Chapter Twenty-One
Dressed in a second-hand t-shirt and sweatpants, with a hoodie that was two sizes too big and sneakers that were just right, I laced my fingers between Dad's and we walked out. His palms were as hard and scratchy as horn, and our weapons beat on our hips. If I closed my eyes, I was little again, and we were on our way to nowhere, without any aim except staying together.
We turned down another series of utilitarian tunnels. From what I could tell, they were organized in a grid, leading into one identical square chamber after another. Most of them did not have doors. I started seeing drifts of filth—first little tongues of trash licking up against corners, then piles as high as my knees. The brown stain of an ancient waterline lifted higher and higher until it touched the ceiling, and we passed rooms choked so full of detritus that I couldn't see the floor. Everything was coated in a clinging, musky scum I associated with oil and dirty humans. The floors and walls were yellow with it, and the ceiling was festooned with greasy cobwebs. The closer we grew to the sewers proper, the further the spaces between the lamps. We alternated through circles of light and shade.
"What is this place, really?" I asked Dad.
"We suspect it was storage for the building above," Dad said. "But they closed it off and forgot about it, so we took it over for ourselves."
"Why is it so gross?"
He laughed. "Anything open to the sewers long enough turns into a sewer itself."
"Then why would the builders connect it to the sewer?"
"They didn't. Not originally."
"Who were 'they'? What did they do?"
"I'm not sure. By the time we got here, the rooms were all empty except for trash. Don might know."
Soon we stood in a single well of light before a steel door. Age had darkened it, and it was pocked with rusty bullet holes. Oiled hinges fresh from the hardware store shone in sharp slashes, like white stitching on dark fabric. The wall was a curious patchwork: the lower two feet of it was grimy and weathered, but on the left side were bricks of various sizes and colors outlined in bright, modern mortar. They had been fit into the wall like Tetris pieces, outlining an irregular shape that bloomed out shoulder-high.
"What's this?" I asked, slapping the newer brickwork.
"Well, it was a hole. This used to be open to the sewers," Dad said. "Mike found it on one of his rambles. At the time, all we could see were some rat-sized holes and a few deep cracks in the mortar. If you leaned down, you could feel a fresh-smelling breeze through the holes. Pretty exciting."
"So you beat your way through it?" I asked.
"Right. Up to this point we'd been taking turns sleeping in the car, so when Raph saw it, ah… well. He hates confined spaces… and he can be excitable."
"He went through a wall?" I asked.
"Shoulder-checked it into submission," Dad said with a wink, and threw the bolts. "Hold your breath."
"For how long?" I asked.
I finished my question just as he threw the door open. Following the swing of the door was a cloud of fetor so strong that I could feel it on my skin. Gagging, I ducked away and covered my face.
"About fifteen minutes," he said, patting me on the back of the neck. All I made was a groaning, hacking sound in reply.
When I had collected myself, he reached down for my hand again. We ducked into a dripping tunnel. The darkness here was solid, an unbroken blackness that stretched away on either side of us. For a moment I was frightened. There were only two lights: the yellow bulb hanging just outside the steel door, which Dad turned off almost immediately, and a lamp from the street above that cast glowing dashes through a grate.
I clung to Dad's arm as he locked the door. I couldn't shake the thought that there was something aware deep in that darkness. Unbidden, the rat in the yukata sprang to the forefront of my mind. I wrapped my arms around Dad's and glared into the abyss. Stopped just behind my teeth was a shout for the specter to go away.
Dad set his hand on mine and squeezed. He said nothing, but he stared into my face without blinking.
"I'm okay," I replied testily.
Dad patted my hand, then rustled around in his pocket. The next thing I knew, a light blazed to life in his hand. I jerked away, blinking stars out of my eyes.
"You're jumpy today," he said.
I ignored the question in his voice.
"Yeah."
"Don't worry. Nothing down here but rats and spiders. This way."
When he turned toward the wall, I saw that the outside of the door to the hideout was covered in a thin brick veneer. Once fully closed, I couldn't tell there had been a door there at all.
"Wow," I said, blinking. "How do you ever find the door again?"
"I won't lie. I've passed it a couple of times." Dad flashed the light on either side of us. I saw nothing but weathered walls and crumbling brick.
"Did Donatello make it?"
"Yes. Well, he planned it. Mike was the one who did the actual art," Dad said. "Hold still."
"What?" I asked. "Why?"
He shrugged off his jacket and threw it over my head. A droplet plunked on his naked shoulder and streaked down to the broken edge of his plastron. It left a dark maroon mark.
"Because it's filthy down here," he said, chucking me under the chin. "You're already going to smell detestable when we get out, but there's no need to make it worse than it already is. Now keep close. There are sidewalks here, but they're not very wide. Follow me and don't leave the path. The mud is deep enough to swallow a horse."
"Are you sure it's just mud?" I asked. "It doesn't smell like mud."
"I'm just trying to stay optimistic," he said.
Suddenly I wanted to cry. I grabbed him around the waist.
"I don't want to go back," I said into his side.
He threw an arm around me and squeezed me tightly, but said nothing. We stood in the thick darkness and stared at nothing.
Eventually he let me go, patting me too hard on the shoulder, and without a word he strode ahead of me. I followed. It was an easy walk, just a foul one. Our path followed a crude cement sidewalk that hugged the wall. The tunnels varied in width and height, sometimes arching above us until they were lost in shade, and sometimes so low that we had to bend over to pass through. Here and there the walkway had been so violently weathered by running water that it had cracked apart, baring rusty rebar.
Our path had been cleared, but not completely. We squeezed past hillocks of trash and crunched over mounds of broken brick. Cobwebs and garbage dangled from the ceilings. The channels were full of plastic bags, twinkling foil wrappers, smashed and discolored paper cups, little rivulets glistening like rainbows. The stench ebbed and flowed, carried to us on faint currents. I detected puffs of exhaust from unknown sources, or cool fresh breezes from outside, or the mutter of machinery I could not name. Most of the time I only heard cars or the rattle of pipes. Far away, I heard the rustle and thud of rats. They frightened me the most. I squeezed up behind Dad and grabbed his hand.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "Did Donatello really frighten you that much?"
"No, it's not that!" I said. "It's the… it's the rats."
He laughed. "Rats! You've faced worse. Are you sure that's it?"
My mouth opened and shut.
Don't say it, I told myself. Don't say it.
"Yes?" he asked. His eyes were twinkling in a way I'd never seen before. I felt like I was looking back in time at someone younger.
"I saw your dad," I blurted.
He stopped suddenly. His hand squeezed mine reflexively. The young man behind his smile disappeared in a flash.
"Please don't joke about that, Saya," he said.
"I'm not," I said softly. "He's been following me for days, and he's been in my dreams. I feel like he's out there right now."
Dad turned to face me, arms held rigidly by his sides, his hand like a weight in mine. His expression was lost in shadow.
"I've been dreaming about him, too," he said. "So have… the others."
"What does it mean?" I asked.
Dad looked away, down the long, burning beam of the flashlight.
"I don't know," he said. "If I were younger, I would have told you he was visiting us. I would have loved the thought of it. But I don't trust him now."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because he might be an onryou, a ghost that comes back for vengeance," he said shortly. "Did he speak to you?"
"Yes."
"Did you understand what he said?"
"Once." I took a deep breath. "He said you were going to die."
Dad threw his head back and blew a long gusty sigh out of his nose.
"I don't want you to die," I whispered.
"Everyone dies," he said, staring at the ceiling.
"Did you kill him?" I asked.
He winced. His fingers released mine.
"I'm sorry," I said. "You don't have to tell me everything. I just mean that…"
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I killed him."
"On… on purpose?"
Dad didn't say anything for a while. He cracked one knuckle after another. The rats rustled together and then were quiet.
"He always loved Donatello so much," he said at last. "They were very similar as people. Both very inward. Treasured their silence and their alone time. Spiritual in… a way I was not."
"Really? Don?" I blinked hard. "I thought he was an atheist."
"He says he is now. But he's still superstitious in ways that make me wonder." Dad waved idly. "In any case, I was jealous for Father's attention. Whatever Don did to curry his favor, I tried to copy. So when Don first began to speak, I was the second to follow. When Don took junk apart to see how it fit together, I was just behind him, deconstructing… destroying whatever I touched. I didn't have Donatello's vision, you see. I didn't know he was trying to understand what made things work. Father saw that brilliance in Donatello early and encouraged it. But he saw in me…" Dad paused. "No intelligence. Just dumb emulation. Looking back, I don't think he realized I was trying to impress him. I think he thought I was a brainless copycat."
"You mean he thought you were stupid?" I asked. "But it sounds like you were just a baby. That's not fair. What about Mike and Raph?"
"Both of them were hurt, too, of course. I was just too small to recognize it. They express pain in different ways." Dad shrugged. "Mike turned to us for love. Raph turned to anger. And I… I organized. It was something of a nervous tic in the beginning. I wanted to make sure everybody was nearby. I wanted to make sure everyone had enough to eat and drink. In those early days, heat was important, so… I also made sure we found places to sun. When Raph or Don started one of their fights, I was the one who made the peace. I started forming a kind of home around us."
"What was your dad doing?" I asked, aghast. "You mean he was just ignoring you?"
"You must keep something in mind, Saya," Dad said. "We had no relation to each other in the beginning. The only element we shared was an accident. There was no reason for him to come back to us. I think the only reason he began checking up on us to begin with was because he was following a regular route by our nook and was intrigued by our transformation." He coughed. "We were stuck, you see. In a channel like this one. We couldn't crawl out."
"You mean you could have starved to death, and he didn't even care?"
"Rats are fond of other rats. Turtles, not so much. You must understand: this was a relationship that developed in shifts. Donatello's development was fastest and most profound, so it was Donatello who drew him in. Then he began feeding us every three or four days and making sure we had water. It was enough because we were still so close to turtles, and turtles have much slower metabolisms. But he was gone a great deal in the beginning. Later he told me that he was sleeping in his master's apartment."
At the time, I didn't understand the heavy meaning behind this. The idea of a giant rat, sopping with sewer water, climbing up through a broken window into a murdered man's apartment? It was a hideous thought. He chanced discovery, he chanced capture, he chanced almost certain death. These days I can imagine him creeping like a wounded thing between the upturned furniture, turning over a bit of broken lamp to sniff at a spot of blood, shuffling into the bathroom, baking in the sweltering New York summer just to be close to the battered fragments that still smelled like the most beloved living thing in his life. How astonishing to see this interminable chain of agony stretching back and back and back. It lanced through Dad's soul and through his father's soul and through the master's soul. Now that I'm older, I can recognize its workmanship in me, too.
"And then what happened?" I asked.
"He moved us to a safer part of the tunnels. I'm not sure what happened to him here." Dad paused, blinking slowly. "He started walking on his hind legs. He started talking like a human being. But he didn't speak the same language as the people aboveground. Sometimes it seemed like he was switching between voices—deeper voices, slower voices. He would have conversations in his sleep. I walked in on him conversing with the corner." He paused. "He told me once, when he was drunk, that he could hear his master in his head. Sometimes I wonder if the master had possessed his body, or if… if it were a different kind of master."
"Like Nezugami?"
Dad shook his head. "Nezugami. I never believed in him. Yes, I thought he was a fascinating old story, and when I was very young I liked to think that we were Nezugami's pupils. But sometimes now I wonder what Father was. How did he know Japanese? How could he know his master's art so well simply from watching him?" He turned to me, eyes wide and terrible. "Did I kill a god?"
I shuddered. Although it was still summer, I felt cold.
"It doesn't matter, I suppose," Dad said. He leaned against the wall. "When Father began walking on two legs, I copied him. Here was something Donatello did last. And when he began practicing katas, I copied him. And this time… this time it was my first honest act as a person: something I wanted to do for myself, for my own sake. It was something I really got, really felt." He stretched out his arms, folded his fingers into fists. The muscles tautened and bulged against his skin, lifting a multitude of shining scars into broad relief.
"So he trained you then," I said.
"Yes," Dad said softly, dropping his arms. "He had the first inklings of his plot to kill Oroku Saki. He realized he could use us. So he began to teach us all the art. But as far as earning his favor? It made no difference for me, or Mike, or Raph. Donatello—Donatello could come to lessons late, or perform a task poorly, and would get away with it. I would stay late, I would take on extra tasks, I would take care of our home, and what did he do?" Dad's lips tightened. "He made a tool of me. He had no affection for me, the same way you would not treasure a broom or a plunger or a fork. He told me where to go and what to do. And for a long time that was what I thought love was. Pleasing, obeying. Servitude. Slavery."
I reached up and grabbed his hand, gave it a squeeze. He didn't seem to notice. His gaze was fixed on the inky darkness stretching away in untold directions.
"But love isn't slavery," he said. "Love is…" He looked down at me, gaze softening. "It's respect. It's respecting another's individuality and differences instead of trying to force them into a mold. It's wanting the best for someone, what's honestly best for them, and having the imagination and empathy to know when that 'best' is different from your own. It's letting people go when they need to go and be what they need to be, even if their future never touches yours again. The problem was that as Father grew older, he didn't want to let me go. I started seeing a world outside where I could be anything, an entire universe where I could do whatever I wanted, and he was angry about that. He was old, he was weak, he was afraid, and he leaned on my duty in the same way he leaned on Donatello's love. One day, we began arguing, and I just…"
He shuddered and looked away.
"Did you really mean to, though?" I asked.
"You could call it a crime of passion." Dad shrugged. "But at no point was I out of control. I could have stopped myself. I did not."
"But Mike said…"
"Mike doesn't want it to be true. He always worshipped the ground I walked on." Dad's lips twisted. "I can't tell you how it felt to let him down. How it felt to let… myself down."
"I'm glad you killed him," I whispered.
"Don't say that," Dad snapped, and grabbed at my arm. "Let's go. I shouldn't have told you this. I wanted us to have good memories of this last walk."
"Dad!" I said. "Slow down. I don't care!"
"You should care!" Dad said. "What I did was wrong. It's enough to damn a man, regardless of what he does with the rest of his life. I've even been waiting for you to repeat the cycle, and I thought: I wouldn't hold it against you. If you had to kill me, then I wouldn't come back as onryou. I would accept it. I would guard you from the other world until you joined me there. Remember that always, Saya. I love you more than my own life."
"But I don't want to kill you!" I said. "Is this why you're taking me back to Mom? You think you're setting this cycle up again, so I'm going to stab you and take your sin away or something? Because I won't! I'd never do that!"
"It doesn't matter if you do or don't," Dad said, "as long as you make your own choices. As long as you're free and your own person."
"Dad, stop trying to hurt yourself!" I cried. "And don't use me to do it!"
He stopped, and turned to me, startled. His eyes were huge in the dim light.
"My god," he said.
"Don't you understand that you're better than Mom?" I said, leaning into him. "You're a good person, Dad! You're good! Bad people don't worry about being good, they worry about looking good. And you try to do the right thing all the time. If you didn't worry about being good, or work at it at all, you wouldn't be. But you are!"
He opened his mouth as though to retort, but then closed it again. He drew me close and breathed in, breathed out.
I felt, rather than saw, the release of his burden.
When I had been brought down to the sewers the first time, I had had the sensation of length. Long walks, long corridors. But I realized that either we had taken a different route or my sense of time had been altered. It only took fifteen minutes for us to find the ladder leading up to the surface. What a ladder—leaning, with missing rungs, cobwebbed, eaten away by moisture until it was as jagged and red as the teeth of a shark. I swallowed.
"Can you believe we fixed this?" Dad asked as he donned padded gloves. I could see the carefully stitched areas in the fabric where extra fingers had been removed.
"Fixed?" I asked. "This was worse once?"
"Absolutely. We found it on the ground. You can still see the outline. See?"
With that, he shone the light down on the sidewalk. He wasn't lying. A rust-red silhouette in the shape of a ladder had been stained into the cement.
"Are you sure this is going to be okay?" I asked.
He gave it a firm shake. It didn't quiver much, but a few particles of rust plinked onto our shoulders.
"Yes. We can't leave obvious signs that we've been here, you know." He extended his arm. "I'll carry you."
"I can climb fine," I snapped.
"I know you can," he said. "But I don't have an extra pair of gloves, and I don't want you to cut yourself."
I don't know what came over me. I realized that when the burden had left Dad, a kind of weight had left me, too. I don't know what it was. I think that if I had still borne it, I would have argued with him and taken off up the ladder by myself. Instead, I jumped up into the crook of his arm and relaxed into his side. He lifted me like I was weightless. I don't think I'd ever appreciated how strong he was before. Like I told you, I was nearly as tall as he was and very heavy, and he never struggled with my weight.
We emerged into the warehouse, and soon crept out onto the street, unlocking and locking padlocks as we passed. The morning clouds were scraps of blue paper against a lavender backdrop, and far away, we heard the baleful rumble of traffic. The white car waited for us in an overgrown alley, motor purring. We slid into the back seat together.
"Sorry for the wait, Don," Dad said. "We had some important things to talk about on the way up."
"Yeah, I'm just burning gasoline," Don said. "And you know how we are just flush with cash."
Only then did I realize how tightly Don's shoulders had tensed up, and when he turned to look at us, his eyes were narrowed. I felt terribly uneasy. All of his anger and tension, especially that directed at Dad, had terrible new meaning. My guts clenched up. It wasn't irrational to think that Don had the walkway bugged, right? If Don loved Splinter, and if there were any question in his mind that Dad had killed Splinter on purpose, and if that murder had been admitted out loud…
"Are you okay, Uncle Don?" I asked, leaning over the dashboard.
Don grunted and put the car in gear. "As soon as we get this over with," he said, "I'll feel better."
Dad set his hand on my shoulder.
"Put your seatbelt on, Saya," he said.