Before her father could respond, Lea grabbed his elbow and dragged him toward the exit.
“I’ll see you next week, Jessie,” she called brightly as the doors slid shut behind them.
For once she was thankful for the Saturday morning traffic. The flow of people swallowed them up quickly, and the clinic soon disappeared out of view. The weekend brunch crowd were out in full force, sipping flavored protein mixes and sucking in oxygen shots as if their lives depended on it.
Lea picked the most crowded bar they could find, a few blocks down from the clinic, squeezing in next to a trio of househusbands with wailing babies. The plummeting birthrate meant you rarely saw children anymore, so every passerby stopped by the prams, cooing and tickling cheeks, making the babies cry even louder while their fathers looked on indulgently.
The dim lights in the bar hid the worst of his face, though they were sitting so close that she could still make out the clusters of milia under his blurry eyes.
“My little Lea, all grown up,” Kaito said. He took a sip of the pale green cucumber slush in the tall glass in front of him and made a face. “Oh, that’s terrible. How can anyone be expected to drink this?” He beckoned to a waiter. “Hi. Excuse me. Can I get a vanilla milkshake, please?”
“A what?”
“An artery-clogging, LDL-rich, triglyceride-packed concoction of sugary, artificially flavored vanilla ice cream and whole milk,” Kaito went on.
“He’s joking,” Lea interrupted. “Such a joker.” She laughed loudly, waved the waiter along.
“It might be a good idea to try not to draw attention to yourself,” she whispered.
Kaito sighed. He looked down at his smoothie, stirring the green slush. The spoon clinked against the glass, filling the air that hung between them.
“You sound just like your mother,” he said, looking up. His eyes were hooded stars in his face, as bright and mischievous as they’d always been. The curve of his mouth still sardonic, still gently mocking. “Just like your mother.”
And there it was again, her mother’s disapproving voice. He could be recognized. You could be seen with him. Directive 28B: Aiding and Abetting an Antisanct.
“Anyway. It’s been almost ninety years. I doubt they even remember who I am.”
Lea shook her head. She knew this wasn’t true, but all she said was: “You’re back.”
Her father stopped stirring. “How are you?” he asked. The smile was gone now. It was a serious question.
“I’m—” The word caught in her throat, a tickle, a blockage, but she forced it out with a cough. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice was measured and calm, no different from when she was giving a presentation at work, talking through compound growth rates and kidney forward curves. But a pressure was building behind Lea’s eyes, spreading to the upper reaches of her nose, the back of her throat. It took her a few seconds to recognize the feeling.
Lea hadn’t cried in decades, and she wasn’t about to start now. She looked away from her father, staring instead at the street outside, where the thick flow of human traffic carried on reassuringly. People talking and pushing and walking, all with the same smooth faces, the same upright gaits. A patchwork of browns and grays and blacks. It seemed everyone was wearing the same fall coat. Suddenly, she longed for summer, the only time of year when the streets erupted in color and sweat.
“I was worried sick. When you dashed out like that across the road. At first, of course, I didn’t realize it was you. What were the odds? But when I saw you—even with all the people crowding around, I knew. I’d recognize my Lea anywhere.”
The lump in her throat grew. Like I recognized you, she thought.
His eyes traced some invisible pattern in her face, one feature to another. “I’m not used to you being an adult.” Her father grinned, revealing teeth that were faintly yellow, their edges jagged and ground down. She hadn’t seen teeth like that in decades. Was this how everyone’s teeth used to look? “Little Lea. Somehow I expected you to still be that little girl with the big, round eyes. Always quiet, always watching. Planning for world domination. Terrifying all the other children at school.”
Her chest squeezed. The tears receded. The face of a boy, pale and afraid, flashed before her eyes. Classmates quiet and crying. A fluffy rabbit, soft, white as a cloud.
“That was a long time ago,” she said abruptly. “I barely remember any of it.”
Kaito leaned back in his chair. He tilted his head to the side and seemed to be sizing her up. It was a look she couldn’t read. “I’m sure. Eighty-eight years. Almost a century ago,” he said.
She was afraid he would say more, but he stopped, looking back down at his drink.
“Aren’t you—are they still looking for you?” Lea said in a low voice. She was grateful for the roar of conversation, the shouted orders and the incessant grinding buzz of the industrial juicers.
“It’s good to see you,” her father said, ignoring her question. “I mean, I wish it could have been under better circumstances. Without you running into rush-hour traffic in the middle of Broadway and all. But still, so good to see you. I can see you’re doing well. Really well.”
“I am,” Lea said. For a moment she allowed herself to believe that she was seeing her father after a long trip away. That he had gone somewhere for work for a few weeks, for a month. That they had a close, lifelong relationship, full of daily phone calls, shared Nutripak meals, long walks in the park. “I’m up for a promotion at work,” she said, even though he didn’t even know what she did, didn’t know anything about the past eighty-eight years of her life.
Kaito grinned. “Of course you are. Bet no one else stands a chance. Bet you’re walloping them all.”
Lea blinked. Did he think this was funny, just one big joke?
“Why are you here?” Her voice was stronger now, and she no longer felt like she was about to cry or shout.
She saw the movement of the streets reflected in the bright pinpricks of his eyes, and it struck her, forcefully, that her father was in there. In this shrunken body, this shell of his former self, it was still him. The same man who’d brought her a plastic dinosaur toy every time he went away on a business trip, the same man who’d carried Samuel thirty blocks to the hospital when the ambulance was stalled in traffic. The same man who’d cried when her brother closed his eyes for the last time. The first man Lea had ever seen cry.
Finally he spoke.
“I’m getting old, Lea.” He smiled another ironic smile.
It hit her then that he was only a decade younger than her mother. Which made him a hundred and seventy, an impressive age for someone of his generation. They’d always known, of course, that he would outlive Uju. His number had always been higher than hers, an ancestral advantage he’d brought with him from the small mountain town in central Honshu to America, all those years ago.
“And, well, I’ve missed you,” he said.
Her insides squeezed. I’ve missed you too, she thought. But what now? What did he think they could be now? There was no family left. Their family had fallen apart a long time ago. She had a different life now, a different purpose.
“I—I need to go,” Lea said. Under the counter, she scraped one thumbnail across ragged cuticles, drawing blood faster than the skin could grow back.
Kaito sighed, and she saw it move through him, rising up from his chest, rippling through his face. In the lines that radiated out from the edges of his eyes and circled his mouth, Lea saw every expression he had ever made. It occurred to her that almost all those smiles and frowns and sighs had taken place outside the boundaries of her life, in some other realm to which he had banished himself voluntarily. The thought made it easier for her to give him the impersonal nod that she gave him now.
The check arrived and Lea pulled out her wallet. Her father didn’t try to pay, only watched as she handed the waiter a card. When the waiter was gone, Lea busied herself with her coat and purse.
“Look,” her father said in a low voice. “I thought of calling you many times, of sending you a message, paying you a visit. Believe me, I wanted to. But it would have only made things worse. I knew Uju had done a great job of dealing with—everything. You were happy, healthy. Healthfin job. Todd. You had, have, a great life. And I get it, I really do. What else were you supposed to do? Sit around and pine after your deadbeat, antisanct, absent dad?”
Lea slipped off the bar stool. “I need to go,” she muttered again.
“Especially after what happened at school, you know—” He stopped, running his hands over his cheeks.
Lea became aware of the unnaturally bright voices of the group next to them, the sideways glances between what seemed like choreographed laughter.
“I really, really have to go. Goodbye, Dad,” she said.
But something inside her cracked when she said the word Dad, and she saw from the way he blinked that he had felt it, too.
“Wait.” He pulled a pen out from the inside of his blazer and scribbled something down onto a damp napkin. When he was done, he thrust it at her. “Just in case you want to—I don’t know, talk. Or something.” He leaned toward her and slipped the napkin into her purse.
She didn’t look back as she maneuvered her way through the crowd. It was only after she stepped out of the juice bar and was standing on the pavement that she allowed herself to look. Her father had made no move to leave. He sat with his head bowed, staring at the half-drunk smoothie clasped between his hands.
The young men next to him were handing around one of the babies, whose balled fleshy fists flailed about as it was passed. The adults’ faces were lit up with joy, all their attention focused laserlike on the child, their eyes and hands alert to its every twitch. The baby began to cry, noiselessly, behind the glass window. Its face was a purple knot of flesh, glistening and ugly with need.