The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (29 page)

“So,” he said. “Now you know what real beauty is.”

She nodded. Rachel knew. She couldn’t stop looking at herself and the face she had lived behind without even knowing what it was. The curse her sister had laid on her was lifted in that instant, but the curse was replaced by a mystery. By more than one mystery—by many, too many to count. And as the mysteries filled her up the blood drained from her face, and her face turned the pallor of death. Her perfect beauty was still there, but all that was lovely about it, and sweet, and hopeful—and whatever scrap of love she had for Markus, or for the world—melted away.

She couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. When she spoke it was as if she were talking to herself.

“Not having to see myself—my face—was my only blessing in this life. Helen told me that. She said,
As hard as it is to be blind, if you had to see yourself every day, to know the face you really wore: that would be worse
. But it’s not—I’m not—like that.” She looked at Markus, bewildered as a child. “She said I was so ugly my face frightened people. Why would Helen say that if it wasn’t true?”

“I don’t know,” he said, knowing full well why. “I don’t know.”

She nodded. Then she dropped the mirror to the ground and crushed it beneath her shoe. Rachel remembered what Mrs. Samuels said, the day she was leaving Roam:
She tells you lies and you believe her because you don’t know any better, because she’s never let you know any better. She’s never let another soul near you. You
couldn’t
know. But now you can, now you can.

Now I can.

“And you,” she said coolly. “Why didn’t you tell me? When you knew who I thought I was, all this time. You waited an entire year.”

“I told you,” he said. “I told you the day we met, but you didn’t believe me. I tried, Rachel.”

“You should have tried harder.”

“Yes, yes . . . But, Rachel,” he said, desperately. “It doesn’t matter now. I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I think you love me. I saved your life.”

And now she touched him, touched him the way he always dreamed she would. The tips of her fingers traced his cheeks, his nose, his chin. He closed his eyes so she could touch them as well and felt her fingers touch the deepest part of him. She pulled him closer, his mouth so close to hers he breathed her breath, and closer still, until the dream he had nurtured every day since he met her became too real to believe: she kissed him, a kiss so light and brief it almost may not have happened at all. But it did happen. His whole body felt it.

“Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered in his ear.

Then she slapped him with all the strength she had, and he fell back, stunned, holding his face in his hands. It was as hard as he had ever been hit in his entire life, as hard as he ever would be.

“What else haven’t you told me?” she said. She took a hard step toward him, and he flinched. “What else?”

He shook his head from side to side without conviction. He was a liar. He had become the man he never thought he could be. His desperate need to love her had made him so. A secret doesn’t feel wrong until it’s discovered, and he felt it, every dark scrap of shame. One last glance from her, knife-sharp, and she pushed past him, knocking his shoulder to one side with the power of a man. He stumbled, but it was his grief that made him fall to his knees.

“Rachel,” he called after her. “Stop, please!” But it was pointless: she wasn’t listening to him anymore. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?” she answered. “To see Ming Kai.”

M
ing Kai’s hut was at the top of a rocky incline, just before the Valley ended and the next world, whatever it was, began. Beyond that lip of land was the mystery so many of the Valley people had journeyed into. Ming Kai’s hut was propitiously situated to encounter the least amount of runoff during the heavy rains (the hut at the bottom suffered most; its inhabitant, Jerrod, the slow boy, lived ankle deep in mud, not that he seemed to mind much), but its distance from the rest of his dwindling tribe also insured a privacy no one else could claim.

Rachel hadn’t known where Ming Kai was until she got her sight back. She knew where everything else was in the Valley because she’d been taken everywhere else, and she’d taken it all in. She’d mapped out the Valley the same way she’d mapped out Roam, step by step. Ming Kai’s hut was in a blank spot in the topography of her mind. She knew now, though. No one stopped her, and no one followed her but the dogs; even Markus hung back. He had known how this was going to play out. Maybe it was for the best; maybe she would understand why he had done what he’d done . . . though he doubted it. Because Ming Kai wouldn’t lie to her; he didn’t know how.

N
o one had ever known a man so old, or even
believed
that any man could live to be so old, as Ming Kai. They had stopped counting the years years ago. His body was shriveled, shrunken by age, the skin so tight around his bones she could see every one of them, a skeleton covered by a thin leathery sheaf. She could see his heart beat; she could see his heart. There were two old women on their knees on either side of his bamboo cot spooning water on him—his head, his chest, his arms, his stomach, his thighs, the thin and fragile remnants of what used to be a man. They were humming to themselves. He breathed four or five times a minute; all he had to do was skip one breath and his eyes would close forever.

He was sleeping when Rachel pushed through the skein of weathered silk that served as his makeshift door.

“Ming Kai,” she said.

The old women glared at her and shooed her away. “Sleeping,” one said. But Rachel paid no attention and pushed past them until she stood over him. “Ming Kai!” When he didn’t stir she shook him by the shoulder until his eyelids creaked open.

“Ah,” he said as his eyes fluttered open to see her. He even smiled. “Rachel McCallister. Pretty Rachel McCallister.”

“You know me?” she asked.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, yes. Markus tells me everything. I knew your great-grandfather, too. I knew Roam before it was Roam. I know almost everything. Live long enough and so will you.”

“Then tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but as he did his eyes closed, and he fell back asleep.

“Ming Kai!”

“At your service.” It was less than a whisper: the words almost died before they found the air. “So, what is it you want to know?”

“Listen to me.”

“I am listening.”

“When I was younger, when I was blind, my sister told me things. That Roam has a Boneyard where the dead were thrown, and a tree where they were hanged, and a house where a door opens and blood flows into the streets, and in the forest all around it are flesh-eating birds that will kill you in seconds and eat you before your shadow disappears.”

He listened, his smile fading. He stared, his eyes as sharp and clear as any man’s.

Rachel was desperate. She needed her past; as wretched as it was, without it she had nothing. But somehow she knew it was not to be. She knew, and still she said, “Tell me. Tell me that’s what Roam is.”

“If it is,” Ming Kai said, “why would you ever want to go back?”

“Because my sister is there,” she said.

“I see,” he said. “But no: it is not so. It sounds like something out of a book, this Roam. A fairy tale meant to scare children.” He breathed again, with some difficulty. “No, this is not Roam. Roam was just . . . a simple town. A small town, where people lived and worked. But beautiful. There were streets, and on some of them were shops, on others . . . small houses where people raised families. There were cats and dogs—not like these dogs, your dogs, but sweet dogs who slept by your feet on a cold winter’s night. It was . . . our home. And together its people made the softest most wonderful thing there is in the world. Together.” He took as long and deep a breath as he could. “But there is nothing so beautiful it can’t be ruined by man. And Elijah McCallister ruined everything, including my life.”

“Mine, too,” she said.

“Yes,” Ming Kai said. “Yours, too.”

Markus was behind her now, edging into the small hut. She stood and turned to him. Even the fire in her eyes was cold. “You were right, Markus: the world is different than I thought.”

“Rachel—”

She held up her hand.

“Don’t speak to me. If I never hear your voice again it will be too soon.”

How still the world became as the truth coursed through her. Everything she knew was wrong—everything. But she didn’t know what to do with the truth; all it could do was destroy her. She shuddered, and for the first time in a long, long time, she looked like the girl he had found behind a motel in the woods, blind, nearly dead, and missing one shoe. But not for long. Slowly, she began to walk away.

“Where are you going?” Ming Kai asked her.

She stopped, and without looking back at him said, “I’m going home. To see my sister. To thank her for everything she did for me—to make things right.”

“Rachel,” Markus said. “No.”

Ming Kai looked on, too, as the old Chinese ladies continued coating him with water. The old Chinese ladies didn’t look at Rachel anymore; somehow they were able to pretend none of this was happening. They continued spooning water onto his head, his chest, his stomach, his legs. He wished he could tell them to stop, but he couldn’t: even though he had led them here, to this dark valley, he was their leader, and they would have been even worse off without him. As long as he was alive, there was a chance that next time he might get it right.
The next time he leads us somewhere
, his people thought,
maybe he’ll lead us someplace good. As long as he’s alive, anything can happen.
He could never tell them the truth—that he was done with leading, done having ideas, done with it all.

And he had always blamed Elijah, for Roam, the Valley: everything. But now, as he came face-to-face with her, he knew it wasn’t Elijah alone who made Rachel into the woman she was: Ming Kai had a part in it as well. It was at the very beginning of their journey into America. He remembered how after many days of riding horses through the forbidding wilderness, Elijah had made the trade he had no doubt planned on making from the very beginning—he would bring Ming Kai’s family here if Ming Kai would just tell him one simple thing: the name of a tree. And Ming Kai told him. But then Ming Kai said to Elijah McCallister,
No good will come from what we do. No flower grows in a poisoned field. We may not see it now, but our children will, and our children’s children. They will be the ones who finally suffer.
How many years had passed since then? How many lifetimes had come and gone? He had meant it when he said it, but he never thought it would actually happen—that his curse would land on this girl, and her sister. Ming Kai was just a man, after all, and they were just words, words like
silk, worm, mulberry tree, wife, family, love, friend.

Home.

“Yes,” he said. Now he knew how this would have to end. “Home.”
A small town, but beautiful, where they made the softest thing in the world.
“You must go home.”

“Ming Kai!” Markus yelled at him. “What are you saying?”

Ming Kai’s voice was weak. Rachel looked down at him as if she heard the sounds he made but not the sense. He held her in his gaze. He was so old, he
did
look like he knew everything there was to know. He looked wise. Only he knew that being old taught you only one thing: that being young is better.

“She must go home,” he said again. “There is no other way.”

Rachel nodded, and took a quick step away, as if to leave this very moment.

“But wait,” Ming Kai said. She stopped and looked back at the old man who, for the first time in thirty years, actually had something to live for. “I will go with you. We will all go with you,” he said. “We will all of us go back to the place where we belong. Everybody.”

“Why would I want you with me?”

“I know the best way there,” he said. “I remember.”

“I can find my own way,” she said.

“And your sister,” he said. “I will take you to her.”

“You don’t know where she is,” she said. “How could you?”

“Not where she is,” he said, cryptically. “But where she will be. I will show you—but only if everybody goes.”

She studied him for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Everybody.” Then she turned to Markus, her voice as sharp as a knife to his throat. “Everybody but you, Markus.”

“Me? But Rachel, please. I—”

“I don’t want you near me. Not after what you’ve done.”

“Rachel, please—”

“You stay here. See what it’s like to have nothing, nobody.”

“You can’t make me stay here, Rachel.”

Behind them, one of her dogs began to growl.

“Rachel,” he said. “I’m sorry. I only did what I thought was right. Because I love you. Don’t leave me. Please. Let me come with you.”

There was nothing in her eyes now—nothing. “It must be hard to take someone’s life away, day after day after day. The way you did mine. The way she did mine. Even I know that’s not love, Markus. No: that’s just evil, pure and simple.”

She turned and walked away, and disappeared into the falling darkness. Markus looked to Ming Kai for help, for direction, but Ming Kai’s eyes were closed. Markus would never see them open again.

T
he next morning, everybody—every man, every woman, all the children and dogs, and of course Ming Kai, carried on his cot by his two attendants—began their trek up and out of the Valley. Rachel was at the front: she could find Roam all by herself, she could taste it in the air. Bringing up the rear was Liling. She could not forgive Markus. She waved good-bye to him as they set off, and he waved back. He was a good man in his heart, but what could she do for him now? She took one long look and followed the others over the rocks and up the hill. When she came to the top of the ridge and was about to take her first step into the other world, she couldn’t help it: she turned to see him one last time.

But he was gone.