Ink and Ashes (10 page)

AFTER SCHOOL THE
next day, I sat at my bedroom desk, attempting to write an English paper, but I still couldn’t focus. I had spent the day avoiding anyone who might ask about the cheating accusation. Dad wasn’t able to schedule anything sooner, so all I could do was wait. And when that wasn’t occupying my head, I was thinking about what we’d found in the report.

I pushed away from the desk and sat on my bed, my mind swimming in a whirlwind of thoughts and questions. My parents had lied to us. Had my father been in the yakuza? How were they able to hide that from us for all these years? How did he really die?

“Hey,” Forrest said as he walked into the room. He threw his backpack on the floor and climbed onto the bed.

“Hey.” I smiled. Having him there made everything more endurable.

Forrest stayed beside me but didn’t say anything at first. He tugged at me until my head rested on his shoulder.

“After everything I’ve done to find out how he died, I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why would the manner of death be undetermined?”

“I don’t know,” Forrest said, “but Nicholas is right. No matter what the answer is, it’s not going to make you feel better.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Maybe not.”

He leaned his head against mine. “Do you think your dad faked his death?”

“No,” I said. “I was there. When he died, we wet his lips with water as he lay there in the hospital. Mom said it would help revive him in the afterlife with his ancestors. His lips were still warm. But then I saw him in the coffin, and I remember when I touched him, he was cold. Really cold.”

The funeral had lasted several days, and yet I couldn’t recall what actually happened except there was one day Mom got mad at Parker because he hit Avery with his juzo and the prayer beads broke. Right after that, I tripped and fell. The string of my juzo snapped and beads flew everywhere, so I sat down and cried because I thought Mom was going to be mad at me. But then this boy about my age came out of nowhere and gave me his juzo. I didn’t know who he was, and I’d never seen him since, but I still use those same beads.

The more I thought about what was happening, the more I wanted to throw something, anything, against the wall. Being accused of cheating seemed insignificant in comparison. Almost. I sighed. Thinking of the accusation actually made me feel worse. In some ways, discovering this information was like losing my father all over again.

“I feel like I don’t even know the man we buried,” I said. There had to be a way to know for sure that he was yakuza.

“Is there anything you have of his?” Forrest asked. “A journal or notebook?”

I closed my eyes and tried to focus my scattered thoughts. Even though I had the notebook, I had memorized that thing before any of this had ever happened. There was nothing in there that ever made me suspect this.

“I have an idea,” I said, harnessing the surge of energy storming inside of me. I rose to my feet.

“Does this idea include doing anything illegal? Will my life be at risk? And-slash-or is there a possibility you might get hurt?”

“No, no, and maybe,” I said, pacing the room. “All we’re going to do is go up in the attic. I was thinking about the funeral, and there was this boy. I’d never seen him before, and he spoke to me in Japanese. But when he realized I didn’t understand what he was saying, he switched to English. He said he would bring me a nicer set of prayer beads from Japan the next time he visited.”

I sat back down at the foot of the bed. “If he was visiting from Japan, his family must have been connected to my father’s life in Tokyo somehow, and my father must have other friends still there. Anyway, Mom has a trunk full of old pictures and all kinds of things that my father kept. I remember she wrote on some of the pictures and made notes because she wanted to put all of it in a scrapbook someday.” I exhaled. “It’s a long shot, but maybe we could go through his stuff, collect any names we find, and search online to see if we come up with anything.”

He lugged himself off the bed and sighed. “I guess you want me to help pull down the ladder?”

“Thanks.”

Forrest got a cane out of the linen closet in the hallway and used it to push up the small square door in the ceiling. He hooked the drop-down ladder with the cane and pulled it down.

I followed him up the ladder and turned on the light. The trunk was in the far corner, but the path was blocked by boxes and unused furniture. Forrest moved an old chair, and I pushed boxes aside until we had enough room to move the trunk.

Forrest brushed off a thick layer of dust coating the box’s brocade covering. The particles caught in my throat and made me cough.

“We’re looking for names, right?” Forrest asked as we each grabbed a brass handle and carried it to the middle of the floor. We’d have more room to sit there.

“Names and anything that gives us clues about my father’s life before he came to America.” I flipped open the brass latch on the front and sat down.

Forrest sat next to me on the dusty bare wood floor and removed piles of photos. Some of the pictures had come from “Get to Know You” posters made in elementary school, but most of them were being “saved” until Mom got around to putting them in a scrapbook because she didn’t buy into the idea of digital ones. She thought they were too easy to lose or forget.

Forrest thumbed through a few and then flung a picture at my lap like a Frisbee. “The year all of our families started the traditional Easter egg hunts at my house,” he said. “Your front teeth are missing.”

I laughed. Not much had changed since then. I still wore T-shirts and soccer shorts. Nicholas and Parker each had an arm around the other and had their Easter baskets raised high with their other hands.

“Hard to believe Nicholas was ever a scrawny kid,” I said, showing him another picture. “Flag football.
Your
front teeth are missing.”

He took it from me. “Forgot my mouth guard that day.”

“Halloween.” I held up another picture. “I don’t even know what our costumes are, but I think we’re wearing trash bags.”

“Parker and Avery at a karate tournament,” he said. “They were always better than I was.”

My brothers posed with trophies and bowl haircuts. At the bottom of the trunk, I found a large envelope with old pictures of my father.

“This is a picture of their wedding day,” I said, holding it by the corner.

Forrest leaned in. “Your mom’s hair is so . . . poofy.”

“She says it was the style, but we still make fun of her.”

Mom’s hair was long back then, and she had curled the ends. Her wedding dress had puffy sleeves and a long train. The veil, attached to a tiara, went halfway down her back. I didn’t care for the dress, but she could make anything look beautiful.

I glanced at another picture of the two of them.

“Look at the way your mom is staring at him.” Forrest leaned in closer, letting his arm linger against mine. “Her eyes seem to say that even if he were a star scattered among the trillions, she would only see him.” He sighed softly. “I want someone to look at me that way.”

Forrest had always been a romantic at heart, but his eyes narrowed and fixed on me with a fire I’d never seen before. His lips fell apart slightly, and he tilted his head to the side. The warmth of his skin against mine made my heart pound the way it did when I was watching a scary movie—that point when I was about to find out what monster hid behind the door, and part of me wanted to know what was there. And the other part of me was too scared to know the answer.

Forrest’s lips moved as if they might say something, but he pressed them together.

“Forrest?” I hesitated. “Did you break up with Olivia because she didn’t look at you that way?”

“I don’t know. We started spending so much time together, and the more time I spent with her, the more I missed spending time with you and the guys.” He leaned back and rested his weight on his hands. “I know the idea of someone looking at me like I’m the only person in the room may never happen. But at the very least, I want to be with someone who makes me
want
to look at her that way.”

“Were you ever in love with her?” I raised a knee and hugged it to my chest.

“No,” he said.

How did anyone ever know if they were really in love? I let go of my knee and grabbed a stack of pictures and began to flip through them, barely paying attention. “I haven’t found anything yet.”

Forrest leaned forward and sorted through some papers and pictures. “All of these newspaper articles are in Japanese. We can try to translate them like the letter, but I think I’d rather eat a spider.” He shivered. “Ugh. Spiders.”

“That can be our last resort.”

My pile had pamphlets that looked like they might be playbills, as well as tickets. I opened one of the playbills and found a piece of paper that had been torn from a larger piece. Someone had written two words in Japanese on one line and two words on a different line. I placed it in a new pile of things to hang on to.

Forrest handed me a picture. “This one has both of your dads and your mom and grandpa.” Mom and my father were sandwiched between my dad and grandpa.

I smiled at the four of them. The next pictures were wedding pictures, and then a handful of pictures from my father’s life in Japan. One was a picture of a woman in her twenties.

On the back of the picture, my mom had written E
MIKO
K
AWAKAMI
. I recognized the name, but not the face. She died long before I was born. I showed Forrest. “This has to be my grandmother.”

Forrest leaned in. “You look like her.” He took the photo from me and studied it.

“This is the first picture I’ve ever seen of her.” I lifted the necklace I wore every day. “My father left this for me. It’s the only belonging we even have of hers.”

Forrest reached over and took the necklace from my palm, the back of his hand resting on my chest as he inspected the bead. “She was very pretty.” He let the chain drop to my chest and looked at her photo again.

I snatched the next picture in my pile. My father and a friend standing on a dock by a lake. They smiled with arms in the air as if they were about to jump in the water. On the back of the photo, in my mother’s handwriting, was the name Takeshi Sekiguchi.

Another featured a close-up of my father dressed in a suit, posing with a middle-aged man I didn’t recognize.

“Is he with your grandfather?” Forrest asked.

“It can’t be. His father abandoned him when he was little.”

The next was a picture with the same man sitting across from him in a tea ceremony. “This ritual means he was formalizing some kind of new relationship with this man,” I said.

Forrest took the last two pictures from me and pointed to the background of the first photo. “See that picture on the wall? I know it’s not exactly the same, but it kind of looks like the family crest you guys have hanging above the couch in your living room.” He pointed to the other picture. “And that same crest is on both of their lapel pins.”

“It looks like a flower,” I said. “Let’s take these and see what we can find out.”

We gathered the rest of the pictures and put them back in the trunk. Though we hadn’t found much, it was enough to give us something to go on.

“LET’S SEE IF
something comes up in an image search,” Forrest said when we got to my room.

I uploaded the image of the crest, but the only matches were to company logos or clubs and none of them were even Japanese.

“There has to be an online library of Japanese crests,” I said.

Finding crests was easy, but matching the picture we had was like trying to pair identical snowflakes. Many were similar with only minor differences in the way the flowers were positioned or the size of the geometrical shapes.

When we translated the letter, it had been tedious, but there was a definite path. This was throwing a dart at thousands and thousands of crests in the dark.

“I have an idea,” Forrest said. He left, and I heard some mumbling in Parker’s bedroom.

When Forrest returned, he had Parker’s laptop tucked under his arm. “I’ll search for the crests, and you can work on the other stuff.” He set the computer on the desk next to mine and sat down.

Between the friend’s name and the paper with the four Japanese words, the paper was a lot more intriguing. I used the same software to translate the first two words.

Hibiki Okada

I translated the next two words.

Hanae Sasaki

“I have two names,” I said. “How’s your search going?”

Forrest grumbled. “Not well. They all look so similar. I might have missed it already.”

I ran a search on the first name. Most of the results were in Japanese, so I picked the first link in English, which led me to an article in a science journal. I skimmed the article, but there was nothing helpful.

The next link took me to the
Japan Times
. The article from almost thirty years ago was about a gunman, Hibiki Okada, who hijacked a ferry and killed the captain before fatally shooting himself. Police said the captain had accumulated over $200,000 in debt.

I summarized the article for Forrest. “Let’s say the money owed was to a yakuza loan shark, and Hibiki Okada was collecting the debt. What reason would Hibiki have to kill himself? I don’t know why my father wrote down Hibiki’s name.”

“I think it smells fishy, but there’s not really definitive proof of anything,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” I searched for the second name.

Some of the links were for Facebook posts that didn’t seem relevant. I bypassed anything in Japanese and clicked on an article from
Today’s Japan
published about the same time as the article about Okada. Hanae Sasaki was a twenty-three-year-old woman who jumped to her death from the twentieth floor of a high-rise building. Evidence from the crime scene suggested someone else had been there.

I showed Forrest the article. “Police found her crying baby on the floor wrapped in a towel. They think she had just finished giving him a bath.” The thought made me shudder. “She was taking care of that baby. I can’t imagine she would suddenly jump off the balcony. Someone from the yakuza must have pushed her.”

“I think it’s like the other article,” he said. “There’s stuff that sounds questionable, but nothing tying any of this to your father or the yakuza.”

A search for the two names together didn’t result in anything relevant. “I know what my father’s handwriting looks like in English, but I don’t know if I could recognize something he had written in Japanese with any confidence. Maybe he wasn’t the one who wrote this. I think it’s a dead end.” I slumped against the back of the chair. “Okay, one more name to go.”

I searched for my father’s friend. Many people named Takeshi Sekiguchi lived in Tokyo, so I began to research them one by one.

“Try doing a search with the name and the word yakuza,” Forrest said.

Several links paired Takeshi’s name with the name Osamu Sekiguchi. The first link led me to an article almost two decades old in the
Japan Times
about racketeering. The Japanese government had been investigating an investment-banking corporation owned by Takeshi Sekiguchi, son of Osamu.

The article showed a picture of each of them when I scrolled down farther. Forrest gasped. The younger versions of these men were in our pictures. Takeshi was the friend on the dock, and Osamu was the man in the tea ceremony picture.

I refined my search to look for information on Osamu Sekiguchi.

“This article says Osamu Sekiguchi has been charged for racketeering before,” I said, “but he has always managed to evade the law.”

“That’s definitely suspicious,” Forrest said.

I clicked the next link and swallowed hard. “Osamu Sekiguchi is the oyabun of the Kobayashi-kai clan in Tokyo. He’s the godfather, and this is their crest. It matches the one in our pictures.”

Forrest spoke in a quiet voice. “If your father was formalizing a relationship with the godfather, and they’re both wearing the crest on their lapel pins . . .”

“And you add these pictures to the missing finger and the tattoos . . .” I rubbed my temples. “I think we have definite proof now.” I pushed away from my desk. Every inch of me felt too heavy for my muscles to carry, but I managed to stand and move to the edge of my bed where I threw myself backward and let my head hit the mattress. Forrest planted himself next to me and did the same. We lay in silence, both of us staring at the ceiling, our legs dangling off the bed.

“At least you know now,” Forrest said.

“I know this is going to sound stupid, but . . .” I reached above me, grabbed a pillow and squeezed it against my chest. “When I said I wanted to find out the truth . . . I think I was looking for a different truth.”

“You were really hoping to find proof he
wasn’t
in the yakuza.”

“Yeah.”

The room felt small, the walls seeming to close in around me. I needed fresh air. I sat up and clutched the bead of my necklace. My eyes wandered around the room.

Forrest sat up too. “Don’t run.”

“What?”

“When something makes you uncomfortable, you run,” he said. “Sometimes you actually get in your car and leave, and other times you change the subject or you shut everyone out.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I need space. That’s different.”

“Sometimes your mind spins when you don’t have answers, and it drives you like no one else I’ve ever seen. But when you’re unsure, or scared, or you don’t know what to do, you run.”

I looked down. My hands were clenched into fists. His words anchored steadfast in my chest. Forrest was right. I just didn’t want him to be.

“You don’t have to run. It’s okay if you don’t know what to do all the time. No one does.” He put his hand on top of mine on the bed. “Come with me and join everyone else downstairs.”

I hated feeling like I had been stripped down with nothing to hide behind. “I think I might stay in my room tonight.”

His hand flew off mine when I threw my hands in the air. “I’m not shutting you out. I just need space.”

Forrest narrowed his eyes, grabbed a pillow off my bed, and threw it on the floor. “Fine. I’ll stay with you, then.”

“That’s not space.”

“It’s at least ten feet of space.” He pointed to the distance between the bed and the closet.

“Forrest, my parents are home. You know how much they love you, but I don’t know what they’re going to think if all the other guys are sleeping downstairs, and they find you in my room. Maybe they won’t mind, but—”

“I’ll be on the floor,” he said.

“I know, but—”

“Come join us then.” He brushed my cheek with the back of his hand, leaving a trail of heat and longing. He’d never done that before. I nearly leaned in to it, but caught myself. What was he thinking right now?

My head skipped around with so many questions I thought it might burst if I didn’t let some of them go. “Forrest?”

“Yeah?” He turned and looked at me—really looked at me, as if he could see something I couldn’t.

I tried to hold his stare, hold his blue eyes that reminded me of the ocean, but I had to glance down. I swallowed my questions and let them settle somewhere deep inside me. If I had learned anything, it was that I was happier when I didn’t know the truth—before I knew my parents had been lying to me and before I knew my father had been a mobster. Once I knew the answers, I couldn’t go back.

I jumped off the bed. “I need to put the ladder away.” Because I wasn’t as tall as Forrest, I took a folding chair and the cane from the linen closet so I could push the ladder all the way up and slide the attic door back into place.

Forrest walked over and put his hands on the back of the chair. “I could have done that.”

“I know,” I said, returning the chair and cane to the linen closet.

Forrest went downstairs to join the rest of the guys. To prove I wasn’t running, I gathered a pillow and blanket from my room and brought them to the family room.

They had already started a movie. No one paid much attention to the TV. Avery and Fed were sprawled on the floor. Parker and Forrest were on one couch, and Nicholas was on the other.

“So we know for sure?” Parker asked.

I nodded. Forrest had probably shared what we’d found.

Parker leaned back against the cushions. “What now? Do we try to figure out if there’s anything else they’re hiding?”

“Mom has to know our father was a murderer,” Avery said.

“We know he was in the yakuza,” I said, “but we don’t necessarily know he killed people.”

“Five rings,” Fed mumbled.

I sat next to Nicholas on one of the couches and picked at fuzz balls on the arm. “Mom has to know he was in the yakuza. We have proof now, so we should talk to her. Ask her about everything.” But the thought still tore my insides to pieces. How much more had they kept from us?

“We tried that, and it didn’t go so well, remember?” Avery sat up and folded the bill of his hat with both hands.

“But now we have proof,” I said.

“Mom didn’t even know about the letter,” Avery said. “What makes you think it’s not our dads who were hiding something?”

Parker leaned on the side of the couch, supporting his head with his hand. “We know that Dad—
George
,” he clarified, “knew our father well, which means he would have known our father was a bad man at some point.”

The conversation I’d overheard through the vents came to mind, and I tried to tell everyone the parts I could remember. “If Mom was worried we might not be safe, there’s something else going on.”

“I agree,” Nicholas said, resting his arm along the back of the couch. “No one wants to find out their father was in the mob, but if he’s dead, why would it matter if you know? My father’s a total loser. You deal with it and get over it, so it seems like there has to be something else.”

I understood what Nicholas was trying to say, but I didn’t know if he’d ever gotten over the way their father had left them. Their mom kept everything together so well, sometimes I forgot that ever-present wound they carried.

Fed positioned himself between me and Nicholas on the floor, using the couch as a backrest. “I’ve been thinking, and if he really was a member of the yakuza, then at what point did he become a judge, you now? Either he left before he became a judge, or he was crooked. Doesn’t the mob always have judges in their pockets? ’Cause that would be a good reason for your parents to keep all this from you.” He looked around. “Or is stuff like that only in the movies?”

My muscles tensed, growing more and more restless. One glance at Forrest made my resolve to stay put stronger.

Forrest leaned forward, placing his elbows on his legs. “What if your parents are the ones who have something to hide? Maybe Avery was onto something when he asked your mom if she’d had an affair. She seemed a little defensive, don’t you think?”

Parker jumped to the edge of the couch. “What if George had our father killed, so he could marry our mom?” His eyes were wide, his face had lost color, and the front of his pudgy nose twitched.

The idea was so preposterous that I couldn’t even react. Sure, the thought might have flashed through my mind, but there was no way it could be true. Avery took off his hat and threw it at Parker. “Are you saying Dad’s a killer too?” His voice had a sharp, condescending tone.

Parker sat straighter. His eyes grew large and his brows slanted up. “What if he is?” He massaged both of his thighs.

Nicholas rose to his feet and folded his arms. “You’re being ridiculous, Parker. Your dad would never do that. He’s a good man.”

I tugged on Nicholas’s shorts and urged him to sit down. “And we don’t know for sure our father is a killer.”

Parker raised his hands, plaintive. “What if he’s in the yakuza too? Haven’t you ever wondered where he goes all the time on his business trips?”

He was right that Dad didn’t talk about work much. And I had to admit a small worry existed. But I was positive our stepdad had all ten fingers. Technically that didn’t rule him out as a killer, but I couldn’t believe it. Plus, I remembered something important. “Dad takes us swimming every summer, you idiot.” We’d been boating at Lake Powell often enough.

“So?” Parker asked. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“So he doesn’t have any tattoos.” Avery glared at Parker as if wondering how it was humanly possible Parker was the older brother. “How can you hide those kinds of tattoos when the only thing you’re wearing is swim trunks?”