She made Lee go back inside to wash his hands with her, then grabbed her sun hat. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.
“Where?” Lee said.
“Take a nap, Lee,” his mother said instead of answering. “When you wake up, we’ll get dinner, okay?”
She knew he was still tired from jet lag, and she knew if she told him where she was going, he’d want to come because something about watching her leave still made him sad. Twelve was too old to miss your parents, and maybe Lee’s parents had made a mistake by having an only child, maybe they’d made him too soft and dependent—at least, that was what Lee’s father had said.
Lee smiled—the last time he would smile at his mom, the last time she would smile back at him—and then she stepped out the door into the sunlight.
Lee liked to think that his mother had died in that moment, not what came after. That she stepped into the sun and it drank up her soul, and the woman who walked out of the open hotel room door was someone else entirely. After all, Lee had never seen that woman’s face.
But this face—the last time she had looked at him, maybe the last time she existed—was hanging up on Sen’s wall.
Lee held the paper in his hands. It felt more like his mother than any photograph—something about photos seemed to flatten his mother’s beauty. But somehow, stripped of colors, rendered only in wispy brushstrokes, the painting showed the sharpness in his mother’s eyes; the warm kindling of her smile; the way she could fade into the background when she didn’t want to be seen, then reappear in vivid lines.
“Why did you paint this?” Lee said, carefully ironing out any emotion from his words. He knew that when something mattered to him, other people could taste it in his words. If Sen saw even a hint of what he was feeling right now, she would drown.
Sen lingered a careful distance away, and Lee knew he’d already spoken too harshly.
“Her face comes to me when I meditate,” Sen said. “Sometimes, when my mind feels very dark, I see her in the shadows. She’s standing on a beach, and the ocean is closing in around her, like—”
“Like what we saw in the town today?” Lee whispered, holding his breath until Sen nodded.
He’d thought it would be difficult to traverse the land of the dead and find his mother, but Sen had already found her. He should have wondered why and how, but in that moment, with his mother’s last smile in his hands, he only wanted to find her.
“Have you spoken to her?” Lee said, turning to Sen, who still looked afraid to approach him.
Sen shook her head. “She tries to speak to me, though.”
“Tries?”
Sen shifted from foot to foot, considering her words. “Her lips move, but I can’t hear her voice.”
Lee pictured his mother on one side of a glass wall, pounding her fists against it, screaming for help to a girl who couldn’t hear.
Sen’s gaze softened, and Lee realized that she expected him to be sad. She didn’t understand that when the police had first said the wordshuman trafficking, when he’d looked up what that really meant, he’d hoped his mother was dead. And now, brighter than the sting of knowing she had died, the knowledge that he might see her again bloomed warm in his chest.Deadwas not the same asgone; Lee knew that now.
“Can you show me?” he asked, each word placed with exquisite care, straining hard to make it a question and not a command.Take me to her, his mind screamed. Just as loud, his mother’s voice rose in his ears, over the squealing of suitcase fabric, jingling zippers:Let me out, Lee.
“Show you?” Sen echoed uneasily.
“You said you saw her on the beach,” Lee said, trying his best not to sound impatient. “The beach we saw when we touched. So...” He held out his hand, but Sen only stared at it.
“Are you sure that’s safe?” she said. “Are you sure it’s really her? Spirits can play tricks on you.”
“If they wanted to trick me, they would have come to me and not you,” Lee said, gritting his teeth at the impatience thathe knew was bleeding through his words. “She must be able to touch you because you’re dead and I’m not.”
Sen frowned. “I’m not dead yet.”
“You’ve been dead for one hundred and forty-nine years!” Lee said, far too loud for this time of night, but he didn’t care. He was so close, and Sen would deny himnow?
Sen clenched her jaw, her expression hardening, and that was how Lee knew he’d pushed too far. He took a steadying breath, looking up at the ceiling and away from the painting to ground himself.
“You are not the first ghost I’ve seen,” he said, unable to look at her. “Every night, my mother screams for my help. I need to know where she is, and who hurt her.”
Lee had never spoken this out loud to anyone before. He felt like he was showing Sen the map of his soul. And yet, infuriatingly, she remained unmoved.
“And if you find out, then what?” Sen said, her expression stern.
