The Crane Wife(63)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘Someone had to, George,’ he’d cried. ‘You just won’t take care of yourself. And aren’t you glad you have that money now?’

George hadn’t even been angry. Mehmet, in his own way, had done it all out of love, and there was no way George was ever going to reject anything done out of love for him from now on. He’d even allowed Mehmet to open an official site about the tiles, despite there being nothing left to sell, because at least it was a kind of memorial to her.

He looked up at the dragon and crane now. Like his daughter, he kept his tile as close to him as he dared, bringing it with him every morning and taking it away every night, not just for safety but because he wasn’t ready to be parted from it just yet, even for a day.

Because she was gone, and this was all he had left.

He’d been unable to return the confession to Amanda and tell her what had happened – or what he thought had happened – in the back garden. The way Kumiko had asked him to remove her heart, the way she had blurred, the way she had kissed him before vanishing. Indeed, it seemed, the way she hadn’t been there at all. JP could only remember Rachel bringing him around the house to where his grand-père was lying alone on the grass.

What JP hadn’t seen was Kumiko.

Because Kumiko, of course, had died in the fire, a fire the investigators seemed to think was ‘probably’ caused by an unattended candle, a fire he and his daughter had only survived by some miracle.

Some miracle, he thought, tapping his fingers on the cutting pad on his desk. If Kumiko hadn’t brought him to the frost-covered grass, how had he got there? Some miracle, indeed.

He still dreamed, but they were different from before, heavily featuring Amanda’s tile. They were dreams of a quiet, sleeping mountain and the constellation that flew over it in the shape of a great bird. They were dreams where he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t speak to her, only see her cast against the sky, eternal and out of reach. They were dreams of the end of the story.

But they weren’t exactly unhappy either. There was grief, of course, he often woke from them weeping, but he felt a sense of peace there, too, as if a battle longer than time had finally ended. There was calm. There was release. And if that release didn’t involve George, then at least it involved Kumiko. As the days stretched on from her actual death, he became more and more a remote observer in the dreams, too. An observer in a story that was turning into a history with every passing day.

He looked up.

An observer. An observer who told a different version of the story. An observer who would tell the story differently than she might. Not in any adversarial way, just someone who might tell it in his own words . . .

‘Mr Duncan?’ a high, melodically accented voice asked him, breaking in on his train of thought. A train he would come back to. Oh, yes.

‘What can I do for you, Nadine?’

‘I was wondering,’ she said bashfully, ‘if I could maybe come in late on Thursday?’

‘How late?’

She winced. ‘Four hours?’

George saw Mehmet swinging back and forth on the stool at the front counter. ‘Is it for an audition?’

Nadine looked amazed. ‘Wow! How’d you guess?’

‘Intuition.’

‘Oh, let her go, George,’ Mehmet said. ‘You should hear her sing. The voice of a dazed trumpet.’

‘And that’s good?’

‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘I could sing for you,’ Nadine volunteered.

‘Not right now,’ George said. ‘And yes, you can come in late.’

‘Thank you, Mr Duncan.’ There was some whispered gesturing from Mehmet. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we found this. Mehmet said to give it to you.’

She held out her really quite astonishingly tiny hand – George had a sudden vision of her having huge success in a racial- and gender-blind cast of Oliver! – and handed George what, at first, looked like a small slip of paper.

He took it from her.

And nearly tumbled from his chair.

‘It had fallen behind your work desk there,’ Mehmet said. ‘It’s so small, it probably just got blown there by a puff of air.’

‘We wouldn’t have found it at all if I hadn’t dropped that box of paperclips, remember?’ Nadine said.

George nodded slowly. It had been a big industrial box containing ten thousand, ordered by mistake and dropped in spectacular fashion by the tiny hands of Nadine, spreading them to every corner of the shop. George expected to be finding paperclips until his retirement.

But these were just passing thoughts, floating idly by as he stared at what they’d given him.

It was a crane, cut from a single piece of paper, just like the one he’d cut on that very first day, the one now stuck to the tile above his head.

But that was impossible.

‘That’s impossible,’ he said.

‘Not impossible,’ Nadine said. ‘Just a mess.’

‘No, no,’ George said. ‘I only made one. Kumiko took it. She used it in a tile. That tile. Up there.’

‘I’ve seen you doing those cuttings,’ Mehmet said. ‘You make about a million of each until you get one right.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t really think that’s how artists do it, but it seemed to work for you.’

‘I didn’t with this one, though,’ George whispered, his eyes still on it. He really didn’t. He was sure of it. Especially because this one looked nothing like a goose.

He began to cry again, softly but beyond his control. Nadine, used to it after working here a week, put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘My father died when I was twelve,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t really get better. But it changes.’

‘I know,’ George said, nodding, still holding the crane, so small, so perfect. It was cut from a wordless page, the stretch of it pure and white.

A wordless page, George thought.

‘We were right to give it to you, yes?’ Mehmet said, coming over. ‘We found it, and I know that since you lost pretty much everything in the fire . . .’

This was only inaccurate in that pretty much didn’t quite cover it. He hadn’t even had any clothes left, having escaped not wearing a single stitch. Worse was that he’d lost his old phone, too, which contained every picture he had of her. And there was nothing left in her flat because she had only, that very day, moved the last of her belongings into his house.

There had been nothing but her body, which they had buried, a practice the undertaker had gently tried to dissuade him as American and impractical, but having found no family of Kumiko’s to contradict him, he’d bought her a new dress, a new overcoat and the closest thing he could find to the suitcase she always carried to bury alongside her, though her burns were so bad he hadn’t been allowed to see her body. He had no idea if the clothes were even used.