I scrunch my head at her strange non-sequitur of a question. “I am not sure. I didn’t count. One hundred, maybe two hundred people—I’m assuming most of them were like you…elves.”
“That they were,” she says, nodding. “And did you see me talk with Santa while you were there, too?”
“Was Santa the one in the red leather coat?” I ask, recalling the older man with the white beard she’d rushed off to talk to when she discovered I had never tracked down the person in the sketch she left behind.
“Yes.”
“Then, yes, I saw him talking to you.”
“I see.” Her gaze gentles a bit. As if she feels sorry for me. “The thing is. it should’ve looked like I was talking to myself. Santa’s technically a spirit—a truly awesome spirit with powers beyond all belief, but a spirit nonetheless. That means no one can see him. Not unless he reveals himself to them. And he wouldn’t have done that for somebody who barged into our annual Christmas party.”
I am, as my American engineers would say, busted. I frown down at the covers ashamed of myself for walking into her trap.
“So you can see the spirits all around us, just like Grandma,” she says beside me, her voice gentle.
My heart goes weak. I’m a master of marketing, but at this moment, I don’t know what to say.
People have accused me of being a liar. The doctors at the institution I went to informed me I had schizophrenia.
But no one has ever confronted me with the truth.
Only Kristal. And I don’t know what to say. So I grab on to the only words I didn’t understand. “Your grandmother sees ghosts?”
“She’s not my real grandmother. That’s what we call Mrs. Claus. Grandma. She married Grandpa—that’s Santa Claus, a year ago, and she sees ghosts, too. She calls them spirits, though. Only fifty elves are working in the workshop right now, but according to her, there were more like four hundred when she arrived. She’s really, really good with spirits, and we all admire the work she does with the elves we can’t see. But she confessed to us her particular talent had made her life hard. A lot of people thought she was crazy in her old life. And the spirits were so demanding that she ended up sacrificing her relationship with her daughters and spending every cent she had to get them what they needed.”
“She’s a great bedtime storyteller, and she chose good books to read to us. But I liked it best when we were in something she called bookhole. That was when she said we needed space to digest an excellent story before we moved onto another one. So she’d fill the week between books with stories from her own life. It sounds like it was seriously hard to live most of her life as a poor black woman who everyone thought was a kook. I can only imagine what it was like for you, living in Japan.”
Her empathy makes something in my chest crack.
“It was,” I admit. “It was extremely difficult.”
Suddenly the words I’ve kept bound up for so long come falling out.
I tell her everything about growing up with a household staff composed of eight people. Only to eventually figure out that we only had five employees working on the estate. The extra three were servants who had seen things they shouldn’t have—more victims of my father.
I told her how the factory home was even worse. It was filled with servants and relatives who had died in terrible ways, thanks to a long line of ruthless Nakamura patriarchs, stretching back to feudal Japan.
I also tell her about Satomi, the smart psychology student who’d become my first and last girlfriend at university. I tell her how she died. And how hard it had been after that to visit my father in his office.
Before then, there had only been the bitter servants to contend with. And they’d left me alone after I learned to ignore them. I heard them conclude that my talent had disappeared with puberty. They’d been sad to lose a conduit to the outside world but not surprised.
However, Satomi knew my secret. She screamed at me every time I entered my father’s office. Cried and begged me to tell her family what had really happened to her. That she hadn’t merely disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Kristal says nothing as I tell her my long story, just nods and holds my hand.
I note that her eyes don’t change and become wary as Satomi’s did when I tell her the truth. There’s only compassion in her gaze as she allows me to talk without interruption.
“For a long time before her death, I thought I was truly crazy,” I confess to Kristal. “It wasn’t until….”
I stop, the memory choking off the story as I begin to fall into the past.
But Kristal squeezes my hand, bringing my mind back to the present. To her. And somehow that allows me to finish the original version of the story I had never told anyone.
“My mother’s death,” I answer. “My father had my mother murdered after he discovered that the Korean caretaker was my father. She died as Satomi did, but this time right in front of me. And even though I was on anti-psychotics, I could see her ghost roaming the veranda where she died in the days that followed. Satomi’s ghost also continued to haunt my father’s office, no matter how heavily medicated I remained. That was when I accepted that these people I kept seeing were ghosts. And eventually, I figured out how to avoid them. I try to never stay in hotels where someone has died. If that is impossible, I have Declan find a room unaffected by death. The same goes for office buildings. I’ve learned to live my life in such a way that I rarely encounter ghosts.”
Kristal nods. “I don’t blame you. All the other elves love Bacchanoel—that’s what we call our twelve days off. They go out and party and have all the fun and sex. But I’m always trying to avoid crowds so that I don’t have to draw portraits of their soon-to-be-departed. That’s why I liked staying here at the inn so much, in a place where it was just us—but I’m guessing from that look on your face and the way you’ve been acting, that we’re not exactly alone here.”
She gives me a wry grin, but then her expression becomes serious. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to put up with that. Staying here must have been excruciating for you.”
Something inside me—the bound-up feeling I’ve been carrying around with me since I was a child—loosens at her words. I would never have guessed how good it would feel to be believed…to be understood. “This place is filled with ghosts. Mostly former guests who congregate downstairs.”
“Is that why the dining room’s always so cold?” Kristal asks. “Marian says that ghosts are cold. That’s why people get chills when they’re in parts of the workshop that used to be old-timey departments like Tin Soldiers and Wooden Figurines.”
I shake my head, still unable to fathom that there is another person out there like me. Then I remember. “Marian said there were over four hundred ghosts there before she arrived. But there weren’t that many at the party.”
“Oh no, like I said, Marian’s great at helping ghosts fade away.”
“Fade away…” At first, I’m confused, but then I remember. “My father was cut down by the daughter of one of his victims on the same veranda as my mother. My mother and a handful of the ghosts roaming around the factory house came to stand around him in an arc as he died. And as soon as he did, they faded away. It was as if they could pass on because their murders had been avenged. And when I oversaw the sale of my father’s city home in Tokyo, Satomi’s ghost was no longer in his office.”