Chapter Two Lee
Steam rose from Hina’s pan, casting the whole kitchen in a dreamy fog. Lee’s eyes watered from the sting of onions, but he
couldn’t smell them at all. He could sense the heat of the steam, the wetness and greasiness in the air from the evaporated
vegetable water and cooking oil, but the food itself had no scent. No matter how much Lee tried, he couldn’t recall what it
was supposed to smell like.
Hina stood at the stove in front of a Dutch oven, sautéing carrots, potatoes, and onions that Lee had helped peel and chop.
She was standing so close to the stain Lee had found that afternoon, yet was completely oblivious to its importance. Lee had
leaned a broom against the thin strip of wall, hoping it would help purge the stain from his mind. But still, whenever he
entered the kitchen, his gaze gravitated toward it.
Hina picked up a plate of browned beef chunks and scraped them into the Dutch oven, then poured in a few cups of water. She
placed the lid on top and turned around, pausing as she realized Lee was behind her. Lee got that from his mother—the ability
to not exist for a while, to make people forget he was even there.
“Hungry?” Hina said, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel.
Lee wasn’t hungry, not really. He’d stopped being hungry ever since he tasted James’s blood on his lips. But he had to eat,
or the sedatives would sear holes into his stomach. He nodded.
“The curry will be another hour,” Hina said, “but I made some spinach salad.”
She moved to the fridge and started scooping greens into a bowl before Lee could object. He took a bite and told her it was
good even though it tasted like TV static, then finished the bowl to make sure she believed him.
Hina had always been a good cook, so Lee knew the lack of taste wasn’t due to her food. When she first started dating Lee’s
father, she’d tried to win Lee over with her impressive breakfast spreads of grilled river fish, simmered lotus root, jelly
yam cake, bamboo shoots, and rolled sweet omelets cut into the shapes of bears. But Lee wasn’t someone who needed to be won
over. He wasn’t the kind of kid who antagonized his dad’s new girlfriends out of loyalty to his mom. He was a good boy, just
like his dad said.
He understood, objectively, that some people didn’t like the feeling of their mothers being replaced. But after the second
girlfriend, Lee never felt that his mother was being replaced as much as his father was entertaining houseguests—his father
never touched his new girlfriends in front of Lee. He hardly even spoke to them, like they were no more than Christmas tinsel
that he’d tossed up on the mantel for decoration.
First there was Ai, the waitress who wore green Converse and ate cheese puffs with chopsticks all day.
Then there was Megumi, the pharmacist with little gems stuck to her gel nails that looked like talons in the light.
Then there was Kaori, who liked to watch anime with Lee on Saturdays while eating Froot Loops.
All of them were Japanese, because his father was an East Asian Studies professor who specialized in Japanese history and tended to run into a lot of women in that line of work.
All of them were perfectly nice people who bought Lee birthday presents and drove him to school—autumn leaves in pleasant shades of red before they fell to the ground.
Kaori didn’t speak much English, so Lee had found himself learning Japanese in middle school just so he wouldn’t have to pantomime
what he wanted for lunch. Lee had thought nothing of it until one day, Lee was talking to Kaori over dinner and he realized
from his father’s pinched expression that he didn’t know what they were saying. Lee had become better at Japanese than him.
As a child, he always wondered how his father spent years dating women he could barely even talk to. Perhaps he wanted someone
totally unlike Lee’s mother, who had never really stopped talking until the day she was crammed into a suitcase. Maybe his
father had simply run out of words to say.
But Hina was different.
The other girlfriends had been polite, but they all sat perfectly straight and still in Lee’s presence, like he was a delicate
soufflé that would collapse if they spoke too loudly. They wanted Lee to like them, but only because they wanted Lee’s father
to like them. So they made him food and did carpool duty without complaint, but they were always watching Lee in the rearview
mirror, as if they expected him to grow horns and fangs and take a bite out of their throats. Lee didn’t blame them—as a teenager
he looked more like a troll trapped in a well than someone who could be related to his All-American Dream of a father. He
was too pale and sharp and thin, his eyes too hungry—things his father had liked in an adult woman, but these same things
made people uneasy when it was a teenage boy.
But Hina never jumped when she turned and saw him in a doorway, never flinched at the coldness of his skin, never shrank away from the shadows in his eyes.
She brought him pretty engraved silverware from yard sales and bright cuts of sea glass and old marbles, like she thought he was some sort of corvid drawn to shiny things.
At first, Lee had pretended not to like her presents because he knew his father would find it strange.
But Hina never stopped, only smiled knowingly as she slipped him more presents wrapped in tissue paper.
Lee kept them all in a glass jar that he set on his window in the house in New Jersey.
He watched the sharp edges capture the starlight and wondered how Hina had known it was exactly what he wanted when Lee himself hadn’t even known.
“Want to hear a ghost story?” Hina said when Lee finished his spinach.
“Yes,” Lee said instantly. Hina knew—like she knew all things—exactly what he wanted.
Lee ate ghost stories like food. When he was twelve, at a sleepover with the rest of his soccer team, they told ghost stories
that only Lee knew were true. When the boys locked him in the basement, he screamed and screamed until someone’s mom came
to let him out, and even then, he wouldn’t stop screaming until his father came and carried him away. It was just a joke , the other kids said. But it wasn’t.
Lee wanted to believe in ghosts the way some people wanted to believe in God. Because sometimes, at night, he heard his mother’s
voice inside his suitcase, muffled through layers of plastic and packing cubes.
Let me out, Lee , she said.
His mother had loved telling him ghost stories too. Like she was preparing him, knowing she would become one. Lee had to believe
in ghosts, because otherwise, he’d lost his mind.
Hina moved easily through the house, and Lee followed behind her, nearly smacking his head on the low ceiling.
Some parts of the ceiling had wood panels that hung strangely low, so Lee had to duck whenever he stepped into the hall.
Lee knew he was probably taller than the average Japanese man, but he wasn’t even six feet tall, so the low ceilings felt like an intentional slight.
Hina laughed at him, toeing her house shoes off at the door.
“I’m too tall for Japan,” Lee said, grimacing.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Hina said. “This was a samurai house.”
“And samurai...” He struggled to form his question, the sedatives gluing his words together. “They were short?” he managed.
Hina shook her head. “The ceilings are low so you can’t raise a sword indoors,” she said, mimicking raising a katana above
her head and striking down. “If you wanted to kill someone by sword, you had to do it outside. Less blood to mop up.”
“Really?” Lee said, running his hand over the polished wood, which he now noticed had thin marks scoring across it. He ran
his finger along the groove. Had someone tried raising a sword here? Had they tried to kill someone?
Lee could picture it now—the glint of plated samurai armor clicking together like dragon scales, the lacquered wood of the
face mask and golden horns on the helmet. Lee had researched samurai in middle school with one of his dad’s girlfriends whose
name he could no longer remember. But the sedatives turned his memory to watercolors, and he couldn’t recall what all the
different parts of the armor were called anymore.
The samurai in his mind raised his blade, but the image dissolved as it struck the low ceiling. Visualization was another
thing the sedatives had taken from him, but it was better that way. He needed to stay grounded in the present, not get lost
in worlds that no one else could see.
“Well, no, the part about cleaning up blood was a joke,” Hina said. “It probably had more to do with not wanting to be decapitated in their sleep.”
“Fair enough,” Lee said, cramming his feet into his sneakers by the door and following Hina outside.
She led Lee to a small stone well at the edge of the yard, just before the forest. The frayed end of a rope hung limp over
the rim. Lee peered down at the watery darkness.
“Tell me the ghost story,” he said.
Hina cleared her throat, then leaned over the well, so that her words echoed as they cascaded down the lightless chasm.
“Once, there was a servant girl named Okiku who worked in a castle,” Hina said. “She was so beautiful that she caught the
attention of a man named Aoyama. But she didn’t love him, so he came up with a plan to make her his bride...”
Lee leaned farther across the well, as did the echo of his reflection in the dark water.
“Aoyama framed Okiku for stealing her master’s plates,” Hina said. “He made her count them again and again, but one was missing,
because Aoyama had stolen it. Okiku would have been executed for theft, but Aoyama offered to protect her if she became his
mistress. But still, she refused him.”
A bead of sweat dripped from Lee’s face and splashed into the shallow water below, his reflection rippling and distorting
in the darkness.