Chapter Fourteen Lee
maggots eat first? Probably the eyes—soft tissues seemed easier to chew. It was almost as if the maggots were Lee’s accomplices,
devouring his sins for him.
He wished he could remember where he’d hidden James, just so he could admire his own intelligence if nothing else. Whatever
he had done with the body, it must have been ingenious, since no one had found it yet.
He felt silly for having worried about getting caught in the first place. He was Lee Turner—of course he could get away with
it. He was smarter than ten cops combined. Even when his brain was filled with watercolors, he could pull off the perfect
crime.
He paused at the thought, his hands slowing as he ground his father’s coffee beans. He felt a smile on his lips and carefully
smoothed it away.
He had killed someone, and even if James had deserved it, it was nothing to celebrate.
He set the coffee grinder down and gripped the edge of the counter and wondered if everyone—his classmates, his teachers, his own father—had been right about him.
He didn’t just look like a monster; he had the heart of one as well.
Just like what they said about his mother.
Lee picked up the coffee grinder and twisted it more vigorously. They were wrong about his mother. They were wrong about him.
“I think it’s done,” Lee’s father said.
Lee tensed up, nearly dropping the grinder. He realized it was now silent as he spun the handle, all the beans transformed
into powder, none of them growling through the blades. He turned to his father, who was sitting on the couch and reading while
he waited for Lee to finish making coffee. It was early morning, and Lee had woken to the sound of his father shuffling around
the kitchen, which was Lee’s cue to make his coffee.
“Just daydreaming,” Lee said. “I need coffee before I can think about the real world.”
“Amen,” his father said, turning back to his book.
Lee finished making the coffees and set them down on the table, then sat with his father, wedging himself onto the side of
the couch, as far as possible from his father’s incessantly loud watch.
His father picked up his coffee, took a long sip, and made an appreciative sound before turning to Lee. “So, what’s her name?”
he asked.
Lee choked on his coffee.
He didn’t have to ask who his father was talking about. The moment his father had seen Sen, Lee had panicked and rambled too
much, and now his father probably thought he was into swordplay.
“Sen,” Lee said, hoping his clipped tone discouraged his father from probing.
“Sen,” his father echoed, nodding as if he approved of her name. “Is she a student?”
Lee couldn’t understand why his father wanted to talk about this.
They never talked about women. But then again, Lee had never had a girlfriend to talk about.
“Not at the moment,” he said. And then, sensing that his father wouldn’t be happy if he left it at that: “Her family owns several old katanas. I told her I was interested and she brought one to show me. We weren’t using it for anything weird. ”
His father laughed. Lee was so startled by the sound that for a moment he couldn’t hear the ticking watch anymore. Lee ran
back his last sentence in his mind but couldn’t pinpoint what was so funny about it.
“Lee, it’s fine,” his father said, his smile warm behind the steam spiraling from his coffee. “I’m happy for you. You never
really took an interest in girls, so I thought—”
“I never took an interest in anyone ,” Lee said.
“Your life will be easier this way,” his father continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “People can be very judgmental.”
Lee clenched his jaw, his fingertips burning from how hard he was gripping the mug.
There was nothing easy about Lee Turner’s life. He was a killer, a criminal, a freak, supposedly smart but with no degree to show for it, convalescing
with the ghost in his closet... and yet his father was proud of him because he wasn’t gay ?
Part of Lee wished he’d started hanging out with girls sooner, just so his dad would have looked at him with that same fondness
earlier. And the other part of him wanted to pour his scalding coffee over his father’s face so he would stop smiling, stop
looking at him so damn proudly, as if he understood Lee at all.
“I’m sure you’ll have fun while you’re in Japan,” his father said, smirking like they were sharing a disgusting secret. “Japanese
girls are special.”
“Special?” Lee echoed, the word like rotting tree bark in his mouth.
His father nodded and leaned closer, as if afraid Hina would hear from across the house. “It’s fine to have preferences. Some people will tell you it’s not, but it is.”
Lee went completely still. He felt like he was in middle school again, with all his friends acting like he was some sort of
snake charmer just because he knew some Japanese. They’d pushed him at Akemi—the one Japanese girl in their grade, who Lee
had never even spoken to before and definitely couldn’t approach after all his friends practically ambushed her at her locker.
Asian girls are the best , his friend Matt had said. They’re small everywhere .
At the time, Lee hadn’t really understood what Matt meant. Now, with his father smiling knowingly at him like they finally
had a shared interest, Lee wanted to yank his father’s eyes out and smash them on the floor. That wasn’t how he thought of
his dad’s girlfriends, and that wasn’t how he saw Sen. Sen was so much more important than a girlfriend—she was his ticket
to the land of the dead.
Lee didn’t often feel angry at his father, who had such a perpetually calm voice and gentle eyes. But now, Lee was having
a hard time forcing his facial expression into something polite. It wouldn’t make his father happy if he knew Lee was doing
everything in his power to find his mother’s murderer, but somehow it thrilled him to think Lee was fucking an Asian girl.
“If that’s your preference , then why did you marry Mom?” Lee asked. He didn’t try hard enough to filter the bitterness from his tone, and he realized
his mistake when his father’s heartbeat suddenly sped up. His father grimaced and massaged his chest.
“Marriage is different,” he said. “The kind of girl you date isn’t always the kind of girl you marry. I mean, how could you
marry a woman who doesn’t speak English?”
He laughed, and Lee realized too late that he was supposed to laugh too, but he couldn’t quite conjure the sound.
“But you speak Japanese,” Lee said to cover up his mistake, hoping it sounded like a compliment and not an accusation.
His father laughed again, but this time it was a lie. “You’re better than me at this point,” he said, clapping Lee on the
shoulder. Too hard, and Lee winced as his shoulder clicked, but his father seemed not to notice. “Explains why it didn’t take
you long to find a pretty girl.”
A pretty girl , Lee thought. When Lee looked at Sen, his mind blurred with a whirlpool of questions: Why was she trained as a samurai, even
though women traditionally weren’t? Why had she confronted someone she thought was a ghost? Why hadn’t she killed him on sight?
But his father saw a woman wielding a katana in Lee’s room at night, and his only thought was that she was pretty.
“I’m going to lie down for a bit,” his father said, still rubbing his chest.
All of Lee’s anger dissolved. He nodded and took his father’s cup. “I’ll make you another cup when you wake up,” he said.
His father disappeared into his room. Lee dumped out both coffees and wondered how he had ruined such a simple conversation,
how he was managing to kill his father day by day when all he had to do was be normal.
Lee went back to his room and lay limp on his futon. Everything will be fine once I talk to Mom , he thought, again and again until he almost believed it.
As the sun rose higher in the sky and he waited for Sen, his chest began to feel tight. It was the first time in a very long
time that he’d looked forward to something.
He thought of Sen’s eyes—the dark, drowning tide in her irises.
Most people felt like different shades of gray, but Sen felt like a blazing forest fire of light.
She didn’t run away from him like he was a bug that had crawled out from the darkness beneath her bed.
Lee was something people feared, but Sen was a warrior who feared nothing. In front of her, he existed.
He had turned over the how in his mind again and again, but it didn’t matter nearly as much as the why .
Why here, why now, why you?
There had to be something that connected them, and Lee would find it.
He imagined Sen striking a match, lighting a candle, and leading him to an underworld of perpetual night, where she would
use her sword to fend off malevolent spirits. He would find his mother there, however she was.
Lee treasured the idea of finding even one small piece of his mother. Maybe some people would rather see nothing at all than
be left with a severed finger or cracked rib where a person used to be. Many people liked to remember their loved ones when
they were beautiful and whole and alive, and were scared to taint that memory. But Lee wanted to curl up in bed with his mother’s
bones, drape her hair over him like a blanket and fall asleep. Small pieces of a person did not scare him. It was still his
mother, after all. As long as she existed, it didn’t matter how.
Darkness was fading to orange sky now, something that could reasonably be called “light,” and Lee felt sick with anticipation.
He hadn’t said what time “morning” was—in truth he didn’t know if Sen even had a clock. But he would know when she was there.
He sat before the door but found no light or shadows behind it. He slid the door open an inch and was met with cool cement.
If he was going to reconvene with Sen more often, he would need to understand why the door between their worlds only sometimes
opened.