Forty-Three Liters

Lin Jie first noticed the meter for Apartment 503 because it was too disciplined.

Forty-three liters every day. Never more, never less.

It was not enough for much laundry or cooking—roughly one shower and a toilet flush. Yet 503 had stood empty for six months, its door crossed with court seals. After Old Madam Xie died, her two sons began fighting over the apartment, and neither had moved in.

Lin Jie read water meters for twenty-seven aging buildings. She knew the temperament of each troublesome dial. The meter at 201 raced because of a leaking toilet tank. The one at 702 stayed still whenever the elderly couple visited their daughter. The barbershop downstairs always blocked its box with a mop bucket.

Only 503 refused to explain itself.

“Someone is stealing water,” the elder son, Xie Guoqiang, said over the phone. “Shut it off.”

“I have to check for a leak first.”

“The apartment is sealed. What could be leaking?”

Lin Jie wanted to know too.

She closed the main valve. The next day it was open, and the meter had recorded another forty-three liters. The valve bore no tool marks; the court seals were intact. She trapped a strand of hair inside the meter-box lid. On the third morning, it lay on the floor.

Someone had a key.

Old Qiu, who sold soy milk downstairs, remembered the caregiver Madam Xie had hired—a tiny woman from Anhui, perhaps in her forties. The old woman had been bedridden for five years. The caregiver slept on the balcony and turned her every few hours through the night. When Madam Xie died, her sons arrived and searched the refrigerator, television cabinet, and bankbooks. The following afternoon, the caregiver left with a blue woven bag.

“Did they pay what they owed her?” Lin Jie asked.

Qiu lowered a strip of dough into hot oil. “Ask the sons.”

By month’s end, Guoqiang had filed another complaint, accusing the water company of tolerating theft. His brother called separately and insisted Guoqiang was secretly entering the flat. Both demanded usage records as evidence against the other.

Lin Jie refused. She said the system was under maintenance.

At eleven that night, she sat on a folding stool on the landing below the fifth floor. When the motion light went dark, only the green exit sign remained. Pipes murmured inside the walls. Someone washed dishes, someone shampooed their hair, someone upstairs scolded a child for slow homework.

At 11:47, the building door clicked softly.

A woman climbed without a flashlight. She knew the stairs well, stepping around a loose tile beneath the leak on six. At the fifth floor, she stopped. She was thin, wore old sneakers, and carried a blue woven bag.

She never touched the apartment door.

She unlocked the meter box, opened the valve, and attached a white hose to the drain outlet beyond the meter. Water slipped quietly into two plastic buckets. When they were full, she closed the valve, checked the dial, and left its hand at what seemed a carefully calculated position.

Forty-three liters.

Lin Jie switched on her phone light.

The hose fell from the woman’s hands, soaking her shoes.

“You cared for Madam Xie?” Lin Jie asked.

The woman shook her head, then nodded. Her surname was Fang. Everyone had called her Little Fang.

“Where does the water go?”

Fang pointed upward.

On the roof landing stood an illegal shed once used for cleaning supplies. Inside, a folding bed rested against the wall. A gray-haired man lay on it, one side of his body immobile. In the corner were a rice cooker, a bedpan, and several blister packs of medicine.

“My husband,” Fang said. “He fell at a construction site.”

After Madam Xie died, Fang never received her final three months’ wages. The agency dormitory prohibited family members, and rents in the urban village had risen again. Remembering the rooftop shed, she moved her husband in after dark. Electricity came from a wire behind the emergency light. Water came through 503’s meter.

“Why use hers?” Lin Jie asked.

Fang crouched to wipe her husband’s hands. She worked quickly, opening each finger and running the damp cloth between them.

“Madam said that for every day I cared for her, she would provide my food and lodging,” Fang replied. “She owed me ninety-two days. I haven’t taken extra. Forty-three liters was what she allowed me before. She said water was expensive and a bath must not use more than one and a half buckets.”

The man began to cough. Fang helped him drink from a chipped enamel cup.

Standing in the doorway, Lin Jie breathed the damp medicinal air. She wanted to say that promises could not keep running through a meter after death. She wanted to warn that illegal plumbing could contaminate the supply and that living on a roof was dangerous. Instead she asked, “How long will you stay?”

“Until I find work that lets me bring him.”

“When will that be?”

Fang did not answer.

The next morning, Lin Jie filed a repair order: worn gears in the 503 meter, intermittent self-rotation, replacement recommended. On replacement day, she removed the old meter as slowly as possible. Fang watched from across the street, her blue bag at her feet.

The new meter box received a standard magnetic lock. Lin Jie left a full bucket on the roof without saying who had brought it.

She gave Fang two phone numbers—one for temporary housing and another for a caregiver position at a rehabilitation hospital. Fang wrote them on the back of a medicine box and said only, “I know.”

Three days later, the rooftop room was empty. The folding bed stood against the wall. The floor had been swept clean. The bucket sat upside down in a corner, with forty-three yuan beneath it.

The brothers’ lawsuit continued for eight months. When the apartment was finally awarded to Guoqiang, he insisted on examining the extra water charges.

“How much in total?” he asked.

Lin Jie tapped her calculator.

“Meter fault. No charge.”

“Where is the broken meter?”

“Scrapped.”

In fact, it remained in the bottom drawer of her desk. Its face had stopped at 1,673 tons, the little red hand pressed against a mark like an unfinished sentence.

Later, Lin Jie sometimes passed a rehabilitation hospital. On winter afternoons, caregivers wheeled patients into the courtyard for sunlight. Once she saw a small, thin woman tuck a blanket around a man in a wheelchair. Beyond the iron fence, she could not be certain it was Fang.

The woman turned to fetch hot water. She opened the tap only a little, filled one enamel cup, and closed it at once. Not a drop more ran out.

Lin Jie watched for a moment but did not call to her.

Back at the office, she removed the old meter from her drawer and sent it to the disposal warehouse as regulations required.

In the field marked Reason, she wrote:

Excessive accuracy.