The Fire Artist (25 page)

My chest closes in on itself. They’re the most comforting words a man has ever spoken to me.

“Me too,” I whisper.

“I’ll have to call your father now and inform him. Rules, you know.”

“Of course.”

The call ends, and I lie on the couch in the living room to wait. My father is probably in his car, driving home from his fishing trip, answering a call from Imran on his cell phone. Soon, my dad will barrel through the door, and I have no game plan. I have no strategy. I glance at my mother. She is freshly made up this morning. She wears mascara. I haven’t seen her wearing mascara in years. Jana ran her a bath earlier. Then I sent Jana to Mindy’s house.

“You look pretty,” my mom says to me as we wait. I look down at my clothes. Shorts, boots, black T-shirt, hair pulled back in a ponytail. I wish I had a sash of bullets to string across my chest, and a gun in a holster on my hip. I can’t help but feel I need something to face my father, to face this reckoning. The irony is, I have two perfectly good weapons in my hands, but I won’t use them.

“So do you,” I tell her, though I wonder if she brushed on eyeshadow and blush for his return from a trip, the good wife welcoming the warrior home, or if she freshened up for herself. I want to make sure her fighting words were real, that she’s not going to cave when she sees him, as she always has. I crouch down next to her, take her hands in mine. “What happens when
he gets home, Mom? What are we going to do when he freaks out about the Leagues and me?”

“I’m going to tell him to leave,” she says crisply. “I’m going to tell him that I never want to see him again. That I never want to be his wife again. That would erase the wish, wouldn’t it?
I wish for my wife to never leave me
,” she says, bitterly reciting the words that chained her. “If I’m not his wife …” She trails off.

A rush of hope fills me. She’s right. Like the Lady said, like Taj said, the wording matters. The wish would no longer hold if she’s no longer his wife. I squeeze her hand.

“Let’s hope so,” I say. But as far as I can see, all bets are off when it comes to gaming a wish.

The minutes tick, and my ears are trained on my father’s sounds. Even after being away for two months, I can pick up the rumble of the engine of his Pontiac the second he turns onto our street several houses away. The car trundles down the road, the engine sputtering. I can hear him well before he slides his car into the driveway and kills the engine. Then the sound of his sandals slapping the concrete floor of the garage, the creak of the doorknob, the heave of his disappointed sigh.

He walks in through the front door and sees me on the couch. His face is sunburned and covered in stubble from being out at sea for so many days. I stand up, and he shoots me a glare. His lips are tight, closed. His eyes narrowed. I wonder if this is how his father looked when he was angry. How his father stared at him before he hit him. Before he taught him how to be a man.

But I don’t entirely care
why
my dad is the way he is. There are things we can control and things we can’t control. He had a choice. He made the wrong choices.

“Catch anything good?” I’m shocked that I’ve made the first move, breathed the first words.

“Marlin. This big.” He holds his hands out wide.

“Where is it?”

“I’ll pick it up later,” he answers in the most disinterested voice. “It’s being cut.”

“Cool. I bet it’ll taste great. Maybe grill it.”

He tilts his head and stares at me, like he’s trying to figure out how I could have this casual conversation with him.

Then he nods several times. “Grilled marlin. Sounds good. You like grilled marlin, dear?”

The question is for my mother. She looks at him sharply. “No. I don’t.”

I want to pump my fist in the air. Small victory for her, but still, it’s a victory.

He ambles into the kitchen, opens the fridge, roots around. “I
wish
there was a beer here,” he says. Then he slams the fridge door and looks at me. “I
wish
there was a burger. I
wish
there was ketchup.”

His words are biting, but his lip is quivering, and he’s going for an old standard. The wounded old dad. “I coached you, Aria. I went to every show. I helped you; we made fire together.” There’s a hitch in his throat. The crying act. The tears that reassure his black heart that the way he treats me is okay when it’s not okay.

“We never made anything,” I spit back as I cross my arms. “And who are you to talk about wishes?”

He raises an eyebrow, casts a curious look, like he can’t possibly know what I mean. I can tell he’s ready to play the confused part. But the next words don’t come from him or from me. They come from my mom. She’s stood up, and she’s making her way over to us, wobbly and precarious as she goes.

But determined.

She makes it to the kitchen and points a finger at her husband. “I loved you, Felix. I would have stayed with you forever. You didn’t have to wish for it. You didn’t have to wish for this.” She gestures to her own deflated body, then to her chair.

“You’re not making any sense, sweetheart,” he says to her, and reaches for her, trying to wrap her in a hug.

She holds off his embrace. “And I’ll tell you another thing. Don’t you ever put your hands on
my
daughters again.”

Fierce and angry, she points a righteous finger at him. Then she takes another step toward him, stumbles, and topples to the floor. I bend down to help her. So does he. We are face-to-face. I reach for her elbow, but he slaps my arm away. “Don’t touch her,” he shouts. The facade is gone, the mask fallen.

“Don’t
you
touch her.”

We stare at each other, locked in crosshairs, a face-off finally.

“I mean it,” he seethes, and I remember what he’s capable of. I remember what’s at stake. But then I remember I’m not keeping his secret anymore. The secret has been shared. He has no more power over me.

“No, I mean it. I mean it this time. Don’t touch me, and don’t touch Jana. Because now Mom knows what you did to me, and Imran knows what you did to me, and if you touch
Jana, I’ll call the authorities. I’ll make sure everyone knows what you did to me and to her,” I say. I don’t bother adding that I’ll be in some no-man’s-land in a few days. I don’t bother because I’ll tell everyone what he did before I’m taken away. I’ll tell everyone to keep him away from my sister. I can’t save myself, but I can save her. I can save her with words. I never understood that until now. I never
got
it until now. No one ever wanted to help me. There was never anyone to turn to, no one to tell. So I did what I had to do. I shut my mouth. Now I don’t have to be quiet any longer.

He doesn’t care though. “Where’s your sister? I need to help her. Seeing as she’s our only hope. You might as well go join your brother. The two of you belong together.” He grabs my chin, and pulls on it, yanking. “You’re useless now.”

Useless
.

I am useless now.

I clench my jaw. I can feel my broken and un-whole heart heating me to record temperatures. My anger stokes the fire, oxygen feeding a ravaging beast, and I’m about to set my own father on fire once and for all.

Instead I use a different weapon. The one I earned. The one I trained. My body.

I don’t turn on the burners. I don’t light the torches. I take the thing that is still mine—my charred hands—and I grab his throat.

I hold him tight around his flesh, digging the pads of my thumbs deep into the hollow of his throat, hunting for his trachea. He coughs and sputters and spits out my name. “Stop, Aria,” he chokes out.

My fingers have found purchase in the back of his neck,
and I will never let up, I will never let go until there’s no more air inside him. I am so strong, my hands are so powerful, I have muscles all over my body, and especially underneath the scarred and ugly skin of my hands. My fingers are steel, my wrists are iron, my forearms are merciless beasts that hold my father in place. I may have stolen every last ounce of fire inside me, but I worked for every inch of my strength.

I can do this. I can hold tight until he turns blue. Until he rasps out his last strangled word. I am capable.

Yet … I feel my fingers loosening.

Because I’m not him.

I can’t do this.

I can’t kill my father.

I stop, dropping my hands to my sides, my chest heaving from the exertion, from the shock of what I almost did. What I can’t ever do. I will not be like him.

My father slumps to the floor, gasping for breath but fully alive.

I stare at my hands as if they’re strange foreign objects, these tools that could have killed him. Now they dangle at my sides as the color returns to Dad’s face. He starts to rise and I have no idea what happens next.

Then there’s a loud ripping sound. I turn to the screen door.

The snow gator is here and he’s lumbering into our house. He looks at me, those big brown eyes as sweet as they were when he let me pet his head. As he turns his long reptilian snout away from me, I understand what happened yesterday on the porch. I understand what the Lady meant.
He’ll take care of you when you need him to
.

He spies my father and snaps his massive jaw.

My father does what any Floridian should do. He backs away from the beast. But those fat little gator legs are furiously fast, and the snow gator knows what he wants. He wants a meal, he wants a former fire-eater. My father scurries down the hall to the bedroom, no thought to my mother, no thought to me, and tries to slam his door. But there’s no time; the snow gator barges into the bedroom, his snout already pushing the door open. I follow, pressing my back against the hallway wall, and I watch as my father jumps onto his bed. The gator follows, tearing the sheets and covers as he goes. My father jumps off and grabs for the sliding glass door to our backyard, trying to unlock it quickly, terror in his eyes. The same terror I saw in Jana’s yesterday when she told the Lady what was happening to her hands.

The snow gator opens his snout as far as it can go and grasps my father’s leg, pulling the foot, then the calf into his mouth. There’s a sound of twigs snapping, and I cover my face with my hands.

I can’t watch. I close my eyes. I hear a crunch, then one final shriek. There’s a muffled noise, then silence.

Soon I peer through my fingers from the hallway, dumbfounded, at the armored animal in my father’s bedroom who has just swallowed a man whole. The snow gator’s belly is distended, like a snake that’s just consumed a rat.

I don’t make a move. I remain very still. The snow gator stays in place, wriggles a bit, then huffs out hard, and I’m horrified that the snow gator might expel my father, regurgitate him on the newly carpeted floor of the bedroom, leaving me to either put my father back together or clean up the mess.

Neither option appeals.

So I wait.

The snow gator exhales, then shifts one more time, as if he’s loosened a belt buckle after Thanksgiving dinner and is now satisfied. He’s accommodated his new inhabitant. He waddles a few inches to the sliding door, pawing at it with his big claws, looking longingly at the canal that’s not far away. I know what I have to do. I have to give the snow gator a safe escape, just as he gave my sister one.

He is one hell of a cleanup crew, and I will find a way to take care of him whenever the Lady needs me to. I step gingerly into the bedroom, walking carefully by the creature that just ate my father, and I open the sliding glass door for him. The gator glances at me, his eyes soft again.

I lean over to pet his snout. “Thank you.”

I stand and he leaves, two hundred pounds heavier than when he entered our house, plodding slowly across the grass of the backyard, slogging his way to the canal, then back to the Everglades, back to the Lady.

It never once occurred to me that he might hurt me too. He would have considered it rude.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve envisioned my father’s end countless times. I’ve also pictured my reaction. I always assumed I’d be shocked or terrified or knocked into a near-catatonic state, staring at my own hands, staggered that I’d actually done it, amazed that I’d acted on every base desire I’d ever had to incinerate him.

His ashes on my hands, his soot in my throat.

Never have I thought I’d be happy. Never have I contemplated that elation would overcome me after my father’s death.

But elation is what I’m feeling because I’m looking at my mother. The same swirling tendrils of smoke and sweet mist that emanated from Taj’s hands two nights ago are now cocooning my mother, lifting her up from her chair, swirling her in slow circles inches above the ground. Her eyes are huge, round orbs mystified by the undoing.

The wish no longer has any hold on her. The bonds of it are broken. It simply no longer applies—because only one of them is living—and so it must unravel.

I walk carefully down the hall, at a tiptoe pace, afraid to disturb but anxious to see. Hope fills me up, a breathless wonder at something I’ve wanted to see for so long. As the smoke spirals her, her body begins to transform. Her flaccid legs are being sculpted again. Her slack, shapeless parts are redrawn by the mist, traced anew as she’s returned to the way she was so many years before, the way I remember her when I was younger, when she was chiseled and firm.