Amir snorted with laughter. Rei wrinkled her nose. “You should not use that kind of language, Merrow.”
It was difficult to keep my face solemn when I had a clear view of Amir’s delight, but I managed as best I could. “I got excited thinking about your cooking.”
Rei sighed. “I won’t say anything to Bear if you promise that you will tell me if he ever treats you poorly. And I need you both to sleep in the house, in separate rooms, from now on.”
Amir and I nodded.
“You have our word,” Amir said. I looked at him. Lies came easily to both of us, it seemed.
Rei studied him. “Do not let this one be a bad influence on you, Amir. I know you share everything, but there is no need to share her mischief. You have a wise heart. I have always seen it.”
I was surprised to see Amir’s cheeks turn pink.
“You are two people, not one,” Rei continued. “Beware if you begin to hear thoughts in your head that do not speak in your voice.”
“Like a ghost?” Amir asked.
“No. Not like a ghost.” Rei threw her hands in the air asthough she were giving up. “Let’s go sit on the porch for your lessons. I brought some books on Native American pottery that I think you’ll both like.”
My mood instantly lifted. Rei, we had learned recently, had not been an elementary school teacher in Japan as I had always believed, but a professor of art at a university. I found the fifth-grade worksheets from the homeschooling curriculum she had acquired fairly dull, but Rei’s lessons sprang to life when she supplemented them with her knowledge of the history of art.
As we walked up the porch steps, she touched each of our shoulders. “I am glad you have each other,” she said, her voice more gentle than before. “My parents, in Japan, lived through great hardship that they would not have survived had they not had each other. They looked nothing alike, but you could not look at one without seeing the other. They shared something that showed on their faces. There was a special energy between them, joining them. Even when my father died, from a heart attack at far too young an age, I saw him for years in my mother. I felt his presence when I was with her.”
I stared at Rei, thrilled. “So your fatherwasa ghost!”
“No. A ghost is troublesome. This was a haunting, maybe, but a happy one. A welcome one. A love that runs that deep cannot simply disappear. It lives on. It has power.”
On the porch, we each settled into our usual chairs.
“What am I trying to tell you?” Rei thought for a moment. “Only that I believe this friendship the two of you share will give you comfort for your entire lives. Even—maybeespecially—when your futures take different paths and you find that you are no longer together.”
Amir and I looked at each other. I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it, too: Rei meant well, but she was wrong. We had been left by too many loved ones; we would never inflict that pain on each other. Already, I heard Amir’s voice in my mind when he wasn’t speaking, just as I knew he heard mine. In the shed at night when it was very cold, we huddled close under the gaze of the red birds we had made together, and I would drift to sleep unsure whose breath I heard so steady and sure, his or mine.
We would never be apart.
