The Crane Wife(50)
Author: Patrick Ness

Evening was falling as he pulled up outside the building that held her flat, a flat he had only ever really stood at the doorstep of while picking her up. Which had never seemed all that weird till now, just another facet of Kumiko’s mystery, that she didn’t want him to see her workspace, didn’t want to feel him there even in memory, she said, or the work wouldn’t flow. He had believed it easily, even though she didn’t seem to have any problem coming to the shop, into his workspace.

He hadn’t called ahead, not that she answered her phone more than a third of the time anyway, but that was all right, maybe it was time for George to be a little surprising. In a good way. He parked and reached for the volcano, looking at it again. It felt so right, felt somehow so open, burning in his hand, a confession and an apology and so much a plea for how much he needed her that he felt she couldn’t help but see it and understand it and add it to the final tile, completing their story, bringing them together, forever. He turned with a rush of hope to open his car door.

And the world came to an end.

Rachel was coming out of the block of flats.

Rachel.

Who lived nowhere near here.

He watched her step from the front door out onto the pavement, illuminated by the lights of the foyer and the few streetlights ticking on. He watched her look through her handbag for her keys, her face unsmiling and oddly confused.

Then she glanced up, as if she’d heard something, and saw him.

The light caught her eyes again, flashing them green as she gave him the briefest of glances. Then she immediately pretended she hadn’t seen him, though there was no way that could possibly be true. She looked back into her handbag and continued the hunt for her keys while starting to move away.

But before she disappeared into the night he caught a last look of her face, and it was still strangely baffled, even disappointed.

George looked up the front of the block of flats to Kumiko’s window. His stomach was tumbling, falling through his body down some kind of alimentary bottomless pit. How had this happened? How had Rachel known where Kumiko lived, when she was so particular about giving out her address to even George? Had they met before? Had they known each other all along? And what had they said to each other?

It was over. It could only be over. And it was over by his hand, his selfishness, and his greed, yes, greed, not for the money that the artwork so surprisingly brought, but for Kumiko herself. He was greedy for her. He wanted more than she was giving, and though that greed was against all his best tendencies, all the things that made everyone like him, he still felt it. He hungered for her, and she wouldn’t feed him.

And now here was Rachel. In Kumiko’s block of flats, probably in her very flat. Where George himself had never properly been.

Somehow, as unreasonable and baseless and outrageous as it was, George started to grow angry. He gripped the steering wheel in two fists, a frown twisting his mouth, the fever feeling like it was blazing now, catching him in a furious shine. It seemed so unfair, everyone else conducting his life for him, yet again, like he was so placid it couldn’t possibly matter. Well, it did matter. It did, at last, bloody well matter.

He had to see her. This had to have some resolution. One way or another, something had to end.

He grabbed the cutting and got out of his car, slamming the door so hard the whole vehicle rocked. He strode to the entrance, ignoring the call button as he held open the door for an exiting young mother and her two children. She looked at him suspiciously, until her eyes caught the cutting under his arm and she said, ‘Kumiko?’

He only answered a gruff ‘Yes’, before brushing past her.

He pressed the up button on the lift thirty-three times before the doors opened. He bounced angrily on his feet as the lift rose, and even now, he could feel the injustice of his anger. He was the one who betrayed Kumiko. She had done nothing.

In fact, that was her crime, wasn’t it? That she had done nothing.

But oh, the injustice of that, too, because of course she hadn’t done nothing. She had given him the whole world. Just not enough of herself in it.

The anger churned in him, ready to boil over, ready to erupt.

The lift doors opened and he stormed down the hallway, going straight to her door and pounding on it.

‘Kumiko!’ he shouted. ‘Kumiko!’

The door swung open under his fist.

He fell quiet as it slowly glided all the way open, gently tapping the opposite wall. It was silent in the flat. The lights were on, but there was no sound, no activity from inside.

‘Kumiko?’ he said.

In three steps, he was further inside her flat than he’d ever been, which was an absurd notion, one he couldn’t believe he’d put up with for so long. No wonder women didn’t take him seriously. No wonder his own daughter laughed at him and talked to him like–

He stopped, raising a slow fist to his forehead, as if to massage away a headache. Where was all this coming from? This rage, this lashing out. Who was he, at this moment?

What had happened to George?

‘Kumiko?’ he asked again, as if maybe she would have the answer.

He moved past a ruthlessly clean kitchen, almost to the point of never having been used, and then into a similarly clean sitting room, so devoid of personality it could have been a hotel.

Was this where she lived? He turned a slow circle. There was no trace of her anywhere. No art of hers on the walls – for these prints of southwestern American pueblos were surely intended only for people who considered artwork as furniture – but also not even a plant or a discarded bit of clothing.

It was almost as if no one lived here at all.

There were two doors off the sitting room, one cracked open slightly to reveal a sliver of immaculate toilet, and the other, shut tight, could only have been her bedroom, which must in turn serve as her workroom, for there was nowhere else possible in this small space. Between the two doors was a small mirror, and George caught a glimpse of his sweat-covered face in it, barely recognising his scowl or the ferocity of his gaze. Even his eyes seemed different, and he leaned forward to look. They seemed almost–

There was a sigh behind the closed door.

He moved towards it, listening, but there was nothing more. He was on the verge of saying her name again, but surely she would have heard him by now? He turned and looked back up the short hallway. Why had the front door already been opened?

Fear suddenly rushed him. Had something happened? Had Rachel grown so deranged that–?

He grasped the doorknob and burst into her bedroom, feeling a crippling headrush as he moved so quickly, and before him–