I acknowledge his greeting with a polite nod.
“Our servants are so very different from us,” my mother observes, following the direction of my nod.
She takes a sip of her steaming tea instead of waiting for it to cool like Norio and me. “They will work until the day they die because they must, whereas you boys and your father will do the same because you can imagine doing nothing else. Do you ever wonder what our servants would do with even a percentage of what we have?”
I exchange a look with my brother, neither of us entirely understanding why our mother has taken us down this particular conversational track. Her family dynasty stretches back hundreds of years, and she has always made it seem as if Norio and I were nothing less than fated to have the riches into which we had been born. When had she started thinking such egalitarian thoughts? Perhaps her factory home banishment was affecting her in ways we couldn’t quite see underneath her perfectly maintained water painting exterior.
That is the last thought I had about my living mother.
In the next moment, she grabs at her throat, choking and then pitching out of her chair.
My brother and I run to her, but there is nothing we can do. She is already halfway to dead by the time we reach her, flopping around like a dead fish on the ground, with blood spewing from both her mouth and eyes.
By the time my brother pulls out his phone, her body has stopped moving altogether, her face frozen in a rictus of pain.
I stare at her dead body, trying to figure out what has happened, why this has happened.
And then, to my great horror, her spirit rises from her body. No longer my beautiful mother, but a grotesque wraith, with a face streaked in blood.
“You see now. This is what love has wrought,” she screams at me, sounding more banshee than human.
“Hayato…”
My mother’s bloodshot eyes lock on mine, her mouth spewing blood with every word. “Do not let yourself fall in love.”
“Hayato, wake up…”
“It is the most dangerous thing a dragon can do!”
“Hayato, come on, baby, wake up now. Wake up.”
I come awake with a yell…to find a pair of kind brown eyes looking down at me.
Kristal’s eyes…. “Are you okay?” she asks, her worried gaze searching my face.
No, no…I’m not okay. My mother is dead. The two Korean servants supposedly responsible for her death are dead. I watched their executions. The man who oversaw those executions, the man I thought was my father, is also dead.
But fear continues to claw at my chest, like a dragon trying to break free.
“Don’t move,” I warn before rolling her onto her back. “Stay still. Don’t talk.”
Control. That is what I need. I dive between her legs and attack her with my mouth until her worried questions morph into moans.
Control…that is what I need…all I want, I insist to myself as I cover her body with mine and drive deep inside her. Losing myself. Banishing the nightmare with the dream.
She comes again, and I release into her only a few seconds later, my body seizing as I spill into the condom.
But it works. When I roll off of her, the nightmare has faded. My mother’s ghost is no longer screaming blood in my face.
“Can I talk now?”
No…no, she can’t. Talking would be dangerous. Talking might undo me after that nightmare, which was really a memory disguised as a dream.
“I will take a shower, then go downstairs to check the weather,” I tell her, climbing out of bed.
I feel her eyes on me. Sad and confused.
This is why you don’t do relationships, I remind myself. You should let her go. Call off the deal. Get her another room.
But I don’t.
22
Twelve-Thirty
I tell Kristal that I would prefer to have breakfast downstairs when we are both done with our showers. This is a lie. But I’d rather tolerate the noisy dining room than answer any of the questions burning in Kristal’s eyes.
Declan’s mother waves us over to the table where she’s sitting with her son as soon as we walk through the open doorway of the freezing cold dining space. As we file through tables filled with guests wearing a mix of formal morning dresses, summer wear, pajamas, and bathing suits, I studiously ignore all the exclamations of “Here’s the oriental again!” and “I wonder where he’s from? His English isn’t bad at all!”
We find a table filled with toast, bacon, eggs, scones, and several other baked goods when we sit down.
“Instead of setting up the buffet, I made you a special breakfast as a thank you for agreeing to fill in for my stubborn son,” Maeve says, glimpsing our confused looks.
Declan merely glowers at the special spread, and I notice his plate remains empty.
“This looks delicious,” Kristal says, taking the seat beside Maeve. “But you didn’t have to do all of this.”