Chapter 4 The Hidden Room #2
Her phrasing appealed to him. He stepped over to another table and came back with a Haruki Murakami novel, 1Q84.
“Here you go,” he said, handing her the book. “And if you wouldn’t mind a bit of friendly advice, read it slowly, to appreciate it fully.”
“I’m not a fast reader… And I hardly read at all anymore,” she confessed. “I just never have time. To be honest, I came in here almost by accident. I’d just got to the station when I found out my flight was delayed, so I figured I’d kill some time in town. I can’t stand airports.”
She opened her handbag, seeming oddly vulnerable all of a sudden, and paid for the book. Then she thanked Mitch, picked up her suitcase and left without looking back.
Mitch watched her make her way down the street, resolutely ignoring the rain falling in a fine mist around her, and wondered to which distant shores Aomame and Tengo would accompany her.
* * *
The following Sunday, Mitch decided to visit his mother.
The secret bookshop had been taking up so much of his time; he felt guilty, as if he’d been neglecting his duties as a son.
It had been too long since he’d last visited, but he had to take two trains and then walk for half an hour to get from the tiny village station to the Sweet Rose Residence, where she’d been living for the past four years.
A flowery name for a place whose residents no longer knew who or where they were.
Mitch spent every penny he could spare to make sure her existence in this depressing place was as comfortable as possible.
During his childhood and teenage years, he’d been extremely close to his mother, but things had changed when his father died, as if a part of her had been torn away.
Her move to the south coast had put even more emotional distance between them, and then her memory had begun to fail.
Whenever he visited, he always brought a slice of the same kind of cake she used to bake every Sunday morning when he was a boy.
She ate it with relish, smiling at each bite, as if to tell her son there were still some things she remembered.
But as the months passed, her smile had become little more than a thank-you to the kind stranger who’d brought her a sweet treat.
The doctors had spoken to Mitch about the stages of memory loss.
Earlier that year, Mitch’s mother had taken a plunge into the void.
She’d retreated into silence, her gaze lost in the fog of absence.
Time and time again, Mitch left the Sweet Rose Residence heavy-hearted, his emotions in tatters, resolved never to visit again because it was pointless – and yet he always came back, to hug his mother and breathe in her smell, to be reminded of a time when he’d been without worries and the world was a less hostile place.
During this visit, he told her all about his work on the secret room and his plans for it.
With her, at least, he knew it was safe to say anything.
He acted out the determination with which he’d hacked through the brick wall, and described the clever mechanism he’d devised to conceal the opening with an old bookcase.
No one would suspect a thing, but just a light pressure on the back wall caused the whole thing to swing inward, revealing the secret room.
Looking at his mother’s hands, blue-veined and brownspotted, he remembered the hours she’d spent helping him with his homework at the kitchen table.
Whole evenings in each other’s company. Why this memory now?
He had no idea. Maybe he was remembering his mother’s sharp mind.
Or maybe some of her motherly love still lingered, trapped within the four walls of this room.
Or maybe it was her soul, leaving her in fragments, pieces of it touching his.
Mitch found himself clinging to these maybes because his mother – who always used to make him summarize his schoolwork on index cards – had just unwittingly given him the solution to his current dilemma.
He would do the same now: make a card for each of his regular customers and use it to figure out who had been the most affected by House Bill 1467.
The ones who loved books that stirred something within their hearts.
Books that made them see the world a little differently.
Mitch was a dreamer, yes. But he believed wholeheartedly that people were shaped by what they read.
First thing on Monday, he applied himself to the new task.
He combed through his sales records and managed to pick out a few familiar names: people he might be able to trust. Then he carefully considered how best to approach them.
He felt a little like a drug dealer, which wasn’t really so absurd – reading could very quickly become an addiction.
Morning and night, he watched for his fellow addicts on the train.
Deaf to everything around them, muttering or laughing or crying in their seats, sometimes even making involuntary gestures – the kind that would’ve marked them as crazy had they not been holding a book in their hands.
The ones who often missed their stop, like his father once had.