However, our one-sided conversation is cut short when his phone vibrates with a new text message. One that brings an immediate frown to his face.
“Is everything okay?” I ask when he picks up his phone and starts texting.
“Kinda maybe. The pilot’s saying Maine doesn’t want to clear him for anything international until after New Year’s. So he’s putting in a new flight plan, just for San Francisco and we’ll go from there.”
Another delay. I can no longer be surprised at this point. “How long will that take?” I ask, gritting my teeth.
“Probably overnight,” Declan admits with an apologetic wince. “But don’t worry, even though the inn’s at capacity for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve celebration, my mom’s already arranging another night for you in the same room. And the pilot’s saying they should be ready to go by the time you wake up.”
“Did you hear that?” the college boy says to the man in the straw hat. “The oriental and the black girl are staying another night.”
By the time I wake up. That’s soon. Only a few more hours. Yet, as I walk up the stairs to tell Kristal the news, I continue to feel as if I’m in a nightmare I can’t escape.
I think about the last text I received from her. “Eating upstairs. Really don’t feel like drawing any pictures of soon-to-be-departed loved ones tonight.”
I’d felt strangely touched that she shared this misery with me. Obviously, she is comfortable, letting me in on many aspects of her life now, filling a hole in me I had not realized was empty. There is a need inside to do the same, but when I think of telling her mine…
My last sight of Satomi’s face flashes across my mind. I’d thought her so winsome and cute when I met her at university, but there was nothing appealing about her the day my father called me into his office. When I walked in, I found her upon the floor.
Her knees were bent at two separate ninety-degree angles, as if she’d keeled over in the middle of a crawl. Her right arm and hand were fully extended. A supplicant begging my father for help. And her mouth was covered in the blood she began to cough up soon after her first sip of tea.
“Satomi!”
I could clearly see she was already long past dead, but the compulsion to run over to the woman I thought would become my bride rendered me irrational. It was one of the weaknesses I thought my father had extinguished long ago with what he’d deemed “necessary punishments.”
These necessary punishments had started when I was seven. We’d been summering at our factory house and though I had been quietly scolded by my mother for years for “telling such terrible lies,” I still hadn’t learned to keep my insane observations to myself.
I’d made the mistake of asking the caretaker, who I would later find out was my real father about the men I’d seen helping him in our large imperial-style garden, early that morning, before most of the house had woken up.
The caretaker who prided himself on his one-of-a-kind designs looked stricken. And my father, who had overheard my question, had come to stand over me, still and outwardly calm.
“Jeong kun tends to the garden by himself. Everyone knows that. Are you accusing him of lying?”
He asked the question in such a way that even as a young boy I knew better than to respond. But my silence hadn’t been enough of an acquiescence for Kazuo Nakamura.
After commanding me to apologize to the caretaker, my father ordered me to my office. There he’d brought out a cane, the same one that his father had used to punish him when he was a boy.
“Let this be a lesson about lying,” he said. Then he slapped my palms with the cane until the skin broke and blood rose to the surface of the painful welts.
I was not able to properly play or use my hands for weeks afterward. And my mother warned me to keep my fantastical stories to myself. “You will only make your father angry, and the punishments will escalate.”
I’d tried to do as she said. But over the years I would slip up. Once in front of a secondary school teacher who’d insisted on contacting my father immediately.
The teacher had been dealt with. A “jump” in front of a train that mysteriously had no witnesses. I’d later found out that this, along with poisoned tea, was a favorite dispensing method of my father’s.
As for me, my father had beaten me across the back with the cane that time. Those welts had also healed, but I felt the pain of that punishment for years afterward.
No more slip-ups after that. Not until Satomi begged me to tell her my secret.
And now she was dead. My heart cracked with guilt and regret as I gathered her in my arms and wept over her lifeless body.