Chapter Fourteen
When I arrived at Rei’s house, I was relieved to see that her car was in the driveway. There was a glow of light beyond the living room curtains.
But when I knocked on the door, she did not answer. I knocked again and called her name. I waited a few moments and tried again. I picked my way through the plants in front of her house and knocked on the living room window. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled her name.
I walked around to the back of the house. Her bathroom window was dark. I knocked on it but heard no response. The window was once again unlocked, and I felt a pang of guilt for not warning Rei, years earlier, of how easy it was to break into her house.
“Rei?” I stepped into the bathroom. An inexplicable sensation of dread passed over my skin like a cold wind. “It’s me, Merrow!”
I walked from the bathroom into the bedroom and flipped on the light. Rei lay on top of her covers, asleep.
My relief quickly changed as I ran to the bed. Rei did not move, and she was not asleep. Her eyes were open. Her face was frozen in an expression I had never seen her wear—she looked as though she were staring at something that terrified her. Her lips formed a thin, immovable circle. Her black eyes were still and unseeing. Nausea roiled my stomach. I sunk to my knees at the side of the bed. “Rei,” I cried. My voice did not sound like my own. “Rei!”
I would never know how much time passed as I knelt beside her. The bones in my body dissolved in response to my grief; I could not move.
I had just seen her. We had just spoken. It was not possible that she was gone.
I thought of how tired she had seemed as we sat together on the porch. I thought of how dismayed she’d become when I expressed my love for Amir. I had run away from her, leaving her alone and frail with shock.
Had I done this to her?
I lowered my forehead to the bed and sobbed. Rei was more than my father’s friend. She was more than my teacher, more than my thankless benefactor. I loved her. After so many years of laughing when she worried over me, now I cried at the thought of my life without her in it. Would I have longed to see the world without Rei’s stories of her childhood in Japan? Would I have loved art the way that I did? She had affected me in ways for which I rarely paused to give her credit.
I cried for her forgiveness.
Through the window, the moon was a bright eye watchingme. What was I supposed to do? I decided I should find Doctor Clark and tell him how I’d come to discover Rei.
As I stood shakily to my feet, my gaze fell on the trunk across the room. It was open. On the floor, Rei’s box—the beautiful box covered in shells from our beach—lay ajar. I walked over to it, my heart hammering in my ears.
It was empty.
I looked back at Rei, my understanding shifting. Had someone done this to her? Had someone killed her and stolen her money?
The pillow beside her was indented, as though an invisible hand pressed it. I thought of spirits, of the red bird on the porch railing, of Amir believing that I planned to leave Horseshoe Cliff without him.
The last time I had left Amir alone with Bear, he had ended up locked in the shed.
But Amir would not do this to Rei.
I thought of the way his face had transformed that day when I returned from my stay with the Langfords, how I had hardly recognized the Amir whom I loved within the storm of violence that had spun in his eyes.
I did not want to think what I was thinking.
I did not want to do what I did, but I did it anyway: I closed the empty box and returned it to the trunk.
“Forgive me,” I whispered to Rei.
I remembered the light that was on in the living room. I hurried down the hall and there, on the shelf that held the carvings that my father and Amir had made, one carving was missing. Iremembered the one that had been in that spot. It was the first tiny house that Amir had created. My father had helped him with it, teaching him; they’d made it together.
I thought suddenly of Rosalie’s words, how there were moments in life when you realize that everything has changed.
I stared at the empty spot, feeling my world shift.
Amir was gone.
