I thought she might smile and cheerfully wave as she had so many times before. That seemed like something an elf would do even when she was disappointed.
But she didn’t wave. She simply got in the car. And she didn’t look back again.
But why should I have wanted her to look back? I was the one who sent her away. For good reasons. Reasons that maybe won’t feel so bad once I’m home in Tokyo, where I belong.
Yes, it’s time to go home, I decide, fastening my seatbelt. And I steadfastly ignore Hikaru Utada’s last plaintive series of I need you’s, until her song is replaced by a Japanese rock track that has nothing to do with love.
Good.
What I had... whatever I had with Kristal…
It’s over now.
Oh no! Is this the end of Kristal in Hayato?
Find out in the next episode of
TWELVE MONTHS OF KRISTAL
TURN! TURN! TURN!
Episode 10
40
Turn! Turn! Turn!
KRISTAL
The tenth day of Christmas
“I’m sorry. The fella you’re looking for passed away a few months ago.”
The unexpected news from the man who ran the halfway house my father had been living in since he got out of jail froze me in place.
I gripped the flip phone my mother gave me along with the number to the halfway house even tighter. “Are you sure?”
I needed for him not to be sure. I needed him to say, “Hold on. Let me check my records again.”
For a moment, I let myself imagine the halfway house’s director putting down the phone and then coming back a few minutes later to say, “Oh, sorry about that. I was looking at the records for another Joe Green— such a common name, you know. Of course, your Joe Green is here, alive and well. Let me go get him on the phone for you.”
“Yep, I’m sure as sure can be,” the non-hypothetical guy on the other side of the phone declared, shattering that illusion.
“I was there at the knife fight he lost. Security guards and I had a hell of a time breaking it up. And the guy you’re looking for bled out before the ambulance could get here. Might’ve been for the best. Hate to say this, but that Joe was mean and angry--always looking for a fight with the world. Not likely he would’ve survived for long on the outside anyway. Know what I mean?”
Unfortunately, I understood exactly what he meant. I was only ten-years-old, but my dad had been in and out of jail most of my life. And my mother’s cancer diagnosis had aged me a lot in the last six months. I had cultivated a polite and much more mature version of my kid voice to do things like talk ConEd out of turning off the electricity in our fourth-floor walk-up, explaining to my fifth-grade teacher why I hadn’t been at school in weeks, and to get additional pain medication for my mother to make her more comfortable.
The halfway house guy probably thought I was a girlfriend or someone my dad owed money. If he’d known I was Joe’s ten-year-old daughter, he never would’ve told me all that. I hoped. Even before I became an elf, I tended to see the best in others.
“Did you get him on the phone?” My mother asked when I came back in from the fire escape, which was the only place in our studio apartment where you could get decent reception. She was lying in the bed we used to share before her coughing got so bad, she made me move to the couch.
She’d complained that the little rail bed was too small when we first moved into the apartment after my father caught his second jail sentence less than a year after finishing out the first. But now, my mother was so frail and thin, she made the twin bed look like it was queen-sized.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “Yes, he’ll be here in about an hour.”
Before I became an elf, I could still lie. But not very well, apparently.
My mother looked at me for a short suspicious moment, one eye squinting. Then she said, “You lyin’. He ain’t coming to get you. He already done moved on from that halfway house. Probably got another woman by now.”
I looked away because no, he wasn’t coming to get me. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her what had really happened. The truth was even worse than what she was thinking.
“You can’t blame him,” my mother continued off my silence. “He’s a man. Men can’t wait. They just don’t know how to keep on loving when the going gets tough. The truth is I should never have fallen in love with him. Should’ve kept you and kept on walking. My good sense knew how he was from the start, but my heart wouldn’t listen...”