The Gatekeeper's Son (17 page)

CHAPTER

15

I went to bed thinking of Shoko, so it’s not surprising I dreamed of her. It was the same as the last dream: the same long staircase leading up to the same shrine, the same house surrounded by a meadow, the same girl standing in the doorway—but this time she’s wearing a uniform. I wave to her and she waves back.

Grandpa shows up and gives me the same speech: “It’s time for you to follow your destiny.”

And again, his shoulders slouch and his face grows haggard. His eyes lose their shine. Then he begins to fade away until he’s gone. In his place, the elderly man appears—it’s definitely the old man from the restaurant bathroom. His forked tongue flicks out at me. I tense up.

Ms. Lin’s up next.

But when I turn around, there’s no Ms. Lin waiting for me. It’s Okaasan with her katana, its handle revealing accents of gold beneath the well-worn black cord. Her energy overwhelms me. I drop to my knees and touch my forehead to the wooden boards at her feet. She speaks softly but sternly to me in Japanese, in a voice that sounds far away.

“Junya, you must get up.” She glares down at me. Then, with a look of disgust, she raises her katana. Sunlight glints off polished steel as it swings up over her head. She steps forward and I squeeze my eyes shut as the blade begins its descent.

I struggled to free my mind but couldn’t. I felt the air move beside me, heard the rustle of fabric, and the darkness began to recede. When a hand touched my shoulder, my eyes opened.

Okaasan was leaning over me!

“Yaaa!” I yelled and rolled away from her, knowing I’d die if I landed at the bottom of the shrine, but I hit the ground a second later.

I looked around. There was no wooden shrine towering above me, just the familiar wood ceiling of my bedroom.

Okaasan rushed around the bed and dropped to the floor beside me. I was on my back, one foot still up on the bed, my pajama pants falling down, cartoon boxers exposed. I looked up at her, eyes wide. I panted for air, my heart about to explode out of my chest.

“You had a nightmare.” She laughed as she patted my arm. “Relax, Junya, breathe. You’re safe.”

I nodded but still couldn’t speak. Her words and the swish of her katana stayed with me.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “I came to tell you it’s time to get up.”

Still I lay there and stared. It was just a dream, but my intuition was screaming at me, insisting it was real.

Her smile faded and a worried furrow appeared between her brown eyes. “What is it, Junya?” She reached out to touch my face, but I swatted her hand away. She pulled back, surprised. “What’s gotten into you?”

I lay there panting, “You tried to … tried to …”

“To do what?”

“You wanted to kill me!” I pushed myself up and glared at her. “I saw it in your eyes!”

Her hand moved to cover her mouth. “You were dreaming, Junya.”

“Why do we have to live like this?” I was yelling now. “The stream, the training—I’m so tired of all this crap!” I punctuated my rant with a fist slammed against the floor.

Her expression changed, first to shock, then to anger. She pulled herself up straighter.

I knew I’d gone too far. “I’m sorry, Okaasan,” I said. “I dreamed you were raising your katana to cut me down. Then
you
came in here and woke me up.” I spoke to her in Japanese, hoping to make up for my outburst. But it was halfhearted and we both knew it.

“Once spoken, words can’t be taken back,” she said. “I’m sorry I scared you, but I didn’t create your dream.” She stared down at me as she had on the staircase. “And if you don’t like your life here, then leave!”

We stared at each other, both of us angry.

After a while her face broke into a crooked little smile. “I don’t live like this to punish you. This is how my mother raised me and her mother raised her. I didn’t know how to live here or what to do with a son. Both were beyond my experience. And I had no one to help me.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry Okaasan.” I meant it that time.

She rolled off her knees and stood up again. “Get ready for school,” she said as she brushed her hair back. “You don’t want to be late.”

I threw on a T�shirt and pulled a worn sweater over it, one of my favorites. It was my dad’s, but he’d never asked for it back, so it had become a regular part of my wardrobe.

I heard pots and dishes banging in the kitchen when I left my room, which was a good sign. If Okaasan were mad at me, the only breakfast I’d get was whatever I made myself. Okaasan was easy to understand that way: either she was mad or she wasn’t.

Tama lay in the hallway in her favorite place, near the windows. I stopped to rub her soft coat. She closed her eyes and purred and then raised her chin to let me scratch there.

“What do you think of all this?” I asked her.

She opened her eyes and let out a loud meow.

Okaasan was wearing an apron now, royal blue with white splotches—a traditional wrinkly tie-dye style. On the stove, an egg bubbled in the fry pan, sunny side up, and a bowl of steaming rice sat nearby. It looked like I was having a Japanese breakfast, although she wouldn’t call it that. When I was younger, I thought everyone ate rice three times a day.

It wasn’t until I’d started junior high school that I got the nerve to ask Okaasan to stop packing anything weird in my lunch: no rice balls wrapped in seaweed, no sandwiches with ketchup smiley faces. There’s nothing more humiliating than opening your
An-pan-man
cartoon lunch container to find a carrot-stick man with a boiled egg for a head and a mayonnaise happy face looking up at you. Even your best friends laugh you out of the room. For some reason, remembering that made me sad now.

I sat at the table and watched her work. Her hands moved fast, her knife slicing through the skin of an orange. Dad kept them razor sharp, which was the only job he had in the kitchen. Okaasan stood on her toes to grab a cup from the lowest cupboard. Her shiny hair hung down her back in a single loose ponytail. I hadn’t noticed earlier, but she was wearing dress pants and a nice blouse, which meant lunch and shopping downtown were in her plans for the day.

I was still feeling shaky. As I looked at her, I realized some of that anger, however irrational, still remained.

She set my breakfast and her cup of tea on the table and sat across from me. I took a bite with my chopsticks, chewed slowly, and enjoyed the taste of the soy sauce mixed with the runny yolk.

“Delicious,” I told her. We both knew I was sucking up.

“You’re welcome,” she said as she filled her cup from a small pot. She watched me eat for a while before she set her cup down. “How was the game last night?”

“The Giants won and the food in Grandpa’s private suite was amazing. Mack gorged like a pig.”

She smiled, but it didn’t last. “Tell me about your dream.”

I continued to chew, stalling. I didn’t know where to begin or how much to say.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said after I swallowed. “I was a total jerk.”

She nodded and a faint smile appeared on her lips.

“You know the Izumo-taisha Shrine, in Japan?” I said.

“Of course. I often went there as a young girl.”

“That’s what I was dreaming about.” I described it, but when I mentioned the massive red posts, she got an odd look on her face.

“You saw three trees tied together and painted red?”

“Yeah” I said. “Everything seemed so real. I guess that’s why I freaked out when you woke me up. Sorry.”

She placed her cup back on the table with a loud thud. “The grand shrine at Izumo doesn’t have a long staircase, and it’s certainly not high off the ground. I took you there enough times, you should remember that.”

“Wasn’t I, like, five or something?”

She considered that and shook her head. “This is impossible.”

“It was just a dream, Mom.”

She studied my face for a moment and then stared down at her teacup. I could tell she was upset because her hands shook as she rubbed the ring on her right hand.

Something clicked.

“Where did you get that ring?”

She glanced down at her finger and moved her left hand to cover it. As she did, she frowned, revealing small lines around her mouth that I hadn’t noticed before. “I’ve worn this for years.”

“Yeah, but where did you get it?”

“My mother gave me this when I graduated. The silver is from the Iwami-Ginzan mines, near Mount Sennoyama.”

“Which mother?”

“My birth mother.” She looked at the ring, and then our eyes met. “Only the women in my family clan wear this. It meant something to me once—an honor of the highest order. Now it’s just a reminder of another life.”

“Shoko has a ring like that.”

Okaasan sucked in a quick breath. “That’s impossible.”

I studied her face. “I told you before—you and Shoko are a lot alike.”

“So we Japanese girls are all the same?” She stood and took her cup to the sink, as if she were running from me. She began to wash the dishes, banging the pots in the sink.

“Remember I told you I was sensing things?” She didn’t answer. “Well, it’s more than that now. I can feel energy, even feel people’s emotions, I can
project
energy, and I get a tingling in the back of my neck when there’s some kind of threat nearby.”

Her hands gripped the edge of the sink.

“Are you OK?”

“No, I’m not.” She turned to look at me. “Even if you take after me … this isn’t possible. You’re a boy.”

“Shoko said that, too!” I stood up and faced her. “That exact same thing.”

She hesitated. “I think you should stay away from that girl.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s changing you.”

CHAPTER

16

As I trudged up the Arbutus Hill, I played the morning’s events over in my head. The more I thought about it, the more I realized Okaasan was hiding something from me. She and Shoko definitely had the same ring, and the similarities between them were too obvious to ignore.

I stopped and looked back toward my house. I knew Shoko was trouble, but she was also part of some larger mystery involving my family. I needed to see her again, but I didn’t even know how to contact her.