The Fire Artist (21 page)

She must be shifting in her chair, squirming. Tough topics make her uncomfortable, and in this moment I want to lash out at her. She never used to be like this. She always used to talk, to answer, to teach. She taught me to read, to ride a bike, to look both ways when crossing the street. She used to be somebody, she used to be strong. Now she says nothing, does nothing. I want to tell her that right now she’s as culpable as my father.

“Mom,” I push. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“She’s hardly around, Aria,” my mother says, snapping at me, backed into a corner by my insistence.

“Is she staying with Mindy?” I ask again. “Please say that’s where she is. Please, please.” I don’t know how much more I can hate myself for leaving her there. But if I have to, I can surely hunt down more self-loathing. Because this is all my fault.

“She’s always at the pool or the beach, and when she comes home she won’t talk. She goes to her room and slams the door. So there. I have failed her too. She won’t talk to me. She won’t
tell me a thing. My son is in prison, my youngest won’t speak to me, and you’re the only one who cares.”

A tsunami of tears comes next, waves of self-loathing from my mother, her admission—out of the blue—that she has failed.

I make some soothing sounds, telling her it’ll be okay. But it won’t be okay; she can’t fix my sister, she couldn’t help Xavi, and she can’t stop my father.

Then my mother surprises me with what she says next. “Jana was leaving for the beach yesterday and I tried to talk to her, I tried to ask her how she was doing. I even got up. I made it to the door, but, Aria, I opened the door—”

“You opened the door?”

I haven’t seen her near the door in years.

“Yes, but I couldn’t make it past the door. I tried to step outside, but it was as if there was a gust of wind that blew me back inside.”

“A gust of wind?” Maybe she’s going crazy.

“And then I just felt as if everything had gone dark and black, and I fell down, and when I came to, I dragged myself back to my chair.”

What kind of gust of wind would knock her out?

As my boots pound the sidewalk on the way to a grate on Sixty-Sixth Street, I have to fight this flickering inside me. It’s like I have a nervous tic the way my shoulders seize up, but it’s because my chest is an accordion, pinching and stretching all the organs inside it. I’ve never been around so many people when I’m in this state, all raw and exposed, a human body painted on a poster in science class with insides shown and labeled.

“And this, class, is the dangerous part,” the teacher would say, her pointer aimed at my drawn and quartered heart.

I keep my head down, my hands laced behind my back, my fingers twisted around each other, so I don’t unleash any flames. I want to sneer and bark at anyone who walks past me, to shout at them to get away, to ask why they’re out at this hour. But it’s New York. It’s not Wonder, Florida, where I can wander around in the wee hours without being seen. Besides, it’s my newfound darkness that makes me feel so mean.

As I round the corner and turn toward Lincoln Center, to
the grate Taj and I picked to meet at, I breathe out this coiled tension, but it has nowhere to go, so it filters back into me.

I reach the grate and call out to Taj.

He appears right away. I picture him racing through the tunnels, a rock being slung out of a slingshot, called forth by his wisher. He pops up the grate and asks if he can come up.

“Of course,” I say, but I don’t smile, because I think it’s awful that he can’t emerge without my permission.

Then he’s beside me. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I say, and feel a little less awful. There’s an awkward moment, as if neither one of us knows what’s next and whether we’re allowed to repeat last night, or whether we return to the way it was before. Then he moves first, leaning into my lips. I close my eyes, and his soft lips are on mine. With each second that ticks by, I can feel my chest loosening, a knot unwinding. My body doesn’t feel torqued, and I realize it’s because of him.

He leans his forehead against mine and asks the simplest of questions. “How was your day?”

It melts me that he wants to know, and it melts me again that I want to tell him how absolutely awful it was.

“Crummy,” I say, stepping back and resting against the concrete wall that hems in Lincoln Center behind us. We’re ensconced in a quiet little nook off the street, a semiprivate corner that makes me feel as if we’re alone. “Yours?”

“It was good. I read a book.”

“What book? Wait. Let me guess. Something fancy,” I tease. “
Moby Dick
?
Ulysses
?”

“Mock my taste, why don’t you?”

“I just did.”

“I read a thriller. Espionage and government secrets and stolen identities across Europe. See, I have a wide range of tastes.” He pauses, then the teasing recedes from both of us as he touches my cheek.

I take his hand and put it on my chest. His palm is warm against my skin, and his touch shoots sparks through me. He raises an eyebrow.

“Do you remember when you first put your hand on my chest?”

“Of course.”

“I liked it a lot,” I say, and I know it comes out shy sounding, and it’s not because I’m a shy girl, it’s because I’ve never let myself be vulnerable.

“Me too.”

I place my hand over his, closer to me, covering my heart. “But it’s more than just that when you touch me. Because a few minutes ago, all I wanted was to set the world on fire. And my chest hurt, like my bones were being squeezed. But when I’m near you, I don’t feel that way at all.”

I always thought I’d squirm if I ever told a guy I liked him, if I ever truly opened up to someone. But maybe that’s because every boy I’ve ever known has been too much hometown, and home is what I’ve always wanted to leave.

“When I’m with you, I feel free,” I whisper, and now I am vulnerable; now I have let down my guard. Instinct tells me to flee, but I resist.

“I feel that way too, Aria. When I’m with you, I feel free too.” The words are heavy because, of course, he’s not free. He can’t be free unless I set him free. And here I am again, circling
the same problem, arriving at the same answer. There are no more nights of waiting one more night to wish. I have to wish tonight. The prospect of losing him pierces me.

“Hey,” he starts, shifting the conversation in another direction. “Why was your day so crummy?”

He takes my hand and we walk around the front of Lincoln Center. I feel unmoored again, now that we’re not kissing or touching. I have the faintest desire to flick my fingers, to unleash a few sparks, and I know the contact with him has only cooled me momentarily. I am a steaming teakettle that was taken off the burner for a minute, but now it’s been re-placed and the dial has been turned back up.

Reprieve doesn’t last for long.

We reach the front of Lincoln Center and sit on the marble steps. I tell him about my day, about my brother, about the call with my mom, about what I think is going on with Jana. Taj stops me when I mention what happened with my mom, how she tried to open the door but couldn’t.

“What did she say happened?”

“She said it was like a gust of wind. Everything went black and dark.”

“Like she couldn’t leave the house?” His throat sounds constricted as he asks.

“That’s what she said.”

“Aria, you told me before that she never leaves, right? That you haven’t seen her out of the house in years?”

“Right.”

“And now she said she was almost physically stopped by some sort of force before she left?” he asks carefully, taking his
time with each word, as if each one is a clue being assembled into a proper order.

“Yes. Why? What is it?”

“Aria,” he whispers. “Is your father’s name Felix?”

Felix
.

I never use his name. I try to never think of his name. It humanizes him. Hearing someone else speak it feels out of joint, a hinge being hung on the wrong-size door.

“Yes. Why?”

“I have to show you something.”

“What? What do you have to show me?” I’ve had far too many surprises today. I don’t want another one, especially one that has to do with my father.

“Trust me, please. Can you come with me? To my library?”

Underground we go.

The tunnels are the kind of dark where you can’t see the outline of your fingers, where you can’t tell if the floor is beneath your feet.

We crunch along through the tunnel, its floor formed by hard-packed dirt and dankness, by naked walls under city streets. His hand holds mine so tightly they might as well be fused together, or maybe it’s because I’m gripping his fingers so hard, forging them into mine. We turn a sharp corner and I stumble, separating from Taj. I fall on one knee, shooting out a hand to brace myself. As I connect with the floor, I release a small plume. The fire lights up the tunnel, and Taj jumps back, pressing himself against the wall.

“Aria, it’s okay.” He’s trying to calm me, but I can tell he’s scared too. Of what I might do. Truth is, so am I. Because I didn’t mean to do that. It just happened. I yank the flames back into my hand, consuming them in my body, without any grace or art, just a sheer blunt tug.

I stand. “Sorry,” I mutter.

“We’re almost there,” he says, but I suspect what he means to say is
Get a grip on your fire, girl
.

But I can’t. Right now, the fire is becoming stronger than I am, eating me from the inside. I’ve never been away from Elise on nights like this when I start to lose my fire. I clench my fist and picture my heart in a vise, immovable metal holding its convulsing center in place. The heart can’t escape; the heart is held. The heart is calm. We reach the door, and Taj opens it, and I practically spill into his
home
, his library.

I grab him, pull him against me, wrap my arms around his strong frame. He senses what I need right now isn’t kissing, though I wouldn’t complain if his lips were on mine. What I need is the pressure of his body against mine. Somehow it settles the fire in me.

After a few minutes, my chest isn’t sputtering. I can manage for a bit.

“What did you want to show me?”

“It’s the book. The registry of wishes.”

My jaw drops. “But you said you can’t reveal wishes.”

“I know.” He scrubs a hand across his jaw as if this pains him. “This is completely forbidden. I shouldn’t be doing this at all. But you need to see this.”

He nods to his desk. The thriller he was reading is off to the side. He pulls open a heavy drawer and takes out a large red book. It’s fat and tall—the size of a giant dictionary.

“I’m told this used to be about the weight of a flimsy magazine. But over the years, over the centuries as more wishes get made, the book gets bigger.”

“They’re all in here?”

He nods, then opens the book, spreading its heavy pages apart at his desk. “With each wish, names are added,” he explains.

“But this is just one book. How they do get in every granter’s book?”

“Whenever a name is added in one book, it appears—like magic ink—moments later in another’s. That’s how the registry works. Almost like a shared document that we all have access to. Any update in one book is reflected in the others.”

“How many names do you think are in this?”

“A lot.”

The book looks like a ledger, with ruler-marked lines and names in dark script. Payment is listed in one column, then whether the account is due, past due, or paid in full, he tells me, and I suspect the Lady must be in here somewhere and listed as
paid in full
. As Taj flips the pages past the
H
s, the
I
s, the
J
s, everything comes into focus.

I stiffen when he lands on the
K
s and begins running his index finger down the names. “They don’t always get recorded properly by jackass granters,” Taj says, speaking matter-of-factly, as if he’s a doctor explaining a simple procedure. “Well, that’s not entirely true. They always get recorded, because we have no choice in that. You are compelled to record every wish precisely as it’s wished, and it’s too powerful a force to resist. But sometimes the jackass granters don’t always have the best handwriting.”

He turns several more pages, passing the names starting with
Ka
-, then
Ke
-, then the few
Kh
- names in the book. As we come closer to my last name, the pages start swimming, letters
levitating and curving toward me. I press my fingers against the bridge of my nose to focus as Taj’s index finger lands on a name, scratched out in poor penmanship, like a kindergartner eking out words for the first time.

Felix Kilan
——

That’s as far as the granter got. The last four letters that form our name—Kilandros—are just one long scratchy line. But it’s him. It has to be him. I follow the line, squeezed in between so many other wishes, straining to keep my eyes on the right wish, the right payment.

Then I see it.

I wish for my wife to never leave me as long as we both shall live
.

“Oh my God,” I say, and I repeat it over and over as I press my hand to my eyes again, as if I can shoo the wish away and the record of it. But I can’t, so I force myself to look again, this time to the payment column.

Paid in Full Upon Transaction. Literally!

That’s how it’s written, with an exclamation point, and I can picture this jackass granter—I’m seeing a Rumpelstiltskin figure, clicking his heels with glee, a tiny little figure, cackling as he entered this wish in the registry. My father got what he wished for all right. A wife fallen ill, a wife saddled with a mystery illness, a wife who literally and figuratively can’t leave him because she can barely even leave her chair.

They say be careful what you wish for. They say wishes come with a price. I always knew that in my head. Now I feel it in my heart.

Wishes don’t
come in bottles, granters don’t live in lamps, and you’re not given three wishes by benevolent genies who nod their heads, wiggle their noses, and say “
Yes, Master
.” I should be mad at the jackass granter—I glance over at his name.
Shaw
. One name, that’s it. But Shaw didn’t make the wish. Shaw simply granted it, wholly intact, upon request, before my father could even offer payment. Because that’s how jackass granters work, and the wish come true was both wish and payment.