Lee swallowed, unsure how to respond. He looked back at the house, tried to imagine a warrior living inside, sharpening his sword where his father sat drinking his coffee.
“Come on,” Hina said, turning back toward the house. “It’s too hot out here.”
She headed back inside, waving for Lee to follow but not looking to make sure—Lee always followed her; she knew that.
But this time, he lingered by the well for a moment longer. Because of the sedatives, it took him several beats to realize what was wrong with the scene.
Hina slid open the back door, slipped on her house shoesand left her outdoor shoes on the porch, then disappeared behind the paper doors.
Behind her, in the bright sunlight, she had not even a trace of a shadow.
Every night since the murder, Lee Turner died at 11:44 p.m.
He tried to open his eyes but found that they didn’t exist, that his whole body was a coffin nailed shut and he couldn’t move, or breathe, or see. He could only feel the cold dirt pressing in on all sides, the maggots and beetles and ants gnawing tiny holes in him that yawned wider and wider until his whole body was a gaping scream. Nausea spun through him but stayed trapped inside as he sank deeper into the earth, far from any semblance of light.This is your penance, he thought.This is the great unknown void that terrifies soldiers and serial killers and sinners. You can deliver death to others, but in the end, it will always call you home.
As always, when he found his eyes and managed to open them, he started to drink in the details of hell.
This hell had open ceilings veiled by cobwebs, screaming cicadas just beyond the walls, damp sheets that clung to him and spilled onto sticky tatami mats.
Then he realized this was not hell at all. Not yet. It was the house behind the sword ferns.
Lee tossed off the sweat-soaked sheets and sat up, tearing off his T-shirt when he realized it was soaked through as well. He checked his cell phone, which said 11:44.
Lee had returned to his dorm room at 11:44, the night it happened. He remembered because the first thing he’d done was look up bus schedules on his laptop, his fingers stinging from all the bleach. The next airport shuttle left at midnight—he would never make it.
He packed his bags and decided to get an Uber, because if hesat still in his dorm and waited for morning, he would peel his own skin off, yank his teeth out, anything to escape the awful crushing feeling inside of him. He’d dragged his suitcase through the streets at night so the driver wouldn’t remember picking up anyone from campus, the rumble of wheels loud enough to drown out the sound of scratching, fingernails on plastic, fingernails on the inside of his brain. When he arrived at the station, it was somehow still 11:44.
He should have felt guilty.
He knew he should have, and that the lack of guilt should have scared him.
But Lee knew many truths about not just the world, but about himself. He knew, for instance, that even when the other boys in sixth grade had shoved him into a school bathroom, torn his clothes off and left him nothing but a pinkSleeping Beautydress to wear, he had felt angry but not violent. And after his mom disappeared, when other boys had seen the story on the news and tossed him dollar bills, saying that was probably what other men were paying to fuck his mom and could they have a turn? Even then, Lee had not tried to hurt them. Maybe it was because he knew he would lose, or because his father had never so much as raised his voice much less his fists. Lee’s anger always burned through his blood and gnawed at his bones and felt like it would eathimalive, but no one else.
That was how he knew James Baldridge had done something terrible.
The only way Lee Turner would have killed someone was if they deserved it.
The fact that there was a gaping void in his memories bothered him far less than not knowing what James had done to him. After all, there were many logical explanations for memory loss—it was a defense mechanism, something a traumatized brain could default to. It could also have been the Ativan, which waslinked to memory loss. To stave off addiction, Lee always tried not to take it more than once a week, but he’d been taking it for a long time, so it might have started to rust his brain regardless. He could also have a concussion, since he knew symptoms could be mild and have a delayed onset. There were a thousand reasons for the missing moments when he killed James, but not a single reason why he would have done it in the first place.
Maybe that was why Lee Turner did not feel like a murderer.
It was what other people would think of him if they knew. But when he looked at his hands, they didn’t look like a murderer’s hands. When he tied his shoes, they didn’t look like the shoes of a murderer. When he drank his coffee, he didn’t feel like he was drinking a murderer’s coffee.
Lee had read that when good people killed, even in self-defense or by accident, they were devastated by the thought of ending another’s life. What did that make Lee, who felt nothing at all? He did not crave the power of ending another’s life, but nor did it repel him, the concept as bland as every bite of food he choked down these days. People lived and died; sometimes they fell and sometimes they were pushed; sometimes they passed away and sometimes they were killed. The end result was the same.
He glanced to the darkest part of his room—the corner by the closet, where his suitcase lay on its side. Lee knew if he listened, he would hear it—nails on plastic, a base instinct to dig and claw and scrape even though it would never save you.Let me out, Lee.
The door to his room slid open. Lee tensed, but it was only his father, peering into his room.
His father seemed startled to see Lee awake. He opened his mouth, then must have thought better of his words, because he only sat down on the tatami mat beside Lee’s futon.
“Do you mind if I sleep here tonight?” he asked, looking at the sheets instead of Lee.
Lee’s mind turned a soft shade of gray. His dad hadn’t asked to do this since Lee was twelve, when his mother had disappeared. He should have been sleeping next to Hina, but clearly something was wrong—his father wasn’t one to be particularly emotional. Maybe Lee’s return had worried him, or maybe Lee had worried Hina and she’d said something.
“Sure,” Lee said.
His father curled up on his side, facing away from Lee. He took a deep breath, then let it out, long and slow and sad.
