The Crane Wife(62)
Author: Patrick Ness

They left the body on the hallway floor, but it was different now. Different, finally and forever. Kumiko guided Amanda through the flames, through the blazing walls of the sitting room and into the kitchen, though nothing seemed to burn them and the smoke was only the remotest concern.

They reached the edge of the fire, where a door opened, out into the world beyond.

‘You need only step through,’ Kumiko said in her ear. ‘You need only say yes.’

Amanda took a Kleenex from the box on her desk and wiped her eyes.

She’d found herself, somehow, stumbling out the back door of the house, dirty but unscathed. She had been groggy, from whatever had happened with the falling ceiling and the impossible smoke that stuck to her insides, but then she’d seen JP and it was as if she’d woken up again. She’d seen her father laid out on the grass. She’d seen the still-inexplicable presence of Rachel. And she’d breathed in the brutally cold but welcomely clear air of the night.

The fire brigade reached them not too long after, and a fire chief told them with great dignity that a badly burnt body had been found on the floor of the hallway, killed by the collapsing ceiling or possibly thrown there from the room above.

Amanda and George wept together then. And had done so more than once since.

‘Are you all right?’ said a voice.

Amanda carefully closed the desk drawer and, through tears, smiled at Mei. ‘Yeah. Just . . . memories, you know?’

Mei nodded gravely. ‘How’s the new office?’

‘Quiet. Which I like. You’ll have your own soon. Now that I’m having lunch with power once a week.’

Mei nodded again. ‘Can tonight start an hour later than we’d planned? My babysitter has a clarinet lesson and I’m still not sure of my outfit.’

JP was in France with his father – even though the homesick Skype sessions had convinced Henri a week was long enough, JP was also simultaneously having the time of his life; a second visit was already planned for summer – so Amanda and Mei had decided to give clubbing a go. Neither of them was particularly enthusiastic, but if it ended early with wine and TV, what was the harm?

‘Of course,’ Amanda said, ‘but no backing out. You still have to go.’

‘So do you,’ Mei said and took her leave. Amanda really did have work to do, after all, quite a lot of it in this new capacity. It turned out Rachel had been world-beatingly good at her job, and that was something Amanda was going to have to try to live up to.

But first, she took out her phone.

Though she’d shared the tile, she felt like she couldn’t tell George about the hallucination in the fire, how she must have been knocked senseless by the collapsing ceiling, and how that strange vision, or whatever it was, had kept her walking through the flames and out the back of the house, saving her life in the most improbable fashion. But as she tapped the most called number in her directory, she put a hand to her chest.

No, there was no scar there. No, she didn’t believe a golden heart was beating inside. And no, she didn’t really believe the ghost of Kumiko had guided her to safety.

But maybe she did believe that when death had entered the room, her brain had conjured up Kumiko to calm her fears, to make everything all right, to allow her the chance to live.

Which was something. Which was more than something.

And so she wanted to speak to her father now, not about anything in particular, just hear his voice, sadder, older, even in these few weeks. She wanted to hear him say her name. She wanted to say his. And she wanted them both to say Kumiko’s.

She listened as it rang and rang. With his still-recovering feet, he sometimes took a while to struggle his phone out of the desk or his bag or wherever he’d left it this time. She didn’t mind. She would wait.

She wanted to speak to him, yet again, of love. And of forgiveness. And of hearts, broken and beating.

There was a click as the call connected.

‘Sweetheart!’ her father said, and the welcome in his voice was food to feed a thousand.

Realistically, he knew he’d never make another cutting. He hadn’t tried yet, of course, it was too soon, way too soon. He couldn’t even look at a second-hand book these days without feeling as if a hole had been punched through his heart. But even if that passed – and he knew, intellectually, that it would, but knowing a thing and feeling a thing were entirely different and probably the cause of all his species’ problems – he couldn’t picture himself ever again instinctively making a cut here, a cut there, unsure what the image was until it was made.

The cuttings had been nothing without her anyway, of course. Just silly little trifles that signified not much.

But with her. Oh, with her . . .

He sighed deeply.

And felt a gentle pat on his back. ‘I know, George,’ Mehmet said, passing him on the way to the front of the shop. ‘Let it out.’

Mehmet was busy training his replacement, a tiny girl from Ghana called Nadine, just about to start university. In drama. Mehmet had hired her. George couldn’t find it in himself to mind.

The shop was back to its previous unspectacular-but-decent business, though there was still the occasional desperate drop-in, coming in with hope on their faces and sometimes tears in their eyes. They left disappointed, but only partially, as George always let them look at what the world thought was the last unsold tile, the dragon and the crane, still watching over him from the wall above his desk, even though it was now worth considerably more than the shop itself.

After the funeral, Amanda had told him of the tile Kumiko had given her, the peaceful, strangely quiet, strangely final one that seemed the end of a story just as the dragon and the crane seemed the start of one. In a back room of Clare’s home, away from the few other mourners at the wake, she had shown it to him and he understood everything. He accepted no apologies from her for keeping it secret because none were needed. He would have done the same and agreed readily that the secret remain, for now, something they could share together, just the two of them.

‘I love you,’ he’d told her, ‘so much my heart breaks. So much that the thought of you having any unhappiness–’

‘I know, Dad,’ she’d said. ‘And knowing helps. It really does.’

The wake had turned out to be an afternoon of revelation, as Mehmet had also pulled him aside and confessed, honestly distraught, to being a better actor than George had ever given him credit for. Mehmet, of course, had been the one who helped early word along, starting rumours, secretly sending details to the right sites, even inviting most of the awful people who’d come to the party, hoping to turn it all into a runaway phenomenon.