Chapter Twenty-Two Lee #2
He imagined her here now, asking him what he planned to do after he uncovered the bones of a dead spy. Turn them in to the
police? Nod and say I knew it! and bury them again? Save them as a souvenir?
But Lee hadn’t thought that far ahead. He never did. He only wanted to see the bones, to remind himself they were real—how
could what came after possibly matter more than that?
When his shovel struck down again, fingers closed around it.
Lee jumped back, stumbling into the shallow wall of the pit and falling onto his back. The shovel fell toward him and the
handle smacked him in the head.
He remembered those hands.
He’d seen them closed around doorknobs, clutching forks, flicking on light switches. But no, he hadn’t buried James. He couldn’t have, because he didn’t have a shovel at college and there was nowhere to discreetly bury a body on campus. He’d put him somewhere darker, colder.
Lee scrambled to his feet, but the hole was empty once more. There was nothing but dirt and worms and the echo of his own
heartbeat thundering inside of him.
He was nearly six feet deep now and still hadn’t found anything. Sen couldn’t have dug much deeper than this, because she
hadn’t been gone very long, so where was the body?
This was the right spot. Lee was certain of that in the same way he was certain of his own name. There should have been bones
by this point—corpses without caskets rose toward the surface after decomposition. But there was nothing here, like it had
never happened.
Lee let out a frustrated yell and sat down in the grave that was not a grave, then leaned back in the earth and pretended
he was dead. He stared at the sun through the fingers of the trees and imagined someone piling dirt over him until it filled
his mouth, his lungs, his ears, his eyes. He pictured Sen appearing above him, eclipsing the sun. He would let her bury him
alive, if she wanted to.
Sen.
He sighed, rolling over onto his side in the dirt, feeling the pulse of the earth beneath his ear.
It was pathetic of him to sit around waiting at the closet door as he had. She was supposed to be no more than a path to the
land of the dead, and she couldn’t even do that part right. A ghost guide who couldn’t even navigate her own world, who fought
him at every turn, who ran from him to tend to her own needs.
And yet he wanted nothing more than for her to appear here now, her face blocking out the sun, her hands reaching out to help him up.
She had killed someone too. She understood, at least in part, the torrents that he carried inside him.
She looked him in the eye and didn’t run away.
Perhaps someone like his father would have thought the situation romantic, but Lee wasn’t interested in Sen’s body.
He wanted to hopelessly entangle her soul with his until they were one and the same, to follow her to the bottom of the sea, to rot beside her when death devoured them both.
He sat up, angry at himself and disgusted with the stains all over his clothes. He walked back home, not even bothering to
fill the hole. He headed up the driveway just as the engine of his father’s car revved.
For a moment, he saw himself as his father would—covered in sweat and dirt and brambles like he’d clawed his way out of his
own grave. He probably had a bruise on his forehead from where the shovel had struck him. His hands shook, either from nerves
or Ativan withdrawal. He looked around for a bush big enough to hide behind, but there were only wildflowers in this part
of the yard. He couldn’t hide, so he would have to lie.
He readied his excuse as he trekked up the driveway.
I’ve taken an interest in gardening to help Hina.
No, that probably wasn’t masculine enough for his father.
I was wrestling in the dirt with other guys.
No, his father would think that was gay.
I was digging for worms for fishing bait. Yes, that would work.
He squared his shoulders and continued up the driveway, waving to his father and smiling as if nothing was wrong.
His father’s car started rolling forward. Maybe he was going to meet Lee halfway down the drive? Lee slowed his pace, but
his father’s car only picked up speed. Through the sheen of pollen on the windshield, Lee could see his father’s blank expression,
looking straight ahead. He was going to run over Lee’s toes if he didn’t turn.
“Dad?” Lee said, the smile dropping off his face. His father gripped the wheel, still staring ahead as if seeing straight through Lee.
His father was probably lost in thought, the way he sometimes got when he missed Lee’s mother. But he would come to his senses
once he spotted Lee waving. It wasn’t as if he would run Lee over with his car in broad daylight.
Maybe that was why Lee didn’t move as his father drove closer, convinced that at any moment, his father would swerve to the
side and roll down his window to talk to him. But his father drew closer and closer, still staring straight ahead. Lee felt
as if he’d grown roots in the garden, unable to move as his father’s car roared toward him. Any moment now, he would slam
on the brakes and laugh with Lee about how he hadn’t had enough coffee today.
But the car never stopped.
Lee jumped aside at the last moment, tripping into the ferns and landing on his hands and knees. His father’s car raced just
past his face, the roar of the wheels bright in his ears, the metal spokes gleaming in the sun, inches from his nose. If he
hadn’t moved, the tires would have ground him into the dirt.
His father’s car peeled out of the driveway, leaving Lee folded over a fern bush. It was as if the dirt from the grave-that-was-not-a-grave
had rendered Lee invisible. Slowly, he rose to his feet, checking to make sure he wasn’t in shock and somehow hadn’t felt
his feet or hands getting run over. But all his fingers and toes worked, and the feeling thundering through him as he walked
unsteadily back home was not shock or adrenaline but rather an unbearable weight, an anchor dragging him to the bottom of
the sea.
Lee locked the bathroom door and turned on the shower. He stopped short at the sight of his reflection. Dirt stains marred his shirt, the shadows beneath his eyes, the corners of his lips. He imagined the edges of all the stains bleeding together, devouring him.
Lee Turner was a stain on his father’s life. And while Lee couldn’t look away from stains, his father couldn’t see them at
all.
He scrubbed every trace of sweat and dirt away, and by the time he was clean and dressed, his father had returned from his
errand. He smiled at Lee as if nothing at all was amiss, then hid himself away in his office. Lee would never tell him what
had happened.
As Lee tossed his muddy clothes into a hamper, a strange sound came from the kitchen. Lee wiped off his hands and followed
it.
Hina was sharpening the kitchen knives. To Lee, the knives already looked impossibly sharp, but Hina kept sharpening them
as if she planned to cut stones in half rather than potatoes. The bright sound of the sharpener flayed his mind with every
stroke. It reminded him of Sen unsheathing her sword, the burning taste of iron raining down over him and filling his mouth.
He needed Hina to be quiet. She would know that he was annoyed when she looked at his face, and she would stop because she
always knew what he wanted.
Lee stood in the doorway of the kitchen and waited. After a moment, Hina’s hands slowed and she turned to look at Lee, setting
down the knives.
“You want tea?” she said, smiling. “Dinner won’t be ready for another hour.”
Lee nodded and sat at the table. The tension left his shoulders now that the sound had stopped. Hina prepared his tea and
passed it to him, then put away the tea tin and turned back to her knives.
“Aren’t they sharp enough?” Lee said, unable to hide the edge to his words.
Hina pretended not to notice it. “They haven’t been sharpened in a long time,” she said.
A coldness yawned open in Lee’s chest, numbing his lungs, crawling up his lips and stealing his breath. Lee felt all at once
that he shouldn’t have been in the kitchen. He had wandered into the wrong house, the wrong kitchen, the wrong chair. Then
air whispered over his shoulder, and suddenly he understood the problem.
The back door was open.
Lee rose to shut it, but without even turning around, Hina spoke.
“Leave it open. I was cooking pork and it got smoky in here, so I need to air the room out.”
“It doesn’t seem smoky anymore,” Lee said, hoping that would be a good enough reason, but Hina didn’t reply.
Lee sat, but his gaze drifted to the bright rectangle of sunlight in the doorway and his bones began to itch. He wanted to
unpeel himself, remove every eyelash, every fingernail, every tooth. He couldn’t stay here.
He stood, trying to pick up the tea and hurry out of the room as quietly as possible, but Hina spoke first.
“I know you’re keeping a secret,” she said.
Lee froze. Hina hadn’t turned around, was still sharpening her knives, but now it felt like she was scraping them through
the seams of his brain. He stared at the rigidness of her shoulders. It was so hard to read people when he couldn’t see their
faces.
“I’m not,” Lee said, taking care to sound firm.
Hina shook her head. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said, her voice softer, “but if it’s something that upsets you, you
shouldn’t be afraid. I’ll always help you.”
Lee felt frozen in place, unable to sit back down or leave, one hand on the cup that was starting to burn his palm. Hina meant
well, but she was wrong. He could never tell Hina about James, and certainly not about Sen.
It was easy enough for Hina to be patient with her boyfriend’s eccentric son, but it was another thing entirely to defend a murderer. Maybe she thought she loved Lee, but she didn’t know him at all. All of her cooking and storytelling was no more than a careful dance.