“I don’t know,” Lee said, and for some reason, the words brought tears to his eyes. “I just want the truth.”
“And what comes after the truth?” Sen pressed, crossing her arms.
Lee swallowed again and shook his head. Sen would hear the pain in his voice if he spoke.I don’t know, he wanted to scream, but he knew it would wake up her whole family.All my life, everyone has fed me half-truths and expected me to feel full, and now it’s as if I live in only half a world and at any moment the sidewalk will end and I’ll fall into the darkness.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and turned to Sen. “I want to see my mother,” he said slowly. “Please.”
She didn’t want to help him. Lee could see it in her eyes. There could be a thousand reasons, but in the end, she said noneof them. Lee thought it probably had something to do with the fact that his shirt was still covered in blood from a man she’d disemboweled three inches from his face.
“In your room,” Sen said at last. “I don’t want my father to hear us.”
“My room,” Lee echoed, remembering the disemboweled samurai on the floor. Tentatively, he cracked the door open. Cool moonlight spilled across the clean tatami mats, the unmade futon. Like so many things Lee Turner saw, the blood and carnage had stopped being real.
He let Sen through behind him, then closed the door.
Sen sat down cross-legged with her back against the closet door, as if anchoring herself to her world. Slowly, she held out her hand. Without hesitation, Lee set his hand in hers.
The wind rose around them, a high-pitched whistle that crescendoed into a scream as it tore through the house. The windows and doors flew open, then burst into torn paper and wood frames, sucked into a gray sky. The ground beneath them softened into ashes. Around them, the screaming gray world pulsed, shadows congealing into blurry silhouettes of faceless strangers. Lee tightened his grip on Sen’s hand, afraid the storm would steal her away.
The world began to solidify, a shoreline carving its way across the horizon. Lee winced at the searing white sky, the sharpness of sand and shells beneath his bare feet. In the distance, the black ocean roared and began to rise. He looked around, but there was nothing but this sameness for eternity. Gray and white and black and Sen.
“There,” Sen said.
Lee felt the words through his bones more than he heard them—it felt like all of Sen’s blood was running through him, like their hearts were joined through their hands.
He followed her gaze, and there, on the horizon, a shadowed figure stood by the shore.
“That’s her,” Sen said, squeezing his hand tighter.
Together, they began to walk.
Lee wanted to run, but the sand clung to his feet and dragged him down, warning him not to move forward. The figure in the distance stood static as a painting even as the winds spiraled around them and violent clouds of sand lashed through the air. Lee tried to imagine his mother’s face, but the memory had been bleached away, and all he could see was Sen’s rendition, his mother brought to life with black brushstrokes.
The sand burned his eyes as it flew around them, the screams of the sea rising. Lee clutched Sen’s hand, wondering how a ghost could be so warm, how the heart of a dead girl could beat so strongly.
They drew closer and Lee couldn’t help but rush forward the last few feet, dragging Sen behind him until they reached the shadow.
But as the sands parted and the shadow solidified, it was not a woman at all.
It was a suitcase.
The screaming rose louder in his ears, but now it wasn’t coming from the waves in the distance but from inside the suitcase. Sen asked him a question, but he couldn’t hear it. He imagined, as he always did when he saw suitcases, how a person could fit inside. This particular one was big enough to fit an adult woman in the fetal position, but you might have to saw off her arms first if her shoulders were too wide. The suitcase trembled as if something was trying to break free, the zippers jingling.
It wasn’t even zippered shut. All he had to do was flip the top open.
Let me out, Lee.
Slowly, with his free hand, he opened the suitcase.
It was empty.
Sand spilled into the bag, filling it with white dust. Sen frowned and peered inside, then cast Lee a wary glance. The screaming had stopped, and now the only sounds were the high-pitched wind and the distant crashing of waves.
I’m sorry, Lee wanted to say to Sen. Sorry for bringing her here for nothing, for scaring her, for being as he was. But he couldn’t form the words. His mouth was full of ash and he couldn’t feel his tongue. He tried again and realized too late that he no longer had a mouth at all. His face was sliding through his fingers, soft gray ash stolen by the wind. In a panic, he looked to Sen.
Half of her face was gone. She too had dissolved to ashes that were rapidly eating away at the rest of her body, like maggots gnawing through dead flesh. Lee tried to move, to hold the pieces of her together, but his arms were made of wood and his fingers were made of paper and he was hammered to a stone foundation. He was the house behind the sword ferns, and he was rotting.
He let go of her hand.
