The lock of black hair he’d cut was whole and real once more, soft and prickly in his palm. He turned his pocket inside out, emptied it onto his desk, and shuffled the strands back together into something resembling a lock of hair instead of a pile.
Why had it changed back? Lee could think of two likely variables: Time had passed since he’d cut the hair, and he was in a different location.
He set half the hair aside, then thought better of leaving it out in the open and tucked it into his drawer instead. The last thing he needed was Sen seeing her own hair on his nightstand. He would monitor that half as time passed.
As for location...
Lee walked into the hallway, but the hair remained the same. His room was not the cause, then.
He walked out the front door—slowly, so the hair wouldn’t blow away. He didn’t know how far he intended to retrace their steps into town—surely his father would hate to see him walking around with nothing but a handful of hair—but he didn’t have to go far. As soon as he crossed through the front gate and stepped beyond the property line, the hair turned back to ash.
A wind rushed by, stirring the ashes into the sky. Lee watched them float away and couldn’t decide if that had answered his question or just given him yet another puzzle.
The house was the difference.
There was something fundamentally different about the house behind the sword ferns and the hotel room in Cambodia, but Lee still didn’t know what that difference was. He hoped he got the chance to find out.
He wiped the ashes from his palms, then returned to his room, opened his laptop, and reviewed his spreadsheet. Still, he couldn’t figure out the secrets of the door. The house clearly had some impact on Sen’s hair, but the door was always in the house and only sometimes open. Lee lay back in bed with a sigh.
Iwasaki Sen, the archivist had said.
That wasn’t the name Sen had given him, and he wondered why. His gaze darted to the door, waiting for it to light up, for Sen to tear through in anger at him for unpeeling her secrets. But the door remained dark and silent. It was the afternoon, and he’d never seen the door between their worlds light up midday.
It took Lee about twenty minutes to find out exactly how the Iwasaki family had died.
When he finished reading, he closed his laptop and sat alone in the dark.
Lee did not understand the feeling that bloomed in his chest, like mold devouring a piece of rotten meat. He could see it now, so vividly—Sen lying dead on the floor, her face papery white, her eyes bloodshot and unseeing. The feeling made his ears ring, his fingertips numb. He had known that Sen was dead, but not like this.
He looked toward the door and imagined the soft edges of her silhouette. Even though her eyes were sharp like Lee’s, her shadow was gentle. Lee wanted to hold that shadow version of Sen, the one he was allowed to touch.
He decided he would not tell her how she died.
He told himself it was out of kindness, that it would be over for her quickly and there was no point in scaring her. He told himself it was because she was in denial and wouldn’t have believed him anyway. If he’d said the words out loud, maybe he would have heard the lie in them. Lee Turner was very good at lying to everyone but himself.
Lee never silenced his phone at night because nobody ever called him.
No one from high school had said a word to him since graduation, and no one at NYU had his number. For Lee, people existed in their own separate worlds that never intersected: home, high school, college. No one wanted to talk to Lee even when he was in front of them, and they certainly didn’t want to think of him when he was far away. Now, in this strange, slow life in Kagoshima, no one needed to know where he was except Hina and his father.
But the night after he brought Sen to town hall, when the moonlight fell cool across his face and darkness pooled across the tatami mats, someone, somewhere, had something to say to him.
He rolled over, tapped the screen of his phone, and squinted as the worst words he had ever seen filled the screen.
From:JAMES BALDRIDGE
You ok man? Haven’t seen you in a few days
“You okay?” James asked, setting a take-out cup on the table.
Lee looked up, less confused about the cup than the fact that he’d somehow missed the sound of the door unlocking, of James calling his name long enough without a response to be concerned. Luckily, Lee had his astronomy textbook open, so it looked as if he’d been reading rather than staring deeper and deeper into his own mind. He’d only moved in a week ago, so James hadn’t seen anything too strange yet.
James was still standing in front of the table, smiling.
“Is this... for me?” Lee guessed. He’d guessed wrong before and taken a bite out of someone else’s sandwich.
“Yeah,” James said. “Do you like coffee?”
“No,” Lee said, but he picked it up and took a sip anyway. When the smile dropped off James’s face, Lee realized he probably shouldn’t have said that. But James had bought it for him, so he knew he was supposed to drink it. “Thank you,” he said belatedly. “Why did you get me this?”
