The Secrets of a Fire King (6 page)

The Secrets of a Fire King

back when she refused to speak English, and he said nothing. He felt this complicity was the least he could offer, because he knew that sometimes still they were hurt. He could tell it from the tense, inward silences that enveloped them now and then. They didn’t offer to share the sources of this pain, and for this he was, at first, grateful. He told himself that they took after him, that they preferred to work things out for themselves, in privacy and silence. It was only later when, one by one, the children left home for large cities and contained, controlled, anonymous lives, distant lives, that he wondered at the depth of pain they might have suffered, that he wished to go back, to touch the tense shoulder, to understand.

Five years after Maria graduated from college, Rob fell from a ladder at work and hurt his back. Lying on the ground, the wind knocked from his lungs, pain like nails in his spine, he understood that his construction days were over. Once he had fi nished physical therapy, the company gave him a desk job. He sat in the windowless office, pushing papers and answering the phone, and thought about the time, forty years before, when he had worked on the radio ship, his future spread out before him like the sea.

Eventually they offered him early retirement, and he took it. He packed up his few remaining tools and removed himself from one-half of his life. As he parked his truck that final day, and carried his toolbox for the last time into the shed, he looked up to see Jade Moon standing in the kitchen window, preparing his dinner, humming. He paused for a moment in the driveway. The song was a light and haunting one, an old song from her own country.

Jade Moon’s voice wavered, and the August heat shimmered around the house. He felt an urgency then, a sudden panic, as if the house and his life within it were part of a mirage. It seemed that this time the attempt to leap from one life to another would plunge him from a terrible height. His fear was so sudden, and so great, that he actually turned to retrace his steps to town. Then a tug of pain in his back stopped him. After a few moments he grew calmer and was able to move forward, bridging the distance with a few steps, his feet on solid ground after all.

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At first the days were difficult, long and restless, and he relieved himself by focusing on projects around the house, working late into the long summer nights. Then his back went out and he was forced to lie still in bed while Jade Moon moved quietly through the house. He observed her as she stepped from one room to another, surprised by her energy, her quiet grace, the traces of youth she had carried with her into middle age. There had been moments, even as a young man just married, when Rob would look at Jade Moon and see what she would be like old. She might be doing anything—reaching to a high shelf for a can, pouring water in a vase, stirring soup. For an instant he would see it—age in her narrow calves, bony as an old woman’s, age in the careful grace of her gestures, age in the stiff curve of her fingers around a spoon. In an instant it was always gone, lost to the completion of her actions, to the resurfacing of her youthful self.

Now, alone again in the solitude of their home, he discovered an opposite phenomenon: beneath the surface of wrinkles and slow movements, Jade Moon had retained elements of her youth.

Her hair stayed dark and her shoulders were still smooth and firm. Sometimes, as she stepped from the bath in a towel, her white shoulders broken by the black water of her hair, he was moved with a sense of collapsing time. She would laugh if he went to her then.

“But I’m such an old woman,” she would say. “What do you still see in me?”

He would not answer, and she would laugh a young girl’s laugh as the towel slipped away to the fl oor.

“We are so lucky,” she said to him once. “We are able to live the happiest time of our lives over again.” Jade Moon remained slim and agile even as Rob, comfortable now in his retirement, grew a mild belly and felt stiffness settling in his joints. He expected that she would live longer than he would himself, and he took careful, secret precautions to make sure she would not lack for money. There was his life insurance policy, bought years before and now paying healthy premiums.

There were blue-chip stocks and bonds locked away in a bank vault. Sometimes he got up early in the morning and drove the
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The Secrets of a Fire King

old truck into town. He had coffee and doughnuts in the bakery with the other retired men, easy conversations that were like surfacing from beneath the water, and then he went over to the bank to count his modest investments. He liked the rich scent of metal and leather in the safe-deposit room. He liked locking himself into a tiny booth and writing down the figures. Most of all, he liked the feeling he had when he returned the box and the key and left the bank. It was the same feeling as finishing a house and knowing that it was a solid house, that it would last. No matter what, Jade Moon would never go without. He drove along the country roads feeling sad at the thought of his own demise, but nonetheless deeply content with his arrangements.

He never considered what his life would be if she were the one to die first and thus, when the first signs came that this would be the case, he was able to ignore them. If Jade Moon was pale, well, she had always been fair skinned. When he saw her stop and touch her heart, as if with pain, he thought—well, she is getting old after all, and so am I.

At last the day came when Jade Moon fainted. She was working in the vegetable garden, but the day was overcast and she was only watering with a hose. He ran to her from where he was repairing the fence, and the expression on her face—something near the pain he had witnessed there during her three labors—

compelled him to finally take her to a doctor. They drove to the same hospital, twenty miles away, where their children had been born. There was a new highway in place now, but Rob took the old road, reassured by the familiar curves and hills. Altogether, they made this trip three times over as many months, for tests.

He expected something simple and curable: high blood pressure, a heart murmur, kidney stones. On their last visit the doctor escorted them into his office to tell them, quietly and gravely, that Jade Moon had cancer, advanced and inoperable. Rob was struck with such shock that he couldn’t speak. Even after they left the hospital and were driving through the snowy white fields on the country road, he couldn’t talk. He drove slowly, glancing now and then at Jade Moon from the corner of his eyes.

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“So, I am dying,” she said finally. “I thought I was sick, and now I know.”

“You’ll get better,” he insisted, though the doctor had given them no hope. Then he turned fully toward her, surprised, for a moment, out of his fear. At the hospital he had been too stunned to translate, and yet Jade Moon had understood the terrible thing that had been said. On the far side of the truck she was looking out over the rolling white fields, and he saw a trace of a smile flicker at the edges of her mouth.

“Do you remember,” she said, “the first winter you appeared in our village? It was snowing then, too, just like now, and we were all shocked at that fur hat you wore. So tall, it looked like something out of a Russian painting. That’s what I thought. You were just as strange, and just as handsome, as a man from a painting. I really thought you were a Russian.” He tried to remember his first day in her village, but all he could bring up was a blur of staring faces darting here and there amid the snow.

“I remember some schoolgirls,” he said. “I remember a whole group of girls watching me walk in. When I got close they all began laughing and ran away. They were wearing their high shoes and running in the snow.”

“Not all of them ran,” she said. “I was among them and I stayed and watched you. Do you know I decided right at that moment I would marry you? Even as you walked into town, I was planning to learn Russian so I could speak with you.” She laughed. Rob understood that she was telling him that she did not regret anything. She had made her choice that snowy day; she had wanted him and everything that had followed was justified by that moment. He felt a thickening in his chest and pulled off the road, into an area beneath a cluster of pine trees.

He leaned over and put his arms around her. The old truck smelled of years of cigarettes and, very faintly, of kerosene. Jade Moon was small and frail beneath the bulky coats and scarves.

Her cheek was dry against his. After a moment she pulled herself carefully away. She put her left hand on his cheek.

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The Secrets of a Fire King

“Rob,” she said, startling him with perfect, lilting English.

“Please. I would like to go home.”

The disease, which had made itself known so slowly, now progressed with an astonishing speed. For Rob, ignoring his bad back and chopping cord after cord of wood to release the wild energy that overtook him at the thought of her death, it was like learning a new word. For years the eye skipped over it, but once it became known, it seemed to appear everywhere. Jade Moon’s symptoms were now so clear, so obvious, that he wondered at the time he had passed without seeing them. She lost weight, she tired easily. And then the medicine was less effective as the pain grew. Within two months she was spending her days in bed, watching TV and knitting. He had written the terrible news to the children right away, and they called home now at frequent intervals, encouraged each time by Jade Moon’s bright, chatty tone. April was in California, working as an editor for a testing company. Michael was a lawyer in Seattle. Maria was married to a landscape architect and lived in Chicago. They said they would come when it got serious, and they did not believe him when he tried to tell them that it was serious already. They were all good at denying what they would rather not see; it was how they had survived, after all. It was only Rob who saw it, how she hung up the telephone and slumped back into her pillows, eyes closed against the lapping waves of exhaustion and pain.

“You must come,” he said to them finally, one after another, and at last he convinced them. They would meet in Chicago, at Maria’s house, and fly home together. Rob nodded at the phone, and told them each to hurry.

“I’m so worried,” Jade Moon said on the morning the children were to arrive. He had told her they were coming and now her fingers moved in a fretful pattern across the sheets. The medication had made her drowsy and forgetful. “I’m worried, and I can’t remember their names.”

He smoothed her hair back from her head. “We have three children,” he told her. She knew by now that he had given them other names, legal names, but today he spoke slowly and used
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the names of their childhood, the ones that she had chosen.

“Spring. Mountain. Sea.”

“Ah,” she said, “yes.” He was relieved to see how she relaxed then, as if each name had diffused through her like a drug.

“Spring,” she repeated, and closed her eyes. “Mountain. Sea.” Her breathing deepened, and he knew she was asleep.

He stood up and went to stand in the window. A few years earlier the city had widened the road and approved a stone quarry on the opposite hill. The traffic increased; machines had cut a great gash in the side, and now the huge boulders rested randomly on the hills, white and inert, like sleeping elephants.

The noise, the tearing of the earth, had upset Jade Moon, and she had kept the curtains closed day and night against that sight.

Now he pushed them aside and, despite the thick heat in the house, the chill outside, he opened the window. The air, bright with sun and cold, rushed around his face. At the house of Jade Moon’s parents he had stood just this way on a winter afternoon, leaving the suffocating warmth of the fire for the bitter, refresh-ing air of the unheated rooms. And it was in the spring, when the air was as fresh and crisp as well water, that he went walking with Jade Moon in the hills behind her parents’ house. There was one spot they went to often, just beneath the crest of the mountain, where a shelf of rock thrust itself out over the sea.

They used to sit there, the sun-warmed rock balanced by the chill of the air, Jade Moon picking the delicate wildfl owers and looking, now and then, out across the expanse of sea to the places he would take her within a year. It was so long ago. They had left as planned, and in all the years of their marriage they had never been back.

Jade Moon stirred behind him; he wished the children would hurry.
Spring, Mountain, Sea
, he murmured, like an incantation, as if the words that had the power to soothe his wife could also hurry his children from their lives.

The image that came to him was incomplete, the way a frame merely suggests the finished house. He said their names again to help it form.
Spring, Mountain, Sea.
The four syllables were suddenly as powerful as a poem. How many times had he heard her
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The Secrets of a Fire King

speak them? Yet for him, until this moment, they had always evoked only the individual faces of his children and the weight of his double life. He had never thought of them this way, as Jade Moon must have, three small strokes of language that reconstructed their shared past. Spring, mountain, sea: he was sitting on a rocky cliff, gazing at an ocean as wide and full of promise as his future, and Jade Moon, young and lovely, was collecting fl owers at his side.

She was sleeping now. Her hair, still dark, had slipped across her face. The stubborn beauty of her gesture clutched at him, and he thought of his many betrayals through the years. He shut the window. Crossing the room, he had again the fl eeting impression of her youthfulness, but when he brushed the hair from her face he saw how tightly the skin was drawn now across her skull. He lay down next to her as he used to do on the nights before Spring was born, when she was so cold and he had talked her to sleep in his arms.

He did not know if she could hear him, or if she was past the power of words to soothe or build or comfort. Yet he spoke softly and steadily, both in his language and in hers, telling her what he had just now understood. When the children arrived that was how they found him, whispering their old, discarded names again and again—as if, by the sheer force of repetition, he could make her understand.