The Secrets of a Fire King (37 page)

“Everyone dresses this way,” I tell her, which is not entirely true.

My mother shakes her head and sighs. “Sit down, Nichola,” she says. We are in the kitchen, and she gets up to make some coffee. She looks so ordinary, so much like any other mother might look. It is hard to connect her with the woman on TV who can hold a crowd of thousands enthralled. It is hard to picture her standing on a platform, offering up the story of my life, and hers, to the tired crusaders. For that is when she tells it, when people are growing weary, when the energy begins to lag, when “Amazing Grace” goes terribly off-key and the day is as hot or as cold as it will get. She stands up on the stage then with her hand on my shoulder and says, “This is my daughter, Nichola. I want to tell you the story of her life, of how the Lord spoke through her, and thus saved me.”

She tells them how it started, how she was young and beautiful and wild, so arrogant that she believed herself immune to the consequences of her sins. From the stage she gives them details to gasp about, how beautiful she was, how drop-dead gorgeous. How many men pursued her and how far she let them go, how high she climbed on the ladder of her ignorance, until the world below seemed nothing but a mirage that never would concern her. They envy her a little, despite themselves, and after a while they begin to hate her just a little too—for her beauty, for the power that it gave her. My mother makes them feel this way on purpose, so that when she tells them of her fall they can shake their heads with secret pleasure, they can murmur to each other that she got what she deserved.

My mother knows her audience. In her weakness lies her strength. She tells them how she wound up a few months later, pregnant of course, abandoned by her family and her friends.

They sigh then, they feel her pain, her panic. They understand the loneliness she felt. When my mother flees on a Greyhound bus the
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crowd is with her. They wander by her side through the darkest corners of an unfamiliar city. She grows fearful, yes, and desperate. They, too, grow numb and lose hope, and finally they climb with her to the top of the tallest building she can find. They stand at the edge, feeling the wind in their hair and the rock-bottom desperation in their hearts, and they swallow as she looks at the city below and prepares herself to jump.

It is such a long way down. She is so afraid. And she, poor sinner, is so beyond herself that she does on impulse what she would never plan: she prays. She whispers words into that wind. She takes another step, still praying. And that is when the miracle occurs.

An ordinary sort of miracle, my mother says, for she heard no voices, saw no visions, experienced no physical transformation.

No, on that day the Lord simply spoke to her through me. She tells how she grew dizzy suddenly. From hunger, she thought then, or maybe from the height, but she has realized since that it was nothing less than the hand of grace, a divine and timely intervention.

She stumbled and fell against the guard rail, sliding on the wire mesh, scraping her arm. Brightness swirled before her. She put one hand on the cold concrete and the other on her stomach, and she closed her eyes against that sudden, rising light. For a moment the world was still, and that was when it happened. A small thing, really. An ordinary thing. Just this: for the fi rst time, she felt me move. A single kick, a small hand flailing. Once, and then again.

It was that simple. She opened her eyes and put both hands against her flesh, waiting. Still, as if listening. Yes, again.

At this point she pauses for a moment on the speaker’s platform, her head still bowed. Her voice has gone soft and shaky with this story, but now she lifts her slender arms up to the sky and shouts,
Hallelujah, on that day the Lord was with me, and intervened, everything was saved.

“Nichola,” my mother says now, sitting down across from me and pouring cream into her coffee. I watch it swirl, brown gold, in her cup. “Nichola, it’s not that I don’t trust you, baby. But I know about temptation. I know it is great, at your age. Next week I am going to do that mission work in Kansas City, and I want you to
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come with me. It will be like the old days, Nichola, you and me.

We could stop in Chicago on the way home, and go shopping.” She offers this last one because she can read my face, like a mirror face to hers, but with opposite emotions.

“Oh, Nichola,” she says wistfully. “Why not? We used to have such fun.”

She is right, I guess. I used to think it was fun. I sat on the stage with my mother and watched her speak. I felt the pressure of all those eyes, moving from the posters and back to me, as my mother told our story. That was when I was still a kid, though, and it was before the protests got so strong, so ugly.

“Look, I already told you. I’m too busy to go to Kansas City.”

“Nichola,” she says, an edge of impatience in her voice. “I promised people that you would.”

“Well, unpromise them,” I say. “They won’t care. It’s you they come to see.”

“Oh, Nichola,” she protests. “People always ask for you. Specifically for you.”

“I can’t,” I say. I’m thinking of the heat, the hours of standing in the group of prayer supporters, of the way there is no telling, anymore, what anyone will do. “I’m so busy. I’ve got a term paper due. The junior prom is in three weeks. I just don’t think I can leave all that right now.”

“Leave school, or leave Sam?” my mother asks.

I’m starting to blush, I can feel it moving up my cheeks, and my mother is looking at me with her gentle eyes that seem to know everything, everything about me. I fold my arms, my left hand covering the place where Sam held on to me so hard, and then I say the one thing that I know for sure will change the subject.

“You know, I’ve been wondering about my father again,” I tell her.

My mother’s face hardens. I watch it happen, imagining my own features growing still and thick like that.

“Nichola,” she says. “As far as your father is concerned, you don’t exist.”

“But he knows about me, right? And don’t you think I have a right to meet him?”

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“Oh, he knows,” she says. “He knows.”

She pauses, looking at me with narrowed eyes, the same expression she wore in the office, negotiating about Kansas City with Gary and the others. Her face clears then, and she leans forward with a sigh.

“All right,” she says. “What if I told you that you’d get to meet your father, if you come with me to Kansas City?”

“What are you saying?” I ask. Despite myself my heart is beating faster. This is the first time she has ever admitted that he is alive. “Is that where he lives?”

She shrugs. She knows she has my interest now. “Maybe,” she says. “He may live there. Or maybe he lives right here, or in another city altogether.” She sits back and looks at me. “I don’t think that you should meet him, Nichola. I think once you do, you’ll wish you hadn’t. I’m keeping it from you for your own good, you know. I just don’t want you to get hurt.” She waits for me to say what I have said every other time: that she is right, that I don’t want to meet him after all.

“All right,” she says at last, when I don’t speak. “All right then.

Here’s the deal. Come with me to Kansas City, Nichola. Do exactly what I ask there. And then, I promise, I’ll tell you all about him.” I sit still for a moment, tempted, but thinking also of the dense crowds, the stink of sweat in air already thick with hate, with tension. I try to imagine a face for the father I’ve never known. I think of Sam, of the answer he’s expecting, and how afraid I am right now to tell him anything but yes. My mother waits, tapping her fi ngers against her empty cup. I wonder why she wants so much for me to go. I remember what I promised in her offi ce.

“I don’t want to do anything . . . anything terrible,” I tell her. I say this so stupidly, but my mother understands. Her face softens.

“Oh, Nichola,” she says. “Is that what this is about? I know how much you hated that business with Gary. It won’t be anything like that, I promise you.” She leans forward and puts her hand on my arm, speaking in a confidential voice. I can smell the coffee on her breath, her flowery perfume. “It’s true I need you to do something, Nichola. Something special. But it’s not a terrible thing, and anyway it’s more that I just need your support, hon. It’s going to be
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big, this protest. The very biggest yet. It would mean such a lot to me if you were there.”

It is because she asks like this that I can’t say no. I hesitate.

That is my mistake. She gives me the smile she uses for the cameras, and pushes back the chair, stands up.

“Thank you,” she says. “I prayed for this. You won’t regret it, honey.”

It’s true that for a few minutes I feel good. It’s only when she’s gone that I realize how much I have given, how little I have gained.

It’s only then that the first slow burn of my anger begins.

My mother’s bedroom is done in rose and cream. A few years ago, when she started getting paid a lot to do Christian TV talk shows, she hired a decorator to redesign the whole house with a professional look. The decorator was one of those angular women with severe tastes, and you can see her mark everywhere else—

black-and-white motifs, tubular furniture, everything modern and businesslike. It’s only my mother’s room that is different, soft, with layers of pillows and white carpet so thick it feels as though you are walking on a cloud. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I could fall right through. I wonder if this is how my mother thinks of heaven, a room like white chocolate with a strawberry nougat center.

I know where she keeps things. I have sat on her bed, amid a dozen quilted and ruffled pillows, and watched her paste newspaper photos into her private scrapbook. She trusts me, the one person in her life she says she can trust, and I would not have imagined that I’d dig into her secrets.

Still, when my mother leaves the next day, when she phones me from downtown and I know for sure she is safely away, I go into her bedroom. I know just where to look. The box is in the closet, wedged into the corner, and I pull it out from beneath my mother’s dresses. It smells of her perfume. I untie the string and lift the things out carefully, the scrapbooks and the yearbooks, the photos and the letters. I note their order. I arrange them precisely on the carpet.

At first I am so excited that I can barely concentrate. I pick up
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each letter, feeling lucky, as if the secrets inside are giving off a kind of heat. In fact, however, I find absolutely nothing, and soon enough my excitement begins to fade. Still, I keep on looking, pausing only once when the phone rings and Sam’s voice fl oats into the room on the answering machine. “Nichola,” he says.

“I’m sorry. You know you are everything to me.” I listen, holding still, feeling shaky. I told him not to call today. I listen, but I don’t pick up the phone. Once he hangs up I go back to the papers on the fl oor.

I read. I sort. I skim. Much of it is boring. I sift through a pile of checkbooks, old receipts, a stack of unsorted pictures of people I have never met. I shuffle through the letters from her fans. It’s just by chance that I see the one that matters. The handwriting is so like mine, so like my mother’s, that I stop. I turn it over twice, feeling the cool linen paper in my hands, the neat slit across the top. I slide the letter out, and money, two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, falls into my lap. I unfold the paper slowly, and then I begin to tremble as I read.

I don’t know if you got my other letters. I can only hope that
they have reached you. I don’t understand why you would do
this, run off without a word. Yes, we were upset at your news
but we are your family. We will stand by you. I am sending
money and I am begging you, Valerie, to come home. I cannot bear to think about you out there in the world with our
little grandbaby, in need of anything.

I put the letter down and fi nger the bills, old, still crisp. My mother told me that they kicked her out, that they severed ties with her forever. At least, that is what she always says, speaking to the crowd, how she begged them to forgive her and they would not. How she was cast out into the world for her sins, alone to wander. I came up here looking for my father, but I sit instead for a long time with that letter in my lap, wondering about my grandparents, who they are and where, and whether or not they have ever seen me on TV. Sam phones again. I hear the longing in his voice, the little flares of anger too, and I do not answer. In-The Story of My Life

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stead, I read that letter again, and yet again. The return address is smeared, difficult to decipher, but the postmark helps: it was sent from Seattle and dated six months after I was born. Seattle, a place that I have never been. I put the letter aside and go through everything again. I look hard, but there is nothing else from them.

I am still sitting there a long time later, studying that letter, when the fax comes through. There’s a business line downstairs, but my mother keeps this one for sensitive communications that she does not want her secretary—or Gary Peterson—to see. It has never occurred to me that she might not want me to see them either, so when it falls from the machine I’m hardly even curious.

I’m still thinking about the grandparents I always thought dis-owned us. I’m trying to figure out how I can find them. I scan the fax, which is from Kansas City. It starts out with the usual stuff, hotel reservations and demonstration times, and I’m about to toss it down when I see this line:
So glad that Nichola has seen the
light at last.

What light?

I read. The words seem to shift and change shape beneath my eyes. As with the letter, I have to read it several times before I can get the meaning straight and clear in my mind. I’m sure that in all my life I have never read so slowly, or been so scared. For in my hands I have their plans for Kansas City. The usual plans at fi rst, and then references to their bold plan too, the one that will keep them in the news. I can see at last why my mother needs so much for me to join them. Like pieces of white ice, her lies melt clear in my hands, and suddenly I see her true intentions. What did she promise me?
It’s a small thing, not terrible, not at all.
But it is terrible. Oh yes. It’s the worst thing yet.