The Crane Wife

by Patrick Ness

  ‘Oh,’ Amanda said. ‘Damn.’

  Kumiko didn’t respond, just reached in and grasped it, holding it in her palm.

  ‘This is a ritual of forgiveness,’ she said, closing her fingers over Amanda’s heart. A light came from behind them, and when she opened her hand again the heart was gone. ‘And so is this.’ Kumiko made the same line on her own chest, her flesh opening to reveal her beating, shining, golden heart. She reached in and removed it, bringing it slowly towards the darkened opening on Amanda’s chest.

  Amanda caught her by the wrist. ‘I can’t. You can’t.’

  ‘And yet we will. Take my heart. Forgive it. By doing so, you forgive us both. And there is nothing more that either of us needs.’

  She moved her hand again, Amanda no longer resisting. Kumiko placed her heart in Amanda’s chest, its golden light shining even through the scar as Kumiko closed the wound.

  ‘But you,’ Amanda said, looking into Kumiko’s eyes.

  ‘It is done,’ Kumiko said. ‘At last. I am free.’

  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.

  ‘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 lov
e 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.

  He hadn’t even been able to kiss her goodbye.

  Except, of course, he had.

  ‘I’ll say it again, George,’ Mehmet said, as George continued to quietly cry. ‘Take more time off. We can run this place while your feet heal properly and you look for a new house and you know, whatever, grieve.’

  George considered this for a moment. There was wisdom in it. Clare and Hank had, with unhesitating kindness, picked him up from the hospital and deposited him immediately into a far-too-swanky room in Hank’s hotel. Though George had an embarrassing pot of money in the bank from all the tile sales, they had refused to entertain a penny of it, seeming genuine when they told him to stay as long as he needed. He assumed they wanted to keep an eye on him, and for once he found he didn’t really mind that they did.

  The nights had been hard, of course, but the days even harder until he started coming back to the shop, limping in on his crutches, much to Mehmet’s scandalised surprise. Mehmet, despite his moaning, had done extremely well on his own, and George had no doubt he could keep it up until things became easier, particularly as Mehmet didn’t actually seem in that much of a hurry to leave.

  But no.

  ‘No,’ George said now, wiping his eyes. ‘I need to do something. I can’t just sit around all day. I need to keep busy.’

  The bell on the door chimed and a customer came in.

  ‘Go help him,’ George said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Mehmet and Nadine watched him a m
oment more, then left to deal with what looked like another order for stag-night t-shirts. George could already hear Mehmet setting a terrible customer-service example for Nadine, but he let it slide.

  Because he was staring at the crane again.

  It was impossible. He had never cut this. Had he? No. It was too skilled, for one thing. Too sharp, too tight, too much of a crane. It was impossible that it was his. It was impossible that it was here.

  But a live crane in his back garden with an arrow through its wing was also impossible. So, too, was the almost accidental creation of the tiles and their inexplicable success. In fact, Kumiko in her every particular was frankly impossible.

  Did he really believe she was the crane? Did he really believe she had come to him and brought him happiness until he grew too greedy to know more of her? Did he really believe what happened in the garden after the fire? That that was the way their story ended?

  If any story even had an ending. If every ending wasn’t just someone else’s beginning.

  But no, of course, he didn’t believe it.

  And yes, beyond anything he’d ever felt, he knew it to be true.

  A crane, made of paper. Made of blank paper.

  If this was a message, he thought he knew what that message might be.

  He placed the crane down carefully, making sure not to crimp it. He’d put it under glass later, protect it with the utmost care, but for now an urgency had taken over. He would no longer make cuttings, no, that was clear, but this crane, however it had arrived, had been cut from a page without words. A page without a story on it.

  A page waiting to be filled.

  He grabbed the first pad of paper to hand. It was a freebie from a supplier and had their name and details across the top of each leaf. He threw it out. He kept looking, opening drawers, rolling his chair to the supply cupboards. There was an unimaginable stock of paper in this shop, from ultra-cheap scrap to stuff you could probably sleep on, but to his increasing disbelief, no proper notebooks, not even lined ones like students used in class. Actually, he thought, did they even still do that or did they just take in laptops or smartphones and record everything?