The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

“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.

  The 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.

  THE JOURNEY BACK

  They walked until dusk. Rachel moved through the forest as if she were following a well-worn trail, as if she were following signs that said THIS WAY TO ROAM; the rest of them stumbled along as best they could, because she wasn’t stopping—that much was clear. Around midday Jerrod, the slow boy, stopped to pee behind a pine tree. It took him a while, and by the time he finished up, everyone had gone. Someone told Rachel he was missing, but she didn’t even turn her head. No one ever saw him again.

  When the last light of the sun shot through the army of pine around them and cast shadows as dark as ditches across the forest floor, Liling hurried, one quick small step after another, to get close enough to Rachel to touch her elbow. Rachel shook her off and kept walking. Liling touched her elbow again—she wasn’t scared of the blind girl (which is how she still thought of her)—and then grabbed it and pulled. Rachel wheeled around and pushed her, and if she’d had a knife in her hand she probably would have cut her wide open.

  “What?” Rachel said.

  “Dark now,” she said. “We rest.”

  “Dark or light,” Rachel said. “What difference do you think that makes to me? I’m not stopping. I know what I need to do.”

  Rachel gave her one last hard look before stalking away.

  “Why you leave Markus back in the Valley?” Liling asked.

  This stopped her. “You left him, too,” she said, turning to her. “And for the same reason. Because he’s a liar.”

  “He give you everything,” Liling said. “He show you everything.” Liling grabbed Rachel’s wrist and yanked her close. “He save your life.”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t save my life. The girl he found in the woods that day—and he killed her. I’m done with him.”

  By then everyone else had caught up with them—worn-out, exhausted. Rachel drew on some vestigial kindness and relented. “We’ll sleep here.”

  The night was so black that even a fire wasn’t enough to crack the darkness, the sparks from the fire rising and dying, swallowed up in it. Everybody slept but Ming Kai. He lay on his side in a small puddle of the magic water, staring into the nothing of the darkness ahead—until a glowing appeared, like a hovering cloud of insects, and coalesced into the figure of a man.

  “Elijah McCallister,” Ming Kai said to the spirit. “See what you’ve done.”

  On the outside Elijah looked like he did in the days before he died: all hollowed out. But now he had been filled up with the peace of death. “It’s not what I intended, Ming Kai. And please don’t say I told you so.”

  “I told you so!” Ming Kai said. “You’ve cursed us! And the girls most of all.”

  “I’m sorry,” the ghost of Elijah said. “I’m sorry for every terrible thing I did. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “One word cannot change the past.”

  “But that’s just it, Ming Kai,” he said, his ghostly translucence moving closer to his ear, to whisper: “This isn’t about the past: it’s about the future. You know that now.”

  “Future.” Ming Kai sighed. “There is no future for you, Elijah. Or even for me.” His old eyes, dimmed now, reflected on his ruined life. “But for them? Maybe.”

  “So,” Elijah said. “What are you going to do?”

  Ming Kai smiled. “You know so much, you tell me.”

  But Elijah fell back into the night and soon was no more than a fire’s spark himself.

  The next morning he was back. Ming Kai was being doused with the water as usual—he felt as if he had lived the last years of his life underwater—and when he looked at one of the old women there instead was Elijah.

  Ming Kai sighed.

  “You haunt me,” he said, “when it is I who should haunt you! What is it you want!”

  “Remember?” Elijah said. “Remember what you said to me? About the worms.”

  “No,” he said stubbornly. Though he did remember.

  “A worm is born a worm, you said. Then it becomes a moth. It is born twice. It has two lives.”

  Then, almost in unison: “We should all be so lucky.”

  Ming Kai closed his eyes and rolled his head back and forth against the wet cot, and when he looked again, no Elijah. It was the old woman. He had forgotten her name.

  “What you saying, old man?” she said.

  He didn’t answer, but with his remaining strength he reached out and knocked the bucket from her hand. The water soaked into the loamy soil.

  “Ming Kai!” she gasped. “What are you doing? Now you know what will happen? Without water, you will die!”

  “I know,” he said.

  Everyone stopped, even Rachel, who turned to see what the problem was. She pushed her way through the ring of people until she was standing beside Ming Kai.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  Ming Kai shook his head, but Rachel wouldn’t leave without an answer. She was glaring at him, waiting for a reason she had been held up.

  “I saw him,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Elijah McCallister. We talked.”

  “Really? About what?”

  “Worms,” he said.

  He looked at her rusted copper eyes, her drawn cheeks. Not so beautiful now—or beautiful in a different way.

  “You hate him, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, with great affection. “I do.”

  She laughed, once. “That’s why you wanted to come back with me: to see what it’s like to have revenge on the person who destroyed your life. We’re the same, you and me.”

  Ming Kai shook his head. “No,” he said. “But we used to be.”

  Rachel smiled at him, her lips tinged with malice. She rubbed his sunken chest with the palm of her weathered hand, as if she loved him. And she resumed her trek to Roam—all of them did. It wouldn’t be long now, not long at all. Ming Kai could feel it in his bones.

  A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING

  Digby wanted a drink—not for him, but for Helen. She didn’t drink, though, and as far as he knew never had. But now would have been a good time to start. For a man who thought he had seen and heard everything there was to see and hear, he’d never heard anything like this. Best to just sit there, he thought. Best not to say or do anything. It just wasn’t his place.

  Markus looked down at his hat and turned it three full times before looking up again. Outside there was a commotion. They heard one dog howl, then another. Soon it became a song, a canine chorus. Markus turned toward the window.

  “She’s almost here,” he said.

  Digby waited for Helen to say something, anything, but she seemed lost.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked Markus.

  Markus shook his head, still looking toward the outside, and shrugged, as if he weren’t really sure anymore. “She doesn’t have much use for me,” he said. “After what I’ve done . . .” Markus looked up at Helen, and Digby saw how it was with the two of them, how they lived in the same world, with the same guilt, born of loneliness and love. “I saved her life, but it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. I messed up. I thought maybe if I could save you, I could save her—one more time. And maybe that would be enough.”

  “She would never hurt me,” Helen said. “Never.”

  Markus turned away. “Oh, Helen,” he said. “She would.”

  “Where is she?”

  “By now she’s at that bridge. Just barely made it across myself—looks like it’s about a hundred years old and held together by spiderwebs and spit. She could make it over, maybe. But not the rest of them. Not that the rest of them need to. She’s enough for whatever she means to get done.”

  “Then I have to go,” Helen said. And Markus and Digby both nodded, relieved. This is what they wanted to hear. “To see her, I mean,” she said. “I have to go
see her.”

  “Have you been listening to this man, Helen?” Digby asked her.

  “Of course I have, Digby,” she said. “That’s how I know what it is I have to do.”

  “I won’t let you.”

  But Helen, as if she didn’t hear him or it didn’t matter if she did, moved toward the door. Markus blocked her path. “You won’t be able to stop her,” he said.

  “Who said I wanted to?”

  He walked to the window and pushed back the shade as outside the dogs made a sound that filled up the world, baying and singing. “It’s the dogs I worry about, more than anything.”

  “Helen,” Digby pleaded with her. “Please.”

  They met in the middle of the room and embraced. She kissed him, and again he took her in his arms and pressed her close, his head resting just beneath her breasts.

  “I love you, Digby,” she said. “Don’t worry: I’ll bring her back here with me and she’ll see, see how things have changed . . .”

  But even she didn’t believe this. The house was lovely. She tried to keep it clean. A place for everything and everything in its place. Cleaning a house was a way to show how much you loved it. She and Digby had rescued the house from time, but she knew it wasn’t enough. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, listening to the silent dark, knowing it; she’d told the whole dead world it wasn’t enough. The past never left her; there was nothing she could do to erase it.

  On the way out she stopped and looked at herself in the mirror. Older now, she’d softened, the edges smoother, the eyes open and kind. While she didn’t have a face anybody would ever pick out of a catalogue, she didn’t feel the need to hide it from herself, nor did it cause her to shudder when she caught a glimpse of herself. This is me, she thought, what I am.

  You’re more than just a face, Digby had told her. But that face I love, too.

  Digby was the best thing in the world.

  She wished she had more time to fix her hair, but she felt like she should go. She brushed it back behind her ears and let it fall down around her shoulders. That would have to do. All of this happened in a moment, but it felt like time had slowed to a crawl now. It was as if she were memorizing her life.