CHAPTER 3 #2
Somebody had thought about this room in a way that had nothing to do with locks or guards.
Somebody had thought instead about what an American woman who drank her tea too hot and read too many books might actually want to wake up to.
That scared me almost as much as a room built only out of chains would have.
Through an open door was a bathroom, and in it a deep tub cut from a single block of pale, grained wood, clearly built for soaking rather than scrubbing.
Steam already curled faintly off unseen pipes somewhere behind the wall, like the whole room had been waiting for someone to need it.
One whole wall of the bedroom was window, glass floor to ceiling, and past it a tower stood lit red and white, blinking slow, almost like breathing.
Tokyo Tower. I'd seen it once before, years ago, on the one trip to this city I'd taken with my mother, back when I was ten.
By the bed was a low table. On it: a fresh yuzu, round and slightly dented on one side, the kind you'd pick by hand instead of buying by the crate.
A folded silk robe. A note in quick, careful characters that I read before I'd decided to, my translator's eye doing its work faster than the rest of me could catch up.
If I needed anything, it said, there was a bell by the door, and Riko would come. It was signed with two initials. K.T.
I read the note twice, the second time slower, the way you reread something to see if it changes its mind. It didn't. The strokes were quick but even, a hand that had clearly written a thousand notes before this one without ever once letting the rush show.
A second door stood in the wall to my left, closed. I didn't have to ask what was behind it.
He stayed in the doorway of my room the whole time we talked. He didn't come in. Not one step, not once.
“You are safe here.” There was no comfort in how he said it. Only certainty, flat and complete. “No one on earth will touch you now but me.” He let that sit a moment before he went on. “This is not a threat. It is a promise.”
I let my expression go blank.
“You may go anywhere in this apartment,” he said. “The kitchen. The tea room. There is a roof garden, if you find the door for it.” He paused. “You may not leave the building. The elevator answers to me. To Daisuke. To Hiro. It will not open for you yet.”
“That's not really a choice, then,” I said. “Staying.”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. I will not lie to you about that.”
I hadn't expected him to just agree with me. It knocked something loose in my chest, small and unwilling.
“I will explain your father after you have slept,” he said. He watched me as though he'd entered halfway through a sentence and meant to let me finish it.
“Do you have questions?” It didn't sound like a real question so much as a door left standing open.
I had one.
“Why me?”
He didn't answer right away. He let a whole breath go by, like he was deciding how much of the true thing to hand me all at once.
“Your father signed a paper,” he said finally.
“That is not your answer.” Another pause.
“When the paper reached me, I saw your name and learned another buyer had your address. I would not leave you to him, so I came myself. I believed moving first was enough to call it protection. It was not. That is the truth.”
I stood there holding that sentence the way you'd hold something breakable someone had handed you without asking if you wanted to carry it.
I searched his face for the lie in it. I translate documents for a living. I know exactly what a lie looks like once somebody dresses it up in careful language. I didn't find one. That scared me more than if I had.
There was nowhere in me to store an answer like that. I am not sure there is now.
I had a dozen more questions lined up behind that one. I let them wait. There would be time, apparently as much as it took.
“Oyasuminasai, Naomi.” (Good night, Naomi.)
He stepped back into the hall and closed the door, soft, the way you'd close a door on a sleeping child rather than a grown woman he'd taken from her own country only hours before.
I stood there a moment longer than I meant to, listening to nothing, because there was nothing left to listen to. He was gone.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a while without moving.
Then I picked up the yuzu from the low table and held it in both hands.
It was heavier than it looked, the peel rough and dimpled under my palms, real in a way that surprised me.
I brought it to my face on instinct, and it smelled exactly like the ones my mother used to peel at our kitchen table every December, right next to the red tin where she kept her good tea.
She used to save the peels in a little dish by the sink, for no reason I ever understood except that she liked how they looked, curled up and drying into something almost like paper.
The whole apartment went bright with it for a minute before the smell faded back into ordinary air.
I cried once. One long, silent break of it, into the sleeve of my own cardigan, so nobody on the other side of any door would hear me do it. My thumb found my mother's ring on my other hand and turned it, once, twice, the jade cool and small and exactly where it always sat.
When it passed, I got up and crossed the room to the second door. The closed one. The one I hadn't asked about. My feet were still in my socks, sliding a little on the cool floor; I'd left my slippers by the tea room without noticing until just now.
I put my palm flat against the wood. It was warm, or maybe that was only me.
I could hear him on the other side. Not words.
Only the ordinary sounds of a person preparing to sleep a few feet away—a chair drawn back, a slow breath, the ceramic click of a cup meeting wood.
Beyond that, the city carried on without me, trains and cars and millions of lives unaware mine had been rearranged.
A pipe ran briefly in the wall. A man getting ready for sleep in his own home after a very long night, the same as me.
I didn't know if I was afraid of him or something else entirely. I stood there a long time with my hand flat on that door, long enough that my arm should have ached and somehow didn't.
Yesterday evening I'd been a woman with a rescue cat named Miso, a stack of translation files, and a life I understood down to the sound of my own deadbolt. Now I stood in a stranger's hallway in my socks, my palm against a door I had no right to touch, waiting to feel something I could name.
Some sensible part of me said not to do it. Some other part, smaller and a great deal less sensible, had wanted to since the moment I first saw the color of his eyes.
Then, so quiet I almost didn't hear myself say it, I said his name.
“Kenji.”
Just once. Just to see how it sat in my mouth, after a whole day of calling him nothing at all.
On the other side of the door, every sound stopped. The chair. The breath. The small click of the cup, set down and left there. All of it gone at once, like he'd stopped moving too, just to listen.
I didn't move my hand from the wood. I didn't breathe either.
I stood there in the dark, in my socks, and wondered if his palm was flat on the same door from his side. And which one of us would be brave enough, one of these nights, to be the one who opened it.