“People come here to escape, not to envy.” Hiroko glanced down the empty aisle. “We can talk here.”
“I wish we did not need to ask you about the children,” Hana said. “But lives depend on it.”
“I did not know that words I had spoken as a child would follow me into my old age. I suppose that this is my punishment for spreading a secret that was not mine to share. All I could think about then was that I did not want to be like those letters I had found.” Hiroko’s eyes glossed over with tears.
“Letters?” Keishin asked.
“Lost, unsent letters from the other world. I found them rotting inside a damp, crumbling box. They smelled foul and were covered with mold and dirt, all their words and sentiments decayed. That is what happens when words are left unsaid. It does not matter how beautiful they are. In time, everything rots. That is how I knew that my father’s secret rotted inside me too. I could smell its stench. I had to tell someone. Anyone. I told a friend, a porter’s son, and made him swear not to tell anyone. Before the day was over, everyone in the market knew my crime. And now you have carried my shame to the one place I thought it would never find me again.”
“We are sorry,” Hana said. “We did not realize that this would cause you so much distress.”
“It is not your fault. It is mine. My father did not know I had followed him to the field. He always said that I was too curious for my own good. He was right. There is not a day that I do not regret hiding in the ruins of that temple and seeing the ‘package’ the Shiikuin had ordered my father to bury among the wildflowers.” Hiroko covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut. “The children…their voices…I can still hear them rising from the ground, louder than the gurgle of the stream.”
“Where is this field, Hiroko-san?” Hana said.
Hiroko dropped her hands to her sides. “Please believe me when I tell you that this is not a place you wish to find.”
“I have no choice. I need to find it.”
“The only choice we have in this world is to be content,” Hiroko said. “But I was a willful and greedy child who wanted to see more than the world outside my window. I disobeyed my father. It is a mistake that I will have to live with for the rest ofmy life. The cries in my head will never let me forget. I will take them with me to my grave, no matter how much their secret rots inside me.”
—
Keishin sat on the steps of the mountain, his eyes not daring to wander past his feet. He did not want to look at Hana. Their search for her mother and father had come to an end, becoming the latest addition to the library’s dusty collection of lost and unfinished things. “I’m sorry, Hana. We tried.”
Hana stared out into the valley.
Keishin reached for her hand then changed his mind. Holding her was only going to make him feel more helpless. There was nothing he could say to comfort her, no way to hold her tight enough to make her feel that everything was going to be okay. He dug his hands into his pockets. Something hard and cold brushed his fingertips. He pulled out the coin Yasuhiro had given him. It had failed to bring them any luck, and Keishin had half a mind to hurl it off the mountain. He gripped the coin, raised it over his shoulder, and stopped, remembering a way to put it to better use. He set the coin on the step and spun it, following a script from another life. The coin twirled dangerously close to the mountain’s edge, slowing Keishin’s thoughts and muffling the noise inside him enough to hear the advice of an old friend.
—
Keishin hurriedly weaved through the packed Indonesian restaurant and nearly ran into a server. He pulled out a chair across from Ramesh and sat down, panting. “I need to find a field.”
“A field?” Ramesh set his fork down. “Now that’s a first. What kind of field?”
“The kind you bury secrets in.”
Ramesh rubbed his chin. “Interesting. Go on.”
“The only person who knows where to find it refuses to tell me where it is. I’ve reached a dead end.”
Ramesh folded his arms over his chest. “What did that person say exactly?”
“Hiroko said a lot of things. Just not anything useful.”
“Good.” Ramesh spooned vegetable curry and rice into his mouth and chewed slowly.
“How is that a good thing?”
“She could have just said no when you asked her about the location of the place and that would be the end of this conversation. It would be a shame to waste all of this food. ‘A lot of things’ gives us something to work with.”
“I wish that were true. But Hiroko just went on and on about how much she regretted secretly following her father to the field.”
Ramesh smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“We are?”
“If Hiroko followed her father without him knowing it, then I’m guessing that she found a good place to hide.”
