? Moran thought as she pedaled her bicycle through an alley, so used to Ruyu’s weight on the rear rack that for a moment she forgot that it was her usual habit to chatter on while pedaling Ruyu around. Moran did not like unfinished conversations; for her, life was a series of ideal moments, all comprehensible, sometimes with small difficulties but always with a larger dose of joy. She did not like finding herself in a murky situation which she could not explain to another person, yet there was the loyalty toward Shaoai, whose trouble Moran had been told to keep to herself. If she stopped pedaling and better clarified Shaoai’s anger, would Ruyu understand it?

5
    When Moran’s phone rang early Saturday morning, she dreaded taking the call, and listened while the answering machine clicked on. No message was left, and a minute later, the phone rang again. It was not yet six o’clock, too early for anything but calamity. Moran picked up the call and heard both her parents’ voices on the other end, and for a moment she could not concentrate while her mother talked about trivialities. “And you,” her father said when her mother seemed to have run out of small talk. “How are you?”
    “Good.”
    “Your voice sounds hoarse,” her mother said. “Did you catch a cold?”
    “Only dry,” Moran said. “I was sleeping.”
    “Listen,” her father said, and Moran felt a twinge of panic, as he was one who preferred listening to being listened to. “We’re sorry to be calling so early. But we just heard that Shaoai passed away ten days ago.”
    Moran asked her parents to hold on for a second, and closed the bedroom door. She lived alone in a rental, and she was used to—and she was certain her house was also used to her—carrying out a life filled with everyday noises but not human conversations. Beyond the closed door was the uncluttered space where, other than a few piecesof impersonal furniture from IKEA, a small collection of objects kept her company: a single silver vase, to which she often forgot to offer flowers; a pair of metal bookends shaped like an old man in a top hat and billowing raincoat, bending low on his cane; a stack of handmade paper, thick, sepia-toned, too beautiful to write on; and a reproduction of a Modigliani painting—a portrait of a certain Mme. Zborowska, whose eyes, under heavy, sleepy lids, looked almost blind in their pupil-less darkness. None of these objects had come into Moran’s life with specific meanings; she had picked them up here and there while traveling, and had allowed herself to form an attachment to them because they were only souvenirs of places that did not belong to her, which she would never see again. In return, by quietly closing the door, she protected these things she loved from the intrusion of an early morning phone call. Later she would not once think of them as burdened witnesses of a death from a distant past.
    “We thought you should know right away,” her father said.
    It was not an unexpected death, she wanted to tell her parents; a relief for all, she wanted to assure them, but the words would be clichés her parents and their old neighbors would have already exchanged. Her parents had called to hear different words, and yet Moran had only silence to offer.
    “We thought of paying a visit of condolence,” her mother said. “But what can we say to Shaoai’s mother? What would you say to her?”
    Moran flinched. Unlike her father, who rarely confronted her, her mother was