Chapter Twenty Lee #2
“That’s her,” Sen said, squeezing his hand tighter.
Together, they began to walk.
Lee wanted to run, but the sand clung to his feet and dragged him down, warning him not to move forward. The figure in the
distance stood static as a painting even as the winds spiraled around them and violent clouds of sand lashed through the air.
Lee tried to imagine his mother’s face, but the memory had been bleached away, and all he could see was Sen’s rendition, his
mother brought to life with black brushstrokes.
The sand burned his eyes as it flew around them, the screams of the sea rising. Lee clutched Sen’s hand, wondering how a ghost
could be so warm, how the heart of a dead girl could beat so strongly.
They drew closer and Lee couldn’t help but rush forward the last few feet, dragging Sen behind him until they reached the
shadow.
But as the sands parted and the shadow solidified, it was not a woman at all.
It was a suitcase.
The screaming rose louder in his ears, but now it wasn’t coming from the waves in the distance but from inside the suitcase.
Sen asked him a question, but he couldn’t hear it. He imagined, as he always did when he saw suitcases, how a person could
fit inside. This particular one was big enough to fit an adult woman in the fetal position, but you might have to saw off
her arms first if her shoulders were too wide. The suitcase trembled as if something was trying to break free, the zippers
jingling.
It wasn’t even zippered shut. All he had to do was flip the top open.
Let me out, Lee.
Slowly, with his free hand, he opened the suitcase.
It was empty.
Sand spilled into the bag, filling it with white dust. Sen frowned and peered inside, then cast Lee a wary glance. The screaming
had stopped, and now the only sounds were the high-pitched wind and the distant crashing of waves.
I’m sorry , Lee wanted to say to Sen. Sorry for bringing her here for nothing, for scaring her, for being as he was. But he couldn’t
form the words. His mouth was full of ash and he couldn’t feel his tongue. He tried again and realized too late that he no
longer had a mouth at all. His face was sliding through his fingers, soft gray ash stolen by the wind. In a panic, he looked
to Sen.
Half of her face was gone. She too had dissolved to ashes that were rapidly eating away at the rest of her body, like maggots
gnawing through dead flesh. Lee tried to move, to hold the pieces of her together, but his arms were made of wood and his
fingers were made of paper and he was hammered to a stone foundation. He was the house behind the sword ferns, and he was
rotting.
He let go of her hand.
Darkness and silence fell over them, the suddenness of it like crashing into a brick wall. They were back in Lee’s room, sitting
across from each other, panting for breath.
Lee wanted to scream.
Just when he felt he was getting closer to an answer, more questions appeared. He was no closer to finding his mother, to
helping his father, to knowing the truth.
He turned from Sen, looking away so she couldn’t see the rage in his expression, so she wouldn’t be afraid. Surely she could
smell death and murder on him.
“We can try again in the morning,” Sen said quietly, as if she feared his response. “I need to sleep, or I can’t train tomorrow
and my father will be angry.”
Lee nodded stiffly. “Okay,” he said, though the words felt brittle.
Sen rose to her feet, her hand on the doorframe. “I hope you can find her again, as you’ve found me,” she said quietly.
Lee looked over his shoulder.
“I hope that she’s like me—still living in some time before she knew pain,” Sen continued. “I hope that all you have to do
is find the right door and you can meet her again in a different time.”
Her words wiped away all of Lee’s thoughts. He could only stare at Sen, where she stood in the doorway between their two lives,
the moonlight bright against one side of her face.
They were perhaps the kindest words anyone had ever said to him, because unlike so many well-wishes, they weren’t hollow.
Lee had found Sen, after all, and the world was full of so many doors he hadn’t yet opened. A strange warmth bloomed somewhere
deep inside his chest, the antithesis to the pain he’d felt moments ago, like his body was thawing out in the sunlight.
When it seemed that Lee wouldn’t reply, Sen turned to leave. All at once, Lee saw his mother in the doorway of the hotel porch,
the door through which she had passed but never returned. The thought of Sen never returning was unbearable.
In the end, Lee couldn’t remember if what happened next was true, or just another dream that bled into reality. He would never
ask Sen the truth.
“You can stay,” he said.
Sen turned, her eyes wide. “What?”
“You said that when you’re in this world, death seems like it’s only a bad dream,” Lee said. “So why don’t you stay here and
return in the morning?”
“I never said that,” Sen said, frowning.
Hadn’t she? Lee swore he’d heard it when they held hands and crossed the beach. Or maybe he hadn’t exactly heard it, but felt
it, the words from her heart as true as the words from her lips.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “You can stay, if you want.”
Lee didn’t understand why he offered this. It wouldn’t help him find his mother. Sen would not have asked it of him, or expected
it. But he had imagined the sound of the closet door closing, the light going dark behind it. One day, the door would shut
and it would never open again. And something about that felt worse than the open door, than the mouth of darkness. Lee had
trouble contemplating that people sometimes stopped existing. Sen was a whole universe, and universes didn’t simply go dark.
“Where would I sleep?” she asked quietly.
“Here,” Lee said, pulling back his sheets. It was a large futon, big enough for them both. “I’ll sleep on top, and you sleep
underneath, so we won’t touch.”
Lee could see many thoughts blazing past Sen’s eyes in that moment. Her gaze flickered between him and the bed, her fingers
worrying the handle of her sword. After a moment, she nodded and closed the closet door.
She set her sword on the ground beside the futon, toed off her sandals, and slid beneath his covers. Lee needed to shower,
to get rid of his bloody clothes, but something compelled him to stay there beside Sen, cold on top of the covers, and feign
sleep until her breathing evened out.
When he thought Sen was asleep from the slowness of her breathing, he looked to her and found himself staring into her bright
black eyes. He opened his mouth as if to apologize, but no words would come because he didn’t want to lie to her.
She pulled one arm out from beneath the blankets, set it carefully on top of Lee’s clothed chest, the layer of fabric between them a buffer against the darkness but thin enough that she could feel his heartbeat.
Lee hadn’t realized how loud and fast it was without the sedatives.
Like he was always balancing on the knife’s edge of fear, waiting for the fall.
But at Sen’s touch, he felt it slowing, the edges of her face blurring into soft shadows.
He didn’t want to sleep, because in his dreams he was alone.
But people like Lee Turner were meant to be alone, and when sleep pulled him under, he dreamed of an ocean of darkness. When
he woke, Sen was gone, like she’d never been there at all.