“I’m going to lie down for a bit,” his father said, still rubbing his chest.
All of Lee’s anger dissolved. He nodded and took his father’s cup. “I’ll make you another cup when you wake up,” he said.
His father disappeared into his room. Lee dumped out both coffees and wondered how he had ruined such a simple conversation, how he was managing to kill his father day by day when all he had to do was be normal.
Lee went back to his room and lay limp on his futon.Everything will be fine once I talk to Mom, he thought, again and again until he almost believed it.
As the sun rose higher in the sky and he waited for Sen, his chest began to feel tight. It was the first time in a very long time that he’d looked forward to something.
He thought of Sen’s eyes—the dark, drowning tide in her irises. Most people felt like different shades of gray, but Sen feltlike a blazing forest fire of light. She didn’t run away from him like he was a bug that had crawled out from the darkness beneath her bed. Lee was something people feared, but Sen was a warrior who feared nothing. In front of her, he existed.
He had turned over thehowin his mind again and again, but it didn’t matter nearly as much as thewhy.
Why here, why now, why you?
There had to be something that connected them, and Lee would find it.
He imagined Sen striking a match, lighting a candle, and leading him to an underworld of perpetual night, where she would use her sword to fend off malevolent spirits. He would find his mother there, however she was.
Lee treasured the idea of finding even one small piece of his mother. Maybe some people would rather see nothing at all than be left with a severed finger or cracked rib where a person used to be. Many people liked to remember their loved ones when they were beautiful and whole and alive, and were scared to taint that memory. But Lee wanted to curl up in bed with his mother’s bones, drape her hair over him like a blanket and fall asleep. Small pieces of a person did not scare him. It was still his mother, after all. As long as she existed, it didn’t matter how.
Darkness was fading to orange sky now, something that could reasonably be called “light,” and Lee felt sick with anticipation. He hadn’t said what time “morning” was—in truth he didn’t know if Sen even had a clock. But he would know when she was there.
He sat before the door but found no light or shadows behind it. He slid the door open an inch and was met with cool cement. If he was going to reconvene with Sen more often, he would need to understand why the door between their worlds only sometimes opened.
He pulled out his laptop and made a quick table, filling inas many variables as he could think of. First, the environmental factors: time of day, weather, temperature, moon phase. Then factors related to him or Sen: last meal eaten, last words spoken, body temp, emotions. He filled in as much as he could remember about the first time they’d met at night, then the second time. Last, he filled in all the information about this moment, then marked in the last column that the door remained closed. He scanned the spreadsheet, but no discernable pattern emerged. He would need more data.
The longer he sat around waiting and adding to his spreadsheet, the more his unease grew. Sen had been real, he was certain. But he went to his nightstand anyway, clutching the sword guard with the golden turtle—what was it with Japanese people and turtles, anyway? Lee had read that turtles symbolized longevity, even immortality. They appeared all over ancient Japanese art and folktales, but hardly seemed fierce enough for a warrior’s sword guard.
Lee turned the pieces of the sword guard over in his hands, pressing them together so he could read the inscription carved around the hole. He did his best to read it but came up short, so he typed his guess into Google Translate, which helpfully corrected it for him.
The way of the samurai is found in death.
Death seemed like a strange sentiment to carry with one’s sword, and if anything, contradicted the turtle on the front. Were samurai meant to die, or live forever?
The door was still dark, so Lee took the sword guard and headed through the kitchen, out to the northern yard. He would take a walk, and maybe when he came back, Sen would be there as well.
He followed yesterday’s path to the beach. The shore had yawned wider in his absence and was slowly retreating to the mountains. Waves had left indentations in the sand, markingeverywhere the water had touched. Lee walked forward, despite Hina’s warning, chasing after the cold sea.
He walked out farther than he meant to, and when he turned around, the house was a tiny brown square in the distance. He felt, in that moment, that if he only kept walking, he could cross the entire ocean. The sea would part for him, inviting him deeper and deeper, the ocean floor a white carpet rolled out only for him.
Something sharp pinched his foot.
He hissed and jumped back, hopping while he examined his sole. He’d stepped on a piece of sea glass, and now his foot was bleeding. The sea was warning him away, it seemed. Maybe one day, he would cross it. But not today.
He cast one last glance at the invitation of the sea, then turned and headed back home.
He rinsed his foot in the shower, then placed a Band-Aid over it, and by the time he returned to his room, light glowed behind his closet door.
He snatched his laptop off his futon and jotted down as much data as he could before Sen got impatient, then snapped his laptop shut and opened the door.
Sen looked younger in the light of day.
She had looked celestial in the pale moonlight, but now there were no shadows to hide the tired creases of her eyes, her sallow complexion, her chapped lips. She wore the cinched robes of a warrior and had tied her hair back harshly, as if to counteract the way the sunlight softened her cheeks and warmed her eyes with gold. Lee remembered what his father said about Japanese women, then wished he could crush the thought. Sen was special, he could admit as much. But not because of her beauty. Lee had no need for something like that.
“Good morning,” Sen said, not bowing.
He stepped aside and waved for Sen to come in, then quietly shut the door behind her. She kept one hand on her swordas she examined his room in daylight, then turned to face Lee, waiting. They shared an uneasy glance as they both waded into the wrongness of the moment—what happened at night could pass as a dream, but what happened during the day was real.
