Steel Breeze (11 page)

Desmond
could hardly think straight, was knocking things over now, rummaging through
the detritus of a living room shared by a widower and a toddler, feeling ashamed
of the mess. With an armload of jumbled clothing, a favorite blanket, and a
brown plastic bottle of chewable vitamins spilling over his elbow, he yanked
open the zipper of Lucas’s knapsack with enough force to jam the teeth. Inside,
atop the folded clothes and a baggie of Goldfish crackers, was a snow-white
origami butterfly. His breath caught in his chest.

He
remembered Lucas pleading with him in Laurie’s foyer.

I
want to show you the paper airplane.

At
the time, he’d figured Laurie had done some kind of craft project to keep the
kids busy. Maybe she had. Dear God, he hoped she had.

Chapter 10

If only.

Shaun
Bell sat in the Logan Airport Starbucks and sipped tea from a paper cup. All he
could taste was the paper, and the tea was too hot. He considered dumping it
out. Rather than calming his nerves, the wrongness of the drink was only
increasing his agitation, but buying it had given him a place to sit while
watching the arrivals. His teacher would stand out from the crowd. Sensei had
at times studied the unconscious posture and gait of those around him and
imitated it to blend in, but Shaun knew how hard it was for him to break the
long habit of moving through the world with the grace and purpose of a heron
gliding through a flock of crows.

A
cocktail napkin folded in the shape of a dog sat on the table beside the tea. The
paper was poor, hardly capable of holding the form at all. The head was
misshapen and ugly. He idly curled his fingers around it and crumpled it into a
ball.

He
was aware of Sensei's suitcase on the floor beneath the table. It had preceded
the man to Boston, and Shaun had claimed it from the luggage carousel. Shaun
let his shoe brush against it. It was the same one Sensei had taken with him when
the two of them had embarked on their journey together from California to the
east coast.

There
were no weapons in the bag. Sensei would have used one of the blades they had
stored years ago at the underground dojo on the west coast. That concrete room
had been a place of awakening for Shaun Bell. He longed for the exhilaration and
clarity of those days of first steps on the path.

Shaun’s
gaze moved across the concourse. A man dressed in vacation clothes was standing
near the restroom playing with an iPhone while his two little girls chased each
other around the terminal.

Everywhere
he went he saw this same phenomenon—parents unmindful of their children, their
attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized
like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh
and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their
backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them
with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human
connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his
immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit
of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him?

Shaun
squeezed the napkin ball in his hand. He turned his fist over and examined his
fingernails. There were no traces of the ink. Would the writer even find the
message? If he did, it would take him time to decipher it. This was a dangerous
game. The man should have acted already. Why did he need more than one message?
It was a writer's business to speak the language of symbols. And really, what
interpretation was required here? The reaper was coming. What more did a man
need to know? But Sensei had taught him to treat all action as art. Shaun had
brushed the message to Carmichael as a
kanji
character, obeying the
master's dictum even as he betrayed him. That the betrayal was diffused in
poetry, calligraphy, and origami did nothing to diminish the intention. He had
strayed from the path of the undivided mind.

Surely
Sensei knew that his excuses for failure at the playground were weak. He lacked
sufficient
yamato damashi
to slay a child. Surely Sensei knew this and
would test him again soon.

He
tapped his foot against the suitcase, and thought of days of long light on the
porch in Huntington Beach, recalled vividly the day when he had first seen that
suitcase sitting on the planks overlooking the rock garden behind the apartment
Sensei had rented from their family on Hale Street. Back before he knew the old
man as
Sensei
.

Shaun
had wandered down the back stairs after fixing himself a sandwich and, as on
most afternoons, had settled into the lawn chair beside the downstairs tenant’s
wooden rocker. The old man had a faraway look in his eyes, but he didn't
redress his face at the sound of the creaking steps, didn’t hide whatever
sorrow he’d been ruminating on the way most adults did when caught. His eyes
met Shaun’s and kindled with the same quiet generosity as always, as his mouth
melted into a faint but honest smile. Shaun’s parents never smiled quite like
that, like they were
really
seeing him. They rehearsed a well-worn
repertoire of faces and voices for patronizing him. He didn't know if they
thought of themselves as masters of feigned interest or if they believed they
were really seeing and hearing him during the few hours each week when they
were in his presence. It was obvious to him, even at the age of eleven, that
the only genuine expression they wore was worry.

They
worried about him, and he thought that was probably a sign of love, but they
worried more about their jobs, their cars, their house, their gray hairs and crow's‐feet.
He saw them separately now, so it seemed they hadn’t worried about him enough to
stay together.

The
old man patted the suitcase. “I am taking a trip,” he said.

“Where?”
Shaun asked.

“Arizona.”

“Why
Arizona?”

“I
looked up an old acquaintance. It will be a hunting trip.”

“You
hunt? Like with a gun?”

The
old man smiled. “I have always wanted to try hunting, but the time never seemed
right for it. When you get to be my age, you realize that it is important to
try new things, to do things you have always wanted to do, or you may never do
them at all.“

“You're
not
that
old,” Shaun said, placing his half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich
on the wobbly little whitewashed table between them.

“Life
is like a water bubble. No one knows when death will come. We must use the time
we have.”

“When
will you be back?”

“In
a few days.”

“What
will
I
do? After school.”

“You
can come down here the same as always. Make the tea. Drink the tea and practice
your
bokken
forms. Just as if I were sitting in this chair. It's good
for you to be outside. Don't start watching TV.”

Shaun
made the same face he would have if his neighbor had suggested that he might
start eating worms, and together they laughed.

A
moment passed in easy silence, broken by the double honk of a car horn from the
street side of the house. “My taxi is here,” the old man said, rising.

Shaun
carried the suitcase to the car for him. It was heavy.

After
the taxi disappeared under the purpling sky, Shaun went to the kitchen and made
the tea. Two cups. He drank one and let the other cool on the little white
table beside the rocking chair. He took up the wooden sword that the old man
had carved for him with his mother’s permission. She had been happy to learn
that he could still spend some time swinging a piece of wood in the back yard,
even after baseball hadn't worked out for him—team sports had never worked out
for him, not at any of the schools they’d tried. It would still be several
hours before she was home. Enough time to practice his patterns. He walked
around the rock garden and stepped onto the freshly cut grass.

It
was good to have something to do in the yard while the house was empty, good to
have something to keep his mind off the absence of the dog. His mother had
gotten rid of the dog soon after she’d gotten rid of his father. Shaun would
never know for sure if she had left the gate open intentionally….

In
the airport coffee shop, Shaun Bell moved the cup to the edge of the table so
that he wouldn't have to endure the inferior smell of the tea. He recalled the
smell of grass and honeysuckle on late summer nights in California, the sky
deepening to burnished indigo while he stepped and pivoted, adjusted his stance
and grip, breathed and sweated until his eyes no longer searched the fence line
for slow moving headlights, his ears focused only on his exhalations and the
dull roar of hard wood cleaving the still air while the first cold, distant
stars came out to watch him.

He
could see Sensei now, moving down the concourse, gliding between the crows.

If
only
.

It
was a phrase that haunted his mind lately, like a mantra.
If only the old man
hadn’t killed a dog that night when he killed the woman.

* * *

Desmond
slept in Lucas’s bed. It was too small for him, and he had to curl up in a fetal
position to do it, but he was too exhausted to care. It would have been harder
to fall asleep in his own bed with Sandy’s ghost beside him, judging him for
losing their son. In Lucas’s room he was able to succumb to sleep while still
taking responsibility for the failure. He knew he could do nothing to rectify
the situation in the middle of the night, knew that whatever he could do in the
morning would only be hindered by exhaustion, so he’d surrendered into merciful
ignorance of the conditions at the stormy surface of his life the way a diver
escapes the turbulence of a rough sea by descending.

Twice
before sleep claimed him for the night, he startled back to wakefulness with
the jolt that comes from the body reacting to the hard tug of sleep—that
alarmed bracing against the sensation of falling. And each time he surfaced,
clutching the Spider-Man sheets, he imagined he could hear the bloodthirsty
blade whispering to him from within the wall, begging him for the freedom to do
the thing it had been forged for, to bleed all of the antagonists—some in
shadow, some in plain sight—who were trying to take Lucas away from him.

The
morning brought rain. Out of habit he rose early, showered, made coffee, and
went to his desk in the living room. He stood in front of the laptop and stared
at the lid until he realized he was holding his breath. Last night had been the
first night with the new locks installed, but he’d still felt compelled to
check them, and now he half expected to find a new haiku on the screen.

His
brain was waking up at the same time as the computer, and he felt a curdling in
the pit of his stomach as he remembered something that had evaded him while
showering and putting on the coffee pot. In the predawn, his first pain-radiant
thoughts of the day had been a replay of the encounter with Phil—what he had
said to his father-in-law and what he should have said…but he had been holding
one detail of the previous night just out of view, protecting himself from the
possibilities it suggested: the paper butterfly.

The
computer was awake now and displayed the white Word document, the cursor
blinking at the end of the lousy couple of lines he had produced at the park. He
sighed and closed the lid. He got up and went to the couch where the origami
insect patiently waited for him.

Desmond
picked it up and turned it over in his hands. He had seen origami butterflies
before, but they weren’t as common as cranes, and origami animals in general
weren’t exactly common enough to be produced like paper airplanes by American
boys hanging out in a tree house. Common enough for coincidence? He couldn't
afford to believe that. And this one was flawless. He looked at the clock:
6:19. It was still too early to call Laurie.
Why? Respect for her Sunday
morning sleep?
He couldn't afford to put manners ahead of Lucas’s safety. He
picked up the phone. At least he wouldn't wake her husband. She had said he
would be away on his business trip until Monday.

She
answered on the fourth ring, her voice coated with sleep. Desmond apologized
but didn’t ask if he’d woken her. Of course he had. “Is Lucas okay?” she asked.
She knew he wouldn’t be calling unless something had happened; a food allergy,
or an injury she hadn’t noticed. How was he supposed to frame the question?
I
was just wondering if Sandy’s killer might have dropped by yesterday to deliver
some party favors for the boys. You didn’t happen to see a guy in a Japanese
demon mask haunting your yard, did you?

“This
is going to sound like it could have waited, but trust me, it’s important. I
found an origami butterfly in Lucas’s bag. Do you know where he got it?”

“Um….”
Desmond could picture her lying in bed, an arm draped over her forehead,
staring up at the ceiling and forcing her brain to work. “Yeah. The boys said
they found it in the tree house. I figured the girl next door might have made
it when she was sitting Carl for me last week. She’s pretty creative…why?”

He
didn’t answer. Morning light had filtered into the room through the clouds and
curtains, and even in diluted gray form, it overpowered the lamplight by which
he had first examined the butterfly the previous night. Now he could see dark
spots on the paper, the shadows of ink within its folds. “It might be nothing,”
he said, not believing the words, “but it has something in common with what
happened to Sandy, so I hope you’ll forgive me for being freaked out.” He
unfolded the paper. “Could you ask the girl if she made it? Call her and call
me back?”

When
the paper was no longer a butterfly, but a many-creased and softly angled paper
square, he let go of it and watched it drift to the surface of his desk. It
sliced through the air sideways and gently came to rest on the wood laminate. A
bold, fluid
kanji
pictogram blazed up at him in black ink. He wasn’t
hearing Laurie’s answer to his question, something about when the sun was up. He
snapped back when she asked him if he was okay.