“Trust, Jones, is something hard to win, easy to lose, and never to be taken lightly.”
—DCI Tom Barnaby, Midsomer Murders (2007)
Daniel texted me directions to a small, triangular plaza near a statue of Chief Seattle, south of Denny Way. Making my way past a herd of blue-badged Amazon employees that had strayed too far from their corporate campus, I got there in time to meet him for dinner the next day before work.
The monorail track ran above, and just a few blocks away, the ever-present Space Needle was casting a long shadow over a crisscross of streets. I exited a city bus, and as traffic sped by, I spotted Daniel a few steps away, hands stuffed in his pockets.
“This must be the nexus of the city,” I joked.
“I’ve heard if you say ‘candyman’ three times at the Chief Seattle statue, Kurt Cobain’s ghost will appear.”
“Is that so?”
He smiled at me, just a small smile, but it was unguarded and hopeful, and seeing it caused a battalion of butterflies to wage war inside my stomach.
Were we okay? Were we not? Clearly he didn’t ask me here to discuss our investigation. Was he going to tell me about the stupid thing he’d done in high school? Or had he changed his mind about our snatch-and-run with Aunt Mona yesterday and decided my weird family was too much for him to handle?
I tried to divine his intentions, becoming hyper-observant of his body language. His hands were in his pockets. Did that mean he was nervous because he was about to tell me we needed to cool things down?
Can you break up with someone whom you’ve only been out with once?
I was being paranoid, surely. It was just that he seemed . . . different. Tense.
Remnants of rush-hour traffic sped down Denny Way. We shuffled silently under trees lining the plaza, and after crossing the road, he ushered me down a sidewalk lined with casual restaurants and into a door marked TILIKUM SUSHI.
The restaurant was cozy and unadorned. A few tables were scattered around the perimeter, but it was what sat in the center that held my attention. Two chefs in black uniforms were cutting up fish in an open kitchen that sat in the center of a square wood counter. And around that counter, like a lazy train, a conveyer belt of slow-moving dishes glided past customers.
“Kaiten-sushi,” Daniel explained. “Have you had it?”
I shook my head.
“Sometimes conveyer sushi isn’t the best because it’s basically fast food. But this place is awesome. I know the owner.”
Of course he did. A few customers huddled around all four sides of the counter, mostly tech bros and lawyer types in suits. We sat down at a couple of free stools, and the chef, a Japanese man in his twenties, grinned when he spotted Daniel. “Yo, magic boy,” he said.
“That’s magic man to you,” Daniel corrected. “Don’t embarrass me in front of the lady.”
“I’m Mike,” the chef told me, holding up a sharp knife. A red bandanna cap covered his head, and his mustache curled up on both ends, à la Salvador Dalí. “And for the record, he embarrasses himself.”
“This is true,” Daniel said, smiling.
“How’s Cherry?” the chef asked.
From a stack below the conveyer belt, Daniel pulled off two china cups without handles and set one in front of me. “Too old for you.”
“I’ve dated older. And younger,” he said, smiling at me. “How old are you?”
“Right in front of my face?” Daniel shook his head, and as he scooped green powder into our cups, he said to me conspiratorially, “Don’t listen to this guy, Birdie. He’s all talk, no game. And his sushi skills are shit.”
The chef pointed the tip of his knife at Daniel. “Those are fighting words, Aoki.”
“Fine. He’s actually one of the best,” Daniel told me. “He worked for Shiro’s, but he opened this place last year. Before all that, he used to live across the street from my auntie, and he hung out with all my cousins. He’s been shit-talking me since I was a wide-eyed, tender boy.”
“You serial pickpocketed me when I was in culinary school,” the chef argued. “That was my beer money, man.”
Daniel held my cup under a tap that jutted below the conveyer belt, pulling a lever. Steaming water streamed from the tap, making the powder inside the cup swirl. When he set it back down in front of me, the floral scent of green tea wafted up. “It’s not my fault that you were the easiest target,” he told the chef.
“Still am, probably. At least there’s a counter between us. You ordering off the menu?”
“Nah. We’re good. Do your thing.”
The chef nodded, reaching over the conveyer belt to hand us rolled-up hot towels on little oblong bamboo trays. “Let me know if you need anything.” Then he left us alone, returning to the giant gray-scaled fish he’d been carving, revealing rosy pink flesh as he sliced.
“That’s tuna,” Daniel told me.
“I think it’s still moving,” I murmured, unsure about all of this. Everything smelled and looked strange. Little signs that sat near the plates on the conveyer were in Japanese and English. It was overwhelming. Especially considering that I couldn’t discern Daniel’s intentions in bringing me here. “I’ve never had raw fish,” I told him.
“Let’s start out slow, yeah?” Daniel said, leaning his shoulder against mine and smiling down at me with his eyes.
“Okay,” I said, trying to dispel my anxieties.
Nodding, he proceeded to explain everything in detail. The purpose of all the little bottles and jars and tiny plates sitting in front us. Where to put my chopsticks. The difference between nigiri and maki rolls and stuffed temaki cones. Between us, he set up a little station of soy sauce, wasabi paste, and pickled ginger slices, and we watched the conveyer belt until he spotted what he wanted me to try first.
“Tuna roll,” he said, taking down a small plate from the belt. “It’s basic. Nothing weird.”
“It’s raw?”
“Think of it as super fresh. Do you know how to use chopsticks?”
“Sort of.” I wasn’t very good at it.
“Then use your fingers. It’s totally acceptable. See?” He wiped his fingers on one of the hot towels we’d been given, and I did the same. Then he dabbed a bit of green wasabi on two pieces of tuna roll and showed me how to dip it in soy sauce before eating a piece himself. “Mmm,” he said, chewing. “See? Try it.”
I steeled myself and popped one into my mouth. It was . . . salty. Briny. Soft. And—
“Oh God,” I murmured as my eyes watered and my nose began burning. Should I swallow this or spit it out? Was I going to gag?
“Wasabi,” Daniel said, laughing. “Swallow. It will go away. Have some tea.”
The tea was too hot. I nearly burned my tongue. But at least the terrible nose burn was fading.
“Well?”
“I can’t taste anything.”
“Try again,” he said, giving me a look that riled up those fluttery butterflies in my stomach again. “Sometimes things are better the second time.”
I tried a second piece, this time without the wasabi. And it was . . . weird but good. He pulled down other plates from the conveyer belt—a salmon roll, a spicy tuna roll, some shrimp nigiri. Pretty little bites dressed in pink and orange roe. And before I knew it, I was eating everything and liking quite a bit of what I tasted. I even began enjoying the burn of the wasabi. It was crave-able.
Throughout the meal, our conversation meandered but never slowed. We talked about work. Octavia the Octopus and the local animal rights group. Card tricks. Books. The painting we helped Aunt Mona steal. And Ivanov’s spreadsheet, of course. Neither one of us could find a speck of information on the “ZAFZ” company that Sharkovsky had translated for us. Daniel even tried enabling a Cyrillic keyboard on his laptop, hunting and pecking until he found the symbols for the address . . . Nada. Zero. Zilch.
Our Raymond Darke investigation had hit a dead end.
But despite that disappointment, it was pleasant to sit together like this, making small talk and enjoying each other’s company. Touching shoulders. Smiling at each other. Like nothing was wrong.
Was Daniel still tense?
“See?” he told me as our little plates stacked up. “I promised you’d like it.”
“You were right,” I agreed.
“Sometimes that happens.” He smiled, but it was nervous, and that’s when I absolutely felt a change in our easy dinner conversation. After a long silence, he said, “Okay. So, I promised you that we’d talk about that thing those kids at Clue were asking me about, and I guess there’s no use putting it off.”
“Okay,” I said, my emotions all over the place. I was relieved he hadn’t said, “Let’s call the whole thing off,” but I couldn’t ignore the feeling in the pit of my stomach. That strange, buzzing trepidation that comes in that moment when you’re pretty sure you’re about to hear something bad, but you aren’t sure how bad, and all the possibilities are so much worse than knowing for sure.
Daniel pulled out his phone and began searching for something. When he found it, he handed his phone to me.
It was an article from the Seattle Times dated a year and a half ago: SUICIDE STILL A GROWING PROBLEM AMONG WASHINGTON STUDENTS.
The first paragraph of the article talked about a high school senior at Garfield High who’d tried to overdose and was found in the school library by a janitor. The janitor heard a suspicious noise: the boy, who was seizing after ingesting a large quantity of fluoxetine, had knocked over a bust of Shakespeare. If it weren’t for the intervention, the boy would have died. He was instead rushed to a local hospital and was “now recuperating at home with his family.”
“That was me,” Daniel said quietly. “Joseph at work? He was the janitor. He graduated the year before from another high school and had just started doing janitorial work at Garfield. And like the article says, if he hadn’t found me, I’d be dead.”
A terrible tightness gripped my chest.
This was . . .
Not what I expected.
Half my thoughts were scrambling to fit this into what I knew of Daniel, reversing and replaying bits of conversation. This never came up in my online searches for him. And of course it didn’t: he was an unnamed minor in this article. And I guess this wasn’t the thing he was going to plaster all over his social media accounts either.
I was lost for words.
“It was at the beginning of my senior year,” he explained. “I’d lost my hearing that summer and missed some school at the start of the year because of it. I got really depressed. My mom was worried and took me to our family doctor. Instead of referring me to someone, he just wrote me a prescription for an antidepressant and sent me on my way. Antidepressants take time to work, and they aren’t all alike. I didn’t understand that at the time. I was impatient and hurting, and I thought maybe I was just . . . unfixable.” He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “It just felt like I was living in a bubble, and that bubble just got smaller and smaller. It wasn’t until I started seeing a therapist afterward that things got better.”
“The monthly appointment you can’t miss,” I murmured.
He nodded slowly and rubbed the heels of his palms over his thighs several times, as if he were trying to summon the courage to speak again.
“Before it happened . . . I was having trouble adjusting to the hearing loss, I blew up at a teacher and got stuck in detention, and I’d just taken my SATs for the second time, and my scores were still terrible.” He stole a look at my face, blinking rapidly, but didn’t look me in the eye. “All that sounds flimsy now, but at the time? I was . . . in a bad place, mentally. I fell into a black hole. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been in that state of mind. I don’t know. . . . It wasn’t a cry for help, or anything. I really thought I wanted to die.”
I never in a million years would have guessed this about him. He seemed so happy. So gregarious. So full of life—
But also hiding something. I thought back to when I’d searched for his Missed Connections ad and found the social media profile that said “Stop asking if I’m okay.” And when he offhandedly described himself as being “depressing” when he was talking about David Bowie’s music. The way he talked about the Houdini incident when we were playing Truth or Lie, and how I felt as if he weren’t telling me something. His monthly appointment that he said he couldn’t miss . . . and what happened at the Clue game.
“Those people who went to your school,” I said. “This is what they were talking about?”
He nodded. “Everyone talked about it. And the more they did, the crazier the stories got. I was my own urban legend. I heard I slit my wrists and bled all over the floor, and if you looked in a certain spot, you could still see the stain.”
I moaned, a little horrified. I could feel his leg anxiously shaking against my stool.
“Anyway, I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me,” he said. “Things got better slowly. My mom moved us into cohousing with her parents and found me a good therapist. I had to try two more medications before we found one that’s been working for me. I mean, it’s a process. Compared to how I felt back then, I feel a gazillion times better, but I don’t want to . . . get into a bad place again. So, I still see Dr. Sanchez every month, just to make sure things are staying steady.”
“That’s your therapist?”
“Yeah. It’s just . . . ,” he started, and then hesitated, searching for the right words. “I know it’s a lot to process. I don’t need you to save me or anything. I’m doing good—really, I am. But this is part of my past, and I can’t erase it. I thought maybe I could. That first night at the diner? You didn’t know me, and that was kind of liberating. For a moment there I was someone else. I didn’t have to talk about my ear or the stupid shit I’d done, and here was this pretty girl with killer eyes who laughed at my jokes, and she liked me. . . .”
I still like you. I tried to say it out loud, but it got stuck in my throat.
“It felt so good to just act on instinct, to just . . . live. And then you showed up at the hotel, and suddenly it felt so much bigger.”
“Fate,” I said.
His eyes softened. “Fate. I got so wound up in it, so wound up in you, that I forgot again. Well, not forgot, exactly. I don’t know. I guess . . . I told myself that it didn’t matter. It was in my past. I was better. It was fine.” He sighed. “Seeing those kids at the Clue game? That made me realize that I can’t escape it. There will always be people who knew me before it happened, and some of them will be cool—like Joseph.”
I thought of Joseph, standing guard by the hotel’s entrance. Maybe standing guard over Daniel, too . . . “That’s how you met each other?” I asked.
“Strange way to start a friendship, but yeah. Joseph kept in touch, checking up on me. And when he got a job at the hotel, he found out there was another opening and put in a good word.”
Once again I was stunned into silence while I digested everything he was telling me.
Chef Mike was hamming it up with customers on the other side of the counter, showing them the head of the big tuna that he’d just severed. I pretended to watch casually, but I couldn’t help wondering, after all that talk about them growing up together . . .
“Yeah, Mike knows too,” Daniel said in a low voice, reading my face. “And he’s totally cool about it. But for all the people who understand, there’s just as many who treat me differently. Some talk shit behind my back, saying I’m weak, or whatever. Some of my friends at school stepped back because they felt like they were barely holding themselves together, and trying to prop up someone else was only going to bring them down. And then there are the lookie-loos—the ones who are fascinated by scandal, but only from a distance.”
“The people at the Clue game,” I said.
“Exactly.” His smile was tight and humorless. “It’s just . . . always there for me, in one way or another. I’ve gone through every emotion—guilt, denial, regret, shame. Most of the time I just wish I could forget it ever happened and move the fuck on, but I’m always being reminded. And sometimes my mom is overprotective because she’s scared it will happen again, so there’s her to deal with. I know she’s just doing the best she can and that I probably hurt her the most, but she makes it worse than it needs to be. I can’t even lock my bedroom door because she’ll break it down to make sure I’m not trying to do it again. She’s gotten better lately, but occasionally she has a freak-out if she can’t reach me, like, immediately.”
It sounded a little like how my grandmother had treated me. I guess we sort of had that in common.
He sat back on his stool, arms crossed over his chest, and sighed. “This is probably a lot of information, huh?”
“It’s a little surprising.” A lot, actually, but I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to make him feel awkward about having told me.
“I guess . . .” He hesitated and tried again. “I guess that I just wanted to get all of this out in the open. Am I freaking you out?”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . overwhelmed. Trying to process. But I’m glad you’re telling me.” Was that the right thing to say? “I don’t mean I’m glad. Grateful?”
Ugh. I sounded like an idiot. Why was this so hard?
“I get it,” he said. “It’s just that . . . I don’t want you to think that I’m struggling all the time, or anything. I’m doing everything I can to make sure I don’t slip into another black hole, and I’m definitely in a much better place now than I was two years ago. Tons better. You don’t have to tiptoe around my feelings.” He scratched the back of neck. Tugged on his ear. Then blew out a hard breath. “I’m . . . not good at talking about this. I don’t know. . . . I guess my biggest fear is that you’ll start looking at me differently—that you’ll start seeing depression instead of me. It’s not easy being in a relationship with a person who’s got this kind of dark baggage.”
I made a dismissive sound, but somewhere in the back of my mind, part of me was wondering if I could. Which was awful. And upsetting. Why would I even think that?
“Trust me. I know from experience. And I’m not just trying to protect you. The more attached I get to you, the worse it will be for me if you decide you can’t handle it.”
I turned my head to look at him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m giving you an out. If all of this scares you, and you don’t think you can handle it, I get it.”
He held up a hand. “Don’t answer now. Before you decide anything, maybe at least think about what I’ve told you, sleep on it, and see how you feel over the weekend. Okay?”
He looked at me, and I looked at him, searching his face. He was serious.
“If you find you can’t handle it and need to bail, just text me,” he said. “It’s easier that way. I can be professional at work, so don’t worry about that. I won’t hassle you.”
A pair of talkative customers walked into the restaurant and plopped down on the two stools next to mine, shattering our privacy. But it didn’t matter, because I was lost for words. My chest hurt, and my throat felt as if it were trying to choke me. Was he encouraging me to stay away? It sounded that way. I was confused and hurt, and that felt selfish, because I wasn’t the one who’d been sad enough to almost die by suicide.
We left the restaurant together, both of us quiet as we took a bus downtown to get to work. Once I got over the immediate shock of it, I wanted to hug him. Hold him. Touch his hand. Anything. I wanted to let him know that I was grateful he trusted me enough to tell me, but I didn’t know how to say it—especially not in a public space, surrounded by strangers. So I did nothing. Said nothing. I held myself together like some kind of walking, talking robot with a cold, mechanical heart. All the way back to the hotel and all through our shared shift, I tried not to think about it. Told myself it was no big deal. I fake smiled and fake nodded and faked my way through the night like a pro.
It wasn’t until I got home that my mechanical heart stopped working, and I fell apart.
I couldn’t have said why exactly. I was just shaken up and sad. He was supposed to be sunshine. That was what I thought the night when I first met him in the diner. But underneath, he was rain and gray skies. The sober realization that he’d struggled and been in so much pain shattered me into a thousand pieces, over and over again, and I cried until I ran out of tears.
I’d lost my mother.
I’d lost my grandmother.
The possibility of losing someone else was overwhelming.
Maybe too overwhelming.
The realization of this made me feel as if I’d been shoved off my feet and all my emotions had toppled out during the fall. Now came the hard part: picking those pieces up and fitting them back where they belonged.