Chapter Twenty-Nine Lee
The sea did not return.
The morning after Hina left, Lee went for a walk on the shore. He imagined Hina coming back to tell him it was dangerous,
that he would drown. But no matter how far he walked, he couldn’t find the sea. His feet bled from barnacles and cracked shells
and sea glass, but he found only parched sand, dead fish, and the scars of waves on the sand.
He walked and walked, determined to never return home, for no one would miss him anyway. But after he’d walked for what felt
like years across the empty sea, he found himself back at the house behind the sword ferns.
Once, the house had felt like it had a heartbeat. Now it only felt like a piece of driftwood chewed through with rot. The
flowers surrounding the house had wilted overnight, now a fetid mess of damp weeds. The porch groaned as Lee walked across
it, the floorboards spongier than they’d been just the day before, as if the house had finally realized its age.
Lee felt as though he was rotting along with it.
It was like a hole had been punched straight through his chest and the wind was rushing through him.
He’d made a mistake that had cost him Sen, and now he was alone.
It felt like a homecoming in some ways, the safe nothingness where he’d lived so much of his life.
But worse than his own situation was the knowledge of what would come for Sen.
He returned to his room and sat in front of his closet door, pressing one hand to the paper, willing Sen to return but knowing
she never would. With the perpetual low tide, the door should have been open even in the afternoon. But when Lee tugged at
the door to check, it wouldn’t open, as if Sen had somehow locked it from the other side. She was truly finished with him,
and he couldn’t even blame her.
He looked out the Sometimes Window where he’d first seen Sen and he tried to conjure her image again, but he could already
feel her face slipping from his memory. The sun shifted beyond the ferns, and Lee realized that Hina’s car was parked in the
driveway.
He imagined Hina there so vividly that he almost smelled the salted salmon she always cooked for breakfast, heard the sounds
of steam and crackling oil and plates clinking against the wooden table.
He rushed to her room and threw open the door.
Pale shadows fell over the tightly made bed, the empty wardrobe with its doors hanging open, the small desk cleared of Hina’s
laptop and teacups.
“Hina?” Lee called, in case she was in the bathroom, but no one answered.
He looked in the gardening shed, then walked around the garden, but there was no sign of Hina. Finally, he knocked on his
father’s office door.
After a moment, footsteps drew closer and his father slid open the door. He stood in the doorway, his eyes big and green behind
his reading glasses.
“Is Hina still here?” Lee said.
Lee could tell from the tightness in his father’s lips that he hadn’t liked the question. “No,” he said. “I don’t know where she is. Probably her parents’ house.”
“Her car is back,” Lee said. He could see it from the window, gathering pollen in the driveway. “Didn’t she take it with her?”
“She took her keys,” his father said, frowning. “Maybe she was too angry to drive and decided to walk? I don’t know what to
tell you, Lee.”
“Okay,” Lee said palely, only because he knew his father didn’t want to continue the conversation. He pulled out his phone
and texted Hina as his father shut the door to his office, but the message wouldn’t go through.
Lee pulled open the back door and sat on the porch, staring at the well where Hina had told him the story of Okiku. He could
see the two of them there, peering down the abyss. Even then, Lee had known ghosts were real, but he’d never thought they
would be what drove Hina away.
The memory faded, and pollen blew down from the trees, and the ghost of Hina vanished in the wind. His father’s girlfriends
came and went with the seasons, and even though Hina was Lee’s favorite, he hadn’t truly thought her absence would matter.
His own mother was gone, and surely nothing could feel worse than that. Surely his heart was impenetrable at this point, and
no goodbye could ever hurt so much. He had only known Hina for a year.
But now, in this world with only his father and no Hina or Sen, Lee felt like he was stranded on a strange island where no
one spoke his language. He had become a ghost, for there was no one left who saw him.
That was when he noticed it: two thin, parallel lines in the dirt, twisting and winding off into the forest. Lee rose to his
feet and followed their path, careful not to step on them.
A memory rose to the surface of his mind—this same twisting path carved into sand. He had followed it then too, on and on and on into the forest, where the sand turned dark.
But here, now, the path ended at the edge of the forest, indecipherable in the dirt.
This isn’t right , Lee thought, clenching his fists. It wasn’t right then, and certainly not now. A piece was missing.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He didn’t want to see what it said, but Lee Turner had to find the truth, no matter how much it scared him.
As expected, it was a text from James. This time, only a single word:
Dig.
Lee’s hands trembled. Maybe he’d been wrong all along. Maybe somehow, cruelly, James had survived. Maybe, despite his eyes
being ripped out of their sockets, his teeth scattered down the stairs, his skull caved inward and brains spilling across
the tiles, he was still alive. People had survived gunshots to the face, falls from rooftops, blazing infernos of plane crashes.
Lee ran across the yard and hurled his phone into the well. It clattered against the stones and splashed at the bottom, but
Lee still couldn’t shake the feeling that James was right there on the horizon, crawling out from the white sand of the missing
sea.
Lee ran back inside and bolted the door just as the gas stove clicked on. He hurried down the hall, hoping it was Hina, but
it was only his father. He caught Lee’s strange look and offered a half smile. “We’ll have to fend for ourselves again for
a while,” he said.
For a while , Lee thought, as if it was only a matter of weeks before his father could find a replacement, someone to stand over the stove
in Hina’s place.
Lee stood in the doorway, so close to the stain he had seen on the first day he came here.
His mind was a carousel he couldn’t get off, spiraling faster and faster as the colors blurred together.
He was close. He could feel it now, in the nauseous blur of colors and lights—the truth.
It was just on the other side, like he was at the bottom of a pond, staring up at the sunlight through the veil of water.
He could just barely make out its shape.
“Sit,” his father said, nodding toward the table.
His father had rearranged the chairs and set out plates to erase Hina’s absence. Lee’s seat was no longer facing the closed
door. He was so relieved not to have to stare at it that he didn’t question anything. He sat with his back to the forest,
watching his dad make ramen.
Steam filled the air and Lee could close his eyes and pretend this was all fine, that Hina was here and Sen wasn’t dying just
beyond the wall and that his father cared for him.
“I got an email from your college advisor yesterday,” his father said.
The words were so unexpected that for a moment Lee didn’t process them, as if his father hadn’t spoken English or Japanese
but another language entirely.
Then the words sank in, water bleeding through paper, and Lee’s blood went cold. He sat rooted in his chair, wordless, his
father’s back turned to him.
“I was under the impression that you were taking a formal leave of absence,” his father said, “not just disappearing in the
middle of the semester. You had a lot of people concerned when they started looking for you.”
They must have lost the paperwork—you know how they are , Lee could have said, wanted to say. He could taste the easy lie on the back of his teeth. But somehow, he couldn’t bring
it forth. His father’s words were stilted, and Lee felt there was something else he was trying to say.
“Then this morning, I got a call from the police.”
Lee went perfectly still, a mouse under the shadow of a fox, waiting for his father to turn around. When he didn’t answer,
his father glanced over his shoulder questioningly.
“Your roommate is dead, Lee.”
Silence fell over the kitchen. Lee couldn’t hear his own heartbeat, or his father’s heartbeat, or the water weakly simmering
on the stove. Coldness bled across the soles of his feet and crawled up his legs, like a frigid ocean pulling him under. He
was going to drown right here in this kitchen.
“Lee?” his father said. “Did you hear me?”
Lee’s gaze snapped up to his father’s wary expression, the same way he looked at Lee when he said something strange. He wasn’t
looking at Lee like he was a murderer. He wouldn’t be cooking ramen if he thought he was in front of a murderer, would he?
Lee pressed his lips together, tried to bring feeling back into some part of his face. Surely his father could hear his thunderous
heartbeat. “Wh-what happened?” Lee said, his mouth full of sea foam.
“Well, the police aren’t sure yet,” his father said, turning the heat up on the stove. “That’s why they wanted to talk to
you.”
Lee gripped the arms of his chair. He needed to run to his room and smash his hard drive, but he couldn’t feel his legs.
“Where was he?” Lee said.
His father paused his stirring, looking over his shoulder. “What?”
“ Where did they find him? ” Lee said.
Where is James Baldridge?
His father shut off the burner and set down his spoon, then turned around and faced Lee.
“In the well, of course.”
Lee stared back at his father, trying to make sense of his words. He didn’t understand the way his father was looking at him, his eyes so flat and empty.
“The well,” Lee echoed.
His father nodded. “Like Okiku,” he said.