Chapter 163: The Empty Grave
The taxi smelled of pine air freshener and old cigarettes, and Selene sat in the back with her hands folded and her whole body braced like a woman riding a horse she did not trust.
Keiko had dressed her that morning in a gray trench coat two sizes too large, a cream scarf over her silver hair, and a pair of sunglasses that swallowed half her face. It had taken twenty minutes and a considerable argument. Selene had surrendered the sunglasses last, with the air of someone handing over a weapon.
"It has no horse," she said, as the car pulled away from the curb. "And I do not see anyone steering it."
"The driver’s steering," Ryuji said.
"The driver is sitting in front of a wheel. That is not steering. That is hope."
The driver, a plump man with a baseball game murmuring from the radio, glanced into the mirror, then looked very carefully back at the road. Tetsu, in the front seat, gave the address in Japanese and kept his face turned to the window so nobody would see him laugh.
[System Log: Day 171, continued]
[I CAN SEE HIM IN A MOVING BOX WITH WHEELS]
[I CAN SEE THE WIFE WEARING A SCARF AND LOOKING BETRAYED BY AN ENGINE]
[I WOULD LIKE TO NOTE THAT THIS IS THE FIRST TIME IN FOUR THOUSAND YEARS I HAVE BEEN GRATEFUL FOR A SCARF]
They climbed away from the harbor, past rows of narrow houses and neat vegetable plots. Selene did not look at Ryuji. She looked at the passing city with the fixed, brittle attention of a woman who had decided to be angry and was not yet ready to put it down.
"I have two more days," she said, quietly, in the common tongue.
"I know."
"I am telling you so you will not mistake this for peace."
"I won’t."
She was silent for a block. Then, without turning her head, "Tell me about him. Kuroda. Not the version you gave the guards at the gate, or the one you gave me at the wedding. The one you have never said aloud."
Ryuji watched a bicycle slide past the window. His mouth had gone dry.
"He had rules," he said finally. "Never owe anyone. Count before you act. Never let them see what you want, because it becomes the handle they pick you up by." He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his sleeve. "I used to think he was teaching me to survive. Now I think he was building something."
"What else."
"He hated tea. Drank black coffee, no sugar, out of a chipped white cup he’d had for thirty years." He swallowed. "When I was seventeen, my first winter after my father’s funeral, he found me sleeping in a stairwell. He didn’t say anything. He took off his coat and dropped it on me and walked away. Never mentioned it again."
Selene turned her head.
"That is the part I can’t forgive," Ryuji said, very low. "Not the beatings. I know what those were. It’s the coat. Because I’ve spent eleven years not knowing if it was kindness or a hook, and now I’ll never get to find out."
For a long moment the only sound was the engine.
"Then do not forgive it," Selene said, and her voice had lost some of its edge. "Look at it. That is different."
She reached over, without a word, and laid two fingers against the inside of his wrist, the way a healer would.
"Fifty-two," she said, almost to herself. "Mine is fifty-three. Count me, Ryuji. Not him."
He closed his eyes and counted. One. Two. Three. Her fingertips were warm. When he got to ten, she shifted her hand into his and laced their fingers together, and neither of them said anything else until the car stopped.
The cemetery sat on a hillside above the harbor, where the wind came up off the water smelling of salt and engine oil. Rows of gray stones ran down toward the sea, some leaning, some hung with faded ribbons. A thin old woman in a green apron was sweeping the path near the gate. She watched them approach with an expression of polite, weary suspicion.
"Third row from the top, under the plum tree," she said, before Tetsu finished his greeting. "Mrs. Takeda said you would come. I do not go near it."
"Why not?" Tetsu asked.
"Because the ground sinks there every night. And in the morning the earth is turned, but from below." She put her hand against her apron, as if steadying something. "I have been groundskeeper here for thirty years. Earth turned from above looks like a wound. Earth turned from below looks like a mouth."
She went back to her sweeping and did not look up again.
The plum tree had not yet put out blossoms. Its black branches hung over a plain gray stone with one name cut into it, KURODA GENZO, and below it the soil lay in a shallow bowl, as if something had been dragged down through the center. The coffin lid lay in the dirt, snapped cleanly in half.
Ryuji walked to the edge and made himself look.
The coffin was empty. A dark suit lay folded in the bottom, neatly, the way a man folds his clothes before bed. A pair of polished shoes sat at the foot. A white shirt, collar flattened. A tie.
On the pillow, upright, sat a paper cup of tea. It was full, and it was steaming.
"Don’t touch it," Ryuji said.
"Wasn’t going to," Tetsu said. His voice was strange. He had knelt in the soil without seeming to notice, and he was staring at the folded suit with his jaw set. "He gave me a coat, you know."
Ryuji turned.
"First winter. I was nineteen, I’d just been picked up off the street, I had a thin jacket and no gloves. He looked at me for about ten seconds and took his own coat off." Tetsu’s laugh cracked in the middle. "Said, ’Don’t catch cold. I need you.’ I thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me."
"Tetsu."
"I loved him, Boss. I know what he did to you. I know. But I loved him." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "And now I’m kneeling in his grave and I don’t know which part was true."
Selene had stopped a little behind them, at the edge of the path. She stood very still, her hands tucked into the sleeves of the too-large coat, and Ryuji saw the change in her face, a small, private flinch he knew by now.
"What," he said, in the common tongue, softly.
"Nothing."
"Selene."
She exhaled. "I did not know you both had a father," she said. "I have been standing here thinking that. Two men with the same ghost. And I am outside it. It is a stupid thing to feel at a grave."
"It isn’t stupid."
"It is a little stupid."
Tetsu had understood none of it, but he had caught her tone. He looked up, red-eyed, and said something to Ryuji in Japanese.
"He says," Ryuji translated, haltingly, "to tell the princess she’s welcome in this. Whatever this is. He says we’re not locking her out."
Selene stared at him. Slowly, her hands came out of her sleeves. She stepped off the path and into the dirt, and she knelt on Tetsu’s other side, and laid one hand flat on the folded suit, very gently, as if it might still be warm.
"Then I will stand here," she said, and Ryuji translated, and Tetsu nodded once and looked away.
They found the letter in the lining of the coffin.
It was an ordinary white envelope, sealed with a smear of wax, tucked beneath the pillow where Kuroda’s head would have rested. On the front, in a tight, square hand Ryuji had last seen on forty-three tax filings, was a single word.
Hayato.
Nobody had called him that in eleven years.
He opened it with fingers that did not feel like his. The paper was thick and cream colored, and the writing marched across it in neat black lines.
"Read it," Selene said quietly. "Aloud. Please. I want to hear it in your voice."
So he read, in Japanese first and then in the common tongue, one line at a time.
Hayato. If you are reading this, I am dead, and something has found my body. I am sorry for that.
I will not make excuses. When I was thirty-one a man came to me owing a debt I could not pay. He said it would vanish if I would raise a boy a certain way. Hard. Counting. Alone. He said the boy would matter one day. I thought I was getting rich.
By the time I understood, you were fourteen and calling me sir and flinching when I lifted my hand.
Ryuji’s voice caught. He swallowed and went on.
I tried to undo it. I could not. I did not know how to be anything else.
It will come to you with kindness. It will use whoever you love. A coat. A bowl of soup. A cup of tea. Do not drink anything it hands you.
I gave you one thing that was mine. The first time you cooked for the men, I stood in the doorway and said nothing, because if I had spoken I would have wept. That was real. Please believe that it was real.
Do not forgive me. Only do not let it use me twice.
K.
The wind moved the branches of the plum tree. Far below, a ship’s horn sounded out on the bay.
Tetsu had both hands over his face. Selene did not touch him. She simply stayed where she was, kneeling in the dirt beside him, and Ryuji realized she was crying without making a sound.
He folded the letter along its old creases, and slid it carefully into his coat.
"It used him twice," he said.
"Boss," Tetsu said, behind his hands.
"The body. It wore the body. Like a coat." He heard his own voice come out hard and flat. "He asked me not to let it, and it did it anyway. It took his face off a corpse and put it on and walked down the street and clapped."
The cup of tea on the pillow stopped steaming.
For one second the whole cemetery was silent. Then the soil at the bottom of the grave began to move, slowly, inward, drawn toward the center, and a narrow stair opened in the dirt where there had been only earth, going down into darkness lit with a faint, familiar silver.
Ryuji felt the key shift under his collarbone. Not a pulse. A pull, steady and patient, as if a hand had closed around the back of his shirt.
"No," he said. He did not move. His foot had already moved, one step, toward the edge, and he stopped it with his whole body.
Selene’s hand found his wrist. Her fingers were warm. "Fifty-three," she said, very low. "Stay with me. Fifty-three. Fifty-three."
From below, up the stair, came a voice. It was not a chorus this time. It was a single voice, tired and old, and it spoke in Japanese with a gravel rasp that Ryuji would have known anywhere.
"Hayato," it said. "Do not come down."
Tetsu made a sound like a man struck.
A moment later the other voice came, the one made of many, smooth and patient and close.
He is not dead, keeper, it said. Not entirely. He is the last pin in the lock. Open the Door tonight, and I will give him back to you whole.
At the bottom of the stair, in the silver dark, something stirred, and a hand rose slowly into the light. A broad, scarred hand, with a familiar ring on the third finger, reaching up toward the surface as if it had been reaching for eleven years.
And beside Ryuji, in the open grave, Tetsu began to climb down.