Lee crawled forward until he was seated in front of the door, his shadow swelling until it covered the woman’s shadow from the other side, the pools of darkness merging into a formless blob, a monster they had made together. He raised his hand to the shadow, feeling for cool cement beneath the paper.
But instead, he felt the paper give with no resistance, threatening to tear. There was a sharp intake of breath from the other side, then slowly, a warm hand pressed against his.
James’s hand closed around Lee’s, pulling him up from the ground.
“You okay?” James said.
Lee blinked and stood up straight, yanked from the whirlpool of his mind.
He was standing in the kitchen of their dorm, a can of Coke overturned on the floor in front of them. Lee had dropped the can, spraying soda across the off-white wall, and then slipped on the puddle. It was dripping down now, slow and syrupy.
Something about the stain unsettled him.
The central splash was a muddy lagoon, surrounded by tiny sparks of brown tearing down in dark stripes. The stain was growing, changing, alive.
“Lee?” James said again.
Lee blinked, and there was James, with his kind green eyes, his expression softened as if concerned. But no one was concerned about Lee Turner, the same way no one was concerned for the ants that they squished into the soles of their shoes.
“Sorry,” Lee said, turning away. He grabbed a couple paper towels and scrubbed the stain away because he knew that was what he was supposed to do, even though it felt like he’d destroyed something of great importance.
For a moment, Lee could feel the fast pulse of the other person through their palm, separated by only the thin paper barrier. His mouth went dry as he searched for the right words. What could he possibly say to a spirit conjured into shadows, probably the ghost of whoever had lived in the house last?
Slowly, he pressed his ear against the paper, listening closely. He heard nothing but slow breaths and the creaking of old floorboards muffled by tatami mats.
“Hello,” Lee whispered in Japanese.
At once, the breathing stopped. Lee held his breath as well, afraid to disturb the sacred silence. He felt as if he was standing on a thin rope over a great chasm. Time did not exist here. Theshadow had fallen so silent that if it weren’t for the flickering candlelight, Lee might have thought they’d left.
Then, a wooden scraping sound ripped through the quiet, raw and ugly. It took Lee a moment to place the sound. It sounded like weathered hinges or rusted knives clanging. The silhouette on the other side shifted, but Lee couldn’t discern what they were doing in the dark lagoon of shadows. He imagined the woman he’d seen standing in the yard and tried to visualize her where now he could see only a hazy outline. Her white, unadorned robes. Her eyes like the lightless depths of the sea. Her dark hair that the wind raked over half her face. The katana at her side, its handle woven with black thread.
The katana at her side...
Lee realized—too late—what the scraping sound had been.
He threw himself away from the door just as a blade stabbed through the paper. It tore through his right sleeve, drawing a line of bright blood across his forearm. If he hadn’t moved, it would have plunged into his eye and skewered his skull.
He scrambled to his feet as the blade withdrew. Lee looked around for something to use to defend himself, but found nothing useful.
He shouldn’t have worried. The blade did not strike again, but something heavy scraped across the floor on the other side, blocking out the light. Tentatively, Lee pressed his hand to the hole the blade had torn in the paper, but felt only smooth wood.
The shallow wound on his arm began to sting, blood running down to his wrist, scarlet devouring the pale blue of his pajama shirt. Lee looked down at the cut, unable to hold back his smile.
The pain was bright and real, which meant that the ghost was real too. Here was his crimson proof that he hadn’t lost his mind, that he was standing at a crossroads between his own world and something more.
Lee grabbed his backpack and dumped out all the Benadryl,the Ativan, the Xanax that he would never be able to replace in Japan. He opened the pill bottles, tore through the blister packets, dropped them one by one into the toilet like coins tossed into a well, and with each one he wished louder and louder for the truth.
He wanted to speak to the ghost again.
At last, he’d found it—a bridge between life and death. If he could only figure out how and why it was possible, if he could learn to part the curtains of the universe and cross into different planes at his will, then maybe he could one day find his mother. He pictured the ghost girl as a rabbit in a cage while he loomed over her, poked her and fed her and studied her day and night. He would learn from her, and he would find his truth at last.
Lee felt full of electricity, light on his feet as he turned on his laptop, bare feet tapping impatiently against the floor, dried blood tacky on his skin.
His laptop blinked to life, and he tapped down on the touchpad repeatedly until a browsing tab popped open and he pulled up Google Translate. His spoken Japanese was passable, thanks to his dad’s girlfriends, but his written Japanese was mediocre at best. Besides, he needed to write this backward—a mirror image—so he had to be very careful and accurate. He practiced writing his question in a notebook a few times, holding the words up in the mirror to make sure they displayed correctly. Then he pulled out a marker, went back to the closet, and wrote his question across the paper door.
How did you die?
He sat back and looked at the nonsensical scribble—backward from his end—and hoped the ghost would see it. He had many questions, but this was perhaps the most important—what was it about this ghost’s circumstances that allowed her to reach outand touch Lee, while his mother’s lost soul had never been able to find him?
