Chapter Thirty-Three Lee
In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.
The house was nearly two centuries old, its walls accustomed to drinking up soot from charcoal burned through the long winters.
Its tatami mats had darkened from the sting of sunlight, hiding the footprints of the last family who lived there. The cypress
walls with tobacco varnish should have swallowed even the darkest stain whole, kept it safe and secret.
But there it was, all the same—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger
had smeared it like a tally mark.
Lee Turner pressed his thumb to the stain, scraped a bit of it onto his nail, then brought it to his lips and licked. He could
taste the wood varnish more than anything else, but yes, that was definitely blood, in a place it shouldn’t have existed.
“Are you... sucking your thumb?” his father said.
Lee quickly pulled his finger out of his mouth, stuffing his hands in his pockets before turning to face his father.
“Just biting off a hangnail,” Lee said, shrugging.
Lee’s father didn’t believe him. Even with all the sedatives in his blood, Lee wasn’t stoned enough to miss this.
Lee turned away so his father wouldn’t have to look at him anymore, then dug into the box on the counter. “Do you want coffee?”
Lee said, already pulling out the hand grinder, the beans, searching the drawers for a measuring spoon.
“The day I turn down coffee is the day I die,” Lee’s father said with a smile. He walked around the counter and pulled out
a drawer, then handed Lee a tablespoon and patted him too hard on the shoulder before going back to the couch.
When his father turned his back to him, Lee pulled out a bag of decaf from the cabinet. It was supposed to be for Hina—his
dad’s girlfriend—but his father wouldn’t know the difference. Lee opened the bag of coffee beans and scooped out a spoonful.
It smelled of clove and tobacco, dark chocolate and roasted hazelnuts.
Lee made coffees for both him and his father, but he found himself dozing off on the couch before he’d finished even half
the cup. His father woke him up half an hour later, and Lee knew he needed to take a walk in the sunlight or he’d ruin his
sleep schedule. He felt hazy, like he was looking at the world through a screen of tulle.
He cast one last look at the stain in the kitchen, then forced himself to head into town even though he felt like a splinter
was jammed into his brain. He could see the stain’s strange oblong shape even as he walked up the long ribbon of driveway,
past his father’s black rental car, which was already gathering pollen. The taste of salt and chemicals still stung the tip
of his tongue. His father had said the town center was a straight shot down the road, ten minutes away.
He swung the gate open with one hand and began to step through.
“Lee?” called a voice from the house.
Lee turned, but there was no one there. It had been a woman’s voice, but there were no women here, at least none that knew his name.
He looked to the horizon, as if the voice had tumbled across the sea.
But the sea had retreated far away, leaving nothing but bone-white sand baking in the summer sun.
He turned and stepped through the gate.
Pain burst inside his skull.
At first, he thought someone had struck him in the back of the head with an iron bar. His hand cramped up where he clutched
the gate, church bells tolling inside his head. It was as if he could hear the heartbeat of the earth, the screaming magma
below the surface. Every sound that ever was and ever would be was echoing inside his skull. The flowers just beyond the gate
shifted in and out of focus—white mountain hydrangeas, then clovers, then dandelions, then dead weeds, then nothing but dirt.
Lee’s entire body was a key jammed into the wrong lock, and the world was forcing him out.
A wave of vertigo echoed through his body, making him clamp his teeth into his lip, drawing more blood, more salt, more vividness
to the surface. Let me out, Lee. His mother’s voice pealed through his brain.
And even though his head felt cleaved in half, he could see the stain on the wall of the kitchen, echoed a thousand times
across his vision. The dark, narrow line that was all too much like a stain he had seen before on a day that felt so far away.
A man, a murderer, a stain.
A man, a murderer, a stain.
Lee was twelve, sitting in a hotel room in Cambodia, staring at a stain by the door. His mother hadn’t come back from her
walk on the beach, and his father was still trying to call her, muttering about contacting the police if she didn’t come back
soon.
The trip was supposed to fix everything. That was what his father had told his mother. Lee had known he was lying, but back then, he’d thought lies were mostly harmless.
It was all because of the games.
His mother liked them too much, and Lee liked them too, but his father didn’t. On nights when his mother wanted to play, she’d
give him a glass of warm milk that tasted bitter, and he’d wake up in the back seat of the car, under a different sky. They
were going to the North Star, his mother said. Or maybe the catacombs of Paris, or the Egyptian pyramids, or the lightless
underworld of Japan. She’d crashed the car once, swerving to avoid an obstacle Lee couldn’t see and veering off into a ditch,
but they’d both walked away with only bruises. Close your eyes, Lee. We’re almost there.
Every time they played after that, Lee’s father found them within an hour. Lee didn’t ask, didn’t know at the time what his
father was doing about it other than whispering sternly to his mother when he found them. He would never yell, because she
was the kind of woman you married. She had bright blue eyes and looked beautiful in lipstick and even if she cried all night,
it didn’t matter.
So when his father said a trip would help them relax, Lee knew the trip was for his mother, not him.
When she walked out to the beach and left the door open, Lee had a strange, vivid dream.
First, the porch door closed. Something thumped on the ground, reverberated against the glass, but Lee didn’t open his eyes.
Of course you don’t care! his mother said in his dream, her voice muted and far away. You never even try to take care of him! If you won’t look out for him, I will!
You’re insane! his father said. You’re lucky I haven’t put you in a padded cell!
Jim, please!
Something thumped against the glass again, and maybe someone was locked out and knocking on the door? But Lee was half asleep,
so he lay still until the sounds went away.
He dreamed that his father took out the trash, even though the maids would have done it in the morning. He dreamed that the
air stung with the scent of cleaning chemicals. He dreamed that he cracked open his eyes and saw a black suitcase on the porch,
heard weak scratching from inside as his father wheeled it away.
Let me out, Lee.
It was only a dream, so he went back to sleep.
But after he woke up, and his mother didn’t return, he realized it wasn’t.
Lee sat on the floor just in front of the porch and stared at a small bloodstain that he knew hadn’t been there that morning.
There it was—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger had smeared
it like a tally mark.
Let me out, Lee.
His gaze traced the winding path of the suitcase wheels across the sand. He could follow them. He could stand up right that
moment and run until he found their endpoint.
But if he followed the tracks and found the suitcase and opened it up, then none of it was a dream. His mother had called
for him and he’d closed his eyes, and she’d died alone in the dark.
No, that wasn’t right.
His mother had simply blinked out of existence, like a light switch turned off.
She was, and then she wasn’t. His father would spend the next decade searching for her because that was what love was—inextinguishable hope, traversing years and countries and logic.
Lee told himself the story again and again until the truth became a dream and the sedatives blurred the walls between sleeping and waking and he forgot what, exactly, he was so afraid of remembering.
Lee did not have a mother anymore, but at least he had a father. And for many years, that was enough.
Until the day Lee’s roommate left the balcony door open.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes , Lee thought as he sat in the stairwell. He dropped his erasers and pencils into the hungry darkness and wondered how it
would feel to fall.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die, though he almost certainly would from that height. He’d read that 50 percent of people survived
a fall of fifty feet. The fourteenth floor was close to one hundred and forty feet. Lee did not crave the moment of impact,
only the fall. How would it feel to be weightless? Would the darkness fold around him and catch him in a pillow of nothingness?
How wet was the mouth of darkness before it devoured you?
Before he knew it, he was leaning over the railing. His center of gravity shifted and he teetered over the darkness.
His foot slipped out from under him, and the darkness yawned wider.
A hand yanked him back.
“You okay, man?”
His roommate was standing there, one hand on Lee’s shirt, the other holding open the door, letting in all the light Lee had
been trying to escape.
“Shut the door,” Lee said.
James blinked his perfect green eyes. Except, in this light, they almost looked hazel. Maybe they were more brown than green.
“I didn’t mean to chase you out, dude,” he said. “Your phone is ringing and you just disappeared like you’d been abducted by aliens or something.”
He laughed, and Lee didn’t, and something inside Lee started to splinter. Lee’s gaze focused on the stain on James’s shirt.
Dark maroon, just slightly above his heart. A dark, narrow line.
“James,” Lee said slowly, “what’s that from?”