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

When they got older, he looked over their homework for mistakes. They were all bright, and their intelligence helped them overcome the thoughtless cruelty of other children. In the end they caught up and even surpassed their friends. April was editor of the newspaper in her senior year. Michael played the clarinet and drew intricate pictures that won awards. Maria ran for class treasurer, and won. They survived the hard years; they grew up. Like him, they had their secret lives outside the house, their lives of the telephone, of prom parties and clubs. He saw them roll their eyes behind Jade Moon’s 32
    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.

    Spring, Mountain, Sea
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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