Ink

“With kakigori. ”

“Never say I don’t sacrifice for my sport.”

We walked around Sunpu Park, avoiding the castle. The cherry blossoms were long gone, but a few cicadas still whirred in the hot summer air. He reached for my hand, his wristband pressed against the inside of my wrist, the scars up his arm scraping against my skin as we walked.

It was almost dinnertime and the sky started to streak with colors; our last day was ending. Tomohiro pulled me into a conbini store and bought bentous for us, which the clerk heated up in a silver microwave. We boarded the puttering Roman bus, the smell of teriyaki and katsu curry flooding our noses.

I didn’t have to ask where we were going. I knew.

They’d finished the renovations at Toro Iseki, and most of the chain-link fence lay stacked in piles ready to take away.

A couple of university students walked around the site, the girl with her arms wrapped tightly around the guy. Near the Toro Museum at the other side of the forest edge, a group of elementary school students laughed and joked.

I stared, feeling like something was slipping away from me.

“Guess I’ll have to find a new studio,” Tomohiro said, but his voice sounded as hollow as I felt.

We stepped through the trees in silence. The wagtails called to each other, ready to roost in the ume trees for the night. The ancient Yayoi huts stood against the orange sky, the once long grasses around them trimmed neatly for the tourist season.

An ugly patch of brown grass was shorter still where it had burned under the dragon’s looped corpse, but that was the only mark left of what had happened to us.

Tomohiro squeezed my hand and pulled me forward. We ducked into one of the huts before we could get caught. Above us, the sun gleamed through the gaps in the thatched roof.

“We’ll get in trouble,” I hissed.

“What’s new?” He grinned and then leaned over to kiss me.

We sat pressed against the walls a long time, staring up at the sky as the colors twisted and darkened. We watched as our last day together faded, as life grew over the shape of what had once been.

I turned the wrong way when we walked back to the bus stop. That’s how much my world was shifting under my feet.

Tomohiro couldn’t make it to the airport in Tokyo, but at my front door—Diane’s front door—he’d stuffed an envelope into my hand and made me promise to read it on the plane.

Then he’d pressed a kiss onto my lips, deep and hungry and sweet, and pulled away before I could say goodbye, his hand raised to his face as he turned the corner for the elevator. I’d leaned against the wall, listening until the elevator doors slid shut. And then ink had dripped back down the hallway toward me, leaving inky trails that looked like fingers grasping, stretching.

Never quite reaching me.

“Want a sandwich for the flight?” Diane asked at the airport. I shook my head. My stomach felt like it was pressing in on me. There was no way I could eat. “Tea? Anything?”

It was like we were strangers again, like she was shoving hors d’oeuvres at me at Mom’s funeral, keeping a silver plate between us. And yet I’d really started to think that looking for ourselves on the other side of the world, we’d found each other. She wasn’t the piece that didn’t fit—she was the piece that completed everything.

We stood at the security gate, as far as she could take me.

“Well,” she said.

Well.

“Say hi to Nan and Gramps for me,” she said. She reached up and stroked my hair. She had that same wavering smile Mom always had when she was pretending not to be sad.

“They’re going to be so happy to see you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” Diane answered.

“No,” I said, looking her right in the eye. “I mean, thanks.

For everything.”

She looked at me, her eyes filming over with tears. Then she hugged me tightly.

“Oh, hon,” she said, her eyes squeezed shut. “If you need anything, you call me, okay? Don’t worry about the time difference.”

“Okay,” I said. She stepped back and looked at me, her eyes shining.

“Your mom would be so proud of you,” she said, and my eyes filled with tears. “It was always so hard for her to put down roots outside her comfort zone. And you managed it in a different language, even.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said, which meant don’t say any more or I’ll start bawling in the middle of Narita Airport.

I guess she got the message, because she closed her mouth and stepped back.

“Bye,” I choked.

“You’ve always got a home here,” she said. “Okay?”

“Yeah.”

I turned and went through the security check. Once I stepped through the metal detector, I turned to look back at Diane, but she was lost in the crowd.

I adjusted my backpack and rolled my carry-on toward the empty benches near my gate. I wished the floor would open and swallow me up so I wouldn’t have to feel anything anymore.

I sat down on one of the hard leather benches by the door. Clusters of gaijin and Japanese tourists sat in the rows around me, while two flight attendants talked in hushed tones. I stared out the giant windows at the planes moving slowly around the concrete plaza.

The whole thing felt surreal. To think that five months ago this was what I had wanted. To go home.

But home wasn’t there anymore, and it wasn’t even Japan, really.

I think it was inside myself

And it was in him.

And that’s why I had to leave. Because I couldn’t stand to break him.

I pulled out the envelope and tapped it against my top lip, staring at the luggage trains and the clumsy maneuvers of the planes. They looked so awkward on the ground, big, flailing machines that tipped from side to side as they stumbled forward.

I looked down at the envelope in my hands.

I was practically on the plane. It was close enough.

I pulled the edge of the envelope up and slid my finger

along the top, the paper ripping into litde puckered edges. I pulled out the note, a plain piece of white paper, and unfolded it carefully.

I’d wondered what he would say to me, agonized over what he would write and what it would mean. And here in red pen was a single word at the top of the page.

??? ??

Itterasshai.

Go and come back safely.

Like I was leaving on a vacation and returning to him.

A sketch spanned the rest of the paper, a haunting black-and-white rose chained to the page by five thick X marks, the lines scribbled and rescribbled to bind the drawing. Even then it was risky, but it was only pen, and he’d always managed to keep tabs on his school notes and doodles.

The rose barely moved as I looked at it, its petals fluttering softly in the drafty airport. It almost looked normal. In fact it was beautiful, the same beauty I saw in Tomohiro’s eyes when he gazed at the wagtails or the sakura trees, when he gave them life in his notebook. The look in his eyes when he gazed at me.

The tears rolled down my cheeks, curving under my chin and dripping onto the paper. The ink ran where