Mother - Chapter 4

4

Father is arranging firewood in the hearth when I enter.

I know I should sleep on it, think things through before I confront him. That’s the smart play. That’s normally always the smart play. But after weeks of ambiguous answers I finally have him caught in an irrefutable lie. While he is still my Father and I respect him, I can’t fight the wave of betrayal rising in my stomach. In my mind there’s nothing he can say that will justify this secret.

“What is this?” I say, holding the photo in front of him. My voice is pained, more hurt than angry. Conrad scuttles over and tilts his head all the way back to try and see.

“It’s a photo,” Father says. I think he’s being facetious until I catch the genuine confusion in his eyes. The room is dim, too. The rice-paper walls are tinted pink, filtering the final moments of dusk into our minka.

“It was taken a long time ago,” I say, keeping a close eye on his body language. “It has all of the farmers gathered outside our minka—

“I think I know what you’re about to say,” Father interrupts. He slumps his shoulders and lowers his gaze.

“You used to live here,” I state. Though I don’t need to. His defeated posture says it all. It’s hard to see him so feeble, but I can’t falter whilst I have the upper hand. It’s not often I have an opportunity like this.

“You and Momma used to be farmers?” Conrad says, eyes lighting up. “Wow! Isn’t that great, Hen?”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” I ask Father as Conrad eases the photo from my grasp. “Are you even really an accountant?”

“Of course I’m an accountant.”

“But you’re also a farmer?”

“It’s complicated, Henrik. I wanted to tell you—

“Tell me now. I can keep up.”

His lips press together and he glances at Conrad. He’s reluctant to come clean in front of him. Something about my expression must convince him I’m not backing down. His shoulders droop again and he indicates I should sit on the right edge of the fire pit and listen.

“You’re right,” he says, puffing out a breath of defeat. “Your Mother and I grew up here on Shinpi Farm.”

He looks up as if expecting an interruption. My silence urges him on. “When we were sixteen, things changed here on the farm, more so for your mother. Living here became impossible. We fled to the city, where I was fortunate enough to find a job and work my way up from there. For a while, things were tough. Really tough. It was a different world than the one we were used to. But eventually we earned enough money to live comfortably, and for me to make some . . . arrangements. I sent a letter to Miiko, pretending to have purchased this minka, along with enough cash to encourage her not to question the matter.”

“You always planned to come back.”

“I wanted the option to,” Father says. “Your mother had no idea. You see, she never wanted to return to Shinpi.”

“You fled,” I repeat, his words finally catching up to me.

Father tilts his head.

“You said you fled Shinpi. That means you were running from something.”

“Your mother believed we were,” Father says. “And I respected her beliefs.”

“But didn’t share them?”

He glances at Conrad again, more nervously this time. “Thirty years ago—shortly after that photo was taken, something happened, something that even today, nobody understands.”

He pauses, as if arranging the words in his mind.

“In the dead of night, all of the children left their beds, and . . .”

A thick silence hangs in the air, saying what Father can’t bring himself to.

“They never came back,” I finish for him.

Father nods.

“Somebody must have seen something.”

“Well, yes,” Father says. “That’s really where a lot of the confusion starts. That night, some of the adult farmers came running from the trees, screaming at the top of their lungs about how the children were acting strange. They said they followed them into the forest, where they saw something . . . unnatural.”

“What did they see?”

He opens his mouth, pauses, then scoffs, shaking his head. “They made up a story, Henrik,” Father says, voice taking a harder tone. “Made up a farfetched tale about the children disappearing—said it happened like magic. And they got away with it, too. Not a scrap of evidence was ever found to incriminate them or anyone else.”

Conrad looks up from the photo, expression midway between wonder and apprehension. He mouths the words ‘like magic’.

A chord has been struck with me.

My hand closes around my sleeve, milliseconds from pulling it up and revealing the symbols of light on my forearm. I can prove the farmers were right all along—they did see something unnatural that night, something that defies all understanding.

But what good will that do? It’ll scare Father and Conrad, then what? Father will scoop us up and run for the hills. Take us back to the city, where I’ll never figure out what happened. I’ll never understand the symbols, the message Mother used her last breath to burn into my skin.

My hand relaxes, falls away. Thankfully, Father is too worked up to notice.

“Mother believed their story,” I say.

“Like I said, I respected her beliefs. But I never wanted to leave my home.”

He gently looks around, face somehow tinged with sorrow and joy at the same time. “This is where I was born, Henrik. This is where I fell in love with your mother, where I feel closest to her. I had to come back.”

It’s the first time I ever see him shed a tear for Mother. It glistens as it meanders down his face. Conrad crawls over to him and presses a finger to his cheek, blocking the tear’s path.

“I only ask you boys to give Shinpi Farm a try,” Father says. “Please, will you do that?”

I don’t have to think about my answer. I’m not even started with this place yet—there’s no way I’m going anywhere. But that’s not how Father would expect me to react. I have too much going for me in the city to give up that easily.

“What about school?” I ask, feigning concern.

He offers a weak smile. “You’re three years ahead of your class. We have time.”

There’s a stagnant moment where I want to return the smile but the weight of the day is pushing down on me.

I drift over to the futon mattress, too exhausted to protest that I’m sharing with Conrad again.

Father ignites the fire pit. The chill is swept from my body, leaving behind the aches and pains I’ve collected from farming.

Before I crash, I mull over everything that happened today, flipping every word in my mind. Every expression, every movement everyone made.

Father’s story brings a rush of relief across my body. He wasn’t hiding anything from me out of spite. I don’t doubt that anymore. He’s just a man who misses his wife, a man who doesn’t want to believe the world is a darker, stranger place than it already is. I remember when I had that luxury. A part of me wishes I can go back to that time.

The other part makes me hungry for tomorrow.

A/N: This chapter has a lot of issues. It's functional for now, but it can definitely pack way more of a punch and there's a lot of missed opportunities, which my reviewers have done a great job pointing out (not just on YWS)

One thing that personally bugs me is how the father seems overly convinced that the witnesses are making up their story to cover some kind of crime. That doesn't make sense, because he knows the witnesses too well to automatically believe that, and wouldn't move his children to Shinpi Farm if he thinks for one second that potential murderers live there. Saying that, he still definitely doesn't believe the witnesses's testimony, because again, if he thought there's supernatural forces at play, he wouldn't move to Shinpi with his children. See my predicament? I think in my 2nd draft I will have him believe the witnesses saw something extremely traumatic and therefore their mind reinveted what actually happened so its easier to deal with. Still kinda flimsy logic, but it's fridge logic!