CHAPTER 2 #2
I didn't cry. I found that out about myself somewhere on Memorial Drive, moving in a direction I hadn't chosen, in a car I hadn't chosen, toward an airport I hadn't chosen either.
I counted instead, silently, in my head, the way my mother taught me long before I ever needed it for anything this large.
Ichi, ni, san, shi, go. One, two, three, four, five.
My thumb pressed flat against my own palm, checking for a pulse that wasn't mine to check.
It didn't make me less afraid. It gave me something to hold instead of something holding me.
The plane waited at a private terminal at Logan, away from any gate I'd have used for anything else in my life, and it was smaller than I expected and nicer than anywhere I'd ever been.
Cream leather, warm low lighting, a hush to it like a very good hotel lobby at midnight.
A woman in a soft gray uniform met us at the top of the stairs, bowed a small precise dip of her head, and said something warm in Japanese I was too tired to fully catch.
Seeing my face, she switched to careful English.
“Please, sit anywhere you like. We'll be wheels up soon.”
I sat by a window. My hands wouldn't stop moving in my lap until she came back with a small covered cup and set it down in front of me, steam curling from under the lid.
The smell reached me before I lifted it, grassy, faintly sweet, unmistakably good loose-leaf sencha, not the bagged kind, the kind my mother used to keep in a red tin on top of the refrigerator where I couldn't reach it as a kid.
I didn't know a cup of tea could undo a person.
My hands shook worse holding that little cup than they had holding the folder with my father's signature in it, and I drank it anyway, because some part of me needed to taste something my mother would have recognized on a night when nothing else did.
I drank it slowly, the way she always said a good sencha deserved, and for exactly as long as the cup lasted, Boston and Tokyo and my father's signature all seemed to belong to somebody else's night, not mine.
Mori sat four rows back, near the rear of the cabin, with his own tablet open and his own quiet work to do.
Once, maybe an hour in, I looked up and caught him watching me, not the way men usually met my eyes, nothing hungry in it, just a careful attention, the way you'd watch a pot you didn't want boiling over.
He caught me catching him. He nodded once and went back to his screen.
I looked out the window instead. Boston was already gone.
I told myself I wasn't going to sleep. I had every reason not to: a stranger's plane, a stranger's tea, a night that had broken every rule my life used to run on.
My body disagreed with me. Somewhere over what I guessed was Canada, the shaking in my hands finally used up whatever it had been running on, and my head found the window, and the low engine hum turned into something almost like my own apartment radiator, and I went under without meaning to.
I woke to the seatbelt light and a change in the pitch of the engines.
Below us, Tokyo stretched through the last blue-black hour before sunrise, its roads still threaded with white and red, its towers lit like coins at the bottom of dark water.
Along the eastern edge of the city, morning had begun to silver the sky.
I'd been here before. Once, at ten, with my mother, the summer before she got sick.
I remembered almost nothing of that trip except one afternoon at Kaminarimon, under the huge red lantern, my mother crying, happy-crying, she called it, laughing at herself while she dabbed at her eyes, because she hadn't been home in fifteen years and hadn't known how much she'd missed the smell of the place, incense and rain and something fried a few streets over.
I remembered the weight of her hand on top of my head, steering me through a crowd of a thousand strangers like I was the only thing in the whole city she meant to keep track of.
I hadn't thought about that afternoon in years. It came back whole now, and it didn't feel like mine anymore. It felt like a good memory dragged into the worst morning of my life, so that even my grief for my mother had somehow become part of what was being done to me.
We did not enter through the public terminal.
A private corridor led to a small immigration room where an officer examined each passport and asked, in Japanese, why I was entering the country.
Mori answered first: a family emergency.
The officer looked directly at me and repeated the question.
I could have asked for help. The truth pressed against my teeth, but so did the image of the second car outside my building and the knowledge that my father had sold my address more than once.
“Kazoku no kinkyuujitai desu,” I heard myself say.
A family emergency. The stamp came down.
The decision was too constrained to be freedom, but it was mine enough to haunt me.
Beyond the room, a car waited on the apron.
A younger man in a dark suit stood beside it, built like someone who used his body for a living, scanning every exit.
He gave me a short nod, opened the rear door, and shut it behind me with a soft, expensive sound.
“Hiro,” Mori said, sliding in beside me. “He drives for the oyabun. He doesn't talk much. Don't take it personally.”
Oyabun. I knew the word the way you know a word from a textbook and not from a life, boss, in the old sense, the head of a house. I filed it away with everything else I didn't understand yet.
Hiro drove us into a Tokyo I recognized and didn't. Neon still climbed three and four stories at a time, though shopkeepers were already lifting shutters beneath it and delivery bicycles moved through the paling streets.
A convenience store glowed on every other corner like a small green sun.
A cat slept in a doorway with its tail curled over its nose, entirely unbothered.
It was the city my mother had loved enough to cry over.
It was warmth I had wanted for ten years without admitting it, and now I was inside it without having chosen that either.
The building, when we reached it, didn't look like a home.
It rose like a black blade, its upper beacon still burning against the washed-blue dawn.
Hiro entered an underground garage through a street opening hidden behind a sliding wall, and I counted the concrete markers as we spiraled down: B1, B2, B3.
The ordinary architecture of parking felt stranger than anything else because it looked exactly like every garage I'd ever known.
A private elevator waited with its doors open, no visible buttons on the panel, only a dark screen.
Mori pressed his palm flat to it. The screen lit green. The doors closed.
“Forty-three floors,” he said, watching the number climb. “It's a long ride. Ask me anything you like.”
I didn't have a question that would fit inside an elevator.
I held my suitcase in front of me with both arms, the way you'd hold something in a crowd you didn't trust, and I watched the numbers change, and somewhere around thirty I realized my heart hadn't slowed once since a folder clicked open in my own living room.
The doors opened onto gold light. Warm, low light, the kind that comes from a lamp somebody chose on purpose.
Past the small foyer I could see the edge of a room floored in pale tatami, and set out on the floor in front of me, side by side, waiting, were a pair of soft house slippers, the kind you'd find in a home that had been expecting a guest.
I stepped out because staying in the elevator wasn't a real option, and I slipped off my shoes at the low step into the foyer, some instinct or memory I couldn't quite place telling me to, and my socked feet met cool tatami, and that was the first thing I'd felt since the fuse went out in my hallway that wasn't fear.
The second thing I felt was him.
He was standing at the far end of the corridor with his back to me, tall in a black suit that fit him the way a good suit fits very few men, one hand resting at the small of his own back, the other holding a small ceramic cup with steam still rising off it.
He didn't turn right away. He let me see him standing there first, the set of his shoulders, the stillness of him, a man who didn't need to check who'd come in because he already knew.
Then he turned. Slowly, unhurried, like turning fast had simply never occurred to him as something a person could do.
His eyes went from my feet up the whole length of me and stopped at my face.
Black eyes. Black hair a little too long for the suit.
A stillness in him I didn't have a word for yet, except that it made the whole hallway feel quieter than it already was.
He said one word, quiet, in Japanese.
“Naomi.”
Just my name. Nothing else, not yet. And then, in English, unhurried and precise, warm in some low register I felt more than heard, the way you feel a bass note before you consciously hear it:
“You are safe now. You may come inside.”
I stood there with my suitcase still held in front of me like a shield, thirty minutes and one ocean away from the life I used to have, and I didn't know yet if I believed him. I didn't know yet if it would matter whether I did.