by Wen Spencer
He sighed with relief, his breath warm across the bare skin of her neck. “What else did you not write?”
She chewed on the pen, thinking back over the impressions that hadn’t made it onto paper. “It’s a hotel room with two Western-style beds, not futons on the floor like it would be for a Japanese-style room. The duvet is pulled back so he’s lying on sheets. The curtain wasn’t drawn, but there’s nothing to be seen from the bed, just open sky, not other buildings or mountains.”
“So, on the coast or on the plains.”
She laughed at the kernel of information. “Most of Japan.” She frowned as she searched for more information that she knew but hadn’t included. “He was tied in the traditional bondage method. You know. The jute rope with all the knots. The ones they use for sex?”
“Kinbaku-bi?” he rumbled softly into her ear, reminding her how close he was. Then, as if he wasn’t sure he understood her, he translated it. “The beauty of tight binding?”
She blushed and nodded. She saw nothing sexy about being tied up, but she knew it was her own personal demon. She still had nightmares of being “restrained” in hospital beds. She focused on the scene, trying to ignore Leo. The only other impressions she could glean were of the man himself. Simon was frustrated by his helplessness, angry with himself for not being able to escape, and afraid mostly for the son he knew would come charging after him. She wouldn’t be so brave in his place.
Leo stood, taking his warmth with him. She felt suddenly, horribly alone, as if Simon’s desperate isolation had seeped into her. “What else?” he demanded.
She stared at the paper, trying to glean more. “I can’t tell anything else. Usually the only way I can tell more is to see a photograph of the setting or visit it.”
Leo growled. “If we knew which hotel he was in, we wouldn’t need you to write more.”
“There is that.”
“What about the scene he disappeared in? Could you find out more if you visited Izushi?”
“Maybe,” she said slowly. “I don’t know.”
“Come with me to Izushi. Help me save my father.”
“What? Me?” No one had ever asked her for help. She was the person who always that needed to be saved. The helpless one.
“Please. This is the first time in six weeks that I’ve had proof he’s still alive.”
Proof? Writings of a possibly mad woman were all he had? It seemed pitiful, but even more pathetic was her sudden want to have him sit back down and let her lean on his strength. Truth was, it wasn’t Simon’s loneliness echoing inside of her, but her own.
“Okay,” she whispered, hating her weakness. “I’ll help you.”
15
The Kindness
of Water
After the peaceful timelessness in the shrine, Leo’s black sports car, gleaming from the recent rain, looked deadly and felt horribly out of place in the zen-barren temple grounds.
Nikki’s stomach was full of cold snakes. Getting into a car with a practical stranger was a huge personal “no no” for her. Only someone who was stupid as well as crazy would do it. People who got into strangers’ cars never were seen again. Horrible things were done to them and their bodies were hidden away where they would never be found. She knew almost nothing about Leo except that he knew what it was like to snap a person’s neck with his bare hands. It wasn’t a particularly reassuring factoid.
Leo opened the passenger door for her and stood waiting, his face unreadable. The interior was as sleek and deadly looking as the exterior.
Getting dressed had been a lesson in her mortality. There was a huge bandage on her left side. She’d peeled back one corner to find a healed but angry-looking scar the width of her thumb. The clothes she’d been wearing had completely vanished except for her bra and underwear, both stained with dried blood. Every movement triggered mild pain, as if someone had carefully beaten her from head to toe. Because of Atsumori, though, all her bruises had already faded to banana yellow.
Nikki tightened her hold on the katana. There wasn’t room inside to swing the sword; she would be totally without Atsumori’s protection. She wasn’t crazy, but she might be stupid.
While she hesitated, a small furry body streaked out from under the nearest porch and scrambled up into the car’s interior. It was Misa’s ginger kitten, Maru.
“Doko iku no?” Leo growled softly.
Maru climbed up onto the passenger seat and mewed.
“Soto soto.” Leo pointed to the ground at his feet.
The kitten mewed again and scrambled onto the storage case between the front seats.
Leo had been desperate to find his father, impatient with all the roadblocks and lack of information. Yet he’d taken responsibility for the kitten. And if he had wanted to hurt her, he would have already done it. She’d been unconscious for hours. What’s more, he could have kept the katana from her, leaving her completely helpless.
“It’s fine.” Nikki slid into the vacated seat, holding tight to the katana.
Leo gave her a long, hard study and then shut the door, giving in to his stubborn passengers. He walked around the car, got in, pushed the kitten into her lap so he could fasten his seat belt, and started the car with rumble.
She wanted to ask Leo questions, but there was an unwritten rule which said that once you started to ask people questions, they were free to ask back. It was the main reason she didn’t seek out other expatriates. The conversations all went the same way. What’s your name? Where are you from? What brings you to Japan?
They had already started down that dangerous road by exchanging names. To be fair, she couldn’t expect him to answer to Scary Cat Dude. God forbid, if they got into another fight. Yelling, “Watch out, Scary Cat Dude!” had shades of Jugemu, the boy who nearly drowned because people had to recite out his ridiculously long name to get him help.
How much did Leo know about her? In the last scene she wrote, he hadn’t been able to dig into her past. He didn’t know about her years locked in mental hospitals. He didn’t know how crazy her mother thought she was.
If he didn’t know, she didn’t want him to find out.
It seemed fairly simple. As long as she kept the door shut on personal questions, she didn’t have to answer any. They could just sit in silence. It left her in a car, though, with a virtual stranger.
She studied his profile as he picked his way through the heavy traffic. His black mane and dark almond eyes said that one of his parents was definitely Asian. His accent spoke of a childhood in the United States. The car was modified for Japan, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car, but the interior smelled of him.
She could create a personality sheet for him. Whenever she had trouble getting a handle on a character, she wrote down everything she could determine about them. Place of birth. Zodiac sign. Pet peeves. Biggest fears. Anything for her hypergraphia to springboard from. Her fingers twitched at the idea. She petted the kitten as a distraction. It purred and wrapped its paws around her hand and chewed with needlesharp teeth.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Nikki said.
“Hoi.” Leo reached over without looking. For a moment his fingers brushed over hers, strong and calloused. The kitten abandoned her and grappled Leo’s hand. He scooped it up and moved it to his own lap.
Leaving nothing to occupy her hands.
“Why do you still have it with you?” she asked.
He stared at the road, muscles in his jaw tensing. After a minute of silence, she didn’t think he was going to answer, but finally he said, “Despite what he thinks, he’s still young and fragile. The world is a hard place to be all alone.”
Was that a comment on the kitten or her?
She distracted herself by digging into her backpack and finding a notebook. Curling up in the seat so he couldn’t see the page, she started to write what she wanted to know about the most. Him.
He’d been in the cage for two days without food or water. He lay on the iron bars, panting. His entire body
felt like he was buried in sand. His eyes felt like sandpaper and his mouth was parched dry. He kept hearing jets and helicopters flying overhead, which meant he was near either Kona or Hilo Airport—unless they had flown him to Honolulu while he was drugged. The first day, he had howled as he tried to escape, but he was too weak for that now.
The far door of the warehouse opened, throwing a shaft of hot light through the dimness. The wind came through the open door, taunting him with the scent of recent rain. A figure stood in the doorway, sunlight gleaming off pale hair.
Behind the newcomer, the familiar voice of his captor was speaking.
“ . . . confirmed that there is only this one. We haven’t determined what it is.”
The newcomer and Williams came striding across the concrete floor, boot steps echoing in the empty space. Leo watched them come, too tired to snarl.
This new man was tall, white, and lean with piercing blue eyes. He crouched down, carefully out of arm’s reach, to stare through the bars at Leo.
“Thought you said you took him down with a tranquilizer,” the newcomer said. He had an odd accent. Most of the men sounded like the people from television, even the men who looked like they could have been local Hawaiians.
“I did.” Williams kept farther back, blending with the shadows.
“So what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s probably dehydrated.”
“You haven’t given him water?”
“It didn’t seem necessary.” Williams had been in favor of shooting Leo from the start. Voices over the radio, though, had ordered for him to be caged until “Fowler” could arrive.
Was this Fowler, then? Did this mean that they would kill him now, or was there some new torture in store?
Fowler scanned the warehouse and spotted the sink on the far wall. He walked to it and turned on the faucet. Would he actually give Leo water? His captors had so thoroughly ignored him that he was sure they were going to let him die in the cage. After filling a plastic jug, the newcomer walked back to the cage, sloshing the water loudly as he walked.
“You want some water?” Fowler trickled a little out.
Thirst moved Leo. He heaved up on his knees, pressed against the bars, one hand cupped and thrust out to catch the stream of water.
“Ah, ah.” The flow stopped. “Say ‘please.’”
Leo studied the man. Was this a trick? Did the man merely want him to beg before he died?
“Say ‘please’ and I’ll give you water. You’re going to die in that cage if you don’t. Do you want to die?”
Leo shook his head.
Fowler shook the jug. “Say it.”
It came out a whisper, but he was rewarded with a handful of water. It was cool and delicious despite a chemical tang he wasn’t used to.
“What’s your name?” Water sloshed loudly again, promising more.
He licked his lips. “Leo. Leo Watanabe.” Another handful of water.
“How old are you?”
“Seven.”
For a minute, no water was forthcoming as the man chose to look to the ninja instead.
“You shouldn’t trust it to tell the truth,” Williams said.
Then the water came, three handfuls’ worth.
“Where are your parents?”
“Gone.”
“Gone ‘went away’? gone ‘died’?”
He didn’t want to talk about his parents. The man sloshed the water jug when he fell silent. He still was so thirsty.
He reluctantly explained. “Mom went away long ago.”
“And your father?”
“Men came to our farm after New Year’s. They said we didn’t own the land. The king gave it to grandma’s grandfather. Dad took the truck to town with papers to show that it’s ours. He never came back. I’ve been looking for him.”
“Williams.” Fowler gestured, and Williams nodded and left.
The questions ended, but the water continued in handfuls until Leo was no longer thirsty.
Williams came back after the sun had set. In the darkness of the warehouse, he was just a dangerous voice. “John and Naomi Watanbe were married twelve years ago. They had no children. Naomi was killed ten years ago in a hit and run. It’s lying to you.”
Fowler shook his head. “Hawaii has a large number of yokai that followed the Japanese sugar cane and pineapple plantation workers from Japan. It’s possible that an obakemono took the wife’s place. His father isolated himself and kept the boy hidden. You can’t have a birth certificate for a child born to a dead woman.”
Fowler glanced toward Leo and saw that he was watching him closely. Fowler turned away and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Any word on the father’s whereabouts?”
“He was in a head-on with tractor-trailer truck on January fifth. Killed instantly.”
Leo wailed in distress.
“What are we going to do with it?” Williams came out of the darkness, his pistol in hand.
Fowler shifted in front of Leo, hands spread to ward off a shot. “I’ll take responsibility for him.”
Nikki stopped writing and peered over the notebook at Leo. He was watching the road intently as he whipped through slower traffic, the kitten asleep on his lap. She had no idea what an obakemono was. What did it make Leo?
Who was this man whom she trusted enough to get into a car with and be driven to parts unknown? He took her away from the multiple-lane highways lined with skyscrapers, through little towns with modern houses with metal roofs, and up into the mountains. They stopped at a quaint little town for gas and rice balls. She squatted over a ceramic gutter on the floor of the very Japanese public restroom, feeling more and more lost and alone. The only feeling that she was doing the right thing came from the patience and care that Leo had for the kitten. It had scrambled out of the car when she opened her door, heading for an empty lot beside the gas station. As she headed back to the car, the kitten was burying its feces.
Leo called a simple “Hoi!” that brought it running back. He’d taken a bowl out of the trunk, set it next to the car, and filled it from his own water bottle. As the kitten drank, Nikki remembered how Simon had dribbled water into Leo’s outstretched palm. Like everything she wrote, it was a vivid nightmare. She was left with memories as if she had personally experienced it. Fowler framed in the doorway, haloed with the brilliant light of a Hawaiian summer. Cool water trickling over parched skin. The taste of water.
It was maddening what wasn’t said or explained in the scene. There was no mention of Leo attacking or killing people. But if he hadn’t done anything, why had the platoon of soldiers ambushed him? Knocked him out, locked him up, and then ignored him for days? Why would the Williams only refer to Leo as “it”?
When Leo had talked to Miriam, he had thought about the fact that Miriam was a Sensitive. Miriam had spent most of the scene trying to escape Leo. It was implied that Miriam could sense his hidden nature.
“Are you some kind of monster?” was probably not a good opening question. Most of the other questions she could think of would reveal that she’d been writing scenes about him. Would he mind? He had recognized himself on her Post-It Note wall, but she had one notebook with his scenes. It was one thing to imagine her writing about him, but it would be another to read his own thoughts on paper. A little voice she used to call her writer’s instinct told her he would be upset by the invasion of privacy.
“I got you water.” Leo held out an unopened bottle that was bejeweled with condensation in the summer heat. “You need to be careful not to get dehydrated.”
“Thank you.” Whatever else he was that led to him being in the cage, he had still been a helpless child dying of thirst. No matter what he was now, he’d treated her with kindness.
16
The Tree of
Many Colors
Leo took her up and over the mountains to a little town called Izushi. She had researched it extensively, so she had a weird feeling of déjà vu as they came down off the mountains into the
narrow streets. Izushi had been founded back in the dawn of time—the town had been mentioned in Japanese literature as early as 27 B.C. Like much of Japan, it put all “historic” parts of California to shame. It had seen the rise and fall of several empires. Unlike Osaka, which had been mostly bombed to rubble and rebuilt, the small town looked like a medieval Japanese village with a light sprinkling of modern technology.
Leo drove through the narrow streets, lined with the stone walls of ancient samurai houses, muttering darkly at the GPS system. The kitten stared at the moving arrow and occasionally lifted a paw to pat at the screen, changing the information.
After the third time, Leo pushed the kitten into her lap. “Keep him out of trouble.”
He reprogramed the GPS and in short order they were at a beautiful inn that looked hundreds of years old. They drove through the huge fortified gate to a parking lot.
“This is the onsen that the Brit—Simon checked into.” Nikki eyed the entrance she had studied via the website. It was a beautiful centuries-old inn. “This isn’t the place he’s being held. It’s a more modern place.”
“I know this is safe for you. I’ve been here twice already, questioning the staff.”
Scaring the staff silly, judging by looks of the yukata-clad woman who went scurrying away at the sight of Leo’s car.
The kitten scrambled out when Nikki opened the door. Leo called something after it as it went scampering away.
“What did you tell it?” Nikki thought of Leo in the cage and changed her pronoun. “Him?”
“To be careful of the cars.”
“Why do you use Japanese with him?”
Leo shrugged and looked vaguely guilty of some crime. “He’s a Japanese cat.”
He surprised her by lifting her Hello Kitty suitcase out of the trunk. He must have found it while she was unconscious. His own suitcase was a simple black, hard shell. While it probably held clothes, it looked like it could contain a number of pistols, too.
