Chapter Twelve Lee
Last summer, Lee went back to the island that had devoured his mother.
He remembered the hotel room number because it had appeared on all the police reports. So, the year before he went to college,
when he was eighteen and his father couldn’t stop him, he flew to Cambodia and stayed in the same hotel room and waited for
a sign.
The first night, he left the sliding door open.
He couldn’t explain to himself exactly why he did this, only that he knew he had to. The door had been open on the most important
day, so it had to be open now, like a ritual, or a homecoming.
Part of him thought his mom might simply walk back through the door, that last time he’d simply closed the door too soon and
his mom hadn’t been able to return. She’d come back after Lee and his father had flown home, had scratched and pounded at
the glass, but hadn’t been able to come back inside and dry off from her swim.
A small, secret part of Lee hoped that whoever—or whatever—had taken his mother would come back.
It had been six years, and both humans and entities would have moved on, Lee suspected. But maybe this was a special door and opening it was like opening a secret mouth that screamed into the forest, that called for the darkness to return and eat and eat and eat.
Lee wouldn’t have minded if they’d taken him too. He knew a human trafficking ring probably wanted young women and would leave
him alone, but he would let them drag him to their lair and harvest his organs because then at least he would know how it
felt inside the suitcase.
But when he arrived at the room, everything was wrong.
Six years ago, the walls had been white, like eggshells. Lee remembered this clearly. But now, the walls were beige. He couldn’t
explain why this deeply upset him, but he could hardly sit still, as if the color of the walls was screaming its wrongness
at him all night. He pushed the bed to the side and scratched at the wall with his fingernails until he could see the white
beneath. He needed to know for certain that it had been real, that he had not misremembered this one specific thing. And there
it was—the soft milky flesh just beneath the tan skin. The truth.
With that problem solved, Lee turned to his luggage.
Lee had bought an extra suitcase when he arrived in Phnom Pen, large and black with a loud zipper and bulky pockets on the
outside. He left it on the patio, just beyond the open porch door of his hotel room. He thought of it like a nest, a womb,
somewhere warm and safe that his mother would crawl back into.
He considered sealing himself inside and waiting to see who would take him. If they came for him, he would be quiet, wouldn’t
say a word as they rolled him away. But no, his place was here—on the bed, sleeping, just like before. If his mom was trapped
in his dreams, this was the only way she would come out.
He lay on the left side of the bed, just as he had back then.
He’d left space for his mom when she came back from her walk, hoping she’d lie down next to him.
Her shampoo smelled like lemons and he liked to press his nose up against her hair and fall asleep in a forest of lemon trees.
Maybe this time, she would come back and lie down next to him.
Darkness fell, and the sliding glass door fogged up as the night grew cool.
Lee rose from his sacred place on the bed and wrote a message with his finger on the glass.
Where are you?
Lee had sensed back then that the door was of great importance. It was not just a piece of glass. It might have been the last
thing his mother touched. Lee could sense traces of her there, because he’d always known when she was close. His mother was
static electricity before a lightning storm, and she buzzed across his skin.
Just like the first time, he fell asleep.
He heard her screams but did not wake, just as it happened every night. Her voice was never sharp enough to tear him from
sleep. The fabric of the suitcase muffled her voice, and the zipper jingled as it rattled, and the suitcase thunk thunk thunked unevenly over the porch because of the broken wheel. The seams of the suitcase groaned as fingers scratched at the vinyl
interior.
But, like always, the suitcase remained tightly closed, and Lee did not wake.
In the morning, Lee opened the suitcase and found a sea turtle.
It had blood in its nose and cracks in its shell.
Its ancient flesh had turned papery and it smelled like rotting fish.
It had probably just made it to Lee’s patio and thought the suitcase was a warm place to die in private, and Lee couldn’t even blame it because he’d had the same thought.
He rolled the suitcase out to the shore and dumped the turtle into the water, where it floated out to sea on its back and the foamy water devoured it.
He’d forgotten to check if his message had been answered, but he was too late—the morning had wiped the glass door clean,
and if there had ever been an answer, it was gone now.
Lee left the door open when he checked out in the morning. He knew housekeeping would close it eventually, but as he left
the room, he couldn’t bear to shut it.
He put his hand on the doorknob to the hallway, suitcase in the other hand, and closed his eyes.
“I’m leaving now, Mom,” he whispered. “Last chance.”
He looked over his shoulder at the open door.
There was white sand, and swaying shadows of trees, and the dark ocean in the distance. But his mom did not return.
That was how Lee knew, now, in the house behind the sword ferns, that a location wasn’t enough to call a ghost forward. If
all it took was the same place and strong desire, then Lee’s mother would have come to him then. She loved him, and he’d given
her more than enough to work with. Which meant there was some other barrier between them that the girl had somehow managed
to shatter.
Deep in his rib cage, another thought scratched at him.
Why her and not James?
If Lee were to be haunted by anyone, it should have been James. He would have accepted that. He deserved it. But instead of
a simple and clean haunting, Lee got another puzzle.
He lay in bed and tried to remember, for the hundredth time, what James had done wrong. But there was only the ceiling, and
the open door with no one in it, and the scent of cleaning chemicals, and the looming shadow of his closet.
It was nearing dinnertime, but Lee couldn’t hear Hina anywhere in the house. Normally, she would have started cooking by now. Lee didn’t mind making his own dinner—he couldn’t taste anyway, so his cooking skills didn’t matter—but his father didn’t eat if Hina didn’t cook.
Lee peered out the window, confirming that Hina’s car was still in the driveway, which meant she was somewhere in the house.
He checked the garden and shed—maybe Hina had lost track of time while gardening?—but she wasn’t outside.
Instead, there were two thin, parallel lines in the dirt, carving a path from the northern yard out toward the shore.
Against his will, Lee pictured Hina in a suitcase. She was smaller than his mother and could probably fit in a carry-on if
her pelvis was broken. Lee was walking before he realized what he was doing, following the scarred path out to the sea.
He found Hina sitting on the sand. The tracks were not suitcase tracks at all, but the wheels of a small cooler that Hina
had dragged behind her. Inside, there were some scattered ice packs and a few bottles of Ramune. Hina seemed not to notice
Lee’s approach, staring transfixed out at the ocean.
“Hina?” Lee called.
She turned around at once, eyes wide, then she smiled and gestured for him to join her.
Lee sat down stiffly in the sand. It was softer than he’d expected and seemed to breathe him in, cradling the base of his
spine. The sea rushed up to greet him, the cold water kissing his toes before rolling back into the foamy brine.
“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” Hina said, still staring toward the horizon.
“It’s...” Lee trailed off, searching for the right word. He liked how small the ocean made him feel, like it could devour
him and all his problems in a single gulp. Nothing mattered in the face of the endless churning sea. It was important, all-consuming,
all-devouring. It might have been beautiful, but Lee had never been good at discerning beauty.
“It’s everything,” Hina finished for him, because she always knew what he meant.
Lee nodded, hugging his knees to his chest.
“When I look at the ocean, I don’t feel alone,” Hina said. “It’s not just water, you know. The sea is alive, just like you
and I.”
“You feel alone?” Lee said, turning to face Hina.
Hina hummed in thought, digging her toes into the sand. “Not so much these days,” she said. “But before I met your father,
I’d been alone for a very long time.”
Lee tried to picture Hina alone but couldn’t quite fathom it. She’d always seemed like a constellation tethered to other stars,
whether it was Lee’s father or her parents or Lee himself. Her light drew other people in.
“I’m glad you’re here now,” Lee said. He didn’t know how he would have gone to college if Hina hadn’t been there to take care
of his father.
Hina smiled. “For as long as you’ll have me,” she said. Then she rose to her feet and stretched. “It’s about time for dinner,
isn’t it?” she said. “How does seafood fried udon sound?”
Lee smiled, because he knew that was the right answer, even though he couldn’t remember how food was supposed to taste. “You
should sit here longer if you want to,” Lee said. “I didn’t mean to drag you away.”
Hina shook her head. “I was going to go soon anyway. The water is retreating, see?” She pointed to the ocean, which had lapped
at their feet when Lee sat down but was now a few feet away. “Low tide comes in fast. The sea runs away every morning and
night. I think it’s had enough of me.”
Hina laughed at her joke, but Lee was too busy staring at the water to respond. He imagined the sea peeling back like a blanket,
stripping away the water all the way to the horizon, showing the pale sand and all its secrets. “How far out does the tide
go?” he asked.
“Too far,” Hina said. “You don’t want to be out here for low tide, Lee, trust me.”
He tore his gaze from the horizon, turning to her. “Why not?”
“The sea retreats quickly, but it also returns quickly,” she said. “You could find yourself miles out at sea, too tired to
swim back.”
“You could sit on the rocks,” Lee said, glancing at the rock formation behind them. “The sea doesn’t reach that far even at
high tide.”
“ No ,” Hina said. A breeze tore across the shore, her hair fluttering around her face, sand stinging Lee’s eyes. As clouds rolled
overhead, Hina’s shadow grew gray and faint, melting into the sand.
“You need to be home at low tide,” she said. “It’s dangerous out here, Lee. People drown. Your mother might have drowned.”
Lee tensed, fingers curling in the sand. The wind rose in pitch, a cloud of white sand blurring the space between them.
“My mother didn’t drown,” Lee said. He knew this to be true, no matter how much the police had tried to argue otherwise.
Once they learned about his mom’s history, they argued that she’d probably hallucinated and walked off into the sea, or thrown
herself off a cliff, or cuddled up with a panther, or met another end of her own making, her own fault.
But Lee’s mother was not crazy. Even in her worst moments, she’d never tried to leave Lee behind.
The wind on the beach died down, a gray silence falling over the shore.
“You wouldn’t want to worry your father, with his heart condition,” Hina said quietly. “That’s all I mean.”
Lee unclenched his jaw, then his fists. “Right,” he said quietly. “Of course.” He rose to his feet and headed back to the
house, not waiting for Hina to follow.
He hid in his own room and shut the door, then sat on his futon. His empty suitcase glared from the corner as if mocking him.
Let me out, Lee.
Lee swallowed and lay down in bed as he heard Hina return and start to prepare dinner. That night, he ate across from his
father in silence, clenching his teeth against the incessant ticking of his broken watch, and said nothing at all to Hina,
who stared mournfully into her soup.
When he returned to his room, light illuminated the closet. Shadows carved the shape of a young woman in darkness on the other
side.
Finally , Lee thought as the door slid open and the moonlight illuminated the glint of a sharpened sword.