10
Kara is drowning.
She cannot breathe, and blackness swims at the edges of her vision. Angry red spots flash in her brain. Her hearing is muffled, and as she lashes out, struggling, she feels as though she moves in slow motion. Water. I’m under water.
The realization is an epiphany. Disoriented, chest aching for air, she pushes herself in a direction she believes is upward, and her arms burst from the water. She sips at sweet relief, the air like magic in her lungs.
All around her, bobbing on the surface, paper lanterns float. Yet these don’t have the variety of hues of the festival lanterns. These come only in white-white lanterns, the spirits of the recent dead, eddying around her, floating closer as though drawn to her.
Something tugs her from below the water. She tries to cry out, but no sound escapes her lips as she is dragged under once more.
No, no, no. I don’t want to-
Her thoughts fall apart. The last of the air inside her struggles to be exhaled. Kara knows that if she opens her mouth she will drown. She will die. But her lungs demand air, and her thoughts are losing coherence, and she cannot stop herself.
She opens her mouth in a scream… but this time it is not silent.
With a gasp, she looks around. No longer in the water, she finds herself in a thick tangle of pines, and recognizes the place immediately. The black woods of Ama-no-Hashidate. Without the water muffling her hearing, the silence is gone. The air is filled with a loud hiss, layers of sound, the voices of serpents.
They hold her arms and legs, their coiled bodies emerging from the branches of the trees, more and more snakes reaching for her, tongues darting, eyes unblinking. Her throat is torn apart by her scream, her chest clenched by utter panic.
Please! she cries. Please!
She does not know to whom she appeals for mercy, only that mercy is her only hope.
Something grips her wrist, colder even than the skin of snakes, but not rough like the serpents. Soft. Gentle. Kara spins to see the hand on her wrist, peers into the thick bristle of darkness between two trees, and her eyes widen. Hope grows.
“Mom?”
The woman smiles. The serpents fall from Kara as though fleeing her touch, driven away. Kara blinks in astonishment and gratitude. Her mother has protected her.
Then the terrible truth crashes in from a part of her mind that cannot be deceived by dreams.
“But you’re dead,” she says before she can stop herself.
The sadness in her mother’s face breaks her heart. The serpents return, but not for Kara. They coil around her mother’s arms and legs, drape over her shoulders, and begin to pull her deeper into the trees.
“No!” Kara shouts. “Stop!”
Her mother hangs her head, hair obscuring her features, as the snakes pull her into the black nothing, and in a moment, she is gone. Kara hurls herself into the dark crush of branches that tear and scratch and jab her, lunging for her mother, but her hands close only on pine branches and shadows.
With a cry of anguish, she wakes…
Kara sat up, and for a moment, wasn’t sure if she had really called out in her sleep. The wan light of Sunday morning came through the window, carried on a warm breeze, but though she listened for his footfalls, her father did not come to check on her. She must have cried out only in the dream.
With a deep breath, she let go of much of the fear that lingered after the nightmare. It dissipated with each passing moment. But the melancholy did not depart so quickly. Parts of the dream were already fading in her mind, but she knew it would be a long time before she forgot the worst of it. Not the snakes, though those were nightmarish. What Kara would not be able to scour from her mind was the look on her dream-mother’s face when she told her that she was dead.
It had felt like a betrayal. The dream-the illusion-could have been sweet. Her mother had come to protect her, to hold Kara, to guide her, and Kara had dismissed her.
It was only a dream, she told herself now. But somehow that reassurance wasn’t enough to relieve her of the strange guilt that she felt. If she had not spoken, if she had not broken the illusion, the darkness would never have claimed her mom. As foolish as it was-Kara knew dreams could not be controlled-the guilt remained.
After the events at the Toro Nagashi Festival the night before, she was exhausted. Her bedside clock revealed the time to be just before eight a.m. She could sneak in a couple more hours of sleep and she knew her father would not wake her. But Kara stretched and sat up, forcing herself to leave the comfort of her bed. Better to be awake now. If she went back to sleep right away, she might return to the same dream. It happened sometimes. This morning, she could not bear the thought.
As she’d fallen asleep the night before she had struggled with the temptation to tell her father everything, to explain what she and her friends believed was really going on. She had played out various scenarios in her mind, imagining that he would go with her to Mr. Yamato-they could bring all of the others, even Mai, in with them-and the principal would listen. She believed that part, at least, was true. The last time she’d been in Mr. Yamato’s office, it had been clear that he already half-believed that something unnatural was going on at Monju-no-Chie school.
But that was where her imaginary scenario fell apart. She simply could not escape the feeling that her father, always a practical man, would think she had lost her marbles. Even when she woke up this morning, that version of events seemed so much more likely to her. He would think that fear or stress had made her snap, or that she was having some kind of breakdown, or he would think she was a liar, and that was the worst scenario of all.
Things had been tense, and Kara had felt the distance growing between them. It scared her to even consider doing something that might push him further away.
She pulled on a pair of shorts and padded quietly to her door, not wanting to wake him. But when she stepped into the hallway, she paused, brows knitting, as she heard voices in the living room. Her father, yes, but he wasn’t alone.
“I feel like I should be doing something,” a woman’s voice said.
Kara blinked. Miss Aritomo? She glanced back into her room to confirm the time. Still five minutes before eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. What the hell was the woman doing here so early in the morning?
She took a sharp breath. Had her art teacher spent the night? Had Miss Aritomo come over after Kara had gone to bed? She couldn’t believe her father would do such a thing. He’d be horrified by how it might look, both to his daughter and to the school administration.
Still, Kara couldn’t rule it out. Otherwise, when had Miss Aritomo arrived? Seven a.m.? Six? She couldn’t imagine that, but she wouldn’t let herself imagine the alternative, either. Her father was an adult, but the idea of him sleeping with any woman both disturbed and disappointed her.
“Yasu had such enthusiasm and he was so kind,” Miss Aritomo said, her voice cracking. “I can’t… even if I were to choose someone else to take his role in the play, I don’t know if I could continue. I don’t know if I should. Three of my students, Rob. My Noh club kids.”
Kara held her breath. Miss Aritomo sounded so torn up inside that she couldn’t help feeling badly. She had never given any consideration to how all of this might affect Miss Aritomo, the grief it would bring her. Could Kara really blame her for seeking some solace in her father’s company?
“Yuuka,” her father said, his voice soft and kind. “Look at me. You don’t know what happened to those other two. It’s completely possible that they really did run away together.”
A few seconds passed in silence before Miss Aritomo spoke. “You don’t believe that.”
“No, I don’t,” her father admitted. “But that doesn’t change anything. It’s possible.”
Kara walked into the living room. “Good morning.”
The two of them looked up, her father in a T-shirt and pajama pants-much too comfortable dressed that way in front of this woman, his colleague-and Miss Aritomo looking tired in a pair of pants and a baggy cotton sweater. She usually looked immaculate, but this morning her hair was wild and unkempt as though she’d just rolled out of
