When you meet someone, you never really forget them.
It just takes a while for your memory to return.

—

The nurse's office was too bright, and Haku wasn't sure how he'd gotten there this time. His memory felt jumbled up and distant, like a fading dream.

He remembered screaming, or at least he thought he did, because his dry throat tasted coppery and raw. He remembered, too, his teacher telling him and the rest of his third grade class about a flock of migratory birds landing in the nearby treeline. The shadowy afterimage of a thousand flapping wings still danced at the corners of his vision, pulsing faintly in time with the beating of his heart.

If he never saw another starling again, he thought, it would be too soon.

Haku tucked his bony knees under his chin and rubbed the worry-smooth face of a five-yen coin. It was a good luck charm, a gift from Uncle Kosuke, so that the pair of them would never have to be apart.

Almost six months ago, he'd sat in the same too-large chair while Nurse Wallace tried and failed to sugarcoat the news that they'd found Kosuke's body on the banks of the Delaware. He'd worn the coin on a chain around his neck every day since then.

Nurse Wallace looked up from her outdated laptop and flashed him the same condescending smile adults always did.

"There you are," she said, in a voice as bright as the humming fluorescents overhead. "How do you feel?"

Blood pounded in his ears and his heart felt like it might beat out of his chest. "I don't know," he said. "Crappy, I guess. Did I hit my head on something?"

"Nothing as traumatic as all that," she chuckled, though what she found so funny, Haku couldn't guess. "You just had a little scare on the playground, I think." She typed something on her ancient keyboard. He tried to crane his neck to see, but she turned her screen away from him.

"Can you remember what spooked you?"

He didn't remember feeling frightened, exactly—just screaming and the screen-door smell of distant lightning. "Um…"

"It's okay if you can't," said the nurse. "We all get a little scared from time to time."

Haku knew better than to argue with adults who had already made up their mind. "I'm tired," he muttered to no one in particular.

"I'm sure you are. Your mother is already on her way, so you just sit tight, okay?"

He nodded once, slowly, and pretended to understand. Mother had opinions about picking him up early from school, and if she was missing work to come and get him, then whatever happened on the playground must have been more serious than the nurse was letting on.

She sent him to the waiting room, to sit under a big vent that rumbled when the heat kicked on and filled the room with the smell of burning dust.

Mother arrived a few minutes later. She smiled at him from the other side of the glass door and waved. He waved back, but he was too tired to smile.

"Hey, sweetheart." Mother crouched down to brush a few strands of dark hair out of his eyes. He knew he should have been glad to see her, that he should have been glad to go home, but the quiet concern just made his cheeks burn with embarrassment. News traveled fast in the third grade, so by now the whole school already knew he was the freak who screamed at birds. "What happened today?"

He buried his face in the crook of his elbow and thought he might die from sheer embarrassment. "I don't know," he mumbled. "I got sick, I guess."

The nurse's too-bright voice floated over the high office counter. "We just got a little scared on the playground, is all," she said, stepping around the desk with the same measured, condescending smile. "But we're alright now, aren't we, Haku?"

"Yeah, I guess so," he said, although he did not feel alright.

Nurse Wallace seemed satisfied. She beckoned his mother over to her side of the high office counter, to talk in that quiet, secretive way adults did. "Mrs. Yuki," she asked, peering over Mother's shoulder to make sure he wasn't paying attention. "Has your son ever had a panic attack before?"

Haku picked at a fraying thread on his backpack and pretended he wasn't listening.

"A panic attack?"

"They're not uncommon after—" Nurse Wallace paused, dropping her voice low. "—after major life changes, even in children. It may never happen again, but if you're worried, I can recommend a grief counselor in Pittsburgh who specializes in families. Given your recent history, it might be something to consider anyway."

The way Mother's shoulders tensed told Haku everything he needed to know about the images 'recent history' conjured in her memory. He hadn't been allowed to go with her to identify the body, and Uncle Kosuke had been given a closed-casket funeral, but in the age of the Internet it was hard to keep anything from a curious child. He knew what drowning did to a body, and imagination provided the rest of the image.

"Even you and your husband might benefit," the nurse pressed on. "I've never met anyone who couldn't do with a little therapy after losing a family memb—"

"I'll keep that in mind for the future," Mother interrupted, in a tone that very much implied she would not. "For now, I'd like to take my son home. He's had a long enough morning as it is."

"Oh." Nurse Wallace deflated. "Right, of course. He'll need a doctor's note if you decide to keep him home tomorrow too."

Mother nodded.

She signed him out without saying anything else of substance to anyone. A kind word here, a polite explanation there. It was a performance Haku had grown accustomed to since April. His mother always danced away from the topic of Kosuke.

If the line of white-haired old ladies behind the desk noticed the nervous edge to her laughter, or the uncomfortable way she fidgeted with her bargain bin bracelet, they were kind enough not to mention it.

He waited until they were in the car to ask the question burning on the forefront of his mind.

"She was talking about Kosuke, wasn't she?"

His mother's already white knuckles tightened around the steering wheel and her eyes flicked up to meet his gaze, briefly, in the rearview window. For a long time, she said nothing. "It's rude to eavesdrop, Haku."

"But she was. When she said 'family history,'" he prompted. "She meant Kosuke, right?"

"You'll never hear anything but bad news that way," she continued. "Anyway, that nurse didn't know what she was talking about. Common even in children. As if I don't know what a panic attack is."

"Do you think that's what I had? A panic attack?" he asked. Mother had worked as an assistant in a psychiatric facility for as long as Haku could remember; she knew about these things.

"I don't know. Probably not. It's just stress. It's been a long year. The move, your dad's new job—"

"And Kosuke," he added, but his mother either didn't hear him or pretended she hadn't.

They didn't talk about Kosuke anymore. Not about his life, or about his death, or about what they were going to do with his remaining possessions, piled high in dusty boxes in their crowded front hall closet. Mother had taken down their photos of him well before the move, and she had conveniently forgotten to unpack them afterwards. If she had her way, he thought, none of them would remember that his uncle had even existed. It seemed so unfair, so disrespectful; his uncle had truly become a ghost, ever present but unacknowledged on the edges of their collective memory.

Father said that ignoring her grief, putting space between herself and it, was Mother's way of coping with what had happened. Haku had tried not to hate her for it, with moderate success.

"We needed the change," she continued to fill the silence, "but it would wear anyone out. Stress made you sick all the time when you were a baby."

"Yeah," he said, "when I was a baby."

He plucked idly at a loose string on the arm of his booster seat and watched the rows of utility poles as they passed. "Maybe I should go talk to that guy," he said as they pulled up to a red light. "In Pittsburgh, the grief counselor guy. Nobody else is talking about Kosuke, and I've been having nightmares again—"

"And no wonder!" Her eyes darted back up to meet his again. "What do you expect, dwelling on what happened to your uncle like that? It's morbid."

"Somebody has to." He crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at her, daring her to look away first. "You and Dad just want to forget about him."

The light turned green. Mother looked away. "That's enough," she said.

"Well, you do—"

"I said enough."

Their tiny apartment was still only half unpacked. Haku pushed past the maze of cardboard boxes in the entry, slipped off his canvas shoes, and made a beeline for his bedroom. "Have you eaten?" his mother called after him. "I can make you somethi—"

"I'm just gonna lay down," he called back without stopping. "I still don't feel so good."

Back in the safety of his room, he finally felt like he could breathe. The panic had ridden home in his lungs, tight and close and fueled by embarrassment and confusion. He felt lighter without it, clearer. When he closed his eyes, instead of the afterimage of a thousand wings beating in the distant treeline, he saw nothing.

Without the sense of impending doom, Haku felt very small and very alone.

Next to his bedroom window, on a shelf where the sunlight could reach it, he had built a small shrine. Kosuke had given him the idea a few years earlier, after Grandmother's funeral, although his had been better. He'd had a picture of Grandmother, for one thing.

Instead of a picture, Haku had to make do with a folded-up copy of his uncle's obituary he'd printed out at school. He kept it hidden in the jacket of an old picture book; if Mother found it, he suspected she would just throw it away.

Haku didn't know if he believed that spirits lived on after a person died. He didn't know how they could. Things had rules, and those rules were based on things that you could see and touch and smell and hear, and the rules said that when you died, that was the end.

Still, Kosuke had believed that he could still talk to Grandmother after her accident, and sometimes when Haku stood in front of his little makeshift shrine, head bowed and breath shaky, he, too, felt a little less alone.

He unfolded the paper and set it in pride of place, wedged between a pack of magician's playing cards and a worn leather billfold. A wooden figurine of a rabbit propped the paper up from behind. The rabbit, now chipped almost completely clean of its white paint, had once belonged to his grandmother.

"I had the dream again," he said. "Just like before. Mom says it's probably nothing, but it always feels so real.

"She says I shouldn't think about you so much," he said. "She says it's 'morbid,' and that's why I'm having bad dreams, but she's the one hiding all your pictures."

He stopped and sighed, and reminded himself that his was just how Mother dealt with these things.

"She misses you," he said. "A lot. We all do."

He waited for a while, hoping something would happen but knowing it would not. The mismatched collection of objects—the playing cards, the figurine, a smooth but otherwise unremarkable stone they'd found combing the banks of Lake Chicago one summer—felt as empty as ever.

Haku tucked the fading obituary back into the dust jacket and replaced it with his coin necklace, resting the clasp behind the rabbit's exposed wooden ears.

It was an hour past his bedtime when Mother plucked the library book from his hands and sat down at the end of his bed. She was still wearing her shoes, and the tense line of her mouth suggested she wouldn't be sleeping anytime soon.

"So," she began. "Nightmares, huh?"

Haku didn't look up at her, just wrung the worn edge of Grandmother's quilt in his hands. "Yeah."

"Want to talk about them? They're about Kosuke, right?"

"Not really," he admitted. "I mean, he's not in them, exactly, but—"

His mother had never taken an interest in the contents of his nightmares before now. Talking about them—like dwelling on his uncle, like talking about Grandmother, like anything else that made Mother uncomfortable—was bad luck. It angered the spirits or brought some bad omen to fruition. It simply wasn't done.

But she leaned in close and ruffled his hair, smiling, with none of the frustration she'd shown on the ride home. "If you don't want to talk about them…." Her voice trailed off, but she didn't seem upset.

"No, it's okay," he said. "But…they aren't nice dreams. You'll think I'm being morbid."

She sighed. "I shouldn't have said that earlier. I'm sorry. It's just—"

"Been a long year," he said.

Mother smiled weakly and gathered him up in her lap. "I know it hasn't been easy on you either," she said, resting her chin on the top of his head. "And I haven't really been there when you needed me, either."

They sat like that in silence for a few minutes, Mother swaying gently with her arms around him. She hummed a quiet song he remembered Grandmother singing when he was very, very small. Haku hadn't realized how much he'd needed the contact comfort until now.

"It's always the same dream," he said finally. "I'm somewhere dark—a cave, I think—and I can hear it storming outside. There's water all around me. It's cold, so cold that it burns, and it's heavy, and it just keeps rising and I can't find my way out—" His lungs burned at the memory and he sucked in a steadying breath. "I'm looking for something in the cave, but the water makes it hard to move. Then I wake up, right before I—" He stopped.

"Right before you…?"

"Drown."

She flinched at his bluntness. For a moment, Haku thought she was going to scold him again, that she somehow knew about the times he'd held his breath for as long as he could or searched on the school computer to find out what drowning felt like. Maybe Mother was right and he only had bad dreams because he was a wicked, morbid little boy.

But she didn't scold him, just held him tighter, and for a long time she didn't say anything at all.

"Mom, is something bad going to happen?"

"What?" When she pulled away, her eyes were rimmed red. "Of course not, baby. Why would you think that?"

"Kosuke said we were cursed."

"Did he." A note of fond irritation crept into her voice. She tried and failed to hide the beginnings of a smile. "What fairy stories was my brother telling you, anyway?"

"He told me that there was an angry spirit who picked off members of our clan one by one because one of our ancestors stole something from him. He said that's what got Grandmother." Haku twisted the hem of his pajama shirt in his hands and didn't look at her. "Is the curse going to get me, too?"

His mother smiled and shook her head. "Dad and I would never let anything bad happen to you, sweetheart."

"What if it gets you first, though? It already got Kosuke…"

She sighed. "Kosuke was very sick."

"But what if the curse is why he got sick? What if—"

"That's enough of that," Mother said softly, leaning down to kiss his sleek hair. She climbed out of bed and settled him in against his fortress of hand-me-down pillows. "You'll give yourself more nightmares."

Haku thought about Kosuke, even though he wasn't supposed to. He thought about Grandmother, too, and about the angry spirit that was probably hiding under his bed, waiting for the right moment to drag him off as punishment for his ancestor's crimes. "I'm already going to have nightmares," he mumbled.

Her face dropped into a serious expression he couldn't read. She fumbled with the pocket of her worn out jeans, twisting the top of it between her thumb and index finger, and said nothing.

Then, all at once, her smile returned. "Lucky for you, your mom still has a few tricks up her sleeve," she said. "Hold out your hand."

He did so dutifully, closing his eyes out of habit.

A folded slip of stationery fluttered into his open palm. Haku opened one eye, then the other, his excitement dissipating. "It's just paper," he announced flatly.

"I wrote something very special for you inside, to chase away the nightmares," Mother said, folding his small hands around it. "It's just for you, so you have to wait until I leave to open it. Your dad will be in to say goodnight in just a little while, but you can't show him either. It'll be our little secret, okay?"

Didn't Mother already know what was written inside? He wondered what could be so secret that even she couldn't see it a second time. Then he thought about curses and spirits again, and about the way Mother and Father had argued over dinner, and came to the next logical conclusion:

"It's magic, isn't it?" he whispered.

She glanced over her shoulder. The sound of Father clearing away the dinner dishes floated down the hall. "Yes. But it won't work if you open it before I leave, so you have to wait."

He nodded, though he didn't really get it. If Mother said he had to wait, he could wait, however much the thought of opening the little pink paper and discovering the magic within excited him. She kissed his forehead again, more urgently this time, and held him tightly in her arms.

"I love you, baby," she said, in the same grave tone she used whenever they talked about Kosuke. "You know that Dad and I would never let anything happen to you, right?"

"You already said," he grumbled, but regretted it when he saw the way her face fell.

"Oh," she said. "I guess I did."

She crossed the room, stopping in the door to turn off the overhead light. He noticed the way her shoulders shook when she walked, and suddenly Haku was very aware that his mother was crying—or at least trying not to.

"Hey, Mom?"

"Yes, baby?" Her breath hitched when she spoke.

"I love you."

Mother made a strangled noise in the back of her throat. "I love you too, baby. Your dad and I love you so, so much." She took a shuddering breath. "Dream some good dreams for me tonight, okay?"

And then he was alone again, the sound of Mother's footsteps fading down the hall before that light, too, winked out.

Haku scrambled out of bed, the stationery still balled tightly in his fist. He didn't stop to turn on his bedside lamp; there was already enough light leaking through the window to read by. He'd hated sleeping under the street light at first, but now the soft orange glow that spilled in through his blinds kept the monsters away better than any nightlight.

He stopped at his bookshelf and pulled the coin necklace back over his head. Mother said he couldn't show anyone, but surely Kosuke didn't count.

The paper was nearly crushed and sticky with sweat, but he managed to peel it open without tearing it. In the dim lamp light, Mother's hasty scrawl was nearly incomprehensible.

Totally incomprehensible, actually; after several seconds of squinting, Haku realized the small, sharp characters were written in a language he recognized, but couldn't read. He had seen them before, on the many curiosities Grandmother had brought with her from Japan. The same script marked both hers and Kosuke's graves.

He waited.

Nothing happened.

The paper sat in his open palms and did exactly nothing. It smelled faintly of the sandalwood incense Mother burned each year on Grandmother's birthday, but it was otherwise unremarkable. He had been expecting magic, or at the very least some kind of secret message. Haku wondered if he'd messed it up somehow.

A knock on the front door distracted him from his disappointment momentarily. It was late, much later than his parents ever had company. He padded over to the cracked door to hear their unexpected visitor, but he didn't make it that far.

All at once, the crumpled paper in his hand grew white-hot. Haku yelped and tried to drop it, but the strange characters hung in the air where the sheet had been. The floor of his bedroom fell away instead.

As the walls stretched down towards inescapable blackness, he found himself too shocked to panic. He imagined falling into a black hole would probably feel a lot like this—like being sucked through an infinitely long and infinitely tiny straw forever, your body twisting and contorting to accommodate a new and unnatural shape.

Rushing air like a hundred hands, formless and invisible, beat against his skin and pulled his clothes, his hair, in a hundred different directions. He squeezed his eyes shut to keep them from popping out of his skull.

Haku cried out for Mother, for Father, for anyone, but the sound never reached his ears. There was only a dull roar, growing louder with each passing second until his eardrums threatened to burst.

And then, as quickly as it began, it stopped. Warm sunlight filtered red through his eyelids, and he felt cool, rough stone under his bare feet. Somewhere in the distance, familiar songbirds sang soft, familiar songs.

With no idea where he was or how he'd gotten there, Haku steeled himself, filled his lungs with cold October air, and opened one eye.

—

Author's Note:

So this took me a year to write in full because I went back and revised it 800 times. I'm going to try to shoot for monthly updates, but you've been warned. Welcome aboard and have fun~!