I flip sadly through an album, studying the photos. Each one is just like all the others, but none of them records my weight or length at birth, or contains a copy of my tiny footprint, or a picture of my parents and me. I slam it closed.
Sometimes I have thought it might be better if I were an orphan, too. If I could have one of the tragic histories so common at the Light House—an alcoholic mother, a homicidal father, parents lost to death or abandonment, anything at all—then I would have been a proper orphan. Then, like all the other children, I might have imagined that the nice couple who ran the Light House were my real parents, or pretended to be sweet and innocent in the hope of being adopted. Somehow, that would have made my life much simpler.
From the time of the incident with the fig tree, I wanted only one thing: to be part of a normal, quiet family.
Still, when Jun disappears into the locker room and I gather up my schoolbag, watching as the surface of the pool becomes calm and glasslike again, or, on Sunday nights, when I listen quietly for the sound of Jun coming home through the green darkness after a diving meet—at such times I feel my desire for a family evaporate like the mist.
I grope after it, though I know it's pointless. There are so many useless things in this world, but for me, the most useless of all is the Light House.
Jun came home. He had a meeting after practice, so he was an hour behind me.
Once a week or so, I managed to guess when he'd show up, and then I'd be waiting for him, casually perched on the couch or standing near the telephone in the hall. If the children or the staff or my parents—or most of all Jun himself—had realized that I was waiting for him, things would have been terribly complicated, so I was careful to make my presence seem accidental. I felt ridiculous, but I kept to my post, making pointless calls to school friends or flipping through magazines.
The front hall was usually quiet and empty in the evening. It is a plain room, with nothing but a frayed sofa and an old-fashioned telephone. The floorboards have a yellowish cast under the bare lightbulb. This evening, I gave myself permission to wait for Jun. He came through the door, dressed in his school blazer and carrying his backpack and gym bag.
"Hello," I said.
"Hi." Even the most ordinary words seemed to move me when they came from Jun's mouth. The fresh, clean smell of the pool clung to his body, and his hair was still slightly damp, the way I loved to see it.
"I'm starved," he said, dropping his bags and slumping onto the sofa. But even this was done in a good-natured way, and his exhaustion was scented with the bright smell of the pool.
"I envy you," I said, leaning against the telephone stand. "You work up an appetite. But I do almost nothing and still eat three meals a day. There's something pointless about that sort of hunger."
"You should take up a sport," he said.
I shook my head without looking up. "I'd rather watch," I said, wincing at my own words.
Those hours at the pool were my private indulgence, and I made a point of sitting as far as possible from the diving platform in order to keep them secret. I was also careful to avoid running into Jun or his teammates at the entrance to the gym, so it was possible that he'd never realized I was there. Still, it made me sad somehow if he hadn't, even though I was the one taking all those precautions.
He'd never put me on the spot by telling me he'd seen me, or by asking what I was doing at the pool. But I felt our bond would be somehow stronger if he knew and had made a point of letting me go on.
"I hurt my wrist today," he said. "I must have hit the water at a funny angle."
"Which one?"
He shook his left wrist to show me. Because his body was so important to me, I lived in fear that he would injure it. The flash in his eyes as he was about to dive, the glint of light on his chest, the shapes of his muscles—it all aroused in me a pleasant feeling that usually lay dormant.
"Are you all right? The preliminaries for the inter-high meet are coming up, aren't they?"
"It's not serious," he said, leaving it at that.
To enter the pool like a needle, creating the least possible splash, Jun had to align his wrists perfectly at the instant he hit the surface of the water. Because he had been diving for so long, he had the strongest wrists I'd ever seen.
Just then, we heard the sound of slippers along the corridor, and Naoki ran into the room.
"Hi, Jun! Could you do a handstand?" He danced around Jun like an excited puppy. He was three years old and suffered from asthma, which left his voice hoarse.
"Okay, but not right now," Jun said, rising from the couch and catching Naoki in his arms. The children at the Light House loved Jun, perhaps because he was extraordinarily good to them. They loved him just as I loved him, and everyone seemed to want to touch him. As he headed off, Naoki still in his arms, I whispered that he should take care of his wrist.
"Then when?" Naoki whined. "And you have to walk on your hands, too." The rough sound of his voice disappeared down the hall.
To my mind, dinner was the strangest part of life at the Light House—beginning with the fact that the kitchen and the dining room are in the basement.
The church and the Light House are old, Western-style wooden buildings, their age apparent in every floorboard, hinge, and tile. The structures have become quite complex through frequent additions, and from the outside it is impossible to grasp their layout. Inside, they are more confusing still, with long, winding halls and small flights of stairs.
The foyer of the Light House leads to a maze of corridors that snake through the building and eventually to a hall on the second floor that looks down on the courtyard through a window. At the end of the hall, there is a trapdoor in the floor with a heavy iron handle. The door makes a dry creak when it's lifted. We would fasten it to a hook on the ceiling before going down the steep flight of stairs to the dining room and the kitchen.
The children loved the secret staircase. Before every meal there was a race—often ending in a fight—to see who could get to the trapdoor first. The director or one of the teachers hurried the children along as they disappeared down the staircase, one after the other.
When I pulled on the rusty handle, heard the creaking of the trapdoor, and smelled the odors of the kitchen coming up the stairs, I was often reminded of The Diary of Anne Frank: the stairs hidden behind the revolving bookcase, the plan of the secret house as convoluted as that of the Light House, the yellow Star of David, the pins in the map tracking the advancing invasion of Normandy, the gloomy, inadequate meals with Peter, the van Daans, and Dr. Dussel. Like Anne, I could feel my appetite diminish with each step I took down the secret stairs of the Light House.
Though the kitchen and dining room are partially underground, they were neither dark nor damp. There are a number of large windows overlooking the garden to the south, and from the windows to the north, light filters in through the woods.
Yet here, too, there were inescapable signs of age and decay. The frying pans and pots lined up on the drying rack were scorched and discolored, and the appliances— mixers, ovens, refrigerators, and the like—were sturdy but old. The surface of the enormous table that dominated the room was covered with scratches and, in places, hollowed out by deep gouges.
I found breakfasts in this dining room almost unbearable, amid a crowd of noisy children and scraps of scattered food. At dinnertime, my father, who went to bed early in order to be up for morning services, would eat with the dozen or so younger children; and afterward I would eat with Jun, Reiko, who was in the third year of middle school, the night proctor, and my mother. But even among the adults, after the tables had been wiped of the children's spills, I still found the meals disgusting.
My mother was the heartiest, most cheerful person at the Light House. Particularly talkative during dinner, she was not one to cast about for topics that would include everyone, preferring to talk about herself and her interests from the moment we sat down until the meal was over. As she would grow increasingly excit
ed and out of breath, I often wondered whether she in fact hated herself for talking so much.
Eventually I began worrying that Jun and the others were growing weary of her. Her lips were like two maggots that never stopped wriggling, and I found myself wanting to squash them between my fingers. It was pitch black outside and the glass in the windows had turned a deep shade of green, but her voice tumbled brightly on in the darkening world. Reiko and the night proctor stared down at their plates and mumbled acknowledgments from time to time.
Jun's hair was dry by then. His body seemed smaller and more vulnerable when it wasn't wet. Unlike the rest of us, he never looked bored or sighed when my mother talked too much. Instead, he listened intently to her overbearing voice, nodding politely, eating with gusto, and even breaking in from time to time to ask a strategic question that encouraged her to talk even more. His voice seemed to blend with hers, and she turned to face him as her babbling grew more and more frantic.
Meanwhile, I sat studying his profile, wondering how he could be so kind while I felt nothing but the cruelest sort of disgust. He would come down from the diving board and return to the Light House, where his muscles would warm and soften like silk floss, and then he would soak up all the things that set my nerves on edge—Naoki's raspy voice, the scraps of food flung about by the children, my mother's endless chattering. It seemed strange that he could be so good when life had treated him so badly: a father who ran off when he was born and a mother who had abandoned him for the bottle. I prayed desperately to be bathed in his kindness.
The sound of children's feet came through the floor from upstairs. It was bath time: I could imagine them running around in great clouds of talcum powder. I stared at my mother's glistening lips and nudged my chopsticks against the fatty bits of meat left on my plate. Then I passed a sauce bottle to Jun, hoping to hear him say "Thank you"—the sound of his voice could wash away the sour feeling in my stomach.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. My mother and father had gone out to record a radio program for the church. Reiko, who shared my room, was stretched out on the top bunk reading a science magazine. Jun was at the ballet class he attended every week. He had started recently at the urging of his diving coach, who said it would help him with form and flexibility. I have trouble imagining him at ballet class, accustomed as I am to seeing his body framed in sparkling water at diving practice, but I found myself feeling jealous of those flat-chested little girls in white leotards, their hair pulled back in tight buns.
In Jun's absence, these Sunday afternoons seemed somber and endless. I kept busy by reviewing for my English class; when I became bored, I flipped through the dictionary at random, studying the simple yet strangely realistic illustrations: an albatross, a still, a wood box, a waffle iron.
It was a beautiful day outside. Sunlight covered the ground like a shower of gold dust. The shadows of trembling ginkgo leaves were etched sharply on the wall of the church, and the breeze blowing through the curtains carried the first hints of summer.
"Are you going to the hospital today?" I said, turning toward Reiko.
"No, not today," she replied without looking up from her magazine.
Reiko had come to the Light House less than six months earlier. My parents had carried in boxes stuffed with books and tired, out-of-fashion clothes, and then Reiko herself had appeared at the door of my room. She was heavyset and taller than I was, and she wore thick glasses. Though she was only in middle school, her flesh seemed to sag in places, like the body of a middle-aged woman.
"Pleased to meet you," she said, lumbering into the room as if her body were a burden.
It was rare for someone as old as Reiko to come to the Light House. Most children were brought as infants and were adopted while they were still young. Jun was the first to reach high school age while still living here.
Reiko's parents were both in a mental hospital. Their problems were apparently very serious, with no hope that they would recover and return to normal life.
"They'll miss you if you don't go." I knew that she didn't like talking about her parents, but I brought them up as often as possible. The children here suffered from almost every imaginable misfortune, yet it struck me as particularly bad luck to have both parents go crazy, one after the other.
"I wish they would miss me," she said. Closing the magazine, she sat up on the bed and took off her glasses. "I'd be glad if they did." With her glasses off, her eyes were so small it was hard to tell where she was looking.
"And that's what makes you so sad?" I asked.
She blinked nervously but said nothing. Her vacant stare confounded my efforts to understand what she was feeling. Her lips were pursed in what might have been a faint smile, but it might also have been a wounded frown. There were several seconds of icy silence.
"The hooks have come undone," she said at last, as if talking to herself.
"Hooks?"
"That's right. The ones that kept my mother and father and me together. They've come undone and there's no way to get them fastened again." Sometimes she spoke like a young lady from a good family.
I wondered what sort of sound was made when the hooks holding together a family came apart. Perhaps a dull splat, like the sound of a ripe fruit splitting open. Or maybe it was more like an explosion, when you mix the wrong chemicals.
Reiko was still looking down at me blankly, the fat on her cheeks and chin hiding her feelings. She put her glasses on again, stretched out on the bed, and went back to her magazine.
Perhaps the wounds she'd received when the hooks broke were still raw. But since I'd never been hooked to anything, I couldn't see much difference in our luck.
I turned back to the desk and began writing unintelligible English words in my notebook. The children were even louder now, but their noise had no effect on the silence that fell between us.
The Light House was always noisy: a mixture of shouting and crying and pounding feet filled every corner of the building like some resident spirit.
Just then, an urgent knock sounded at the door, and the part-time nurse came in carrying Rie in her arms.
"We're going to take the children to the bazaar at the church, but Rie seems to be coming down with a cold. Could we leave her here with you?" She spoke quickly, rocking the child in her arms.
"Sure," I said, getting up from the desk to take Rie. "I'll look after her."
"Do you want to go with us, Reiko?" the nurse said, looking toward the top bunk.
"It's very kind of you to invite me, but I'm afraid I have other things I have to do today." As always, Reiko's refusal was excessively polite.
At a year and five months, Rie was the youngest child at the Light House. She wore a bright red playsuit over her white shirt, and her nose was shiny and damp.
The din from the children reached a crescendo and then subsided as they left with the three nurses. I took Rie downstairs and out in the backyard.
The brilliant sunlight made the shadowy places seem fresh and clean, and the objects in them—a tricycle, a broken flowerpot, every leaf and weed—stood out vividly. Cases of bottles waiting to be recycled and an empty box with a picture of asparagus were piled by the kitchen door.
After the fig tree had stopped bearing fruit, it was cut down, leaving only a small mound of earth where the well had been. Rie was amusing herself by sticking a little shovel into this mound while I watched from a short way off, seated on one of the cases of bottles.
The tiny legs protruding from the elastic hems of her pants looked like pats of smooth, white butter. Whether they are dark and blotchy, covered in a rash, or rippling with rings of fat, I am always fascinated by a baby's thighs. There is something almost erotic about their defenselessness, and yet they seem fresh and vivid, like separate living creatures.
Rie was scooping up dirt with the shovel she held in one hand and dumping it into the bucket she held in the other. She had been doing this for some time, but when she missed the bucket and spilled the dirt on her hand, sh
e came staggering toward me on unsteady little legs, crossing the boundary between bright sunlight and quiet shade. She made little pleading noises as she held out her soiled hand. It seemed clean enough to me, but I blew on her palm anyway.