“I’m not trying to.”
“I know,” he says, another super amused smile crinkling his eyes.
Then he kisses me again while the Beach Boys harmonize like nobody else.
And I stop worrying about falling. That’s already happened. The ledge I was white-knuckling is a distant memory.
I’m falling, falling, into True Love.
The only thing I can do now is brace myself for impact when I hit the ground.
“Kristal-san…” he says, pulling back from the kiss, his voice short on air.
“Yes?” I answer just as breathlessly. Hoping he’s thinking what I’m thinking. Falling like I’m falling.
But then he says, “I believe I know how to solve Declan’s problem.”
Ooh, what does Hayato have up his sleeve?
And does this kiss mean he’s falling for Kristal, too?
Find out in the next episode of
TWELVE MONTHS OF KRISTAL!
DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME
Episode 5
21
Dream a Little Dream of Me
HAYATO
The fifth day of Christmas
“Hayato, what a pleasant surprise. I did not expect you until tomorrow. Did I write down the date wrong?”
My mother stands to bow when I stride out onto the garden veranda of our “factory home.” This is what we called the ancestral estate we kept in a rural part of Japan, where the first of our Nakamura Auto factories was established.
My mother is in her mid-forties by now, but thanks to her insistence on either carrying a sun umbrella or wearing a wide-brimmed hat whenever she steps outside, her milky white skin bears no traces of her true age. The way she speaks further enhances her carefully preserved youth. Her lilting Japanese sounds as soft and delicate as the newly formed flowers in the beautiful garden where she’s sharing breakfast with my older brother, Norio.
I bow to both my mother and older brother before answering, “I finished my exams early and decided there was no reason to stay on at the university.”
“I am surprised you bothered to return to university after your semester with Father,” Norio says after also bowing. “You already look more like a businessman than a student.”
Instead of replying, I give him another respectful bow.
Norio doesn’t know what my semester with our father really entailed or that I had not stepped foot into the Nakamura Industries office even once during my supposed internship.
Norio and I remain loyal to each other. We are full brothers and have been told since birth that we are descended from samurais on both sides of our family lines. How could either of us not be loyal to the only other person in the world who completely understands what it was like to grow up as a scion of two of Japan’s most venerated family names? What it was like to have every aspect of your life controlled by a megalomaniac father with sky-high expectations.
There is no one I trust more than my older brother, but I cannot tell him what I’ve endured at the sanitorium these last few months. Or why our father committed me there in the first place.
Before my time in the sanitorium, I was tapped by the Nakamura marketing department to become the face of our sports car division. But I’m also smart enough to obtain a business degree with the goal of eventually running that same marketing department. Norio believes me to be exactly as my father has ordered me to present. I’m dispassionate and so consistently serious, he most likely cannot recall the last time he saw me smile.
He doesn’t know my secret. Or the lengths our father would go to ensure that secret was never revealed again.
“What a happy occasion,” our mother says into my polite silence. She beams, and despite what I’ve been through since seeing her last, I find myself almost tempted to smile back.
She appears happy. Happier than she’d been in Tokyo, even though she’s been banished here by our father with nothing but a pair of Korean caretakers to attend to her.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asks me. “I had been thinking of requesting a fresh pot when you arrived.”
“Yes, thank you,” I say, taking a seat as my mother gracefully summons the female half of her servant pair and requests another pot of tea.
The servant disappears into the large but aging main house with the pot. And I easily fall into a discussion with my mother and brother about my and Norio’s upcoming summer, which will be spent working for Nakamura Industries. For real this time. I have a marketing internship at our Tokyo branch. Meanwhile, after receiving an advanced robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Norio would begin what would surely be a lifelong stint at our technology division in Osaka.
There is something different about Norio, I note. He seems more self-assured, more powerful…the reason for his new comportment hits me suddenly, like a blast of cold air. I cannot see it, but I somehow know Norio has received the traditional back tattoo our father denied me. Yet another rebuke on our father’s part. Norio has his respect, while I have nothing but his abject shame after what happened with Satomi.
Shortly after the servant pours us all tea from a fresh pot and departs again, I feel another set of eyes on me.
My gaze drifts over to the Korean husband, tending to the maples at the far edge of the garden. He is the opposite of my mother. His body is as squat and work-worn as hers is tiny and slender. Her carefully shielded skin is snow-white while he is tanned brown. And his face is a heavily lined rectangle, while hers is a perfect uncreased oval. He raises a hand and gives me a tentative wave.
I acknowledge his greeting with a polite nod.
“Our servants are so very different from us,” my mother observes, following the direction of my nod.
She takes a sip of her steaming tea instead of waiting for it to cool like Norio and me. “They will work until the day they die because they must, whereas you boys and your father will do the same because you can imagine doing nothing else. Do you ever wonder what our servants would do with even a percentage of what we have?”
I exchange a look with my brother, neither of us entirely understanding why our mother has taken us down this particular conversational track. Her family dynasty stretches back hundreds of years, and she has always made it seem as if Norio and I were nothing less than fated to have the riches into which we had been born. When had she started thinking such egalitarian thoughts? Perhaps her factory home banishment was affecting her in ways we couldn’t quite see underneath her perfectly maintained water painting exterior.
That is the last thought I had about my living mother.
In the next moment, she grabs at her throat, choking and then pitching out of her chair.
My brother and I run to her, but there is nothing we can do. She is already halfway to dead by the time we reach her, flopping around like a dead fish on the ground, with blood spewing from both her mouth and eyes.
By the time my brother pulls out his phone, her body has stopped moving altogether, her face frozen in a rictus of pain.
I stare at her dead body, trying to figure out what has happened, why this has happened.
And then, to my great horror, her spirit rises from her body. No longer my beautiful mother, but a grotesque wraith, with a face streaked in blood.