The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Page A

wedding. During the ceremony.
    One month into their marriage, she discovered she was three months pregnant and immediately began finding even more fault with him. He didn’t separate the knives into steak versus regular. He piled his fag ends in the potted camellia she’d hung out on their new balcony in a flat he never finished renovating like he promised. And then, one night, during still-rather-amazing seven-months-pregnant make-up sex, he had looked so angry that she’d spontaneously slapped him across the face, hard enough for her wedding ring to cut his cheek, an action that shocked her so deeply she’d stayed at her father’s that night, frightened of what she was capable of doing next.
    Henri left the next day. ‘It is not the slap,’ he said, maddeningly calm. ‘A Frenchman can take a slap, Lord knows. It is how your face looked when you did it.’ He took her arm with a gentleness that told her it was over more brutally than any fight ever could have. ‘You fight your hatred for yourself, anyone can see, and you do your best, taking it out on people who you think will be strong enough to handle it. I understand this. I am the same. It is hard but it is bearable if your love for me is bigger than your hate. But it has tipped somewhere along the way, and there is no recovery from that, I do not think. For either of us.’
    The pain of this made her anger blaze anew, and she’d swept him away in a torrent of vengeful promises that he’d never see his son, that if he didn’t disappear, she’d tell a judge
he
slapped
her
– and what English judge wasn’t prepared to believe that about a Frenchman? – so he’d better leave the country altogether or she’d have him arrested.
    He finally believed her. And left.
    Yet when their son was born, she named him after Henri’s beloved late uncle, like they’d once discussed. She’d immediately shortened it to JP, but still. Even now, she spoke French to him as much as English to make sure he stayed fluent and could talk freely to his father.
    Henri had been the love of her life, and she’d never be able to forgive him for it. Or herself, it seemed.
    In the meantime, he called, and the sound of his voice made her sad enough to turn up the telly while he spoke, haltingly, to JP, who answered everything into the receiver with a very cautious, ‘
Oui
?’
    ‘Look,’ Amanda said, shoving her fork back into the salad container and swallowing the tears. ‘I’m sorry for what I said about the Animals In War thing. I’m sorry for swearing. I’m sorry for fucking
everything
, all right? There’s no need to dole out more punishment.’
    Mei’s eyes seemed to genuinely fill with surprised concern, but Rachel stormed in first. ‘It’s not the Memorial?’ she said. ‘It’s more like your overall
vehemence
?’
    Amanda, who’d expected – foolishly, it now seemed – to be greeted with fast assurances that she had nothing to apologise for, got irritated all over again. ‘My grandpa Joe lost a leg in Vietnam,’ she said. ‘And then got spat on by peaceniks when he came back in his wheelchair. So forgive me if I think a monument to a
carrier pigeon
is in bad taste.’
    ‘
Whoa
,’ Mei whispered. ‘Your grandfather fought in Vietnam?’
    ‘That can’t possibly be true,’ Rachel said, her voice growing harder.
    Amanda froze. It wasn’t actually true. Grandpa Joe had never been drafted and had died on a worksite when a digger accidentally severed an artery in his thigh. She could just feel the bad karma piling up for pretending otherwise even for a moment. But needs must.
    ‘Did he kill any Vietnamese?’ Mei asked, suddenly serious in the way she always was when anyone within hearing distance might have been disrespecting any Asian of any kind.
    Rachel tutted scornfully. ‘British soldiers didn’t actually
fight
in Vietnam? Australians bloody well did, though. My father–’
    ‘My grandfather was
American
,’ Amanda said, because that part was