The Witness

Clara had read the book alone the previous winter, in her own room, over four nights in February. Something in it had reached a place she didn't have words for and hadn't tried to find words for since. She'd wanted to tell someone and hadn't been able to say what there was to tell. The book had said it for her. She'd closed it on the fourth night and sat for a while in the cold room with her coat still on.

She'd thought of her sister then. If her sister read it, she would know. Clara wouldn't have to say anything, because the book would have said it, and her sister would have read the same words, and it would be between them without Clara having to find a way to carry it across.

It was June before she brought the book down from the shelf and put it in her sister's hands.

Her sister settled into the chair by the window and began. Clara pulled a chair close and sat beside her, near enough to see the page, though she wasn't reading it. She'd read it. She was watching for the place.

There was a passage near the middle of the book. Clara knew where it fell, a few pages after a turn in the story, on the right-hand side, low on the page. She'd read it three times in February and then a fourth before she closed the book. She wanted to see her sister reach it. She wanted to see whether it would do to her sister what it had done to her, because if it did, then she hadn't been alone with it in February, and if it did not, she had been, and would go on being.

Her sister read. The pages turned. Clara watched her sister's hands and her sister's face and said nothing, and found she was holding the arm of the chair. The turn in the story came and went, and Clara saw it register, a small settling at her sister's mouth. A few pages on, the passage was there, low on the open right-hand page, where Clara knew it to be.

Her sister's eyes reached it.

Clara watched. Her sister read down the page at her steady pace and came to the place and didn't slow. The eyes moved across it and past it and on to the next thing. The page turned. Whatever Clara had carried up the stairs in the cold four months ago, her sister had passed straight through it and gone on into the rest of the story.

A few pages later her sister stopped. She held the book a moment without turning the page, her thumb still on the corner, and read something again. Then she looked up at Clara and held the look a beat longer than Clara expected, and smiled, and let a small breath go, and turned back to the page with whatever it was kept to herself. Clara didn't know what had caught her. She hadn't stopped there in February.

Clara sat with it. Her sister read on, untroubled, somewhere further into the book now, held by her own places in it. They'd read the same words. They hadn't read the same book.

Clara leaned back in her chair. The afternoon held at the window.

When her sister finished the book and set it down, Clara picked it up and carried it back up the stairs and put it on the shelf in her own room, where it had been in February.