“I got lucky,” Raymond said, when he was sure Isabel did not plan to say more. “I talked to this Luis Velez in the Bronx who told me about a newspaper article. So then I knew it was the Luis M. Velez on the Upper East Side, where nobody ever answered the door. I went there to leave a note, but while I was there I ran into a neighbor who knew where Isabel was.”
A silence fell. Nobody filled it.
“I brought your tea,” he added.
He placed the pot in front of Mrs. G’s place at the table. In case she wasn’t sure where it was. She had always seemed to find it in the past, though. Raymond suspected her hands could be guided by its heat.
“I still can’t believe you did that,” she said. “You did all of that for me?”
“Well . . . yeah. I mean, you were so miserable. Not knowing. But now I wonder if that was better. You know. The not knowing. If it’s a really terrible thing like this . . . was it better not to know?”
Mrs. G sighed deeply. Poured herself a cup of tea, placing her finger just inside the rim as a gauge.
“Right now it is very hard,” she said, “but I think in the long run I will tell you it is always best to know. In this moment I’m still caught up in the fact that you did this huge thing for me, and I can’t seem to get my words together to tell you how grateful I am. But I will. I promise you I will. My thoughts are all over the landscape. As to the question you asked me, Isabel. If I want to know more of the terrible details. I think I want—or actually need, really—for you to tell me that Luis did not suffer. But of course you can only do that if it’s true. I’m not asking you to lie to me just to make me feel the tiniest bit better. But also I want you to say what you can bear to say and not one word more. If you can’t bear to relive this, then don’t do it for me. Please.”
“The medical examiner said he was killed instantly,” Isabel said.
“All right, then. I am afraid this will have to be the small favor for which I attempt to be thankful.”
“Oh, you have a cat,” Isabel said after several minutes of sipping their tea in silence. “Luis didn’t tell me you had a cat.”
“She is new here,” Mrs. G said. “Where do you see her?”
She was speaking normally. Almost casually. But her voice had lost something, Raymond thought. It had lost its energy. Its unique brand of aliveness. It felt almost as though Mrs. G’s voice had lost Mrs. G, and was now existing on its own, without her.
“She just stuck her head out from under the couch. But then she took one look at me and went right back under again.”
“She was wild for part of her life. Not all of it, I don’t think. She does not behave like a cat who has never known people. But still she is quite wary. I’m not surprised that she would hide when a new person is at hand.”
“I don’t think I have to tell you that Luis adored you,” Isabel said, turning the conversation suddenly back around. Out of small-talk territory. “Because I know he was not a man who would make a secret of a thing like that.”
“The feeling was definitely mutual,” Mrs. G said in return. A tiny glimpse of her old self peeked out through those words.
Raymond heard himself let out a sigh of relief. Even though he would never in a million years have welcomed this outcome, he felt deeply relieved that Mrs. G had been right. That Luis really had loved her.
“He told me you were the only person he’d ever met who didn’t have one prejudiced bone in your entire body,” Isabel said. “Not even one hair on your head with a slight bias—that’s what he said. For the first couple of years he kept looking for some of that when he was with you. Some little bit of judgment. He figured, yeah, of course, you were better than most. Better than ninety-nine percent of the people he met. But he figured he’d find some little scrap of something in there somewhere, because he mostly always did with people. But not you. He just stopped looking after a while. He said if there was one thing he could say about you, one big thing that defined you, it’s that you value every human life the same. He said if you were a story, your title would be something like ‘Every Life Has Value.’ He really admired that about you. And it confused him a little, too. He kept wondering how a person gets put together that way, but he never found out. He could never figure out the roots of that.”
“I don’t think every life has exactly the same value,” Mrs. G said. “I think Rosa Parks’s life had more value than Adolf Hitler’s. But I think that’s a different kind of a subject than what you meant.”