Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lee
The sea did not return.
The morning after Hina left, Lee went for a walk on the shore. He imagined Hina coming back to tell him it was dangerous, that he would drown. But no matter how far he walked, he couldn’t find the sea. His feet bled from barnacles and cracked shells and sea glass, but he found only parched sand, dead fish, and the scars of waves on the sand.
He walked and walked, determined to never return home, for no one would miss him anyway. But after he’d walked for what felt like years across the empty sea, he found himself back at the house behind the sword ferns.
Once, the house had felt like it had a heartbeat. Now it only felt like a piece of driftwood chewed through with rot. The flowers surrounding the house had wilted overnight, now a fetid mess of damp weeds. The porch groaned as Lee walked across it, the floorboards spongier than they’d been just the day before, as if the house had finally realized its age.
Lee felt as though he was rotting along with it.
It was like a hole had been punched straight through his chest and the wind was rushing through him. He’d made a mistakethat had cost him Sen, and now he was alone. It felt like a homecoming in some ways, the safe nothingness where he’d lived so much of his life. But worse than his own situation was the knowledge of what would come for Sen.
He returned to his room and sat in front of his closet door, pressing one hand to the paper, willing Sen to return but knowing she never would. With the perpetual low tide, the door should have been open even in the afternoon. But when Lee tugged at the door to check, it wouldn’t open, as if Sen had somehow locked it from the other side. She was truly finished with him, and he couldn’t even blame her.
He looked out the Sometimes Window where he’d first seen Sen and he tried to conjure her image again, but he could already feel her face slipping from his memory. The sun shifted beyond the ferns, and Lee realized that Hina’s car was parked in the driveway.
He imagined Hina there so vividly that he almost smelled the salted salmon she always cooked for breakfast, heard the sounds of steam and crackling oil and plates clinking against the wooden table.
He rushed to her room and threw open the door.
Pale shadows fell over the tightly made bed, the empty wardrobe with its doors hanging open, the small desk cleared of Hina’s laptop and teacups.
“Hina?” Lee called, in case she was in the bathroom, but no one answered.
He looked in the gardening shed, then walked around the garden, but there was no sign of Hina. Finally, he knocked on his father’s office door.
After a moment, footsteps drew closer and his father slid open the door. He stood in the doorway, his eyes big and green behind his reading glasses.
“Is Hina still here?” Lee said.
Lee could tell from the tightness in his father’s lips that he hadn’t liked the question. “No,” he said. “I don’t know where she is. Probably her parents’ house.”
“Her car is back,” Lee said. He could see it from the window, gathering pollen in the driveway. “Didn’t she take it with her?”
“She took her keys,” his father said, frowning. “Maybe she was too angry to drive and decided to walk? I don’t know what to tell you, Lee.”
“Okay,” Lee said palely, only because he knew his father didn’t want to continue the conversation. He pulled out his phone and texted Hina as his father shut the door to his office, but the message wouldn’t go through.
Lee pulled open the back door and sat on the porch, staring at the well where Hina had told him the story of Okiku. He could see the two of them there, peering down the abyss. Even then, Lee had known ghosts were real, but he’d never thought they would be what drove Hina away.
The memory faded, and pollen blew down from the trees, and the ghost of Hina vanished in the wind. His father’s girlfriends came and went with the seasons, and even though Hina was Lee’s favorite, he hadn’t truly thought her absence would matter. His own mother was gone, and surely nothing could feel worse than that. Surely his heart was impenetrable at this point, and no goodbye could ever hurt so much. He had only known Hina for a year.
But now, in this world with only his father and no Hina or Sen, Lee felt like he was stranded on a strange island where no one spoke his language. He had become a ghost, for there was no one left who saw him.
That was when he noticed it: two thin, parallel lines in the dirt, twisting and winding off into the forest. Lee rose to his feet and followed their path, careful not to step on them.
A memory rose to the surface of his mind—this same twisting path carved into sand. He had followed it then too, on and on and on into the forest, where the sand turned dark.
But here, now, the path ended at the edge of the forest, indecipherable in the dirt.
This isn’t right, Lee thought, clenching his fists. It wasn’t right then, and certainly not now. A piece was missing.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He didn’t want to see what it said, but Lee Turner had to find the truth, no matter how much it scared him.
