Twelve Months of Kristal: 50 Loving States Maine

But this time, she surprises me by answering, “Yes, I definitely want a drink.”

I pour one out for both of us and come back to the bed to hand it to her. Kristal has been shy with me from day one, but tonight her eyes skitter more than usual.

She takes a small careful sip. Winces. Then takes another one. And I feel terrible for not having something sweeter to offer her.

The air between us is nothing but awkward as we both drink my Japanese whiskey. I let the silence go on, wondering if this isn’t a good thing.

Feeling uncomfortable with each other might be enough to distract me from the fact that she’s still wearing nothing but a towel. Maybe tonight will be the night I figure out how to end this madness with her. Perhaps I’ll wake up the Nakamura Hayato I used to be tomorrow, a man who has finally come to his senses…

“So are they gone then?” she asks, interrupting my hopeful thoughts.

“Is who gone?” I reply, confused by her sudden question after such a long silence.

“Whoever you were talking to when you came out of the bathroom.”

I freeze. Then after several moments, I say, “I wasn’t talking to anyone. As I told you.”

She sighs and sets her tumbler down. “Okay, let’s start slow. When you came to the warehouse, how many people were at that party?”

I scrunch my head at her strange non-sequitur of a question. “I am not sure. I didn’t count. One hundred, maybe two hundred people—I’m assuming most of them were like you…elves.”

“That they were,” she says, nodding. “And did you see me talk with Santa while you were there, too?”

“Was Santa the one in the red leather coat?” I ask, recalling the older man with the white beard she’d rushed off to talk to when she discovered I had never tracked down the person in the sketch she left behind.

“Yes.”

“Then, yes, I saw him talking to you.”

“I see.” Her gaze gentles a bit. As if she feels sorry for me. “The thing is. it should’ve looked like I was talking to myself. Santa’s technically a spirit—a truly awesome spirit with powers beyond all belief, but a spirit nonetheless. That means no one can see him. Not unless he reveals himself to them. And he wouldn’t have done that for somebody who barged into our annual Christmas party.”

I am, as my American engineers would say, busted. I frown down at the covers ashamed of myself for walking into her trap.

“So you can see the spirits all around us, just like Grandma,” she says beside me, her voice gentle.

My heart goes weak. I’m a master of marketing, but at this moment, I don’t know what to say.

People have accused me of being a liar. The doctors at the institution I went to informed me I had schizophrenia.

But no one has ever confronted me with the truth.

Only Kristal. And I don’t know what to say. So I grab on to the only words I didn’t understand. “Your grandmother sees ghosts?”

“She’s not my real grandmother. That’s what we call Mrs. Claus. Grandma. She married Grandpa—that’s Santa Claus, a year ago, and she sees ghosts, too. She calls them spirits, though. Only fifty elves are working in the workshop right now, but according to her, there were more like four hundred when she arrived. She’s really, really good with spirits, and we all admire the work she does with the elves we can’t see. But she confessed to us her particular talent had made her life hard. A lot of people thought she was crazy in her old life. And the spirits were so demanding that she ended up sacrificing her relationship with her daughters and spending every cent she had to get them what they needed.”

“She’s a great bedtime storyteller, and she chose good books to read to us. But I liked it best when we were in something she called bookhole. That was when she said we needed space to digest an excellent story before we moved onto another one. So she’d fill the week between books with stories from her own life. It sounds like it was seriously hard to live most of her life as a poor black woman who everyone thought was a kook. I can only imagine what it was like for you, living in Japan.”

Her empathy makes something in my chest crack.

“It was,” I admit. “It was extremely difficult.”

Suddenly the words I’ve kept bound up for so long come falling out.

I tell her everything about growing up with a household staff composed of eight people. Only to eventually figure out that we only had five employees working on the estate. The extra three were servants who had seen things they shouldn’t have—more victims of my father.

I told her how the factory home was even worse. It was filled with servants and relatives who had died in terrible ways, thanks to a long line of ruthless Nakamura patriarchs, stretching back to feudal Japan.