Get Ready
HAYATO
Two summers after my mother’s death, my father ordered me to start dating the woman he wished me to wed.
Koyamo held a long list of accomplishments. She’d gone to the finest schools, won awards for horseback riding, and had a glamorous job as an editor for a high fashion magazine. Her beauty was subtle. Just enough to appreciate, but not so overpowering that other men felt compelled to gaze. She spoke softly but succinctly, and her skin was milky white as if she had never walked in the sun. She was everything the CEO of a major Japanese corporation would want for his son. And after just a few months of dating, I began to warm to the idea of marrying her.
Or perhaps I thought that if I played the part of the potential groom well enough, I would no longer be the man who saw ghosts.
I did not know back then that my father was the person responsible for my mother’s death. Or perhaps I refused to know. I had not been able to bring myself to look upon her ghost, much less listen any further to her rants against falling in love.
Guilt and duty performed a strange dance inside of me back then. I was ashamed of my secret ability to see ghosts and still trying to reconcile Satomi’s death at my father’s brutal hand. Dating Koyamo eased those conflicted feelings as she proved to be a perfect match.
She talked little of herself and only asked me enough questions as to appear polite. She was most interested in surface things, like who would attend certain galas and who might win the current season of Ninja Warrior. Yet, she never gossiped, and she refused to watch television dramas or reality shows.
“I don’t like seeing people so upset,” she confessed on our first date, her cheeks pink with pretty embarrassment.
She was curiously incurious about me. I suspect that her father had fully briefed her on my background as mine had hers, and she felt no need to dig any further. I liked that.
She was a tranquil pond disguised as a woman. And I knew if we were to marry, there would be no protests about my refusal to live anywhere that wasn’t a brand-new construction. She wouldn’t demand anything of me or go to my father with concerns of strange behavior. I felt no desire toward her whatsoever, but I sensed that she wouldn’t mind if I took a mistress to satisfy my needs beyond the sex required to produce heirs.
So by the time my father called us to the Nakamura estate in Tokyo to have lunch with him — code for “assure him we were on the marriage track,” I had already decided that I would wed her as my father wished.
And, as Koyamo and I sat together in the foyer, awaiting my father’s arrival, it occurred to me to quietly propose.
“As you know, it would please both our fathers if we joined in marriage,” I said to Koyamo.
Her eyes lit up at my words. But her expression remained smooth and placid as she answered, “Yes, an engagement would please them very much.”
Neither of us had mentioned finding the prospect of an engagement pleasing for reasons that had anything to do with ourselves, but I pushed on anyway. I had learned my lesson about mixing emotion and relationships after my season in the sanitorium. A loveless marriage seemed the best choice for someone in my position.
“Perhaps, then we should…” I cut off, a cold shiver running up my back.
For Satomi had blinked into the parlor without warning.
Her skin was even paler than Koyamo’s, and the blood she spat up as she choked on my father’s poison stained her mouth.
“Is this her? Is this the girl my murderer wishes for his son to marry?” Satomi demanded, her voice crackling with malice. Her eyes were as crazed as one of the spurned women in the dramas Koyamo refused to watch.
“Hayato? Hayato? Are you okay?”
Years later, Kristal’s voice pulls me into the present.
I blink a few times, forcing the memory back into the past where it belongs.
“Sorry,” I say, turning to face her. We’re in the back seat of a Suburban headed to my brother’s house. “Could you repeat the question?”
Kristal eyes me, her gaze full of worry. “What were you thinking about? You seemed really far away.”
Kristal was the opposite of Koyamo. She never let me hide. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
I cast about for a reasonable excuse and found one in the song playing on the car’s radio.
“This song, ‘Get Ready’…it is by The Temptations, yes? But the person singing doesn’t sound like a member of that group.”
To my relief, the probing look drops away from Kristal’s face. “No, it’s not. This is a cover from this white Motown funk band called Rare Earth. Jae–Hyun loves them — speaking of him, here…”
I don’t notice the sketchbook in her lap until she pulls off the top page and hands it to me. “This morning’s drawing.”
I don’t answer. I scowl at the sketch, resentment against this Jae–Hyun coursing through me. He and her job at the workshop are the only obstacles to continuing my relationship with Kristal in Japan.
“Whoa! Is this where your brother lives?” Kristal’s eyes saucer as the car swings right into the carport of my brother’s estate overlooking Lake Washington. “This place is even bigger than the workshop! I can’t believe we’re actually going to spend the night here!”
“Neither can I,” I grumble as we step out of the car. “But the pilot will have to file a new plan to get us to Japan. Yet again.”
Kristal’s expression suddenly goes from impressed to doubtful. And I brace myself to fend off another argument about why we should go to San Francisco to meet up with her Jae-Hyun instead.
But then she says, “I hope no one in your family has a soon-to-be-departed loved one.”
I’m nervous about that prospect too. If the man Kristal keeps sketching is who I think he is…
“Is it too late to go to a hotel?” Kristal asks as we walk up to the stone steps to the estate’s double front doors. “I don’t want to embarrass you.”
Her voice shakes, and just like that, my irritation fades. Suddenly, I’m more concerned with Kristal’s feelings than my own.
An idea occurs to me. “Yes, I would prefer a hotel, but there is a guard here—a spirit as you call him. He was someone who served my brother, Norio, well until his untimely death. I’ve only visited Norio’s home once, but I noticed him wandering the grounds. Back then, I cut my visit short to avoid him, but now…”
Kristal’s eyes light up. Much like Koyamo’s did at the prospect of marriage but for a much more altruistic reason. Eagerness to assist rings in her voice as she asks me, “You want to help him move on to the next realm?”
“Will you help me?” I ask.
“Of course!” she answers, her tone now bright and happy. “Poor soul. I hope we can make this plan of yours work.”
I glance over at her, an affection like nothing I’ve ever felt before rippling through me. Just as I suspected, the prospect of helping someone was enough to banish any nervous feelings about meeting my brother and his family.
“Me too,” I agree. However, I am not talking about the plan I only came up with to distract her.
I raise my arm to knock. But before my knuckles can make contact with the wood, the door swings open, revealing a small, plump black woman who is not my brother Norio’s wife.