The Wish

The Wish 10 MINUTE READ

Frances had worn a suit for this because she needed the support. The comfort of the starched collar keeping her head from bowing in dejection as it wanted to. The grounding grip of the shirt, waistcoat, and jacket to keep her spine straight. But within she felt a woman, and a bereft one, her insides some howling void while her outsides kept the stiff upper lip and made sure everyone had enough to eat at the wake.

It took more control than she thought she had to excuse herself after the last speech and make it to their bedroom without weeping. Too many old friends, too many young hunters, and she couldn’t let them see.

Frances got hold of the silk kimono Richard bought her for their fifth anniversary before flying apart.

“God,” she sobbed out, twisting the silk between her fingers. She slid to the floor despite the complaint of her knees and knelt there, sagging against the side of their shared wardrobe. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to open it since he’d gone away to hospital. She purchased the suit new to keep from having to think about sorting his things. Having to disrupt the harmony they had achieved together. To keep from having to handle the ties she’d picked out for him over the years, the shirts bloodstains never quite came out of, the items rattling in jacket pockets he forgot to unload entirely.

“Please, God, I…” She tried to focus on her breathing, keep it steady. She had never caught gas full-on, but her doctor had said: do not over-exert, do not hyperventilate. Their masks hadn’t been perfect and traces of the deadly mists of the front had shown themselves to weaken her lungs over time. Calm was an impossible ask. Grief, hemmed in by propriety to the absolute limit, demanded its time now. “Please, I, I must— Please do not keep him from me, I want to see him again, I want—”

Cheng Min-xia awoke with a shuddering sigh, pillow wet beneath their face and chest tight. They sat up and rubbed at their eyes. Through the large plate glass windows of the penthouse suite, far below, Hong Kong gleamed with a million bright shards of neon and fluorescent, alive regardless of the hour. And the hour was late— or early, really. Four in the morning. By seven, they would be on a flight to Los Angeles with their agent. A new contract with Versace. Asian was in, again, if it had ever been out. Time for Max Cheng, as they were known in London and New York, to make the jump to California.

The phone rang. Max’s first reaction was to hunt around in discarded clothing for their Nokia, but after a groggy moment they realized they weren’t hearing a novelty ringtone, but the classic sound of the hotel landline.

“I felt you would be up,” a woman said in clipped Mandarin as they pressed the handset to their face and flopped back down amidst the pillows.

“Good morning, Mother,” they replied, stifling a yawn. “If you wanted to say goodbye, you could’ve called later, on my mobile, my flight isn’t—”

“Stay,” she demanded.

Max sighed again, although the exhaustion of crying had left them with the last vestiges of the dream. “Is Grandmother still sucking her teeth? I can’t stay just to please her.”

“You know it isn’t about pleasing her,” their mother replied. “This is unprecedented. And for you to make this announcement and then run away to America, you know she—”

“I know she wants to keep me here to study like an insect under glass, and, if she can at all afford it, fix this.” Max twined the phone cord around their long fingers, the white plastic sliding over the glossy red manicure on their nails. “She will never understand. You don’t understand. That doesn’t make it a lie. Also, if you try to keep me, you know you’re only inviting Liu to come around the house with his tacky gifts, and being besieged by my agent isn’t likely to help Grandmother’s mood either.”

There was silence from the other end of the line for a moment before their mother asked, “You’re granting one right now, aren’t you? A Wish?”

“So, you believe me?” they countered.

“I thought you were safe,” she said, “because of the Price I paid, and because you are my son. But I believe you. Even if I did not, I can believe too easily that our family’s trade would find a way to survive despite my best efforts.”

Max rolled to stare out the window again, ruminating on how many battles were too many to wage in one early morning phone call. “I’m not your son. This proves it— and if you believe me, you wouldn’t ask me to stay.”

“Was the Price paid, in full?” she demanded, apparently making her own choice about what was most important to berate them over. “You do not yet know how the Arbiter makes up the cost for not collecting in full on a Wish granted. None of your credit cards or expensive clothes will spare you from the difference being taken out of your flesh.”

“It was paid, with interest, before I was born,” Max admitted. They didn’t like to talk about this, not with Mother. Even as hard as the dreams, the memories-not-theirs, could be, they were personal. Treasured. “I am simply finally in the correct position to see the bargain through. It’s… it’s not a bad one, Mother.”

“No one can judge whether a Wish is good or bad. Not the supplicant, and definitely not the Arbiter!” she snapped. To Max’s horror, her iron control over her words shuddered under something like grief of her own. “I was so sure, when I Wished that I would be passed over, when I Paid in never seeing you play with a sister or brother. I was so sure it ended with me. But you sound happy.”

“How do you think the difference will be taken from me if I collected payment and did not grant the Wish, Mother?” Max asked, gently.

“It was never going to turn out any other way, was it?”

Max thought of the woman in the stiff funeral suit, crying on the floor of her bedroom. “I don’t think I would want it to. Besides, times are different, now, Mother. No one is going to accost me at a photoshoot and demand their child never be visited by fever at the cost of their eyesight. I’m not going to entertain emperors. No one even really believes in Arbitration anymore— especially not in America. I will be fine. And Grandmother can suck her teeth until they finally fall out.”

Their mother hissed through tears. “You have no piety, and little respect for tradition. Your bones will be broken by bad deals.”

“My bones are more likely to be broken by bad heels,” Max shot back. There was a time their mother seemed progressive, even daring. But something about seeing their only child wearing a skirt in a feature of Vogue UK, and then declaring themselves to have inherited familial magic only thought to be passed from mother to daughter, had rendered her nearly as conservative as Grandmother. Although it had to be said she had not turned in her slacks for hanfu yet. “Whatever Grandmother says, I watched and listened to her. It is always the Arbiter’s choice to grant a Wish. Just because she chose to play Monkey’s Paw doesn’t mean I will, or that you would’ve had to. Refraining is just about strength of will.” Perhaps rudely, they added, “You could’ve had seven children and never granted one.”

“You are not strong enough,” Mother snapped. “Without taking precautions as I did, you will grant your own Wishes. You will revel in the power as your revel in your Western fame and lavish parties, and when the blade finally makes itself visible above your neck, I will not be able to stop it for you. You are not strong enough.”

“With respect, Mother,” Max said, carefully, “you have never known as much about what I am as I have.”

“It was never going to turn out any other way, was it?” she repeated.

“I received the Wish long ago, and took the Price at that time,” they said. “So, no, Mother. Call again on my mobile in two hours and ask after my stock of socks and traveler’s cheques. But if Grandmother wants to demand I stay to be studied, interrogated, Wished into normalcy, she can puzzle through dialing me herself. You wanted to be free of this. Let yourself be.”

There was another long silence. Then:

“I Wish—”

Max’s heartbeat spiked. “Mother!”

“I Wish for you to be happy,” she spoke over their interruption, “for the rest of your days, regardless of what you are, where you are, and what you may come to do.”

The words hung between them, resonating over the line. Max’s bold statement about the Arbiter’s power to reject Wishes also hung there, but next to the power they could feel on the tip of their tongue, it was as pale and blustery a statement as their Mother had judged it to be.

“What do you offer in exchange?” they asked, softly.

“My happiness,” Mother replied. “Until I die, I will never truly rest, never know simple contentment, nor joy, nor satisfaction from a pleasant meal or a task completed. I will forever be plagued by concern for you, for the evils Fate will attempt to visit on you in a world that is changing all the time, as my child who changes with it.”

Tears slid down Max’s cheeks again. But they felt the Balance in their bones, and the words, the old words, the words they had heard Grandmother say time and time again, came out of their mouth without hesitation: “This is a fair Price. I will grant your Wish, Cheng Fan.”

“Thank you, Arbiter Cheng Min-xia,” she said, and rung off.

“I want more time with him,” Frankie sobbed on the floor of the bedroom she had shared with Richard for nearly fifty years. “God, perhaps I will never have enough, but I— All I Wish is to love him again, over and over again, forever— and perhaps that will be time enough.”

“What do you offer in exchange?” a voice asked, there and not there, a specter of indeterminant age and power seated on the foot of her marriage bed.

“All of the life I have left in me,” she whispered, raising her dark eyes to a pair not dissimilar, “every hard-fought joy I might’ve known, every extra moment I could have touched the lives of others, every measure of aid I could have offered to protect the innocent. It is— it’s so selfish. But is it enough?”

“This is a fair Price,” Arbiter Cheng Min-xia said, well before they were born. “I will grant your Wish, Frances Benham.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/28/2019 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024