The Fire Artist (5 page)

Fire that could shield me. Fire that could protect me. Fire that could save me.

“The only thing is, it won’t last,” the Lady said, creaking back and forth in her swing. My feet swung gently too. “You will be striking a Faustian bargain, my child. You will be Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill over and over. Your stolen fire will never last. You’ll burn out every few months and lose your control. You’ll have to get it back, and sometimes the fire you bring into your heart is too much, so you let a little bit loose or else it will smother you. You will do this in the water. You’ll have to do this over and over, every year, then a few times a year. And each time, a piece of your heart will become charred. Until eventually it’s turned to ash.”

My life for my life.

That seemed a fair price to pay.

My mother points to her bookshelves, just a few feet away from her chair. “The one on New York. Can you hand me the one on New York?”

“Do you want to get it?” I ask gently.

She shakes her head; her eyes look like those of a mouse being met by a cat.

I reach for the hardbound book of pictures and hand her the heavy volume—a photographic journey through New York City over the years. The library binding crinkles around the corner. My brother picked this up for her at a bargain basement library sale a few weeks ago. He’s at the library a lot for his community service. The three of us have even looked at it together a few times, and it feels good to have all of us back in this house again, even though things aren’t the same as they were before.

“Show me your favorite.” I crouch down near her shapeless form, which merges with the cushion. She’s not fat. She’s tiny,
she eats very little, and she’s simply soft all over, like the air seeped out of her and now she’s a raft languishing deflated on the side of a pool. My mother used to be beautiful. There’s a framed photo on my dad’s nightstand of her standing on a fountain in the middle of an outdoor mall. She looks like she’s in mid-dance-step, jaunty and sassy, with a short black-and-white dress whisking around her thighs. She’s playful in the picture, her eyes sparkling and teasing, as if she’s saying
I can make a fountain too
.

She opens the book and flips slowly through the pages. “Central Park, of course. And the New York Public Library. And Broadway. I bet Broadway is amazing,” she says dreamily, then hums a few bars, maybe from a show tune or maybe just a made-up number in her head.
Someday, we’ll see a Broadway show
, she used to tell me.
We’ll go to a musical, all decked out to the nines, nails done, and best shoes on, tickets we saved up for for months in our hands
. “But this is my favorite,” she says as she turns another few pages and shows me a picture of Grand Central Station.

It’s swarming with people fanning out in all directions. I wonder if she’s trying to tell me something—that she longs to be around people again, that she craves escape too. I want to tell her that New York would be perfect. Maybe we’d even run into the beautiful boy.

I hear the sound of the shower from the lone bathroom down the hall. My father is in there. My mother closes the book. “We could go there someday, Mom,” I whisper. “I’m getting stronger every day. Maybe I’ll be recruited and we can take a trip to New York.”

Something flashes in her eyes for the faintest of moments—hope?

I continue, keeping my voice low. “They have the best doctors there, you know. In New York. We could find someone to treat you.”

My mom’s never been to New York. She’s from Nebraska, grew up right in the heartland, in a tiny little town, nothing but wheat and corn and red, rusty pickup trucks. Then she just up and got the hell out of town. That’s how she told the story of her exodus, the first girl in her family to go to college, to a university in Miami.

“Nebraska is an icebox. Don’t let that middle-of-the-country thing fool you,” she said when I was in second grade. She tapped the map of the United States that was tacked to our hallway wall and crouched down to my height. “It’s no place for a water girl. In the winters, the cold smacks your face and bites your skin. Everything is frozen. The horizon is gray as far as you can see.”

The way she tells the story, you’d think she’d packed a few swimsuits into a bandanna, wrapped that around a stick, and hitched all the way to the Sunshine State.

“The day after graduation, I walked out the door and turned my back on Nebraska. I had a destination, and I had some determination, so I trekked right across the country and then down south as the ocean called out to me. I needed to be near waves, and warm water, and seas I could dive into year-round,” she said, sweeping her index finger along the mapped edge of Florida’s coastline, as if I needed the reminder that we lived on a big toe surrounded by blue. But I watched her hands, mesmerized by the way she could weave both water and words, how every
move of her body, every ordinary gesture, even her hand trailing along a laminated map, was a ballet.

Now she’s camped out on a papasan chair and hasn’t felt the sun on her skin in years, stricken by some mystery ailment that’s handcuffed her to the house and turned her into a shell of the woman she once was. She doesn’t even talk the same.

“They do, Mom. The doctors in New York, they’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong,” I say, trying desperately to plant the seed of escape in her. Maybe we can do more than visit New York. Maybe a doctor can heal her, and then she can protect Jana from our dad. Or better yet, she can leave him, and be the mom she used to be. She can take care of Jana.

She waves a hand, like she’s swatting away an errant bug. “Don’t worry about me.”

“But don’t you want to? They have medicine for panic disorders. There are things you can take, you know. I’ve researched it. I’ve looked it up.”

Her eyes harden, as they do whenever I name it. The thing that pins her down. “Aria, can you go fetch me my newspaper? I want to read the latest on how the Lookouts stopped that tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean,” she says.

The Lookouts are the teams of elemental artists who help fight forest fires and turn hurricanes into tropical storms. Elemental artists can’t control Mother Nature, but they can help quell her when she slouches toward disaster. The Lookouts are the reason neither Florida nor any other state has been battered by anything greater than a category 1 or 2 storm in the last several years. The reason why brush fires in Los Angeles last for hours now instead of days.

“Yes, Mom. I’ll get you the paper.”

I open the front door, where I’m greeted by a blast of morning heat. I walk to the end of the driveway, grab the newspaper, and bring it to my mom.

“Thank you, my love,” she says, then kisses me on the cheek and opens the paper, closing the conversation.

When I return to my room, I kneel by my bed and pull out an orange crate that holds my fashion magazines. I don’t read them for tips on what to wear. I like to draw on the models instead. I give them tails and longer noses or cartoon eyes and extra hands. Nothing fancy, nothing that would make comic book artists quake in their boots. But they’re mine. They’re my graffiti, and I like to keep them, to look at them when I need a laugh. They’ve served their purpose many times, after many returns from the garage, when all I could do was use my wrists to flip through pages of my mustachioed models waggling cigars from their pouty lips and quipping cartoon-bubbled sayings—“Get your fish and chips here” and other ridiculous things.

Inside one of the magazines is a worn-out sheet of paper I’ve kept there for more than three years. It’s full of dates, including the one I marked on it two nights ago. The night I lost my fire. The night I regained my fire. The night my fire started to eat me alive.

Again.

“What if hair could feel?”

“What if?”

“Do you think my hair can feel your hands?” Jana asks me
as I weave another section of her rabbit-soft brown hair into a French braid. She’s folding a flyer from last night’s show into a makeshift fan.

“Well, I hope you can feel my hands, dork.”

“No. I mean
really
feel. Like details. Like your—”

“Shhh …”

“Why?” She finishes the fan, then waves it in front of her face to cool off. It’s hot and then some in our house; but proximity to me makes her toastier.

“Don’t.”

“But I can. I can feel the ridges a bit—”

“Anyway,” I say, cutting her off, “what are you going to do today?”

She shrugs. “There’s nothing
to
do. I hate summer vacation.”

“Words you rarely hear from a twelve-year-old.”

“Well, it’s boring when you’re twelve and don’t have a phone or a car, and your mom won’t drive you anywhere and your sister is gone all the time.”

“It’s not as if I love all-day practices either when school’s out. Anyway, what’s Mindy doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, call her,” I say. Mindy is Kyle’s little sister.

“It’s too early. She’s never up this early.”

“Text her. Use my phone. In my pocket.”

I loop another strand of hair as Jana reaches into my pocket. Her hand is cold and it tickles. I wriggle a bit. She laughs, then sends a message.

“I’ll call you when she writes back, okay?”

“What if you’re on fire?” Jana teases.

“Then I guess you’ll never know what Mindy wants to do today, silly,” I say as I wrap the end of the braid in a tight rubber band. “There. Beautiful.”

Jana leans back into me, and I wrap my arms around her. “Do you want to go pool hopping tonight?”

She turns her face to me and grins. “You’ll go with me?”

“Sure. I think the Markins are out of town for a few weeks. We can sneak into their yard.”

Jana beams. “I love pool hopping with you.”

“I know. Because you’re a fish.”

“Maybe I should just go to the beach today.”

I tense. “Okay, but don’t tell Dad.”

“Why?”

I lower my voice. “Because he’ll ask a million questions. You know he will. He’ll want to know if you turned into a dolphin or something.”

“Maybe I am a dolphin,” Jana says, and flashes me a smile, her teeth white and bright and perfectly straight.

“You might be. But don’t tell him. Promise me, okay?” I whisper, tightening my arms around her, gripping her as if I can protect her this way. With her promise. With a hope. With a wish.

“I promise,” she tells me.

“Time to go,” my father barks from the driveway.

I jump up. “I’ll draw a dolphin on your arm later if you’re nice to Mom today. I’ll even give him sideburns,” I say as I give Jana a kiss on the forehead, then grab my bag as she tells me
no sideburns ever
. I rush out, shouting good-bye to my mom, who’s working the crossword puzzle now. Xavier is still snoring, lying
on his stomach, with one arm dangling off the side of the couch. The back of his hand glares at me, marked with a dark
X
, etched like a tattoo.

I slide into the front seat of my dad’s car, a 1970 Pontiac GTO he restored a few years ago with parts that had come into the junkyard he runs. He also had one of his car cronies lay a pair of flame decals on the sides. They’re hideous.

“Did you sleep well last night?” He twists his gaze behind him as he backs out of the driveway.

“Like a baby.”

“Do you feel rested today?”

“Totally.”

“I told Nava you need to work on control exercises.”

“What a surprise.”

“You do. I want pristine control, Aria.”

“I’m sure.”

“Don’t be sarcastic with me.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I meant it. I’m sure you want pristine control. I have no doubt you want perfect, rigorous, pristine, impeccable control. And you’ll get it. So don’t worry.”

“I don’t worry. You are the most talented fire artist there is.”

I am, and I like to think it’s because I train so hard. I work harder than anyone, but maybe that’s just to make up for my crime. Maybe I can never make up for it. Maybe I’m only good because I’m not natural.

Silence fills the car for a few minutes, but at least the air is cool inside these four doors. When my dad fixed up this car, he fixed the AC in it too. I take a pen from the front of my
backpack and draw a stick figure blowing up TNT on my thigh.

“Don’t do that,” my dad says.

I ignore him, bending my head lower to ink out a cartoon explosion. Thighs are wonderful inventions with their dual purpose. They propel us quickly if we work them, and they also provide magnificent, omnipresent canvases.

“Why do you do that?”

I say nothing. This—silence, the occasional snark—is all I have to fight back. To show him that he hasn’t broken me.

He relents. “Someone’s coming in today to pick through our stock of Fords. Should be a good day. We have a lot of those,” he says in an offhand way. As if I care about his love of cars. “Fords.”

“That’s great.”

“I’m betting we’ll clear a thousand.”

“Fabulous.”

“Wouldn’t it be, though?” He turns toward me at the red light.

I try not to look at him. “Yes. Money’s awesome.”

If I’m recruited into the Leagues, I plan to save every last dime and use it to steal again. To steal my mom and my sister and my brother away from my dad.