The Girl from the Well

“So,” Callie says, “‘Shut up, Callie. Let me handle this’? That’s your choice for famous last words?”


“I was under a lot of pressure, all right? I’d like to see you come up with anything better at such short…” Callie is already laughing, and soon the boy cannot help but join her. But Callie’s laughter begins to waver and break, until she now begins to weep, allowing the emotions from the last several months to catch up to her. Tarquin says nothing as she turns and cries on his shoulder. The laughter fades from his expression, and he stares over her shoulder, troubled.

Alarmed and shaken by the recent turn of events, Tarquin’s father flies immediately back to Mutsu. He believes the police when they tell him of the landslide, but an inordinate amount of time is spent reprimanding his son for getting Callie into trouble. Surprisingly, the boy endures the lecture meekly enough, and anger eventually gives way to relief and tears. The three soon find their way back to Tokyo. Within a week, they return to America.

For now, the Chinsei shrine remains uninhabited, as almost everything else is in Yagen Valley during the cold months. Nothing moves within its boundaries, and if something does stir within the shrine, within the hundreds of dolls that still lie waiting to be sacrificed, or within those dolls where some things still lurk unseen, struggling futilely to undo the red threads that bind their forms, none go so far as to step out into the daylight and the world beyond. The shrine sits in repose, serene, to await the coming winter and the thawing, healing spring that comes soon after.





CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE


    Hanami


A year passes and, like all humans, they are older.

Callie meets Tarquin and his father for lunch at a small street in downtown Washington, DC, where the Halloways now live. Tarquin is now sixteen. He has grown five inches since Callie last saw him, with every expectation of adding more to his height in the coming months. His skin is darker, and he is quicker now to smile and talk than he was in the past. His natural gift with words has only improved over time, and he regales Callie that week with amusing anecdotes and humorous stories until she is laughing helplessly, pleading with him to stop. He wears a white shirt with short sleeves, and his arms are bare. The tattoos are gone.

Callie is also different. She is studying at a college in Boston and, like the Halloways, no longer lives in Applegate. She wears a long dress that reaches her knees, styles her hair shorter, and still has that scar on her little finger. She is on a scholarship, studying things that sound bigger than their purpose: a degree in education, with a minor in international and cultural studies. She does not always have time to see Tarquin, though they correspond frequently through emails and often arrange for small trips when one can visit the other. Today it is Callie’s turn, and after lunch they make their way to the Washington Monument, where the National Cherry Blossom Festival is about to begin.

“I don’t know why they don’t just call it hanami,” Tarquin’s father says. Of the three, the man is the most unchanged, though he has a faint stoop to his shoulders and a few more lines around his eyes.

Tarquin rolls his eyes. “This isn’t Japan, Dad. It’s an American thing now, so the general public will probably take ‘cherry blossom festival’ over a Japanese word they don’t understand.”

“Maybe I’m just too much of a purist.”