Women On the Other Shore (23 page)

Takeshi eventually seemed to notice that she had t u n e d out. He stopped talking and slipped a CD into the player.

Soon I'll be with Akari.
Picturing in her mind t h e route she usually pedaled from the station to the nursery school, Sayoko looked for the sign announcing the Musashino exit to appear overhead.

The billboard atop a tall building in the distance was taking forever to draw near, and the sun-beaten scene outside t h e window s e e m e d to be at a complete standstill.

176

With an ear cocked toward her mother's movements downstairs, Aoi crept on tiptoe to the phone in the hallway, lifted the handset, and swiftly punched in the number. She listened impatiently for the ring, but as before, all she got was a high-pitched woman's voice announcing,
The number you have dialed is no longer in service.

"Would you like a little snack, Aoi? I made some cream puffs."

At the sound of her mother's voice, Aoi hastily returned the handset to its cradle. Her mother had no doubt been watching the phone downstairs: a green light lit up on it when the upstairs extension was in use. It seemed to Aoi that her mother spent every minute she was home monitoring the phone in the living room.

"No thanks," Aoi replied, returning to her room. She sat on the bed and looked out the window. The rice had been harvested, transforming the paddies into a vast expanse of black and brown. Beyond them, the mulberry fields had turned yellow. A dull gray sky stretched endlessly overhead.

Aoi had never been alone in the house since coming home.

Although Mrs. Narahashi would have liked to quit her job and stay home full-time, the economic realities didn't permit it, so Grandma came to keep an eye on Aoi the four days each week her mother was at the bakery. T h e constant guard hardly seemed necessary. Why would Aoi want to leave the house when there wasn't anywhere for her to go?

She had never consciously decided that she wanted to die. She'd merely longed to go someplace other than where she was. Someplace 177

where she and Nanako had no need to shake anybody down, no need to find another hotel every night, and no need to worry about truant

officers' eyes.

When she first came to and opened her eyes, Aoi saw only white, and for a moment she actually believed she had arrived in that new place. There'd be no more muggings, no more hotel rooms, no more disco buffets, no more keeping track of every last yen they spent.

But where was Nanako? Slowly turning her head to look for her friend, she found herself peering instead into her mother's weeping face. Behind her was her father, his face drawn tight. They were calling out her name, their voices far away at first, then gradually nearer, and Aoi realized that she had gone nowhere at all. "Where's Nanako?" she asked, but her parents gave no indication that they had even heard; they simply went on calling out her name over and over.

She was in a private room, but there was no TV or radio. Her mother changed the flowers in the vase on the nightstand every day.

Aoi later learned that when she and Nanako made their leap, they'd landed not on the pavement in front of the main entrance but on the roof of the bicycle shelter standing to one side. The tin roof had cushioned their fall and bounced them off onto a soft patch of lawn, allowing them to escape with only some very nasty bruises, no broken bones. But during the time she was in the hospital, she could get no sense of what was going on, why she was being kept there, where Nanako had gone.

Her parents asked no questions. "This is the hospital where you were born, dear," Mrs. Narahashi kept repeating, her face like a wooden mask. "I was actually planning to go home to Grandpa and Grandma's to have you, but you decided you wanted to come out almost two months early. I remember it was one of the hottest days of the summer. I went into labor way before I expected to, so we rushed down here to the closest hospital, and the next thing we 178

knew you were born. Your dad and I knew right away we wanted to name you after a summer flower, but it took us a long time to settle on which one. Since you were premature, they had to keep you in an incubator, and I cried myself to sleep every night because they wouldn't let me hold you. Then when they finally did, I was so happy the tears poured out even harder. I swore to myself, no matter what happens, I'm going to protect this child. You were so amazingly tiny, and so unbelievably precious, even the nurses were lining up for a chance to hold you." Aoi's mother recounted the same events all over again every time she remembered another detail.

Mr. Narahashi stopped by each evening but, as always, remained a man of few words. He sat on a folding chair and asked her with a diffident smile whether there was anything he could bring her—

something in particular she wanted to eat, perhaps, or some manga she'd like to read. Neither he nor her mother responded to Aoi's questions about Nanako's whereabouts.

Besides the almost daily checkups and tests, she was scheduled to talk with a therapist as well. The sessions took place in a gleaming white room, where a woman who spoke in exceedingly soothing tones asked her if she had a favorite teen idol, what subject she liked best at school, which of her teachers she didn't get along with, and all sorts of other things Aoi could hardly have cared less about, trying to make it seem like they were just having a friendly chat. This person wouldn't answer Aoi's queries about what had happened to Nanako, either. Like the doctors and the nurses, all she said was that she hadn't heard anything and didn't know.

Aoi's mother accompanied her everywhere she went, whether to tests or to the therapist or to the toilet. One time when Aoi emerged from her therapy session, her mother was not on the nearby bench where she always waited. Aoi thought she had probably stepped into the ladies' room, so she walked down the hall to the hospital store 179

to buy some juice. As she got in line for the cashier, she noticed the magazine rack across the aisle and idly began scanning the covers of the news-and-gossip weeklies. A headline on one of them jumped at her as if it had been cut out and placed in relief:
High-School Girls
Leap from Roof After Fugitive Love Affair.

Aoi slipped out of line and pulled the magazine from the rack.

The story was about her and Nanako. Her parents had reported her missing in early September. A major search was mounted, focusing mainly on Izu and Tokyo. Her mother had apparently told the police that Aoi felt too embittered about Yokohama to ever go near the place again. But those weren't the kind of details Aoi cared about.

She frantically scanned ahead, searching for any clue to Nanako's condition and whereabouts. Unfortunately, before she could learn anything, her mother rushed up and tore the magazine from her hands in an absolute frenzy. "Your grandma's here," she stormed.

"She brought you those cakes from Hasegawa's you like. Come back to your room and we can all have a snack together." Her shrill tone and the hell-bent look on her face were completely incongruous with what she was actually saying. All eyes in the store were on her.

Later that day when her father offered to bring her something, Aoi asked him to pick up one of the weekly magazines for her. Such a pained look came into his eyes that for a brief moment she actually thought he might burst into tears, but when he appeared the next day he brought a manga weekly with him. Hoping even a magazine like that might say something about her and Nanako, Aoi pored over it from cover to cover, reading the letters to the editor and feature articles and everything. But she found no mention of them or the incident.

She remained in the hospital for about two weeks. When she was finally discharged and her father drove them all home to Gunma in his taxicab, she still hadn't been able to find out anything about Nanako. Her mother told her on the way that she could stay home from school until after winter vacation. Not that her mother's say really mattered, since Aoi had no intention of going anyway. She knew school was more than she could handle right now. The first thing she did when she got home was to dial Nanako's number. An emotionless female voice announced,
The number you have dialed is
no longer in service.

Either her parents or her grandmother had been on watch twenty-four hours a day ever since. They continued to ask no questions and to remain silent on the subject of Nanako. Aoi spent the days in her room upstairs, gazing out the window and watching the autumn landscape slowly give way to winter.

But even in her seclusion, Aoi was able to begin putting some pieces together. She quickly realized that the men and women she saw hanging around outside at all hours were reporters from the media. And she learned that Nanako had survived the fall without serious injury, like herself, but was taken to a different hospital. She'd stealthily searched the entire upstairs, sneaking into her parents'

room and rifling through their drawers until she came across several tell-all magazines hidden in her mother's seldom-opened kimono chest. Back in her own room, she'd read them cover to cover.

She learned a number of other facts from the magazines as well.

The journal in which she'd detailed their daily expenditures was found after their leap, and when it revealed that the two girls in question had been staying at love hotels, the media jumped to the simplistic conclusion that they were lovers. Or they deliberately chose to play it that way for its sensational value. And so the taw-dry tale took shape: the two girls had found a summer job together in Izu intending from the start to run away afterwards; they'd con-summated their passion in a succession of love hotels and haunted Yokohama's discotheques night after night; but despairing of ever gaining acceptance for their forbidden love, they'd resolved to die together.

As far as Aoi was concerned, none of this tale had anything to do with her. It lacked a single shred of truth. And this meant, too, that everything the magazines said about Nanako must also be false. For example, one magazine claimed that her father was in drug rehab and her mother worked as a hostess at a cabaret, while another said her father was in jail on a misdemeanor conviction and her mother was a hooker in Takasaki who only came home on weekends. Others claimed her father had run away with a younger woman, or that her mother was the mistress of a CEO somewhere. The only background for Nanako that Aoi could trust was the apartment she'd seen with her own two eyes—the black hole of a place that bore no clues to its occupants' identities or their lives.

Presumably because they'd failed to find any such sordid details with which to embellish Aoi's story, the scandal writers portrayed her only as an earnest and attentive student.

Taken collectively, even without any basis in fact, the articles presented a neat little story line of Nanako as seducer leading Aoi around by the nose. Even readers smart enough not to fall for every hack-neyed detail were likely to pick up this much. That was what hurt Aoi most.

What a bunch of retards! They've turned us into a couple of les-bos. Isn't it a scream? People are such dimwits. Say, maybe we should
always show up at school arm-in-arm from now on.

Aoi thought she heard Nanako's scoffing voice and looked up, her heart skipping a beat. But all she saw was her own summer uniform hanging against the yellowing wall panel.

Before this, Aoi's father had rarely made it home for dinner, but now he seemed determined to join them at that hour every night.

Aoi's favorite foods appeared on the menu day after day. Hamburger steaks and omelets, gyoza and savory custard, tuna sashimi and macaroni gratin, and so on—often several dishes at a time with no regard for how well they complemented one another. The TV that 182

had always been on now sat silent. In its place her parents kept up a constant flow of pointless banter as if they belonged to some kind of improv comedy act—taking care always to stay on happy topics.

Aoi had no appetite, but she knew the dinner show would go on and on, escalating in inanity until she finished, so she forced herself to keep her chopsticks moving.

One day Grandma was on duty while Mrs. Narahashi was away.

She was in the living room watching
Mito Komon,
the samurai drama she was hooked on, with the TV turned up so loud Aoi could hear the dialogue all the way upstairs. Tuning in and out as she sat gazing from the window, Aoi suddenly straightened up, bounced to her feet, and pulled on a pair of jeans over her pajama bottoms. She hadn't gotten dressed in days. Slipping just a sweater on over her pajama top, no coat, she grabbed her coin purse and started tiptoe-ing down the stairs. The show stopped for a commercial break, and Aoi froze against the wall near the bottom, waiting for the action to resume. When the commercials ended, she took a deep breath and stole down the hall to the front door. Taking care not to make a sound, she slid her feet into a pair of sneakers and very slowly rotated the lock. She looked over her shoulder but saw no sign that her grandmother had heard.
Mito Komon
blared on.

Opening the door, Aoi slipped outside into the cold. Once she was beyond the gate, she broke into a run and raced as fast as she could for the bus stop. It was a quiet weekday afternoon, and there were no other pedestrians in sight. The reporters and media crews long camped out in front of the house had recently pulled up stakes and gone elsewhere. She waited forever for a bus to come, stamping her feet impatiently. Her breath was white. Numbness crept into her fingertips. She realized how long it had been since she was last out of the house.

Relying on her memory from the one time she'd made the trip 183

before, Aoi transferred to a second bus and rode to the stop nearest Nanako's apartment complex. She ran through the rows of identical buildings looking for the one marked E, then charged helter-skelter up the stairs to the familiar door and punched the button on the intercom again and again. There was no answer. Her shoulders still heaving, she reached for the knob.

It turned. She yanked the door open. Three bare rooms stood before her.