HAYATO
I have never needed to get out of anywhere as much as I need to get out of Maine.
When I return to the inn for dinner after another full day spent outside at the beach, I find the cold dining room crowded with guests gossiping about what happened between Rodge and Melvin earlier.
“If you ask me, he’s simply being stubborn,” an older male wearing a summer worsted suit with a straw hat opines to a college-aged guy, dressed in a knitted sweater polo with nautical stripes. “You don’t throw away years of friendship for pride.”
“But you also don’t go off and forget about the girl you pledged your life to,” the young male insists. “Why if I’d had a wife, I never would have been unfaithful, even if she died early.”
“You only say that because you were never married. Take it from someone who was. You would have moved on, especially after seven years…”
I do my best to ignore them. But they’re arguing so loudly, it’s hard to hear Declan when he joins me for dinner. He’s alone, too. Kristal texted me earlier that she was eating dinner upstairs to avoid the rush of guests who had descended on the hotel for New Year’s. And Siobhan was taking a long nap back at her place after staying up all night with Declan.
I’m grateful for the company, but I only pay half attention to what Declan says throughout most of dinner. The other guests are so loud and the dining room is so cold, it’s hard to concentrate.
However, our one-sided conversation is cut short when his phone vibrates with a new text message. One that brings an immediate frown to his face.
“Is everything okay?” I ask when he picks up his phone and starts texting.
“Kinda maybe. The pilot’s saying Maine doesn’t want to clear him for anything international until after New Year’s. So he’s putting in a new flight plan, just for San Francisco and we’ll go from there.”
Another delay. I can no longer be surprised at this point. “How long will that take?” I ask, gritting my teeth.
“Probably overnight,” Declan admits with an apologetic wince. “But don’t worry, even though the inn’s at capacity for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve celebration, my mom’s already arranging another night for you in the same room. And the pilot’s saying they should be ready to go by the time you wake up.”
“Did you hear that?” the college boy says to the man in the straw hat. “The oriental and the black girl are staying another night.”
By the time I wake up. That’s soon. Only a few more hours. Yet, as I walk up the stairs to tell Kristal the news, I continue to feel as if I’m in a nightmare I can’t escape.
I think about the last text I received from her. “Eating upstairs. Really don’t feel like drawing any pictures of soon-to-be-departed loved ones tonight.”
I’d felt strangely touched that she shared this misery with me. Obviously, she is comfortable, letting me in on many aspects of her life now, filling a hole in me I had not realized was empty. There is a need inside to do the same, but when I think of telling her mine…
My last sight of Satomi’s face flashes across my mind. I’d thought her so winsome and cute when I met her at university, but there was nothing appealing about her the day my father called me into his office. When I walked in, I found her upon the floor.
Her knees were bent at two separate ninety-degree angles, as if she’d keeled over in the middle of a crawl. Her right arm and hand were fully extended. A supplicant begging my father for help. And her mouth was covered in the blood she began to cough up soon after her first sip of tea.
“Satomi!”
I could clearly see she was already long past dead, but the compulsion to run over to the woman I thought would become my bride rendered me irrational. It was one of the weaknesses I thought my father had extinguished long ago with what he’d deemed “necessary punishments.”
These necessary punishments had started when I was seven. We’d been summering at our factory house and though I had been quietly scolded by my mother for years for “telling such terrible lies,” I still hadn’t learned to keep my insane observations to myself.
I’d made the mistake of asking the caretaker, who I would later find out was my real father about the men I’d seen helping him in our large imperial-style garden, early that morning, before most of the house had woken up.
The caretaker who prided himself on his one-of-a-kind designs looked stricken. And my father, who had overheard my question, had come to stand over me, still and outwardly calm.
“Jeong kun tends to the garden by himself. Everyone knows that. Are you accusing him of lying?”
He asked the question in such a way that even as a young boy I knew better than to respond. But my silence hadn’t been enough of an acquiescence for Kazuo Nakamura.
After commanding me to apologize to the caretaker, my father ordered me to my office. There he’d brought out a cane, the same one that his father had used to punish him when he was a boy.
“Let this be a lesson about lying,” he said. Then he slapped my palms with the cane until the skin broke and blood rose to the surface of the painful welts.
I was not able to properly play or use my hands for weeks afterward. And my mother warned me to keep my fantastical stories to myself. “You will only make your father angry, and the punishments will escalate.”
I’d tried to do as she said. But over the years I would slip up. Once in front of a secondary school teacher who’d insisted on contacting my father immediately.
The teacher had been dealt with. A “jump” in front of a train that mysteriously had no witnesses. I’d later found out that this, along with poisoned tea, was a favorite dispensing method of my father’s.
As for me, my father had beaten me across the back with the cane that time. Those welts had also healed, but I felt the pain of that punishment for years afterward.
No more slip-ups after that. Not until Satomi begged me to tell her my secret.
And now she was dead. My heart cracked with guilt and regret as I gathered her in my arms and wept over her lifeless body.
“This is your fault, not hers.”
Still clinging to my dead fiancée, I’d looked up to see my father now standing up behind his desk.
His tailored suit and elegant office radiated dignity. But the dark eyes blazing beneath his otherwise cold expression, told the true tale of his merciless fury.
“She is dead because of your lies. Obviously, my earlier punishments in your boyhood were not enough.”
“You shouldn’t have done this!” My voice cracked with rage as I hugged her already cold body to my chest.
My father’s answer to that was to bring out his phone and push a button.
Satomi’s voice suddenly filled up the air between us, “Nakamura-sama, I thought I could marry Hayato as you wished. He is so handsome and smart and from such a good family. But he has told me some very strange things about himself. I fear for his mental health….”
My father pressed the pause button before Satomi could finish her confession.
“If you had not persisted in this nasty habit of making up stories, your fiancée would still be alive.” My father regarded me with a sneer, his complete and utter disgust written plainly across his face. “Now I am forced to deal with disappearing the body of a girl from a prominent family, and as for you…”
He shook his head at me. “This should have been the year you received our family tattoo, but you are not in the least bit worthy.”
My father’s sneer abruptly disappeared, his face settling back in the coldly placid lines he had become famous for in Japanese business media.
“Further punishment is obviously required. Better punishment,” he declared.
Then he picked up the phone and calmly asked his secretary to send in two specific guards. A few minutes later I was pulled off Satomi’s body. But not by my father’s official bodyguards.
Those were clean-cut men in suits, who never took off their designer shades even when inside. But the men who pulled me off of Satomi’s body had beard scruff and visible tattoos.
This was the real power of our family I came to find out later on after my father and older brother went to war with each other. These secret guards were tied to the yakuza background that my father had worked hard to keep secret in his mostly legitimate business dealings.
But my father was dead now. Those yakuza ties had been cut by my brother, the only of Kazuo Nakamura sons who had been deemed worthy enough to receive it.
And as for me, I have to keep my mind steady on the present prize.
One more night, and then we’ll be headed back to San Francisco. It won’t be necessary to get off the plane there, I remind myself, like a mother assuring a fearful child.
We’ll merely refuel, then we’ll be off to my main residence. A penthouse suite in the Tokyo high rise I had built from scratch after my father died. There I’ll have uninterrupted time with Kristal. We’ll settle into a routine of work and sex, and without all of this strange outside stimulus, I’ll have the opportunity to grow tired of the elf.
The current infatuation will fade and I’ll send her back to San Francisco with a nice bonus to assuage any overly attached feelings she might have developed for me.
It’s a good plan. But this whole situation makes me tired. No fun with Kristal tonight, I decide as I open the door. Just a shower and bed.
As soon as I enter the room I find out neither are immediately possible. The door to the lavatory is closed and I can hear a shower going in the background. Along with Kristal singing “Monday, Monday” at the top of her lungs. Another The Mama and The Papas song.
There’s also a tall, stocky woman cleaning our room. She’s wearing a cardigan with the same golden name plate as Rodge. And her similar size and cragginess tells me she must be related to Rodge in some way. I would guess his mother; she looks so much like him. But she doesn’t appear all that much older than the innkeeper. Perhaps Siobhan’s disapproving mother? That would certainly make more sense.
“Oh, you’re back. I thought I’d have a bit more time to pick up. Poor Roddy’s so overburdened with all the New Year’s Eve guests. And I tell you, you’re not helping him much with you’re not leaving today like you said you would.”
I lift a brow at her. If she thinks she’s been inconvenienced, she should see how I feel after spending several crucial days on what was supposed to be a simple 24 hour trip with a turnaround.
It strikes me as entirely unprofessional that she’d act so put out by the unexpected extension of our stay. Also, why was she cleaning our room while Kristal was obviously in the shower? In my experience, most cleaners only came into a room when it was occupant-free. But I have a feeling neither Rodge nor his mother knew or cared much about the concept of good customer service. It was yet another reason I was dying to leave this inn behind.
The noise of the shower abruptly switches off, and Kristal’s “Monday, Monday” gets louder as she comes closer to the bathroom door.
“And the black elf’s out the shower, too. Well then, I’ll just get out your hair so you and her can get back to all that sex you’ve been having. Though you’d think the two of you be tuckered out by now.”
Yes, apparently being incredibly rude and impolite runs in this family.
I’ve had just about enough of this, and I’m about to tell her to get out. But then Kristal opens the door and exits the lavatory wearing nothing but a towel. Which barely does anything to cover her lush curves.
In an instant, my decision not to have sex with her before we leave is reversed.
But I am more than ready to be done with the complaints of Rodge’s overstepping relative. I open the room’s front door and let her know, “There’s no need to come back. We’re checking out for certain tomorrow.”
The woman stops mid-step, freezes, then frowns up at me. And she’s now close enough for me to notice the one element I didn’t before. She’s cold. So freezing cold, it feels like I’m standing next to a block of ice.
Only one kind of being gives off that kind of cold.
Ghosts. The housekeeper, she isn’t Rodge’s sister. She’s a ghost. Most likely Rodge’s mom.
I silently curse. I’ve done it again. I’ve slipped.
“You can see me?” the ghost asks.
At the same time, Kristal asks, “Who are you talking to?”
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
What will Hayato do now that
he’s mistakenly revealed his secret?
Find out in the next episode of
TWELVE MONTHS OF KRISTAL.