I carefully removed the box from the drawer, as if I were handling something fragile. I expected it to be heavier, yet the box was as light as . . . a cream puff. I also expected to find a mass of brightly colored mold inside; however, the pastry looked almost as it had in the store—puffy and golden.
"Rie, come here. I have a treat for you."
She turned to look, and when she realized what was in the box, she came running happily to jump into my lap.
It wasn't until I cut the cream puff in half that I realized that the sweet smell of eggs and sugar and milk had been replaced by an acrid stench, like that of an unripe grapefruit. As Rie's lips sank into the cream, the smell filled the room. It nearly made me sick, but Rie devoured the pastry. Her eagerness was almost painfully sweet to see.
"Is it good?" I asked, but the wind drowned out the question.
I put the uneaten half of the cream puff back in the box and took it down to the garbage pail in the kitchen.
The wind continued to blow as the night wore on. The heat and humidity made sleep difficult. Every time I started to doze off, the sweltering air would drag me back from my dreams. Reiko had returned from visiting her parents, eaten a few pieces of chocolate, and gone to sleep without even brushing her teeth. As I listened to her sugary breathing, I could feel any chance of sleep slipping away.
I was about to check the clock to see how much time had passed when I suddenly heard footsteps in the hall. A door opened somewhere and then closed again, and I could hear anxious whispering. I kicked off my damp quilt and unfastened another button on my pajamas. Staring at the slats of the bed above me, I tried to make out what the voices were saying. I was wide awake now, my nerves jangling.
After a few minutes, I could distinguish my mother's voice over the rest. The others were muffled and subdued, but she sounded as agitated and sharp and somehow self-satisfied as ever. Even Reiko was roused from her deep sleep and leaned over to look down at me.
"What's happening?" she said.
I got out of bed, ignoring her question. My body felt strangely stiff, and I realized that I was exhausted from so many hours of trying to get to sleep. I opened the door and stood for a moment with my eyes closed, waiting to adjust to the light.
"Aya!" my mother called, pressing her hand to the front of her worn nightgown. "Rie's sick. She has a fever and terrible diarrhea, and she's been vomiting all night. Her lips are dry, and she has a strange rash. I don't know what's wrong with her. I wanted to call an ambulance, but your father said we should get that Dr. Nishizaki, the one with the clinic near the station. He says Nishizaki's a member of the church, so God will look after her. They're calling him now, but it's terrible, and in the middle of the night—all we can do is pray. Oh, Aya!"
The words came spilling out in one breath. The night nurse and the other employees who lived at the Light House stood around her, their faces drawn with fatigue and anxiety. There was something in my mother's tone hinting that she found the emergency almost thrilling.
I pressed my hands over my aching eyes, wondering why she insisted on chattering like that, why she had to explain everything when I already knew what had happened.
At that moment, Jun came up the stairs.
"I got through to Dr. Nishizaki. He said to bring her right away." He went into the children's dormitory and came out holding Rie. She lay like a limp rag in his arms. Her cheeks and hands and thighs were covered with pale pink spots, as if her body had rotted with the cream puff and was growing pink mold.
Jun carried her down the stairs, and everyone followed. My father was waiting in the car out front, the engine already running. Jun climbed in beside him, still cradling Rie.
Though I was responsible for her condition, I found myself watching Jun instead. He seemed so brisk and decisive, and his arms were muscular as they embraced Rie. His sincerity was almost more than I could bear.
Whenever there was an emergency—the time I fell in the river, the grease fire in the kitchen, or the earthquake that knocked over the china cabinet—Jun always managed to calm and reassure the rest of us. It was sad that someone could be so kind. The sound of the car engine faded into the night.
The others returned quietly to their rooms while my mother continued to call after the car. "Call me the minute you hear anything! I'll wait by the phone! If they send her to the hospital, let me know so I can get her things together!"
When they were gone, she turned to me, ready to launch a new soliloquy. "I hope it's nothing serious . . ." But I just nodded vaguely and said nothing, wanting to be alone with my thoughts of Jun.
I returned to the pool as soon as I could. It seemed all the more precious after I'd tasted deeply of my own cruelty. The ripples reflecting on the glass roof, the smell of the water, and above all the purity of Jun's glistening body—these things had the power to wash me clean. I wanted to be as pure as Jun, even if for only a moment.
In the end, Rie had gone on to the hospital. They said she vomited until there was nothing left and then slept for two days, as still and cold as a mummy. My mother went to the hospital to take care of her and came home with long reports. I wondered whether they'd found any trace of the cream puff.
I'm not sure how I would have felt if Rie had died, how I would have made sense of what I'd done. Because I had no idea where the cruelty came from, I could look at Jun's arms and chest and back without feeling the slightest remorse for having hurt Rie.
I was alone in the bleachers. It was as warm as ever. Voices and splashing hung like fog over the competition pool and the children's pool beyond it, while here there was nothing but the quiet splash of a diver entering the water, and then another.
Jun was wearing a navy blue suit with the insignia of our school embroidered at the waist, one of those we'd washed that night in the hall as we'd talked about the snowy morning. It was wet and clung to his hips. He had a habit of pulling at the wristbands he wore on each arm as he made his way to the end of the board. Then he would spend a long time getting the position of his feet exactly right.
"Back two-and-a-half in the pike position," I murmured.
It was a beautiful dive. His body was straight and perpendicular to the water at entry, and there was almost no splash. A few bubbles rose from the bottom, and then the surface was glassy again.
I liked pike dives better than tucked or twisting ones. When the body is bent at the hips and the legs and feet extended, the tension in the muscles is exquisite. I liked that shape of his body, with his forehead pressed lightly against his shins and his palms wrapped behind his knees.
As his legs traced a perfect circle in the air, like a compass falling through space, I could feel his body in mine, caressing me inside, closer and warmer and more peaceful than any real embrace. Though he had never held me in his arms, I was sure this feeling was true.
I let out a long breath and crossed my legs. The other members of the team took their turns diving, and between dives the coach shouted instructions through a megaphone. The swim team was practicing in the competition pool. A girl, apparently the team manager, was leaning out over one of the starting blocks and timing the laps with a stopwatch. Everyone except me was hard at work—but I, too, had a purpose in being here: to heal myself.
It wasn't until I'd passed the dressing rooms and the line of vending machines in the lobby that I realized it was raining. A hazy sun had been shining all day, so I was surprised by the sudden change; sheets of rain drenched the sports center, turning the poplars and the scoreboard and the soccer field dark gray. The enormous raindrops sent up miniature detonations as they hit the ground.
I stood helplessly by the door. It would take at least five minutes to get to the station, no matter how fast I ran; in rain like this I'd be soaked in five seconds. The prospect of riding home on a packed, rush-hour train in wet clothes seemed too depressing.
The couch in the lobby was already full of people waiting out the storm, while others were lined up at the pay phone to call for cabs. S
eeing no alternative, I went outside. The air smelled of rain, of earth dissolved in rain. I sat down on the steps under the eaves and watched the drops pelting the ground. From time to time they splashed up on my socks.
Jun would still be at the team meeting or taking a shower, but I was worried that he would come out before it stopped raining. I had no idea how to face him if he found me sitting here. He would appear as he always did, fresh from his beloved practice; and I would be stained with the traces of Rie's tears and her rosy pink rash, which the pool had failed to wash away. I was about to run out into the rain when someone called my name.
"Aya!"
Jun's voice stopped me. I turned to find him standing above me on the steps. He looked fresh and clean, exactly as I'd imagined him, and for a moment I only watched him, unable to think anything to say.
"This is unbelievable," he said, his eyes moving from me to the rain.
"It is," I said. We stood on the steps, watching in silence. We had to stand close together to avoid getting wet, and through my skirt I could feel his gym bag rubbing against my leg.
I was grateful that he hadn't asked me why I was here, as if I had been forgiven some trespass. The rain was falling even harder, blotting out the world beyond the eaves.
"What happened to the rest of the team?" I asked. He was too close for me to turn to look at him.
"The coach gave them a ride home," he said, still gazing out at the rain.
"Why didn't you go with them?"
"Because I saw you leaving."
"Oh," I muttered. I wanted to apologize or thank him, but the words that came out of my mouth were the most dreary, practical ones: "Do you have an umbrella?" He shook his head.
"It wouldn't help much anyway," he said. "It's raining too hard. We should just stay here awhile."
Stay here awhile, I repeated slowly to myself, and with each repetition the meaning seemed to change, becoming "I want to stay here," then "I want to stay with you."
A taxi stopped in front of the building, its wipers beating frantically. A group of children who must have finished their swimming lessons came running out past us and dove into the cab, trailed by their mothers. But all the sounds—the hurried footsteps, the drone of the taxi's engine—were drowned out by the rain. The only noises that reached my ears were Jun's breathing and the thunder rumbling in the distance.
The raindrops continued to assault us, soaking Jun's shoulder; the fabric of his shirt clung to the curve of his back; but he seemed oblivious, listening for the thunder with childlike enthusiasm.
When I was with Jun, I often thought about our childhood: I recalled all the games we had played, just the two of us, in various places around the Light House. I had been alone with him when he drank the milk from the fig tree, and when we discovered the snowy hall. None of his school friends or his teammates or the other children at the Light House shared these memories; I was the only one who had seen the expressions on his face at these moments, and I kept those images locked away like a bundle of precious letters. Then, from time to time, I would take them out to go over again.
Still, as time passed, the letters were becoming faded and brittle in my hands; and at some point, I stopped adding new ones to the bundle. Perhaps it was when Jun and I stopped being children—when the mere thought of him began to cause me pain, as it does still.
The thunder rumbled off into the distance; the rain, however, was as heavy as before. The damp spot on Jun's shoulder continued to spread, and I began to worry that he was getting cold.
"We should go inside," I said, tugging him by the elbow. He took one last look beyond the eaves and nodded.
We passed through the lobby and headed back to the pool. There was no one left in the diving well, but several men in swimsuits and T-shirts were collecting the kickboards and mopping the deck. The lights had been turned down; it seemed like a different place. Evening had arrived here even sooner than in the rainy world outside. We sat in the highest row of bleachers, our backs against the railing. The surface of the pool rippled gently below.
"This feels strange," I said, staring at his profile.
"Why is that?" he said, turning to look at me.
"I'm usually the only one up here in the stands. I sit here all alone and watch you on the board. But today, here you are, sitting right next to me."
"You always come to watch me practice, don't you?" His voice was so warm, so full of gratitude, that I could only nod.
Your body falling through space touches the deepest part of me. I murmured in my heart the words I could never say aloud.
"I come here straight from class and just sit and watch. I don't have anything else to do. I don't exercise, I don't do much of anything. I must seem like a useless old woman to you."
"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself," he said. "You'll find something that's right for you eventually. You just seem uncertain right now."
"Is that what you think?"
"It is," he said, nodding.
I wasn't at all sure whether I was uncertain or not, but he seemed so completely convinced that I let it drop. I suddenly felt quite peaceful, and I didn't know what to do next. My desires seemed simple and terribly complicated at the same time: to gaze at Jun's wet body and to make Rie cry. These were the only things that gave me comfort.
The mops scraped across the floor. The water level in the pool had fallen, as if a plug had been pulled, revealing a pattern of tiles in the wall.
"You never seem uncertain," I said, kicking my toe against the schoolbag I had left at my feet.
"There's no time for that when you're diving." He gripped the railing with both hands and raised his body, as if about to do a chin-up. "Maybe it's because there was something so uncertain and twisted about my birth, but when I'm up there on the board I just want to dive as straight and clean as possible, with no hesitation."
I was watching Jun's powerful fingers as they gripped the rail.
"Do you resent what your parents did to you?"
"No," he said, hesitating for a moment. "How can you resent someone you don't even know?" I suddenly felt terribly sad, as if I were only just learning that he was an orphan. No matter how kind he was to people, no matter how perfectly he performed his dives, he would always be an orphan. I wanted to breathe on his damp shoulder, to warm it with my breath.
The rain was beating on the glass above us. The pool was empty then, and the attendants had climbed in to scrub the bottom. The diving well was larger and deeper than I had imagined. They had turned off the lights above the bleachers, as if we were descending further into the night, and we were left in the dim glow that reached us from the pool.
We rambled from topic to topic—the extra math homework, our class trip, the school assembly—and occasionally we would look up at the rain. It seemed to be slowing.
"I wonder when Rie will get out of the hospital," Jun said at last, as if this were simply the next topic in our long, meandering talk. But the mention of her name pierced me like a thorn.
"I wonder," I said.
I pictured the scene in her hospital room from the one visit I'd paid her: the walls decorated with crayon drawings, the stuffed Mickey Mouse on her bed, and Rie herself stretched out lethargically on the wrinkled sheets.
"It was you, wasn't it?" His tone was so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, that I didn't understand immediately. "You did that to Rie, didn't you?"
The voice was the same, but this time the words began to sink in, as if they'd been replayed at a slower speed. There was no hint of blame or reproach in his voice, yet I felt a chill come over me.