Free Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach

That was when she went back to Japan with Hiroshi in her womb. She never saw or heard from his father again.
    He always felt sad thinking about it. He remembered how, when he was little, he had sometimes made up stories that his father was an important man, an adviser to the US president, or a great scientist, or very busy doing other important things for the world. But one day, he had told himself, his father would come back, put his hand on his shoulder, and say,“This is my son.” And then everything would be wonderful.
    He had an idea. Hiroshi put the photo away and scooted over to the shelves by the window, where he kept his most private possessions in a tin box on the lower shelf. Actually, it was mostly junk: The movie tickets from the robot films he had been telling Charlotte about. A white glove he had found lying on a park bench when he was a kid, as though the person who had been wearing it had gone up in a puff of smoke the moment before; Hiroshi had been so fascinated that he couldn’t help but take the glove home. A notebook with the Masters of the Universe characters He-Man and Skeletor on the cover. That had been the first thing he had ever bought with his own pocket money, though he could no longer remember why and didn’t know what he should write in it. It had been lying in the box ever since. A little, blue plastic dog. A seashell from a beach he had gone to visit with his mother he had no idea where.
    And a penknife that had belonged to his father.
    It was a thick penknife, red with a white shield with a cross in it, and opened out into eleven different tools, including a knife, corkscrew, bottle opener, and scissors. When he was little, one of the blades had suddenly snapped shut when he was playing with it and cut his finger badly. He hadn’t touched the knife since, had forgotten all about it. But it had belonged to his father, who had carried it every day for years. At least that’s what Mother had said.
    Hiroshi hesitated. All at once he wasn’t so sure he even wanted Charlotte to tell him something about his father. Not even if she was just making up stories. Maybe she would say something horrible about his father, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to hear that.
    He would have to think about it.

    The days passed, and the doll never appeared. When he finally spotted it on the windowsill, Hiroshi hesitated for a moment, then put the penknife in his pocket and ran out of the door.
    “Do you have something?” Charlotte asked straightaway, and when he nodded, she said, “Come on, then.”
    She went out into the garden with him. “I thought my mother would never leave the house again,” she remarked as they strode across the lawn. “She’s got a friend she usually goes to see, the Italian ambassador’s wife I think, but she’s not in town at the moment. At least she went to the hairdresser’s today—that will take three hours, maybe longer.”
    “Why are we going out in the garden?” Hiroshi asked.
    “It works better outside,” Charlotte said, crossing the lawn to a little copse of trees.
    In between the trees was a regular thicket; they could hardly see the house from here, and they scratched their skin on the branches, and their clothes were snagged. Charlotte seemed to know the way, though. She marched ahead until they reached a small clearing, then she sat on the ground and put out her hand. “Okay. Hand it over.”
    Hiroshi took his father’s penknife from his pocket and put it reluctantly into her outstretched hand. She closed her fingers around it, shut her eyes—and smiled.
    “That gave you a right old shock,” she said, without opening her eyes.
    “What?” asked Hiroshi.
    “When the knife snapped shut.”
    Hiroshi caught his breath, surprised. How did she know about that? He’d never told anyone, not even his mother.
    Charlotte was quiet for a while, keeping her eyes closed and the knife held tight in her hand. “Your father’s from Texas,” she said at