The Crane Wife(36)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘Child,’ Rachel said, curtly. ‘Doesn’t count.’

‘I love my dad.’

‘George,’ Rachel nodded.

‘I loved Henri.’

‘Did you?’ Mei asked, eyes wide.

Amanda looked down at her burger, suddenly a little less hungry, remembering that night he’d stopped by, the night he hadn’t mentioned again on any of his subsequent calls to JP. ‘Yeah.’ She looked back up at them. ‘Yes, more than I can say.’

‘So you’re lucky then,’ Rachel said. ‘At least you’ve had somebody. I’m just so tired of hating everyone and myself and the two of you–’

‘Hey!’ Mei said.

‘Oh, please,’ Rachel pffted. ‘I don’t even know why I’m here. Do you? I don’t even know why I’m trying to–’

She stopped, her face scrunching up in some really, really unattractive crying. She stood suddenly, so quickly the chair behind her fell over. She took one look at it and fled the restaurant. Yes, Amanda thought, fled was the right word.

‘Wow,’ Mei said, turning back to Amanda. ‘Do you think you should go after her?’

‘Not me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You.’

Mei acknowledged this was probably true, grabbed her bag and left without saying goodbye. Or paying for anyone’s share of the bill.

Amanda stayed, pondering the conversation and finishing her burger. And what the hell, a few bites of Mei’s, too.

Back at work, Rachel pretended the outburst had never happened, which wasn’t a surprise, but she still kept up the almost-friendliness campaign, which was. And should also have been a warning, should have given Amanda greater pause before even thinking about risking the tile at work, because here, inevitably, was the moment that probably almost had to happen: Rachel standing there, her eyes laser-like on the now-hastily-being-shut drawer.

‘That was–’ Rachel started to say.

‘None of your goddamn business, is what it was,’ Amanda said sharply.

‘I’ve never seen one in person?’

Amanda stared her down. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Amanda–’

‘Can I help you with something, Rachel?’

And then, once more, there was a strange moment. Rachel’s eyes seemed to flicker and she hesitated. Then she looked down, crestfallen, at the papers in her hand and started walking away. Who are you, Amanda thought, and what have you done with Rachel?

But as she watched Rachel’s unfeasibly shapely bottom shuffle off in defeat, Amanda found herself feeling an emotion so unassociated with her that it took her a minute to identify it properly. It was pity. Worse, it was recognition. She looked at Rachel and suddenly saw a fellow-traveller across that baffling, hostile landscape she knew all too well, the one whose entire set of rules seemed to exist for you to never properly learn and therefore be forever excluded, no matter how much you pretended it didn’t matter.

For Rachel, it might have even been worse, because she had known the rules for a long time, had thrived on them, and had maybe now – if her equally unprecedented lunch outburst was anything to go by – found them empty. What happened to a person then? If she was trying this badly to be friends with Amanda, of all people, and doing it this incredibly incompetently, then what did that mean? Amanda realised she knew. As much as she still didn’t actually like Rachel – because that seemed several bridges and an ocean too far – she glimpsed a harrowing sliver of understanding about her.

Rachel was lonely. And where Amanda had known that feeling her whole life, Rachel seemed to have just woken up to the possibility she’d been lonely all along.

‘Rach?’ she found herself saying.

Rachel turned back, her green eyes watery, but ready to be defiant. ‘What?’

Amanda’s hand hovered over her desk drawer before deciding that no, she couldn’t do that. No matter how much pity she had for Rachel, it wasn’t enough to share this, not yet, probably not ever, not something this private, this hers.

So she found herself inexplicably doing the next best thing, regretting it even as the sentence fell clumsily from her lips. ‘My father’s having a party to introduce people to Kumiko. There’ll probably be artwork there.’ She swallowed, as if to stop herself, but somehow the words kept being spoken. ‘Do you want to come along?’

Rachel’s smile of acceptance was any number of things. It was grateful, it was unnervingly bright, but mostly, Amanda’s heart quailed to see, it was triumphant.

13 of 32

‘You have changed,’ the lady says.

‘I have,’ says the volcano. ‘And I have not.’

She flies in her usual cautious circle around the open skies above his factories. ‘You are a man of peace.’

‘I am not currently a man of war, my lady. It is not the same.’

‘Yet you create, you build, you add to the world.’

‘It is what volcanoes do. Until we are tamed into mountains.’

‘You tease me.’

‘And you taunt me, my lady.’

She lands, placing her feet on the peaked roof of a factory. The billowing black smoke it produces does not sully her clothing or her skin. It flows around her, leaving her untouched.

‘Taunt you?’ she asks. ‘How is this true?’

‘My thoughts are filled with you,’ he says. ‘You enter my dreams, yet you stay out of arm’s reach.’

‘You enter my dreams,’ she says, crisply, ‘and you do not.’

The volcano smiles, and she sees, again, the malevolent merriment behind his blazing eyes. ‘My lady dreams of me?’ he says.

She takes off in flight again.

14 of 32

‘Wait, my lady!’ he calls after her. ‘A gift!’

She soars around behind him, over the vast countrysides of factories and mines that have replaced the nations he once warred upon. ‘What gift would I accept from you?’ she asks. ‘You are a volcano. You destroy.’

‘And create.’

‘And destroy again.’

‘And create again, my lady. You know this to be true.’

‘What is your gift?’

‘Alight once more, so that I may give it to you.’

‘You are dangerous to me.’

‘You are just as dangerous to me, my lady. If I harm you, you will turn me into a mountain. It is a risk to us both. Either we both live, or we are both destroyed. And I wish to live.’