I understood everything now. Even if Sarah wanted to come to see Mari and me, she couldn't—she couldn't talk to us. But having come to Japan, she'd been unable to refrain from calling. I understood why. I understood the anguish Sarah and that young man had struggled through. And so, after nodding firmly to show that I understood, I turned away. I'm sure the four of them walked out of the hotel not long after, a happy American family. Only Sarah must have kept turning back, looking my way again and again.
I turned around after a while to make sure they were no longer there, and then all the strength slipped from my body and I sank back down into one of the couches. My head was swirling, and my palms were still hot with the touch of that boy's tiny hands. It felt like something was starting to change there, like some transformation was blossoming out from my hands.
The lobby seemed utterly empty now that they were gone . . . it seemed as if nothing at all was left. The sounds of cups clinking together and the clump of people's steps just kept repeating, streaming on and on. That was all.
I arrived back home feeling completely worn out.
The interior of the house was dark and wrapped in silence when I opened the door—evidently my mother was out. I walked straight to the bathroom and slowly washed my face, gazing at the mirror, swearing to it that as long as I lived I would never say a word to anyone about what I'd just seen. And then beyond the edges of my reflection, those features so similar to my brother's—a recollection of those brown eyes. I've seen him, there's nothing I can do about it now. And we didn't just happen to run into each other, either. I went there intentionally, specifically for that reason. These thoughts made me feel even more exhausted than I had before.
I decided to change my clothes. On my way to my room, I passed the living room door.
And then I heard her voice.
“Shibami?”
It was quite a surprise. I opened the door and found that, for some reason unknown to me, Mari was lying on our couch, her eyes half open, looking sleepy, just as if she'd been living there all along.
I really had no idea what was going on anymore.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“You said last night that I ought to come visit during the day, didn't you? So I came, but then . . . there was nobody around, you know, so . . . oh-h-a-a-h!” Mari yawned.
“Why didn't you use the bed in the guest room? Didn't you have trouble falling asleep on the couch?” I asked. She'd been sleeping with her body curled up into a little ball, like a child taking a nap.
“No. It was too bright in the guest ro-o-oh-ohm . . .”
Now that she'd mentioned it, I remembered that we'd sent all the curtains in the guest room to the cleaners. Mari's voice sounded charmed and kind of fuzzy, as if half of her was still dreaming. Her eyes seemed to be focused on something way off in the distance, as people's eyes do when they're feeling tired. Her eyes were beautiful.
“It's gotten cloudy out, you know.” I said this with the same feeling I'd have had saying words whose meaning was something extraordinarily tender. I walked over to the window on the other side of the couch where she was lying and opened the curtains. Suddenly the room filled with a hazy brightness.
I looked up at the overcast sky.
“Maybe it'll rain. Or maybe it'll snow,” I said.
Just then Mari sprang up into a sitting position, and her expression changed—she drew her eyebrows together and stared at me. Her eyes looked wild, almost demented.
“What? What's wrong?” I asked.
I started feeling extremely uneasy. It even seemed like her face was mirroring my unease. I hadn't seen her look this strange in ages.
“Let me see something,” Mari said.
Then she touched my hands—the hands that boy had touched.
She looked up at me, her face utterly vacant.
“You were with Yoshihiro?”
Her voice was extremely faint, so faint that it took me a while to figure out what she was saying. I shuddered and detached her hands from mine, practically flinging them away.
Finally I managed to speak. “Nope.”
My voice was dry, and it was an odd way to answer.
“Of course you weren't, what on earth am I saying? Nobody's going to be seeing him or doing anything with him anymore, are they? I'm still half asleep, I was getting things all mixed up with the dream I'd been having.”
Mari pressed her fingers to her temples as she said this.
“My brother died a long time ago,” I said.
“I know that,” she replied.
She sounded the same as always.
“It's just that I was having this dream. Just before. And there happened to be this scene in it where you'd gotten together with Yoshihiro and the two of you were talking, you know? You were . . . I don't know, it was someplace bright, like a hotel lobby or something.”
I didn't know how to reply. So I just said, “Oh.”
The instant I spoke I felt something warm pierce my heart.
“Wow, you were right. It's raining!” Mari said
She was looking up out of the window.
The sky was dark. You could feel the rush of the rain, of those large drops of water streaming down, gradually closing over the town. The heavy sky, thickly layered with lead-gray clouds, stretched off into the distance. Would their plane have left the airport by now? Or would they be sitting at the gate, pleasantly chatting of this and that? That family—four people I'd never see again. In the midst of the airport's incessant bustle, the floor around them gleaming beneath the lights, a scene just like the one I entered when I went to see my brother off to America, and when I went to welcome him back. I called the scene up in my mind, as if to make sure that I still remembered.
“Mari, I'm sure this is going to turn to snow tonight. I'll ask my mother to call your house, okay? That way you can stay over tonight.”
“Sounds good to me,” Mari said.
She went on looking at the rain, her back to me.
I slipped quietly from the room and closed the door.
Since all that money had actually come back, and since this is the kind of thing that almost never happens, I got out my umbrella and set out to spend.
On rainy afternoons, department stores always seem strangely bright and warm, and you can smell the moisture. I headed for the book section and bought nearly a ton of books, and then went and got a few CDs. There were no lines at any of the counters, and it was very quiet, everything neatly arranged. There were just a few shoppers scattered here and there, and the unoccupied clerks all looked extremely elegant.
Even after I'd bought all this I still had some money left over, so after I'd had a cup of tea I went to buy myself a shirt. I found one that I liked a lot, so I was feeling terrifically light-hearted as I started toward the elevator, heading for home . . . then suddenly I found myself passing the sleepwear corner.
Suddenly I remembered. That's right! Mari's sleeping over tonight!
I decided to buy her the dark blue, quilted, super-warm-looking pajamas at the very front of the display. They looked so warm and well made that I didn't think there would be any problem even if the wearer suddenly decided to put on a coat and go outside sometime in the middle of the night.
“Is this a present?” asked the clerk.
“Yes, it is,” I answered.
The clerk gave the packaged pajamas a red ribbon.
That's it . . . Mari always sleeps in pajamas so thin it makes you shiver just to look at her, and I have that image of her, that's why I wanted to give her these pajamas . . .
Not long after my brother died, Mari ran away from home.
Her parents had been opposed to the relationship from the start, of course, and they'd made her stay home from work for a week without even asking her if she wanted to, using “appendicitis” as an excuse, and they'd even had the nerve to ask that once the week was up she just forget about Yoshihiro—but Mari's running away certainly wasn't in defiance of any
of this. She said that she'd just gotten tired. I think this was probably the truth. Her poor parents weren't even a part of her world right then. I was frightened; it terrified me to think that I might be asked to do anything but cry and be with my family, a family now plunged in darkness—and so I didn't see Mari. Even when I heard that she'd run away from home I didn't feel any particular urgency . . . or perhaps I ought to say that I couldn't feel that way, that I didn't have that freedom.
A week had passed since Mari's disappearance when her mother called for the second time, sounding half crazy. For the first time I reacted, decided to see what I could do. I had a feeling I knew where she was.
Spring was drawing near, and that afternoon the sun was warm and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers. I didn't even wear a jacket.
I got on the train.
Mari and Yoshihiro had rented a small one-room apartment in the next neighborhod where they went for their rendezvous. I figured that if Mari was anywhere, she had to be there. But what will I do if I find her there, dead? This thought kept circling through my head. Silent spring scenery shook past outside the window, and the faces of the people sitting in their seats looked peaceful and vague. If I'm too late, if I just find her body, will I feel sorry? Pale light shot through the swaying interior of the train. No, as a matter of fact I probably won't, not particularly. This is what I thought at the time. And I honestly believed it.
I told the people in the maintenance room that I was Yoshihiro's sister and borrowed a key, then rode the slow elevator up to her floor. There was no response when I pressed the doorbell. So I slipped the key into the lock and went inside. The room was dark and unbelievably cold. The blinds were all shut, the air so chilly I felt the cold pushing up through the bottoms of my socks into my feet. I had never been so scared in my life. I walked forward one step at a time, imagining the corpse I was just about to see. Soon my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and I discovered Mari lying on the floor, wrapped up in a blanket.
She was breathing, inhaling and exhaling slowly, deeply, the way people do when they're asleep. It was a healthy sound, not the sound of someone who's taken sleeping pills. I shook her awake, and she groaned and rubbed her eyes. I was shocked to find myself looking at her bare arms sticking out from the sleeves of a short-sleeve T-shirt. Looking under the blanket I saw that all she was wearing was that T-shirt and a pair of panties. She might as well have been taking an afternoon nap at some resort in the full heat of summer.
“Mari, did you walk here like that?” I asked.
She shook her head and then pointed to the floor. Her coat and a sweater and everything down to her stockings lay scattered around the room.
Mari remained silent and abstracted, almost as if she was in shock.
“Listen, Mari, let's go to my house,” I said. “I'll ask my parents to give your mom a call, and then you can just stay in the guest room, you can stay there all by yourself, you don't even have to open the door.”
She made no reply. The room was too dark, I couldn't see the expression on her face. But the feeling I got from her was so bitterly cold that it compelled me to hurry. I pushed her arms into the coat, bundled up the rest of her clothes, and led her from the apartment. I hailed a taxi, and we headed for home. Mari turned to look back several times on the way. I had no idea what she was looking at, but I watched her gazing steadily with those cold eyes at the scenery dropping away behind us.
My mother's persuasion and Mari's stubborn insistence that she didn't want to go back home for a while convinced her parents to let her stay. It was arranged that she would stay with us for a while, living in the guest room.
I took care of everything involved in giving up the apartment—that room, of whose existence only my brother and Mari and I had been aware—by myself. There wasn't very much in the way of furniture and decorations and so on, but I found ways to dispose of what there was, and made sure to cancel the lease. It was pretty rough having to do all this in secret, but then there was the deposit: I made up my mind to keep whatever came back as a fee for the work I'd done. Of course they'd rented the place for such a short time and the lease had been canceled so suddenly, and then on top of that my brother had made holes in one of the walls to put up shelves, so in the end I didn't get very much at all.
Yoshihiro was dead, and Mari had settled down in our house, so there was no reason why our parents shouldn't know about the apartment. But if they found out, Mari would be forced to remember the coldness of that room once more, and I hated the idea of letting that happen.
Maybe I was trying to make amends for having thought it wouldn't matter if she died.
I arrived home just in time for dinner.
Mari sat between my mother and father, as if she were their daughter.
“You sure took your time,” she said, smiling. “Shall we begin?”
My father, unable to wait, had already started eating. The room was filled with steam, and it was hot, and my mother came and set a pot down on the table, holding it firmly between pot holders, laughing.
“It's Mari's favorite—chicken curry!” she said.
As soon as I'd sat down I passed the large, ribbon-wrapped package over to Mari. “It's a present. I had a bit of a windfall today.”
For some entirely obscure reason my father started clapping.
Mari grinned, narrowing her eyes ever so slightly.
“I feel like it's my birthday,” she said.
* * *
The rain turned to snow and quietly began to pile up.
Mari said she'd sleep with me in my room, so I suggested that maybe we could go to sleep in the guest room instead, playing video games.
She sat on top of her futon, which was right next to mine, looking warm and cozy in the blue pajamas I'd given her. The room was quite dark, and only the world beyond the window, that world of tumbling snow, looked white. The light from the television flickered down onto our futons. The newscaster was saying that there would be heavy snowfall in Tokyo again overnight.
“It's funny, it didn't snow at all last year,” I said.
“Didn't it? I was so completely out of it that I don't remember.” Mari smiled. “This sure has been a strange year. Like a dream. I wonder—do you think maybe my condition has improved a bit since last year?”
“It sure looks that way,” I said, laughing.
“I mean, what was he?” Mari said.
She was talking about my brother.
“I don't think he was actually human. I really don't,” I replied, investing these words with as much meaning as possible. Of course he was nothing more than one vibrantly charismatic young man, but since his death was so sudden and meaningless, and because until he died he'd made life as enjoyable as he possibly could, his existence had taken on a peculiar meaning.
“Now, whenever I think about my brother I start feeling really weird, sort of dazzled. I think about how his face looked when he smiled, and of his voice, and of the way his face looked when he was asleep . . . and I start to wonder if he was ever really here, you know, and if he was, it seems like maybe his being here was something irreplaceable—that's how I feel.”
“You too?” Mari said.
“And Sarah too, I bet.”
“Everyone who knew him.”
Was Mari the winner, or Sarah? For a moment I considered this question very seriously. But it was hard to say who had come out ahead. Thanks to Yoshihiro they'd each arrived at places they'd never anticipated.
“During this past year I spent a lot of time wondering how on earth I got to be where I was,” Mari said. “It seems like after I fell in love at the airport that day I just noticed that I'd ended up like this, in this place. There was nothing left anywhere around me, there was nothing I could do but keep going—I was deep in the heart of night. Slowly I started to figure out where I could start to rebuild things, but there was nothing there. What sort of creature had Yoshihiro been? But no . . . that didn't mean anything either, there was no meaning. Tha
t thought is what made it possible for me to settle down and go to sleep.”
I sat gazing into space, thinking back over the scene in the hotel, calling up an image of Sarah as she'd looked when I saw her there, and the face of her son, so familiar and so terribly dear to me that it made me shake. And I remembered Mari during the past year, how she'd been as dark and quiet as a shadow, and myself, never far from her, making my own way through a difficult time.
I got under the covers of my futon.
“Listen, Mari. This has been a strange year for the two of us. It's like we've been living in a space different from the rest of our lives, like we've been moving at a different speed. We've been sealed off—it's been very quiet. I'm sure that if we look back on all this later it'll have its own unique coloring, it'll be a single separate block.”
“Yes, I think you're right.”
Mari climbed down into her futon too, then pushed her arm up and out so that it extended beyond the base of her downturned chin. She showed me the sleeve of her pajamas.
“It'll be this kind of deep blue,” she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks in your eyes and your ears and all your words—the color of a completely closed-in night.”
The snow kept falling, and we lay with our faces turned up toward the TV screen, each trying desperately to win the video games we were playing, and then eventually we both drifted off to sleep.
I awoke with a start. Looking over to my side, I saw that Mari was asleep, her face illuminated by the glow of the television. One hand was still holding the controls for the game, and a good half of her body was lying outside of her covers. She looked as if she'd just suddenly dropped dead, right in the middle of things. Under the quiet music of the game I could hear the sound of her breath.
The expression on her face was bizarre. Her face looked pure and lonely, like the face of someone who's been crying. And it hadn't changed at all since a year ago, or since long before that, when Mari was small.
I pulled the covers up over her and switched off the television. Suddenly the room was completely dark. But of course outside the window the same snow continued to tumble down. The fuzzy pale-bright glimmer of the snow streamed into the room through the gap between the curtains.