The Crane Wife(59)
Author: Patrick Ness

For a strange passing instant, she seemed to blur. George could think of no other word for it. He would look back on this moment, press at it, see if he could sense something more there that he could name, because it really did feel like it was here that the important thing happened. He didn’t know, would never know, what it was, but this momentary blur of her, when she was somehow there and not there, seemed indelibly the moment where the story ended. It was a moment that should have lasted for an eternity, at least.

But it passed almost immediately. The blurring ceased as quickly as it had begun, though there was something different about her when she knelt down to him now, something less defined, like all boundaries had fallen from her.

‘What just happened?’ he asked. ‘Something–’

‘She is safe, George,’ Kumiko said. ‘Amanda is safe.’

‘What? How can you know that? How can you–?’

But she was already raising her hand to the skin of her chest again, and once more she drew a line with her fingernail. The skin opened, the fissure parting to reveal–

‘Kumiko, no,’ George whispered. ‘What have you done?’

She put her hands on his cheeks, the tears from her golden eyes streaming. ‘You saved me once, George. And by loving me, you have done so again.’

She brought his lips to hers, and they kissed. It tasted to George of champagne and flight and flowers and the world being born and of the very first moment he laid eyes on her and she’d told him her name and it all burned bright as the raging sun, so bright he had to close his eyes.

When he opened them, she was gone.

‘Why are you crying, grand-père?’ JP asked, a moment and a lifetime later. Then he whispered fiercely, ‘And why are you naked?’

‘She’s gone,’ George couldn’t stop himself from saying.

‘Who?’

George wiped his eyes. ‘The lady who was just here. She had to go.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And your grand-père is very, very sad about that.’

JP blinked. ‘What lady?’

‘Okay, this is weird,’ Rachel said, sitting up on the grass, looking like she was trying to figure out where the hell she was. She saw the fire and looked astonished, then saw George and JP and looked even more astonished.

‘Are you all right?’ George asked.

Rachel seemed to take this question very seriously, even putting a hand to her chest as if to check her heart was still beating. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I think I really am.’ She got to her feet, swaying a little, but upright. ‘I think I really am all right.’ She laughed. And laughed again.

‘MAMAN!’ JP suddenly shouted, leaping from George and dashing towards a figure staggering, impossibly, out the back door of the burning kitchen.

(Out the locked back door of the burning kitchen, George had a second to think.)

Amanda.

Her face and clothes were black with smoke, the whites of her desperate eyes comically bright under the thick layer of soot. She was coughing into her fist but coming away seemingly unharmed from the wall of flame behind her. ‘JP!’ she cried and came running to meet him halfway across the lawn, picking him up in a fearsome hug. She staggered over to George. ‘Dad!’

‘I can’t stand up,’ he said. ‘My feet–’

‘Oh, Dad,’ she said, pulling him into her sooty embrace as well.

George felt his last defences collapse as he was held by his daughter. ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’

‘I know,’ Amanda said, holding him tight. ‘I know.’

‘She’s gone.’

And he felt the truth of it like a bullet in his heart.

Amanda held her father tight against her as he wept, JP making spitting sounds to clear the soot from his mouth where he’d kissed her, and Rachel standing there watching it all.

‘Thank you,’ Amanda whispered to her over George’s sobbing head. Rachel gave her a questioning look. Amanda gestured to JP.

‘Oh,’ Rachel said, turning back to the fire and watching it burn. ‘No problem.’ And then as if to herself, ‘No problem at all.’

There was a crash and a sudden whooshing sound as the fire brigade finally, finally started to aim hoses at the fire from the street side, a fine mist of steam drifting into the back garden. The flames at the top of the house immediately disappeared under the water, replaced by thicker smoke.

‘We can’t get around any more,’ Amanda said, nodding to where the side of the house was now collapsing in burning slow motion onto the driveway. ‘We’ll have to wait back here until they put it out.’

‘Un feu,’ JP said again.

The feu had, by this point, been burning long enough to keep them all uncomfortably warm, so Amanda gently undraped the Wriggle blanket from around her son. ‘Why don’t we give this to grand-père for now?’

‘He’s naked,’ JP said, happily.

She put the blanket around George’s shoulders, covering him.

‘It’s all over,’ he said.

‘I know, Dad,’ Amanda said, rubbing his back. ‘I know.’

‘She’s gone.’

‘I know.’

He looked up at her, quizzically. ‘How do you know?’

But before she could answer, Rachel interrupted. ‘Amanda?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you tell work I won’t be in on Monday?’

‘Are you kidding me–?’

‘Just, please, Amanda. As a friend.’

Amanda coughed again, watching her. ‘Yeah, okay, I guess.’

‘In fact,’ Rachel said, turning back to the fire, ‘maybe you could tell them I’m not coming back at all.’ She hugged her arms to herself, and it took Amanda a minute to wonder how it was that Rachel looked so different.

Then she realised it was because she looked free.

V.

No one needed her in a meeting for at least an hour, the corridor outside was momentarily clear, and she could probably get away with ‘accidentally’ locking her door for a few minutes, so what the hell? She hung the tile on the back wall of her new office, if only to see how it looked.

It looked . . . well, it looked great. How could it not? The mountain of words on the horizon, the bird of feathers in the night sky above, forever beyond each other’s reach though – painfully, beautifully – forever in each other’s sight. A picture of sadness, but also of peace and history. They could look upon love and be comforted.