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chapter twenty two
i hope it's cold in new york
ONE WEEK LATER
It was a quiet week following Hyuga's revelations abut my father. At least, as quiet as it is in a place like S.W.O.R.D, with two gangs preoccupied in hunting down Himari Iemura and a third gang fighting off another in the bordertowns between White Rascals and Oya territories.
I hardly left Tetsu's room, which I had all but moved into. I slugged through my days in a fog, grieving all over again. Today, I held Angels and Demons in my hands, looking over the annotations Yuki had made in Japanese. Some of them were simple: English words that didn't quite translate to something in Japanese were scrawled in kanji in a way he understood, some were questions he had about the landscape in Italy, a place he had planned on taking my mom when he beat the cancer. Others were his own personal takes on the story, what he interpreted some of the lines to mean. Like usual, I had stopped about three-quarters from the end of the seven-hundred page novel, a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Hang on to the Yuki Morizono that you and your mother knew.
Ukyo's words kept coming back to me, and I had to think about Fuyumi. How for at least the first little while, he and Shu would have beaten themselves up over not noticing Fuyu was depressed. How all they would have been able to see was some fictional version of her last moments, trying to figure out how she felt. I know I was like that for a while, thinking about Yuki in that bed, knowing the end was drawing near. Sickness can kill your perception of your loved ones.
Using the cuff of my WSTR sweater, I dabbed at tears beginning to form in my eyes before making a decision. A decision to remember who Yuki was: a biker, a joker, a reader, a wannabe world traveler, for a long while he was a connoisseur of fine beer, and then he got sober and seemed to be a better person for it. He was the best father I could have asked for, even we weren't related by anything more than his and my mother's marriage certificate.
Staring down at the novel, I took a deep breath and turned the page. The next chapter wasn't annotated, and I missed the different colors of pen ink, and the familiar delicate lettering that marred the other pages. Grabbing a pen of my own form the nightstand, I smiled before continuing what my step-father had started.
Hey, dad. I wrote in kanji at the top of the page. I miss you, but I need to move on now. And that means reading to the end. I hope that wherever you are, you know how it ends as well.
Holding back tears, I began to read, smiling as I added my own annotations to the margins.
___
A few hours later, my phone rang. It was a call I didn't know how to answer. A call from my mother back in Canada. How could I tell her the truth about what Yuki had done? She had already lost the love of her life. I couldn't make her feel like she didn't even know who he was.
