Lee closed his eyes and took a deep breath. That was what his father always told him to do before getting upset. Lee let out a long, slow exhale that the wind stole from his lips and carried into the dark woods.
When he opened his eyes, the window had appeared, glowing white from reflected sunlight. He blinked a few more times, but the window remained in the same place, mockingly bright.
I am tired, and stressed, and maybe dehydrated from the heat, Lee thought as he turned and headed away from the house, even though his legs felt stiff.Not to mention the second Benadryl I took, which probably has me sleepwalking.He repeated these reasons, determined to fit them into the puzzle of his mind, to pound his fists on top of the pieces until they all lay flat together.
He walked up the long ribbon of driveway, past his father’s black rental car, which was already gathering pollen, brushing ferns out of his face as he headed for the front gate. His father had said the town center was a straight shot down the road, ten minutes away.
He swung the gate open with one hand and began to step through.
“Lee?” called a voice from the house.
Lee turned. There was Hina, standing on the porch. Shesquinted in the sunlight and smiled at Lee as the wind shuddered across her linen skirt. Hina looked timeless, like she could have been twenty-five or forty-five or anything in between. She’d always looked a bit on edge in New Jersey, but now she fit perfectly into the scenery, another one of the colorful flowers around the house, angled toward the sunlight, sparkling with dew.
“Will you help me make dinner?” Hina said.
Lee looked back at the gate. He needed a SIM card, but he supposed that could wait.
“Sure,” he said, heading back up the lawn, stepping up onto the porch. Hina smiled and opened the door to let him inside. The gate at the edge of the property swung slowly in the wind until a strong breeze gave it one last push, latching it shut with a definitiveclick.
Chapter Two
Lee
Steam rose from Hina’s pan, casting the whole kitchen in a dreamy fog. Lee’s eyes watered from the sting of onions, but he couldn’t smell them at all. He could sense the heat of the steam, the wetness and greasiness in the air from the evaporated vegetable water and cooking oil, but the food itself had no scent. No matter how much Lee tried, he couldn’t recall what it was supposed to smell like.
Hina stood at the stove in front of a Dutch oven, sautéing carrots, potatoes, and onions that Lee had helped peel and chop. She was standing so close to the stain Lee had found that afternoon, yet was completely oblivious to its importance. Lee had leaned a broom against the thin strip of wall, hoping it would help purge the stain from his mind. But still, whenever he entered the kitchen, his gaze gravitated toward it.
Hina picked up a plate of browned beef chunks and scraped them into the Dutch oven, then poured in a few cups of water. She placed the lid on top and turned around, pausing as she realized Lee was behind her. Lee got that from his mother—the ability to not exist for a while, to make people forget he was even there.
“Hungry?” Hina said, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel.
Lee wasn’t hungry, not really. He’d stopped being hungry ever since he tasted James’s blood on his lips. But he had to eat, or the sedatives would sear holes into his stomach. He nodded.
“The curry will be another hour,” Hina said, “but I made some spinach salad.”
She moved to the fridge and started scooping greens into a bowl before Lee could object. He took a bite and told her it was good even though it tasted like TV static, then finished the bowl to make sure she believed him.
Hina had always been a good cook, so Lee knew the lack of taste wasn’t due to her food. When she first started dating Lee’s father, she’d tried to win Lee over with her impressive breakfast spreads of grilled river fish, simmered lotus root, jelly yam cake, bamboo shoots, and rolled sweet omelets cut into the shapes of bears. But Lee wasn’t someone who needed to be won over. He wasn’t the kind of kid who antagonized his dad’s new girlfriends out of loyalty to his mom. He was a good boy, just like his dad said.
He understood, objectively, that some people didn’t like the feeling of their mothers being replaced. But after the second girlfriend, Lee never felt that his mother was being replaced as much as his father was entertaining houseguests—his father never touched his new girlfriends in front of Lee. He hardly even spoke to them, like they were no more than Christmas tinsel that he’d tossed up on the mantel for decoration.
First there was Ai, the waitress who wore green Converse and ate cheese puffs with chopsticks all day. Then there was Megumi, the pharmacist with little gems stuck to her gel nails that looked like talons in the light. Then there was Kaori, who liked to watch anime with Lee on Saturdays while eating Froot Loops. All of them were Japanese, because his father was an EastAsian Studies professor who specialized in Japanese history and tended to run into a lot of women in that line of work. All of them were perfectly nice people who bought Lee birthday presents and drove him to school—autumn leaves in pleasant shades of red before they fell to the ground.
Kaori didn’t speak much English, so Lee had found himself learning Japanese in middle school just so he wouldn’t have to pantomime what he wanted for lunch. Lee had thought nothing of it until one day, Lee was talking to Kaori over dinner and he realized from his father’s pinched expression that he didn’t know what they were saying. Lee had become better at Japanese than him. As a child, he always wondered how his father spent years dating women he could barely even talk to. Perhaps he wanted someone totally unlike Lee’s mother, who had never really stopped talking until the day she was crammed into a suitcase. Maybe his father had simply run out of words to say.
But Hina was different.
The other girlfriends had been polite, but they all sat perfectly straight and still in Lee’s presence, like he was a delicate soufflé that would collapse if they spoke too loudly. They wanted Lee to like them, but only because they wanted Lee’s father to like them. So they made him food and did carpool duty without complaint, but they were always watching Lee in the rearview mirror, as if they expected him to grow horns and fangs and take a bite out of their throats. Lee didn’t blame them—as a teenager he looked more like a troll trapped in a well than someone who could be related to his All-American Dream of a father. He was too pale and sharp and thin, his eyes too hungry—things his father had liked in an adult woman, but these same things made people uneasy when it was a teenage boy.
But Hina never jumped when she turned and saw him in a doorway, never flinched at the coldness of his skin, never shrank away from the shadows in his eyes. She brought him prettyengraved silverware from yard sales and bright cuts of sea glass and old marbles, like she thought he was some sort of corvid drawn to shiny things. At first, Lee had pretended not to like her presents because he knew his father would find it strange. But Hina never stopped, only smiled knowingly as she slipped him more presents wrapped in tissue paper. Lee kept them all in a glass jar that he set on his window in the house in New Jersey. He watched the sharp edges capture the starlight and wondered how Hina had known it was exactly what he wanted when Lee himself hadn’t even known.
“Want to hear a ghost story?” Hina said when Lee finished his spinach.
“Yes,” Lee said instantly. Hina knew—like she knew all things—exactly what he wanted.
Lee ate ghost stories like food. When he was twelve, at a sleepover with the rest of his soccer team, they told ghost stories that only Lee knew were true. When the boys locked him in the basement, he screamed and screamed until someone’s mom came to let him out, and even then, he wouldn’t stop screaming until his father came and carried him away.It was just a joke, the other kids said. But it wasn’t.
Lee wanted to believe in ghosts the way some people wanted to believe in God. Because sometimes, at night, he heard his mother’s voice inside his suitcase, muffled through layers of plastic and packing cubes.
