Chapter Twenty Lee
“Lee, come help me for a second,” his mother said.
Lee swung the hammock until it set him on his feet, then looked over the edge of the balcony. He’d been reading on the second
floor of the bungalow in Cambodia for most of the afternoon.
When he peered over the edge, he saw blood.
His book slid from his fingers, falling to the ground. He hurried downstairs and threw open the door to the first-floor patio.
His mom was in her swimsuit, crouched in front of something large and brown. It made wheezing sounds and sat in a pool of
blood.
“Mom?” Lee said, clutching the doorframe.
“Lee, help me,” his mother said again. “Be brave for me.”
Lee swallowed, then slowly stepped onto the porch.
His mother was kneeling in front of a turtle, making soothing sounds as it twitched and splashed in the blood. Instead of
a round shell, the turtle’s center curved in like an hourglass, its middle pinched in around a ring of plastic from a six-pack
of soda. A purple ribbon curled out of the turtle’s nostril.
Lee’s mom looked over her shoulder, her eyes dark. “Scissors, Lee,” she said.
Lee dashed off, glad to have an excuse to look away.
He dug through his mom’s suitcase until he found her nail scissors, then hurried back and jerked them toward her, afraid to draw too close.
His mom worked the tiny scissors through the plastic, finally ripping away the plastic ring.
She sighed as she set it to the side and placed the scissors beside it.
“Hold her for me, Lee,” she said.
Lee stepped forward slowly and placed his palms on the warped shell. The turtle turned its head to the side and watched Lee
with sad black eyes.
Lee’s mom grabbed the end of the ribbon and pulled.
The turtle made a low sound of pain as Lee’s mother tugged the endless length of string out of its nose. The turtle wobbled
from side to side, but Lee held its shell down with shaking hands. More blood sprayed from the turtle’s nose until at last
his mom had pulled the entire ribbon out.
Lee let go immediately and backed up against the wall. The turtle turned around and started shimmying across the sand, heading
back for the water.
“Will its shell go back to normal?” Lee said, watching the deformed turtle wobble away.
“Probably not,” his mom said with a sigh. “It’s broken forever now.”
The wind tossed her curls back, and Lee thought he had never seen his mother look so sad. Not for him, not for his father,
not for herself. But for this turtle, tears bloomed in her eyes.
She made Lee go back inside to wash his hands with her, then grabbed her sun hat. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.
“Where?” Lee said.
“Take a nap, Lee,” his mother said instead of answering. “When you wake up, we’ll get dinner, okay?”
She knew he was still tired from jet lag, and she knew if she told him where she was going, he’d want to come because some thing about watching her leave still made him sad.
Twelve was too old to miss your parents, and maybe Lee’s parents had made a mistake by having an only child, maybe they’d made him too soft and dependent—at least, that was what Lee’s father had said.
Lee smiled—the last time he would smile at his mom, the last time she would smile back at him—and then she stepped out the
door into the sunlight.
Lee liked to think that his mother had died in that moment, not what came after. That she stepped into the sun and it drank
up her soul, and the woman who walked out of the open hotel room door was someone else entirely. After all, Lee had never
seen that woman’s face.
But this face—the last time she had looked at him, maybe the last time she existed—was hanging up on Sen’s wall.
Lee held the paper in his hands. It felt more like his mother than any photograph—something about photos seemed to flatten
his mother’s beauty. But somehow, stripped of colors, rendered only in wispy brushstrokes, the painting showed the sharpness
in his mother’s eyes; the warm kindling of her smile; the way she could fade into the background when she didn’t want to be
seen, then reappear in vivid lines.
“Why did you paint this?” Lee said, carefully ironing out any emotion from his words. He knew that when something mattered
to him, other people could taste it in his words. If Sen saw even a hint of what he was feeling right now, she would drown.
Sen lingered a careful distance away, and Lee knew he’d already spoken too harshly.
“Her face comes to me when I meditate,” Sen said. “Sometimes, when my mind feels very dark, I see her in the shadows. She’s
standing on a beach, and the ocean is closing in around her, like—”
“Like what we saw in the town today?” Lee whispered, holding his breath until Sen nodded.
He’d thought it would be difficult to traverse the land of the dead and find his mother, but Sen had already found her. He should have wondered why and how, but in that moment, with his mother’s last smile in his hands, he only wanted to find her.
“Have you spoken to her?” Lee said, turning to Sen, who still looked afraid to approach him.
Sen shook her head. “She tries to speak to me, though.”
“Tries?”
Sen shifted from foot to foot, considering her words. “Her lips move, but I can’t hear her voice.”
Lee pictured his mother on one side of a glass wall, pounding her fists against it, screaming for help to a girl who couldn’t
hear.
Sen’s gaze softened, and Lee realized that she expected him to be sad. She didn’t understand that when the police had first
said the words human trafficking , when he’d looked up what that really meant, he’d hoped his mother was dead. And now, brighter than the sting of knowing
she had died, the knowledge that he might see her again bloomed warm in his chest. Dead was not the same as gone ; Lee knew that now.
“Can you show me?” he asked, each word placed with exquisite care, straining hard to make it a question and not a command.
Take me to her , his mind screamed. Just as loud, his mother’s voice rose in his ears, over the squealing of suitcase fabric, jingling zippers:
Let me out, Lee.
“Show you?” Sen echoed uneasily.
“You said you saw her on the beach,” Lee said, trying his best not to sound impatient. “The beach we saw when we touched.
So...” He held out his hand, but Sen only stared at it.
“Are you sure that’s safe?” she said. “Are you sure it’s really her? Spirits can play tricks on you.”
“If they wanted to trick me, they would have come to me and not you,” Lee said, gritting his teeth at the impatience that he knew was bleeding through his words. “She must be able to touch you because you’re dead and I’m not.”
Sen frowned. “I’m not dead yet.”
“ You’ve been dead for one hundred and forty-nine years! ” Lee said, far too loud for this time of night, but he didn’t care. He was so close, and Sen would deny him now ?
Sen clenched her jaw, her expression hardening, and that was how Lee knew he’d pushed too far. He took a steadying breath,
looking up at the ceiling and away from the painting to ground himself.
“You are not the first ghost I’ve seen,” he said, unable to look at her. “Every night, my mother screams for my help. I need
to know where she is, and who hurt her.”
Lee had never spoken this out loud to anyone before. He felt like he was showing Sen the map of his soul. And yet, infuriatingly,
she remained unmoved.
“And if you find out, then what?” Sen said, her expression stern.
“ I don’t know ,” Lee said, and for some reason, the words brought tears to his eyes. “I just want the truth.”
“And what comes after the truth?” Sen pressed, crossing her arms.
Lee swallowed again and shook his head. Sen would hear the pain in his voice if he spoke. I don’t know , he wanted to scream, but he knew it would wake up her whole family. All my life, everyone has fed me half-truths and expected me to feel full, and now it’s as if I live in only half a world
and at any moment the sidewalk will end and I’ll fall into the darkness.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and turned to Sen. “I want to see my mother,” he said slowly. “Please.”
She didn’t want to help him. Lee could see it in her eyes. There could be a thousand reasons, but in the end, she said none of them. Lee thought it probably had something to do with the fact that his shirt was still covered in blood from a man she’d disemboweled three inches from his face.
“In your room,” Sen said at last. “I don’t want my father to hear us.”
“My room,” Lee echoed, remembering the disemboweled samurai on the floor. Tentatively, he cracked the door open. Cool moonlight
spilled across the clean tatami mats, the unmade futon. Like so many things Lee Turner saw, the blood and carnage had stopped
being real.
He let Sen through behind him, then closed the door.
Sen sat down cross-legged with her back against the closet door, as if anchoring herself to her world. Slowly, she held out
her hand. Without hesitation, Lee set his hand in hers.
The wind rose around them, a high-pitched whistle that crescendoed into a scream as it tore through the house. The windows
and doors flew open, then burst into torn paper and wood frames, sucked into a gray sky. The ground beneath them softened
into ashes. Around them, the screaming gray world pulsed, shadows congealing into blurry silhouettes of faceless strangers.
Lee tightened his grip on Sen’s hand, afraid the storm would steal her away.
The world began to solidify, a shoreline carving its way across the horizon. Lee winced at the searing white sky, the sharpness
of sand and shells beneath his bare feet. In the distance, the black ocean roared and began to rise. He looked around, but
there was nothing but this sameness for eternity. Gray and white and black and Sen.
“There,” Sen said.
Lee felt the words through his bones more than he heard them—it felt like all of Sen’s blood was running through him, like
their hearts were joined through their hands.
He followed her gaze, and there, on the horizon, a shadowed figure stood by the shore.