A Dream of Trees Read online

  A Dream of Trees

  Samantha Sotto

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Samantha Sotto

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Carisse Sotto Yambao

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Samantha Sotto

  For Ben

  Who is missed and loved while he dreams

  “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”

  -Helen Keller

  “A dream is not reality, but who's to say which is which?”

  - Alice Through the Looking Glass

  1

  A Journal Entry: Day Twenty

  Life without the delete button or SpellCheck is, quite frankly, a terrifying place. I find myself chewing on the cap of my pen, debating how to spell “receipt.” “I before E except after C,” isn’t exactly the most reliable spelling rule, no matter what Charlie Brown says. Species. Science. Sufficient. Eight. Protein. Efficient. Cheiromancies. Cleidomancies. Eigenfrequencies. Obeisancies. Oneiromancies. The rule should probably go, “I before E except when it doesn’t damn well feel like it.” Still, the rule does serve some purpose. It’s short and catchy enough for children to remember so that they can raise their hands in class and spell really important words like friend, believe and cookie with a big smile. I suppose that’s why people make up rules in general. They make you feel safe. Which is probably why I haven’t felt safe since I arrived here. There are no rules in this place. At least, none that I understand. I thought that writing down everything that’s happened here would help. It hasn’t.

  I’ve never been the type of person who liked talking to herself, not even on paper. To make it easier, I pretended that I was writing letters, but my growing stack of unsent mail only made me feel more trapped. I switched to writing in a journal. Considering my circumstances, it seemed more appropriate. It felt less like a lie. Whispering secrets in ink isn’t a task you do when you have company. Here, I am always alone. I’ve discovered that the hardest part about writing is signing my name. Bothering to spell it out after each journal entry would mean that I entertained the hope that, one day, someone might actually find my words and wonder who I was. A name is only important when there is someone around to call you by it. I doubt very much that I shall ever hear it spoken again. Perhaps, in time, I will forget what it is. But for now, there is no such danger. I know who I am, where I am from, and who I love. And when I am brave enough to be honest, I may even admit that I also know why I am trapped behind this door.

  2

  The Door

  The door never changed, but the rooms behind it did. Small rooms. Burning rooms. Rooms that weren’t rooms at all. Shiori Ametsuchi had stopped trying to guess where the door was going to lead her next. The only certainty was that whoever she found inside those rooms was going to be dead before she left. She pressed her ear to the warm cypress planks and listened, half-convinced that she did this out of habit than hope. Only silence ever echoed through the wood.

  Shiori closed her fingers around a brass doorknob that had tarnished to black. There was no shape she knew better. She had turned it countless times and each time, it grew slick from her icy sweat. She wiped her palms over her blue gardening apron. Like the door, the apron and the ripped linen dress she wore beneath it, were a constant. She was always dressed for a day of puttering around a garden, pruning branches and snipping off dead leaves. Shiori did not mind that her clothes never changed. They kept her ready for good days when the door allowed her to spend time with her trees. On bad ones, her clothes didn’t matter. There was no appropriate attire for watching people die.

  Shiori drew a breath deep into her lungs and held it until her chest burned. Her eyes watered. In this place where a door dictated her destination and days, She treasured the handful of things she could control. A few even served a purpose. Pain, however fleeting, was a respite from being lost. Shiori closed her eyes and counted backward, savoring the seconds the door and its rooms retreated into the back of her mind. Sixty-three. Sixty-two. Sixty-one. Sixty. Counting anchored her. When nothing else was certain, there was a numbing comfort in always knowing what number came next. Fifty-nine. Shiori exhaled a wish.

  Not a child.

  Not again.

  Please.

  Shiori pulled the door open and stepped through. A desert and the sea greeted her from the other side.

  3

  Cake

  No one expects to die young. We are invincible and immortal until we are not. When the illusion lifts, we see death barreling towards us, toppling over, without the slightest hesitation or pause, all of our precious things. Aiden Yoshimoto Millen’s sole consolation on the occasion of his death was that there was scarcely anything in death’s path for it to knock down. He cared about little and worried about less. A single regret gnawed at the walls of his stomach. Any day after he turned sixty would have been a much better age to go. Dying at thirty-three invited too much pity.

  Aiden’s father, Robert Millen, had gotten it right: a massive heart attack in his favorite recliner at age sixty-five, clean underwear, and a really good scotch still wet on his lips. Quick. Clean. Dignified. Robert’s death was the only thing Aiden envied about the man. He had hoped to die at home like Robert had, but to do so required having one. Aiden chastised himself for complaining. His hotel room was more than comfortable, and the complimentary bathrobe, exceptionally soft. If he was checking out tomorrow, he might have been half-tempted to steal it. It cocooned him as he sat by a tall window with a view of an unremarkable street, enjoying as much comfort as a 100% Turkish cotton robe could give to a man who was going to be dead by morning. Aiden leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think of how much time he had left or how utterly meaningless his remaining hours were. It was easier than he expected.

  A hundred thoughts swam in lazy circles above him, defying gravity in spite of their weight. They moved gracefully along the pond that was the ceiling, like the koi fish that lived in the crystal canals of Gujo-Hachiman, his mother’s hometown. Aiden trailed his thoughts. While they were many, they were of only two things: Sophie and cake.

  One of his earliest memories of cake was of a chocolate cupcake he had dropped on the kitchen floor when he was five. The sticky mess of fudge icing and rainbow sprinkles over the white tile was the most tragic thing he had ever seen. In time, Aiden learned not to run while carrying cupcakes, and that sadness had a much darker range of shades than chocolate brown. But not all cakes were sad. His divorce cake was possibly the most amazing red velvet cake he had ever tasted.

 
Aiden had paired the cake with a double shot of espresso that he drank from a chipped red mug. Between sips, he rested his coffee on an old cork coaster he had inherited from the previous occupant of his freshman college dorm room. The coaster offered timeless advice in bold, italicized black print. Don’t Fuck Up the Table. Aiden had modified it almost as soon as he found it, crossing out the last two words with a Sharpie he had borrowed from Liam, his roommate. Liam had been wearing a gray hoodie, ripped jeans, and a pair of faded red Chucks when he dug the Sharpie out from his blue backpack. It was eight o’ clock in the morning when Aiden sipped his espresso and ate his red velvet cake. It had just started to rain. He remembered every detail of that day not because he was particularly sentimental. It was just what he did. He remembered things.

  The burgundy and black striped tie the weatherman wore two Thursdays ago.

  The chicken curry puff he had for lunch on a Monday last month.

  The lilac scarf the painfully thin woman standing in front of him at the supermarket checkout counter wore around her neck last year.

  When he was six, Aiden thought that being diagnosed with an eidetic memory was just a fancy way of saying that he kept a large box of pictures in his head that he could touch, smell, and taste. When he got older and remembered more things than he cared to, he realized that it was also the doctor’s kind way of saying that he was cursed. Still, it was useful when he needed a party trick or felt like distracting himself by reminiscing about cake.

  The red velvet cake balls served at the hotel’s buffet that afternoon might have been better than the cake that marked his divorce, but Aiden had been forced to skip dessert. From experience, he knew that he could not hold down anything more than two cups of black coffee before screening his films. His latest documentary, The Loneliest Hour, explored the Japanese epidemic of people dying alone in their homes and remaining undiscovered for long periods of time. The Japanese called it kodokushi. Lonely Death. It was not a topic that Aiden enjoyed discussing, despite the compulsion that had driven him to film the kodokushi apartments and the companies that specialized in cleaning them.

  There was something tragically beautiful, yet deeply repulsive about cleaning up homes that had turned into tombs. Push and Pull. The best films, in Aiden’s opinion, were the ones that held the audience captive no matter how hard they tried to look away. What Aiden didn’t count on was how tightly the world of the kodokushi would hold on to him. It had been nine months since he had stepped inside his first Lonely Death apartment, but whenever he closed his eyes, the pieces of rotting scalp that had fused to the apartment’s tatami mat flickered like an old film on the inside of his lids. A private screening for an audience of one. Aiden rubbed his eyes. The image clung to him, more stubborn than a stray eyelash or a speck of dust. He forced his lids open, blinking away hot tears. A shadow grew in his periphery.

  Arms. Legs. A body sitting on his bed. Aiden steeled his jaw, refusing to look in its direction. Dying had a way of playing tricks on the mind. He anchored his attention on an abstract painting mounted next to the flat screen television. It looked like the sea. Or the desert. He couldn’t decide.

  “It’s the ocean, I believe,” the figure on the bed spoke, her voice, crystal and sweet like a wind chime made from tiny glass beads. “But it also could be sand. What do you think?”

  Aiden squeezed his eyes shut, telling himself that she was not real. If he ignored her, she was going to go away.

  “Or it could be both,” the woman said. “You don’t need to choose. This is what I enjoy most about art. Everything else in the world demands that you make a choice. Coffee or tea? Black or a splash of cream? A peaceful death or an unimaginably painful one?”

  4

  Tea

  Shiori had stopped counting the visits she made to the dying after her hundredth one. There was no point in keeping track of something that was never going to end. But abandoning her count did not prevent the tiniest details of her visits from being carved into her skull. Though many of them were far from pleasant, a part of Shiori was grateful that she was allowed to keep them. Without these bits and pieces of other peoples’ lives, she would be empty. She had no memories of her own. She wondered what stories the young man sitting by the hotel room’s window was going to leave with her when he died.

  “Who are you?” The man’s voice, a blend of whiskey and smoke, quivered at the edges. The man was bundled in a white cotton robe, his dark hair still damp from a bath. The scent of his shampoo wafted in the air, a soothing blend of light citrus and warm spices. But if his bath had meant to relax him, it had failed. Tension hardened his temples and jaw, but did not make him any less beautiful. He had the kind of face you could get lost in if you were not careful.

  “My name is Shiori.” The syllables coated her mouth with rust. She winced, fighting the urge to retch. Saying her name out loud was always a painful reminder of how it was the only thing she knew about herself. And even those three syllables were uncertain.

  “What are you doing here?” the man said with a steadier voice.

  Learning her name, Shiori thought, had given him courage. Labeling things calmed people. It was the unknown that they feared the most. “I was invited.”

  “Listen, lady, I don’t know who ‘invited’ you here, but it wasn’t me. You need to leave. Now.”

  “May I know your name?” Shiori studied the chiseled angles of his face. He looked like a Daniel, a Kai or a Jin, but she doubted that any of her guesses were correct. In all of her visits, she had never gotten a single name right.

  “I said get out.” The man pushed himself off the chair.

  “I will.” Shiori plucked a bottle of water from the minibar and twisted it open.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Making tea.” Shiori emptied the bottle into a stainless steel electric kettle. “I can’t leave until you die. I thought that you might like to have some tea while we wait.”

  Earl Grey or Chamomile? It was one of the simplest questions Aiden had ever been asked, but he struggled to answer it. Giving Shiori an answer was to concede that she was real. Dying was difficult enough without losing his mind. The kettle gurgled over his thoughts.

  Shiori tipped the kettle into two white ceramic cups. Wisps of chamomile-scented steam twisted up from their rims. “Our time together might be more pleasant if I knew what to call you.”

  Aiden clenched his jaw, unwilling to feed his delusion that a Japanese woman who came up to his shoulders was sipping tea in his hotel room while waiting for him to die.

  “I know that this must all seem very strange to you,” she said. “It still feels strange to me too and I have done this many, many times.”