Chapter Twelve
Mom had me sit down at the table for breakfast. It was with wide eyes and a grumbling stomach that I watched Ms. Fujita fix the single meal in the kitchen. When she came into the dining room to drop off the food, Ms. Fujita gasped over my cheek and touched it with her papery hands. She told me many things that I didn't understand in a concerned voice. I told her "thank you" a lot, but she shook her head. When Mom entered the room, clothed in a black pinstripe suit, Ms. Fujita turned on her and said a great many more things, rapidly and with feeling. Mom bent her head, touched my cheek. Her reply to Ms. Fujita was reserved. Ms. Fujita bowed and didn't say anything for the rest of the meal.
"Are you all right?" Mom asked me. Her voice was hoarse.
"Yes," I said. "I've had worse."
"Your father is coming to New York," she said, sitting down across from me.
I froze. "He is?"
"It will be a reward for you." She poured her tea. "Once a month, in Central Park. If you are good."
"What about my uncles?"
She coughed. "Perhaps."
"I want to see Mike and Don."
"We shall discuss it." She covered her mouth.
"Are you sick?"
"No." She poured tea for me—green tea. I wrinkled my nose. Quickly, she realized she had erred, and drew it away.
"What else did he say?" I asked, staring at her rice.
"That," she said, "is our business."
Dr. Hernandez and another doctor shunted me through a clanking, rattling white doughnut that took detailed images of all my insides, a process that seemed to take an infinity. When we left the Bunker, Mom treated me to a nice restaurant. We ate soup and overpriced baked chicken with our backs to the wall. I was getting better at picking out the Elites, but only because I remembered their faces. There were the two girls again, the ones who had been in pastel dresses; now they were in business suits and their hair was up, and they looked for all the world like they were high-powered executives on a lunch break. There was the man with the broken nose, except now he was with two other men and a woman, and if their sleeves fell back you could see scars and the evidence of broken wrists and fingers.
"How many Elites do you have?" I asked softly.
"Enough," Mom said.
"But who would try to kill you?"
"Oh, I have many enemies here. The American Mafia and their ilk, the Russian mob, the Yakuza, some South American and Chinese elements, some governments. It goes on and on."
I shuddered. "Would they kill me?"
"If they wanted to die slowly." She smiled and sipped her tea.
"But couldn't they shoot us from far away?"
"They could try."
"What does that mean?"
"I have enough money to protect us." She squeezed my hand under the table. Her palm was as rough as Dad's.
"Then… if you can keep off all of these big criminal organizations, why didn't you just destroy the farm?" I asked.
She paused. "I didn't want to."
"Why not?"
She began slicing her chicken into even quadrants. "You would have fled again, and into the woods, at that. We know there are tunnels, but we just don't know how many or where they open. Usually we could scan the ground for temperature differences, but they are maintained at the same temperature as the surrounding earth. We thought about launching a miniature EMP bomb onto the premises, but… the result would be messy. The outcome uncertain." She shrugged. "I suggested we wait until you left."
"You… you knew I would leave?"
"Eventually. Two young girls eventually get up to no good. Then no fighting, no bloodshed, just an easy pickup and a getaway. I like my Elites, and I hate to waste them."
Swallowing my chicken was like swallowing sandpaper.
"Don't worry. This life is still new to you." Mom leaned back and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. "Give it time."
I looked at her, incredulous, because those were clearly Dad's words, not hers.
After Mom returned me to the apartment, she told me she had business to attend to and was gone. Then Fujita-san directed me to the level just downstairs, a series of meeting rooms and offices. Just like that, I was thrown on the mercy of a tutor of the Japanese language—a small, wiry man who never smiled and snapped if I so much as hiccupped. After that was a tutor of English, a cinnamon-haired older lady with a lisp, and after that, an owl-eyed geriatric who taught math. I was given some rudimentary tests. Staring at papers, as it turns out, is not my strong suit. All that time, I had thought I could read; I could sit down with a whole novel and read it in a few hours. Then I was given a textbook of dry paragraphs on Japanese history and I felt like stabbing my eyes out with my eraser.
When Takeru returned, I was sweating bullets in the living room, staring at a chapter about decimal places. He flopped on the sofa and kicked his nasty, sweaty feet up on my textbook, then turned on the TV.
I nearly snapped at him. But then I thought of Dad and the family meeting in the park. So I jerked my book out from underneath his feet without comment, picked up my pencil bag and notebook, and headed into the tatami-mat room.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"A place where you aren't," I said, and tried to slam the paper door. I nearly knocked it out of its runners.
Just as I was about to sit down, I looked to my left and halted in my tracks. There was a cabinet standing against the wall with its doors hanging open. The inside was all gilded, and a Buddha sat in the center, legs crossed. A food offering lay before it: a heap of oranges, a bowl of cooked rice. Sitting just beside the cabinet at eye-level, there was a shelf set with an elegantly crafted miniature shrine that enclosed three calligraphy-laced papers. The shelf was framed by two photographs.
My heart stuttered. On the left-hand side was a photo of Akemi, in full ninja regalia, her foot thrust up on the edge of a roof and her head thrown back. A city lay prostrate at her feet. On the right-hand side was a photograph of me as an infant. It had to be me; no other baby could have possibly been so uniquely hideous. I looked so much like a turtle, so wrinkled and patchy-skinned, that I wondered what Mom could have possibly expected from my physical appearance as I aged. Even though I had been swaddled—and there was a chapped hand lying across my chest, probably Mom's—you could just barely see the shell peeking up over the back of my neck.
Ms. Fujita appeared beside me and said something solemn.
"Oh my god!" I jumped away. "Fujita-san, don't… don't scare me like that."
She gestured at the photos and began talking. She mimed bowing before the gilded shrine and lighting candles. I glanced over my shoulder. Takeru was not watching TV; he was glaring through the open doors. Ms. Fujita looked over and gestured at him, too.
He groaned, but he shambled in anyway.
"She wants me to tell you about the butsudan and the kamidana," he said. He pointed at the cabinet. "Buddhist." He pointed at the shelf. "Shinto. Offerings in the morning. You shut the butsudan at sunset and open it in the morning. So now you know. There."
"Why am I here?" I said, pointing at the photo.
"I don't know. Ask Mom." He backed away. Ms. Fujita narrowed her eyes.
"How about you?" I asked. "Why aren't you there?"
"Maybe because I'm not dead," he said. He flopped back onto the couch.
"Wait," I said, leaning on the paper door.
Ms. Fujita apologized profusely and pushed my hands off of the paper panels, then mimicked a hand punching through.
"Oh, sorry," I said. "Um. Sumi… sumo…"
"Sumimasen," said Takeru.
"Sumimasen, okay. Do you not get homework or is it just me?"
He glared up at me. "Mind your own business."
"I'm serious."
"Yeah, maybe I don't want to. Or need to." He sank into the cushions. "Doesn't matter anyway."
"Wouldn't Mom notice?"
"She's been home more in these last three days than she has in the last three months," he said.
"What?"
"She's gone," he said. "All the time."
"Wait a minute!" I said. "So she wants to keep me in a little box without ever talking to me or anything?"
"You're putting it nicer than I would," he said.
"What about katas?" I asked. "When do we do katas?"
"I do katas after school with a tutor." He eyed my face. "Why do you care?"
"Oh my god," I said. "Dad made me promise to stay. I'm trying to make this not suck."
"Some dad you've got." He sneered. "Does he know she smacked you?"
"That's none of your business."
Ms. Fujita said something sharp. Takeru rolled his eyes, but he looked back at the TV and said nothing. Ms. Fujita pressed me back inside of the tatami-mat room and closed the door. When she looked back up at me, it was with the same mild smile. She picked up my books and pencil bag and walked out a different door.
"Hey!" I rushed after her. "I need to finish that."
She was waiting for me, and mimed shutting the door and kicking off my slippers. So I did. When I turned back around, she was trotting down a flight of stairs toward a tinkling fountain. Trees, flowers, shrubbery, and stone rose in civil arrangement on every side. We were surrounded by glass—glass walls, a glass roof—and even the tiles, white and shining, seemed translucent. It was warm, but not terribly so, and the plants whispered around me in an omnipresent breeze. You could just see the high rises between the trunks.
Ms. Fujita set my book and pencil bag down on a table sitting in front of the fountain and then pointed. There were softball-sized goldfish gathering at the edge of the pool, orange ones and calico ones with jeweled scales and white ones with red wens, lipping greedily at the surface. Their pool fed into a swimming pool lined with rushes, waterweed, and lilypads. The water was clear and green, ruffled by the breeze, water-bugs, and the odd dragonfly.
"Oh," I said. "Kirei."
Ms. Fujita nodded, patted the back of a plush chair. I sank down into the cushions and sat there staring for a while. The goldfish saw us and immediately began whipping themselves into a frenzy, struggling to push their comrades aside, every now and then violently rushing across the surface. Finally, I crossed my arms on top of my books and dropped my head into my arms.
Ms. Fujita appeared beside me with a cold glass of water, then sat down across from me and said something that sounded kind.
"I just want to go home," I said.
She pushed something into my hand. I looked up with bleary eyes. A canister of fish food. She pointed at the goldfish, smiling.
I had no idea that goldfish were contortionists, much less fat ones, but these clearly were. They twisted over sideways and backwards for pellets, and if that didn't work, they bowled each other over and tackled one another head-on. Ms. Fujita pointed down at them and said, "Kingyo." She smiled at me.
I returned it. "Kingyo," I replied.
I followed Ms. Fujita wherever she went. When she cleaned the kitchen, I sat on the floor nearby completing square after square of hiragana. When she rolled up her sleeves and scrubbed the bathroom, I sat in the hallway just outside the door. She laughed at me and pointed toward the glasshouse, but I pretended not to understand her. Instead, I showed her a page of fractions. She threw up her hands in mock distress.
I was genuinely sad to see her walk out of the door at eight. She smiled at me and bowed. Behind her, the two Elites on guard stared unashamedly at me.
"Itte kimasu," she said, and shut the door.
I was still up when Mom came home. She swept through, filing her nails, and paused when she saw me curled up on the sofa.
"Why aren't you in bed?" she asked.
"Is what Takeru says true?" I asked. "You are never home?"
Her eyes narrowed. "Sometimes my job requires that I leave the country."
"So I'm not going to practice katas with you or talk to you or anything? You're just going to lock me in this little house and see me a few times a year?" I sat back. "I could do that and live at the farm, and be with all my uncles and…"
"No," she said. "This is not up for debate." She strode down the hallway.
I pattered after her. "When am I going to see Dad?"
"The end of the month."
"You're not lying, are you?"
"No!" She looked me up and down. "It is too late for you. Go to bed."
"When do you practice katas?" I asked.
She laughed softly. "I practice at five."
"Okay."
"Five in the morning."
"In the exercise room?"
Her laughter died, and she stared at me with a funny expression. "Yes."
I turned, nodding. "I'll see you then."
I woke in the predawn dimness, took a deep breath, and thought hard of the farm. I could almost smell the freshly cut grass and the chilled air. Then the air conditioning kicked on, the perfumed air blew in, and the illusion was gone. I jumped to my feet. I threw on my clothes, but I left the wig on its stand.
Mom was stretching. She cracked her neck as I entered the room.
"Ohayou gozaimasu," she said.
I nodded.
And then I heard a soft "ohayou!" from the front door.
I looked up. Ms. Fujita stood in the doorway, smiling at both of us. She set down her purse, kicked off her slippers, and padded into the room.
"Fujita-san!" I said.
And to my shock, she began stretching, too—stretching as far as her joints would allow. She smiled at me the entire time.
"She's a ninja too?" I asked.
"Hai," said Fujita-san, then rattled something off.
"Fujita-san's family has worked as our housekeepers for generations." Mom twisted, cracking her back. "Of course they are trained in our art."
"If I get up at five, and you're not here… is she going to train me?"
Mom paused, looking down at me. "She could."
"I would like that," I said swiftly. "I would like that a lot."
"I would prefer to oversee your training first." Mom stood back. "Show me what you know."
I did my best. Mom did not stop me, even when I knew I had made a mistake. She only stood against the wall with her arms crossed. I went through all the katas, from the first to the last. It took me about forty-five minutes, and by the time I was done, my arms and legs were burning.
"There," I said, panting.
"Terrible," she said.
Figured.
"We will start from the beginning," she said. "Now."
We lingered on the first kata alone for nearly an hour. Deeper stances! Don't bend your wrist that way! Straighten out that elbow! Fujita-san had time to finish practicing, take a shower, and putter around in the kitchen before we'd finished the second one. By the end of the training session, I was sopping with sweat. When we sat down to eat, my hands were shaking as I struggled with the chopsticks.
"Poorly disciplined," Mom said. "Poor form." She adjusted the placement of my fingers on the chopsticks.
Novelty is intoxicating, but like any drug, its power wanes over time. Soon my gloriously furbished room was merely a room. The huge apartment shrank. I pattered around its edges like a mouse in an aquarium. When I looked down on the faraway streets, I thought I knew what princesses in towers felt like.
I left only for appointments with Dr. Hernandez, who proclaimed my organs an utter mystery, ordered a battery of tests and x-rays, and prescribed shots and pills to help me grow. I spent more and more of my time in the glass house, feeding the goldfish and soaking up sunlight. If I stood directly in the heart of it and closed my eyes, I could imagine myself back in the boundless woods of Massachusetts.
After my third week of Japanese lessons, Mom started talking to me in short, snappy sentences, which she expected me to answer in kind. I stumbled over articles and sentence order. She glared down, implacable. Fujita-san was far more understanding. I think my happiest moment was on the fourth week, when she asked me to move my feet so she could vacuum the carpet and I understood it.
As the fourth week grew to a close, I finally asked. "When am I going to see Dad?"
Mom hesitated over her breakfast, but didn't look me in the face. "Not this week. I am leaving town this week."
"But you said…"
"Not this week. Next week."
"Will you be back next week?" I asked.
"Maybe. I have duties to attend to." She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.
Anger boiled up in my chest. "You promised."
Her eyes met mine and I suddenly understood.
"You're never going to let me see him," I said.
"He has had more than enough time to meddle with you," she said. "He has wrought damage that can never be undone."
"But you promised," I snapped. "And now you're just going to leave and you might leave all month or more, and you'll never see me anyway. Why can't I just stay at the farm?"
"Stay at the farm!" she said, incredulous.
"Takeru hates me!" I said. "And I hate being locked in the apartment all day!"
"When you can be trusted, I will let you leave. Until then, you are to stay here."
"When's that gonna be?" I asked.
She stared me down. "When your katas are excellently performed. When you can speak to me properly in Japanese, and not in English slang. When you respect me." Her eyes flashed. "When you stop talking about that wretched farm and those who live there."
"Why not?" I said. "That's where my family lives!"
Mom's fingers twitched. Her eyes grew wide, dark, and angry. Chills ran down my spine: for a moment I could see what she saw, the farm in flames, the family lying crooked and dead, blood against the walls and pooling on the floor. When she spoke it was in a monotone.
"I will kill them before they take you again," she said.
My throat closed up.
I resolved to never mention the farm or Dad to her again.