The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards Read Free Book Online

said, speaking to her hands. “It sounds like dogs barking. I don’t want to know this language.”
    He looked at her profile, her narrow face and generous lips, and remembered how much she hated to do things unless she ex-celled at them. Once she had ripped out an entire piece of embroidery because of a tiny flaw she had discovered in the first stitch. He put his silverware down and spoke to her sternly.
    “Jade Moon,” he said. “You must learn. This is your country now. What if there is an emergency and you need to use the telephone? What if something happened to me?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, glancing up, and he saw the worry move like clouds across her face. Then she composed herself and grew stubborn. “I will learn emergency phrases,” she said. “But that is all.”
    He felt his patience ebb. If she would not learn, then she would be dependent on him all her life.
    “You are nothing but a lazy woman,” he said. “Lazy, lazy, lazy.” He spoke the last word emphatically, aware of the great insult it would be to her, amazed, even as he spoke, at the depth of his own cruelty.
    Her face changed and grew still, closed to him. On the table the baby kicked and cooed. Jade Moon picked her up, wiped her tears away with the back of her wrist, and turned away, leaving the ruined fish in the middle of the table.
    That night Rob did not sleep well, and in the morning Jade Moon avoided him until he left for work. On his way out the door he paused, disturbed by both the silence and by some other, subtle change he couldn’t name. Then it came to him. He looked around again, from cupboard to stove to table to chair.
    All the small white cards had disappeared.
    Spring was two years old when her brother was born, and by then the argument about language, about names, had become a tender, misshapen knot in the living flesh of their marriage.

    Spring, Mountain, Sea
    29
    When Jade Moon held the new baby on her shoulder and said she would call him Mountain, the air was tense with years of accumulated arguments. Jade Moon, stubborn, talked on. She herself had traveled too much in her life, as her name foretold. She wanted her son to stay in one place, as solid and steady as a rock cliff against the sea. She would give him the name to ensure him strength. She said all this defiantly. Rob sighed, eyeing their small son. When the nurse took him off to fill in the paperwork he tapped his pencil against the wooden desk, looking out the offi ce window over the parking lot. He wrote down his father’s name, Michael James.
    Three weeks before their last child was born, just a year later, Jade Moon announced that if it was a girl, she would name the child Sea.
    “Why Sea?” Rob asked, looking up from his newspaper. The two older children were asleep, and Jade Moon sat at the desk, slight even in this last month of her pregnancy, writing a letter to her parents. The translucent paper rustled softly beneath her pen. Though he spoke fluently, Rob had never read her language well, and the characters seemed both ominous and full of mystery. Was that how it felt to Jade Moon, he wondered, walking in the town or buying groceries? He tried sometimes to imagine how his language, divorced from meaning, might sound. Was it melodious, like French or Spanish? Was it the harsh singing of Chinese? Did it really resemble the sound of barking dogs?
    Sometimes he tried to listen to only the sounds of English, but for him sound was meaning, impossible to separate.
    “Sea,” she said, “for two reasons. First, because it is a sea that both separates and connects my family and myself. And second, because I am Jade Moon, and the moon controls the movement of the sea. I do not want my daughter to travel as far as I have in this life. Besides,” she added, “it is a beautiful name, both in your language and in mine.”
    “When they go to school,” he argued, “they’ll need American names. Why not call her Maria? It’s from Latin. It’s an