The Crane Wife (27 page)

‘George–’

‘I won’t forgive you. Not if it makes you leave.’

She placed a hand on his chest, as if to calm him. She kept her glance on it, so he looked down, too. Her fingers spread out–

–and seemed to change. A splay of feathers shot from underneath them, white as the moon, white as starlight, white as a wish.

Then they were gone.

‘I cannot stay,’ she said. ‘It is impossible.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It grows harder by the moment, George,’ she said, another flash of feathers appearing under her hand. And then gone again.

George sat up further, though he had to steady himself. He was still extremely light-headed, no doubt what was causing him to see all these dreamlike things. The fire burning with impossible colours, greens and purples and blues. The night sky above them far too clear on this winter’s night. The stars sharp enough to cut your hand if you touched them. And he was cold, freezing cold–

But also burning up, the fire seeming to rise from his injured feet and blaze through him, coursing a fresh rage into his blood, an anger large enough to–

‘No,’ Kumiko said, though not as if she was talking to him. ‘You have done enough. You know that you have.’

George blinked at her. ‘What?’ But the burning was fading, the overwhelming feeling of eruption subsiding, disappearing into memory. He frowned. ‘My eyes were green just then, weren’t they?’

She leaned to him and kissed him, her own eyes still golden, even though he was between the fire and its reflection. ‘I have found peace with you,’ she said. ‘A peace I was desperate for, a peace I hoped might have even lasted.’ She looked back up at the fire. ‘But clearly it cannot.’

‘Please, Kumiko. Please don’t–’

‘I must go.’ She took his hand in hers. ‘I must be released. I must be forgiven. I can no longer ignore how I ache for it.’

‘But I’m the
last
person who should be forgiving you, Kumiko. I slept with Rachel. I don’t even know
why
–’

‘It is not important.’

‘It’s the most important thing of all.’

He pulled away from her. Time seemed to have dammed itself for a moment. How could this fire be blazing so heavily with no fire brigade swarming over the property? How could he no longer be freezing here on this grass? How could Kumiko be saying these things to him?

‘I know you now,’ George said. ‘That’s all I wanted. That’s all I
ever
wanted–’

‘You do not know me–’

‘You are the lady.’ He was firm when he said it, and calm. ‘You are the crane. You are the crane I took the arrow from.’

She smiled at him, sadly. ‘We are all the lady, George. And I am your crane and you are mine.’ She sighed. ‘And we are all the volcano. Stories shift, remember? They change depending on who is doing the telling.’

‘Kumiko–’

‘I misspoke before.’ She gently wiped some ash from his cheek. ‘You
do
know me, George, and I need you to forgive me for that knowledge. It has brought you into the wrong story, and it will consume you. So you must forgive me for it.’ Then she repeated her words, full of sorrow, but also full of longing. ‘Everyone needs forgiveness, my love. Everyone.’

George watched as she reached up to her chest and, with the nail of her index finger, drew a line down her skin. It opened like a fissure in the earth, widening until he could see her heart beating its life underneath it. She took George’s hand in her own and guided it there.

‘Kumiko, no,’ George said, a great feeling of grief starting to press against his chest and throat.

‘Take it,’ she said. ‘Take my heart. Free me.’

‘Please don’t ask me,’ George said, his voice cracking, his own heart swiftly breaking. ‘I can’t. I love you.’

‘It is the most loving thing one person can do for another, George. It is what makes life possible. It is what makes it
liveable
.’

Her heart beat there, glistening with blood, steam rising from it into the cold air.

‘You’ll leave,’ George said.

‘I have to leave either way. But I can leave either imprisoned or free. Please. Please do this for me.’

‘Kumiko–’

But he found he had no further words. He also found that somehow he understood. She loved him, but even that couldn’t keep her tied to this earth. She asked him to forgive her for his knowledge of her, and somehow that made sense, too. As long as it was
this
story of herself she could tell, not the one he demanded to know, all would have been well.

But he
had
demanded. He had been stupidly, stupidly greedy for knowledge of her. And he had found out.

He knew her.

But wasn’t that what love really was, though? Knowledge?

Yes. And then again, no.

And now she was right, there was no choice. There was only how she would leave to be decided.

He held his hand above her chest, hesitating.

‘Do not!’ a voice boomed across the garden.

Rachel stood at the side gate, her eyes a green so bright George could see them even in shadow, almost as if she was burning from within. JP stood by her side, sucking his little thumb, wild-haired and startled, Wriggle blanket over one shoulder.

‘Rachel?’ George said. ‘
JP
?’

‘
Grand-père
?’ JP said around his thumb. ‘Mama went– ’

‘You will not do this!’ Rachel yelled, dragging JP forward so abruptly he called out in surprise. ‘You will not!’

George tried to stand, but the burns made it impossible. Kumiko rose behind him, though, getting to her feet, the wound on her chest now gone (and he hadn’t
really
seen it, had he? That had just been the smoke inhalation . . .). She stood strangely before Rachel, extending her arms, as if expecting a fight.

JP let go of Rachel’s hand and he ran over to George. ‘Mama went into the house!’ he said, eyes wide.

‘She
what
?’ George said, looking back at the blaze, an inferno with no escape. He turned to Kumiko and shouted, ‘Amanda’s in there! Amanda’s in the house!’

But the world had stopped.

The volcano approaches the lady across the field of battle, the world behind him burning. The lady still carries her wound, he sees, blood dripping from her outstretched wing. It gladdens him that she still suffers, but his heart breaks for it, too.

‘You will not do this,’ he says to her. ‘It is not for you to decide. It is for me.’

‘You know this is not true,’ the lady says. ‘You know that I have given the choice to him.’ She frowns. ‘No matter how you may have tried to persuade him otherwise.’

The volcano smirks. ‘This body,’ he says, referring to the form he wears. ‘It fights back in surprising ways. I have been in it since before its birth, but it is . . .’ He flashes a look, almost of admiration. ‘Surprisingly strong.’

‘Is it not time to free her?’ the lady asks.

‘Is it not time to free him?’ the volcano replies.

The lady looks down at George, frozen there in a moment of time, his voice caught in a terrible plea, one she knows will need an answer.

‘He loves me,’ the lady says, knowing it to be true.

‘That he does, I admit,’ the volcano says, his eyes burning. ‘Despite being given ample opportunity to destroy the love you returned. They are great destroyers, these creatures.’

‘So speaks a volcano.’

‘We build as well as destroy.’

‘You could not come between us. Though you tried.’

‘But it is inevitable, my lady. Once he knew you, he entered our story, and the harm I may do him here is so much easier to accomplish.’

‘You think so, do you? You think it is that easy?’

‘I have started already.’ He gestures to the blaze behind him. ‘This form and I have set fire to your world. To his. It is only the beginning of what we shall do to you, my lady.’

‘Are you sure the fire is yours? Can you say that this is your destruction with the utmost certainty?’

The volcano frowns. ‘I will not listen to your riddles, my lady.’ He looks at George. ‘This is not the way our story ends. You know this.’

‘Stories do not end.’

‘Ah, you are right, but you are also wrong. They end and they begin every moment. It is all about when you stop the telling.’

He has reached her now. They are closer than they have been for eternities, and they have also always been this close. With a shrug, the volcano steps out of Rachel’s body, his green eyes gleaming, and she falls to the grass and out of the battlefield. The volcano reaches a hand to his chest and opens it, exposing his granite heart, beating in a field of molten lead.

The bullet still lodged within.

‘I wish to end this, my lady,’ he says, solemn now. ‘The victory is yours. I see now that it always was.’ He kneels before her.

‘There is no victory,’ she says. ‘I have made no triumph.’

‘I only ask of you what you asked of him, my lady. Free me. Forgive me, at long last.’

‘Then who will be left to forgive me? I do not think he will be able to let me go, in the end.’

‘It is the eternal paradox, my lady. The only ones who can free us are the very ones who are too kind to do so.’

He leans his head back, closing his eyes, presenting his heart to her, beating in its crater.

‘And now. Please.’

She could wait, she knows. She could stretch out their story forever, but she also knows she would never move from this moment, not until their story was finally told. The volcano is correct. There is only this end. There has only ever been this end.

And so the lady grieves, weeping larger than the heavens, filling oceans with her tears.

The volcano waits, silently.

It is, finally, an easy motion. She reaches into his chest and first removes the bullet of herself. As it leaves him, he groans in exquisite pain. She clenches her fist around it, and when she opens her hand again it is gone. He weeps for its loss. She brushes the tears from his eyes and waits for him to gather himself, returning the courtesy of patience he has just shown her.

‘My lady,’ he whispers.

Then she reaches into him again and, with a sigh of ancient grief, pierces his heart with her fingers. In her hand, it crumbles instantly to ash, blowing away in the wind.

‘Thank you,’ the volcano says, relief shedding from him in waves of fire and dying lava. ‘Thank you, my lady.’

‘Who will take my heart now?’ she asks as he rises and solidifies, reaching for the horizon as he becomes, simply, a mountain.

Perhaps he makes to answer, but he is already stone.

R
achel collapsed to the ground at George’s feet. He clutched JP tightly to him still and looked back up at Kumiko, who stood as if frozen. He shouted her name again. And once more.

Finally, she seemed to hear him. ‘George?’

‘Amanda’s in the house! She went in to save us!’

Kumiko looked back to the raging fire. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I understand.’

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!’