CHAPTER 5 #2
I didn't call out. I turned the page instead and read the next poem to myself, quietly, just for me this time.
We ate dinner early, Riko already gone home for the evening. Grilled fish, the tamagoyaki I'd helped make that morning, rice, small dishes of pickled things I still couldn't name. He ate slow and precise, like he'd decided long ago there was no reason to rush anything worth enjoying.
Halfway through the meal he set his chopsticks down across his bowl and looked at me. “Tell me about your mother,” he said. “Not what happened to her. Who she was.”
Nobody had asked me that in twelve years.
Not like that, asking for her instead of asking about her death, like the two were the same question.
I opened my mouth to give him the short version, the one I gave at dinner parties and interviews, and something about the way he watched me, patient, like he had the whole night if I needed it, made the short version feel like a lie by omission.
So I told him the real one.
I told him she used to hum while she cooked, always off-key, always the same three songs, and that I still couldn't hear a rice cooker click over without hearing her voice underneath it.
I told him about the red tin of sencha she kept on the top shelf, out of my reach until I was eleven, and how she let me stand on a stool and get it down myself the week before she got sick, like some part of her already knew and was starting to hand things over.
I held up my right hand so he could see the thin jade band on my finger. “This was hers,” I said. “She used to say it would end up on a hand she'd never met. I thought that was such a strange thing to tell a kid.” I twisted it once around my finger, an old habit, and made myself stop.
I told him about the aquarium too, the two of us at the touch tank, her laughing so hard at a starfish that she cried. “She had a laugh that didn't care who heard it,” I said. “My father never understood it. I don't think he ever really liked it, either.”
I told him that after she died, he boxed up half the house within a month, and I found the red tin in a donation bag and took it and never told him.
I told him one more thing, the smallest one, the one I'd never said out loud to anyone: that some nights I caught myself humming those same three songs, off-key, the way she had, and only noticed I was doing it when I got to the end.
I don't know how long I talked. Long enough that my tea went cold and I didn't notice until I reached for it. He didn't interrupt me once, not to ask a question, not to fill a pause. He watched me with those dark, patient eyes like every word I gave him was worth keeping.
When I finally stopped, a little embarrassed at how much I'd said, he was quiet a moment.
“Thank you,” he said. “For giving her to me. I have almost nothing of my own mother to give back.”
“Tell me anyway,” I said. “Whatever you have.”
He considered that like a man checking a blade for balance before he used it.
“She died when I was fourteen. Cancer, in her lungs, though she never smoked in her life. My father died eight years after that.” A beat passed.
His right hand moved to his left, thumb resting a moment against the healed end of his shortened little finger, before he let it drop.
I didn't know yet what that gesture meant to him.
I only knew I wanted to ask, and didn't. “That is the whole of it.
I don't have stories the way Riko has stories. I have facts.”
“That's not true,” I said, gentle. “You have a roof, and a rice ball, and a mother who never got to see you become this.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. “She told you about the roof.”
“She told me you came down for dinner, not for fear.”
“I was ten,” he said. “I am rarely afraid, even now. But I have never once been immune to being hungry.”
A flicker crossed his face, there and gone, and it was enough to make my chest go warm and strange.
I didn't press him for more. I understood, the way I had with Riko that morning, that some doors only open the width they're going to open, and pushing at them only teaches a person to lock them harder.
We sat with that a while, the food gone cold between us, and neither of us minded.
By the time we'd cleared the dishes together, him washing, me drying, another silence that didn't feel like silence so much as company, it was late, and my eyes had gone heavy with the particular exhaustion of a day spent feeling things.
I said good night in the corridor. At his study door I stopped, my hand on the frame, and found myself saying it in Japanese instead of English, because it felt truer that way.
“Kyou wa arigatou gozaimashita,” I said. Thank you, for today.
He studied me for several heartbeats, as though the sentence weighed more than its six words. Then he nodded once, reserving language for the things that mattered too much to trust with more.
In my room I pulled the cream cardigan on over the soft cotton I slept in and sat cross-legged on the bed with my medical notebook open on my knees, meaning to add the day's new words the way I did every night, a habit that had outlasted three languages and one dead mother. Sanma. Yuzu. Dashi. Onigiri.
I reached the last blank page in the back, the one I'd been saving without knowing what deserved it, and before I could think better of it, I wrote two words in my own hand, in Japanese, small in the corner where no one would see them unless they were looking.
Watashi no.
Mine.
I looked at it a long time. I didn't know yet whose claim it was supposed to be, his on me, or some small, new, terrifying claim of my own I didn't have a name for yet.
I closed the notebook before I could decide.
I set it on the nightstand, lay back, and stared at the ceiling and listened to the building breathe around me.
Through the wall I heard his chair push back from the desk, a small scrape of wood on wood, and then the familiar weight of him crossing the room. I knew his footsteps by now, unhurried, even, a little heavier on the left.
They came toward the connecting door between our rooms.
I sat up. My whole body went still and listening, the notebook forgotten on the nightstand, my mother's ring cold against my palm where I'd wrapped my hand around it without noticing I'd done it.
The footsteps stopped.
I counted my own heartbeats instead of breaths, one after another, and lost track somewhere past ten.
Nothing happened for several heartbeats. No hand on the door. No voice. Just the particular quiet of a man standing on the other side of a thin piece of wood, deciding something, and me on this side, hoping he'd decide it the way I wanted him to.
Then the footsteps moved again, away from the connecting door, out toward the corridor and the front of my own room instead.
Three soft knocks landed against my door. Not the connecting door. The other one.
I swung my feet to the floor, my heart going fast and loud in the quiet, and sat there one more second before I rose to answer it.