The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  Nothing had changed since he left the Valley ten days ago, though Markus felt like he’d been gone for a long, long time. He wasn’t surprised: nothing ever happened here, nothing but the slow and steady exodus of one man after another. Some took their families with them, others left them behind and took their chances on their own, but it was a certainty: one day everyone would be gone, one way or another, and then the moss would grow and the rain would wash everything away, even history. Maybe the boat would be here for a while, and some lost traveler a long time from now would come upon it and wonder whether the oceans had once come this far in. Balanced on logs on a flat stone outcropping, the boat dominated the dim valley like an abandoned temple. And even after five days it was mossing up, the deck covered in leaves and branches, vines hanging off the bow.

  Now the Valley was still as Rachel and Markus walked down the rocky slope and arrived in the middle of nowhere. Rachel did whatever she did to understand where she was. She tilted her head back, then to one side; she sniffed, she listened, she sensed. Markus was watching a blind girl see. Like him, she was waiting. Then, slowly, as if finally deciding it was safe, his people came out of their huts and lean-tos, stepped out from behind wherever they were hiding, and the old people, the moss-scrapers, whose backs were hunched and rounded from bending over all day—including his mother, Liling—they rose and joined the circle of people who had come to see the new human being Markus had brought with him back to the Valley. When had this happened—ever? It had never happened. And so everyone (all fifty-three of them) came out to view this phenomenon. Markus and Rachel were completely surrounded, and Rachel could feel it, holding tight to Markus’s arm, whispering: “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he said, though he could only imagine what this must have felt like to her. He wished he could show her, make her see: they were only people. People like her, like him, only . . . different.

  Night fell fast, edging through the Valley like a fog. Rachel needed a safe place to sleep. Not that anyone in the Valley would hurt her, but some of them were curious—overly so.

  He decided to put her on the boat.

  He walked her to the deck, and then into the small room Markus called the cabin; there was space for some bedding in it and not much else. His head bumped against the ceiling, though she slipped in just fine. He watched her try to understand where she was.

  “It’s a boat,” he said. “The cabin of a boat.”

  “A boat? But—”

  “Long story,” he said. He thought about how much of his life he left within these planks, how ridiculous it was, and how ridiculous he was to have ever started building it. But maybe this is what it was meant for all along. “There’s a bed for you, and a roof if it rains, which it does quite a bit.”

  She fell asleep before he was even able to go. He watched her breathe, her chest rising and falling in soft, shallow breaths, like a sheet lifted by the wind. He covered her in silk and took the liberty of brushing the hair from her face—brushing it perhaps more than it needed to be brushed—back off her forehead. But that was all.

  She stayed in the boat for two days, eating, cleaning herself up, getting her strength back. She listened to the Valley from the prow. She had never been away from her sister before. Three or four of the dogs settled in on the ground beneath the hull. Markus brought her food and sat with her while they talked about what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to learn about everything: to be in the world no differently than anybody else, to see without seeing. To be able to take care of herself, without the help of anyone. These were not his goals for her—his goal was to keep her as close to him as possible, so that one day she would see that she could in fact do anything, be anyone she wanted to be . . . as long as he was beside her.

  On the third day, Rachel and Markus descended the stairway and joined the Valley people in the one small flat clearing there was, a field where some food was grown (a little corn, squash, tomatoes) and where goods were exchanged, and where the moss-scrapers gathered with their old knives, scraping moss off of whatever they were asked to: chairs, clothes, the family silver brought from Roam.

  Markus cleared his throat. “Everybody,” he said. “Everybody? This is—”

  Rachel pulled on his coat sleeve. “I can do this,” she whispered.

  She smiled tentatively and looked around; she almost seemed to see everyone. “My name is Rachel McCallister,” she said. “I come from a place called Roam. It’s not far from here, but . . . far enough, I suppose. Markus saved my life, I—I’m indebted. I hope to learn whatever it is you have to teach me.”

  One of the old combos gently touched Rachel on her arm, took her hand, and said, “We have corn. I’ll show you.” And Rachel went with her, casting not even a blind glance back at Markus, who watched her go, suddenly, inexplicably bereft.

  His replacement mother, Liling, the old moss-scraper, saw what was happening. She was pure Chinese, though she had never seen China. But the way she walked, her slow, tiny strides, the old threadbare kimonolike wrap she wore day and night—even her pidgin English—made her seem authentic, directly from the mainland.

  “Why you bring her here?” she asked him.

  He ignored her: he was watching Rachel, who was on her knees, in the garden, digging into the soil with her fingers. How could she do that and still be so beautiful? Liling didn’t go away. “I told you. She was lost in the woods. She was almost dead.”

  His mother stared at him until, defeated, he looked away. Liling looked at the moss beneath her nails, the scabs across the side of her hand.

  “No good will come of this,” she said.

  Markus didn’t answer. What could he say? Maybe she was right, maybe not: he was willing to take any chance, every chance, for the good.

  “Ah,” she said. “I see.”

  “See what?”

  “You want her to be wife!” She shook her head. “All because she pretty.”

  “Not that. Not just that.”

  “So, if she not so pretty you bring her here and make her wife?”

  Markus decided it was best not to say anything further to his replacement mother. She would only twist his words to make them fit into the story she was telling herself.

  “About her, this is what we say,” she said, tossing a handful of moss over her shoulder. “We say, ‘She like a seashell washed up on shore. Pretty on outside, but inside—empty.’ ”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But how do you know what’s inside if you never look?”

  Liling scoffed. “You think she will want this? If she knew where she really was?”

  “She’s blind, Mother.”

  “Yes, but for how long?” She glared at him, and then looked away, toward the cave. “If you love her, you know what to do.”

  Markus knew what she meant. But is that what love was, really? Was it something floating around out there, like a cloud, something everyone could see and agree on? Rachel would have died without him, facedown as she was on the forest floor, blind: didn’t that mean something?

  But that’s not how it worked, and he knew it. And he wasn’t built like that. It was only a matter of time before he would do the right thing.

  “Maybe we’ll go away together,” he said. “Maybe to Arcadia. Maybe somewhere else.”

  He surprised himself. He had no idea he had planned this far ahead.

  She shook her head. She was old; she knew better. “You lie to her, you lie to me, you lie to yourself. Blind girl blind you.”

  And she went back to her moss.

  The rest of the Valley welcomed Rachel, and not a week had passed before she became a part of life there, such as it was. No one cared that she was beautiful; no one cared that she was blind. Her beauty and her blindness were the same to them: differences, distinguishing characteristics. They put her to work in the morning—stacking stones for walls, gathering wood, patching up the lean-tos, digging rainwater ditches—and at night she sat beside the fire, where the old ones remembered t
he past, and told stories about it, because they knew the past was all they’d ever have. Rachel didn’t say very much, but Markus could see her listening, taking everything in, as if she were more than a visitor to just the Valley: she was a visitor to the world. She was learning how to be a human with other humans. He could almost hear her mind thrumming, like a bird trying to get out. Then, as the fire died down, he’d take her back to the boat and say good night and she’d disappear inside the cabin until the next morning, when he would be there, waiting for her again. He was never far. “Maybe you shouldn’t work so hard,” he said to her one day when she was working so hard. And she said, “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what to do.” But with a smile.

  She bathed in rainwater and dried herself with silk. The women made her dresses; they braided her hair. When he heard her laugh for the very first time, he knew he would never live long enough to hear that sound too much.

  Weeks passed like this, then months, and Markus only fell deeper in love with her. How could he not? The more he saw, the more he loved. There was nothing she could do he didn’t love. The gentle way she held a river rock in the palm of her hand; the way her lips curled when she smiled; how every word she said was considered so thoughtfully before she spoke it, and how it was spoken, softly, beautifully, as if no word were more important than the one passing her lips: each deserved the unreserved attention of her tongue.

  Her tongue. All her parts. Thoughts of her filled him up, constantly. Even her hair possessed him. He dreamed of it. He dreamed of climbing through it, naked, getting lost in it; of crawling inside her body through her mouth. He dreamed of what it would be like to kiss her. He could feel it in his heart, his blood; his hands trembled. And once he thought of kissing her, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. His lips were pressed to hers in his mind forever. She exhausted him with her kisses. They had no time to eat, and barely had time to breathe. If it ever actually happened—if in real life she actually did kiss him—he thought he would probably die.

  All day long, day in and day out, he was close enough to touch her shoulder, or hold her slender wrist, but he never told her how he felt, and he was sure she didn’t know. But he wrote her a love letter. The same one over and over and over again.

  Rachel,

  I love you.

  Markus

  He kept twenty or thirty in his back pocket, and when he was with her he’d press one into the palm of her hand.

  “What’s this?” she’d ask.

  And he’d say, “Nothing.”

  “It’s always nothing,” she’d say, and smile.

  “Keep it with the others, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case it becomes something.”

  It was their own joke, that single thing they shared that no one else would know or understand, like people did when they were in love, even if one of them didn’t know it yet.

  But she was happy. Look at her. That is something everybody knew.

  He tried to avoid Liling, but there weren’t that many places to go in the Valley, so he often found himself in her company. And here they were again today, together, Rachel out collecting firewood with one of the old men.

  “She is so happy,” Liling said.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “I think for a girl who cannot see, she is very happy.”

  “Please. Stop.”

  “Stop? Stop what? I only say I think for a girl who cannot see, for blind girl, she is very happy.”

  “I know what you’re saying.”

  Liling was a foot shorter than he was, but it never felt that way, even when she was looking up at him, the way she was now. “What, Markus?”

  “You know,” he said.

  “Then why you not hear me?”

  He looked around, made sure no one was listening. “And what makes you think it will be so much better then? She’s happy. You said so yourself.”

  “This not about her being happy. It is about you being happy. Is all about you.”

  “No. It’s about you. You don’t like her because I like her. Because I love her. You don’t want me to love anyone but you.”

  “I raised you wrong,” she said. “Why can you not do right thing?”

  “She thinks the world is . . . different than it is. She believes things. If she knew how things really were I think she might . . . I think she might change. I saved her life.”

  “No prize for picking beautiful girl up in woods. It’s for after; that’s what you get prize for. For doing hard things. But you don’t even take her to Ming Kai!”

  “He’s sick.”

  She slapped him. She had never done that before, but it seemed to come quite easily. “You lie to me again, I hit you again. In case you don’t know when you do it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Ming Kai show her things you don’t want her to see. You only want her to see you.”

  He shook his head, but when he saw her raise her hand he nodded. Everything she said was true.

  “You tell her about river,” Liling said. “So she decide on her own.”

  “I’ll tell her,” he said. “Soon.”

  She studied him, gauging his heart. “Yes,” she said. “I believe it. Soon, she will know.”

  The problem now was getting Rachel alone. She did so many things, and everyone loved her so much, Markus didn’t have the chance to talk to her the way Liling wanted him to, the way he knew he should. But as the weeks passed he felt his replacement mother watching him, waiting for him to do the right thing. Finally he saw his chance: Rachel was washing her hands in a water bucket. She had been sweeping leaves all morning, and the leaves had continued to fall, and she had continued sweeping them . . . but now she stopped, and Markus approached her.

  “Markus,” she said, without turning.

  “How do you know when it’s me?”

  “Your footsteps are apologetic.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She turned, smiling, wiping her hands on her long, black skirt. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “Everybody else here just does what they want to do and doesn’t think twice about it. But you’re never sure.”

  “And you can hear that—”

  “In your feet.”

  “Oh.”

  He asked her to go for a walk, and she said yes, and for the first minute of it he listened to his feet. He couldn’t tell the difference between the sound of his footsteps and anybody else’s. The sun broke through a sheet of gray, and a sunbeam landed on her face, then faded as the clouds smothered the light. They kept walking, farther from the others but not far enough, in a sweet silence.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “I mean look at me: I’m walking. No one is telling me where to go. No one is holding my hand or guiding me. Not even . . . my sister.”

  “That is good,” he said.

  She nodded. “I can gather firewood and plant a garden. I can clear a trail. I know everything about the Valley, Markus, where every tree is, every rock. In my mind there’s a map, and I can walk it, going anywhere I want to, without anyone to help me.”

  She stopped and curled one arm around his neck and the other around his back and hugged him, pressing his body so close he could feel her ribs, the top of her hips. She had never done this before. He didn’t know how long he could endure it.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You did it.”

  Her face was so close to his he could feel the air move when she breathed. He breathed, and when he did he breathed in the air that had just left her, and in the same way she took in his. He was staring into the eyes of a blind girl, and she was staring back at him.

  “Helen is going to be happy,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “When I go back to Roam she’ll see that I’m alive, and that will make her happy enough. But then she’ll see that I’m alive in a different way. She won’t have to take care of me any
more. We can just love each other, as sisters, and friends.”

  “Helen?” he said, bewildered. “But I thought you were happy here.”

  “I was always hoping to go back to Roam, Markus,” she said. “You know that. The Valley is—was—practice. I think I’ve practiced enough, don’t you?”

  He couldn’t look at her any longer. He stared at the forest floor, at the impression of her footprint in the dirt. “I understand.”

  She must have heard the forlorn and bitter sadness in his voice, and touched him lightly on the arm. “You’ll go back with me,” she said. “I want you to see Roam, meet Helen. I need to go, Markus.”

  “I won’t try to stop you,” he said. “But we were lucky to get past the birds once. I don’t think we could get past them twice. I mean, it’s possible, but do you want to take that chance? You know what they could do to us.” It was not easy for him to lie, but he had never wanted anything as much as he wanted Rachel. She was worth lying for.

  “I was hoping you would say, ‘I know a secret path. I know how to get past them.’”

  “I don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t. We were lucky.”

  He couldn’t bear to look at her now, so disappointed. He looked down again, blinked, concentrated on bringing the ground into focus. When it did, he saw something protruding from the soil, something unnatural and foreign. He dug it up with his fingers, cutting one on a surprisingly sharp edge; a thin stream of blood dripped off the tip of his index finger. It was a piece of glass about half the size of his hand. Then he wiped the dirt off its surface and saw that it was more.

  It was a mirror, or a shard of one. The first time he had seen one was at the Peach Blossom.

  “Markus.”

  Liling, walking in her mincing steps down the path toward them. He slipped the mirror into his pocket and stood. He knew why she was there in an instant: she was carrying the empty wooden bucket. Her face was flat and humorless. She looked from him to Rachel and back again. “Ming Kai is sick,” she said.

  Markus nodded.

  “What’s wrong?” Rachel said.

  “He’s thirsty.”

  Liling held out the bucket. He took it, but didn’t move.