Warcross (Warcross #1)(76)
A blue egg comes tumbling into view, and Hideo looks up to see Sasuke wearing a goofy grin. “Threw it too hard!” he shouts. “Can you toss it back?”
Hideo grabs the egg and flings it back at his brother. The egg flies far past the clearing and disappears into the thick of the park’s trees, where they line the banks of a tiny stream overgrown with bamboo. He laughs as Sasuke’s grin changes into an exasperated frown. “Wait for me, Hideo,” he calls over his shoulder, and then he stomps off into the trees to fetch the egg. Hideo turns his back and keeps setting out the other eggs. A few minutes later, he glances over his shoulder.
“Are you done yet?” he calls out.
No answer.
Hideo stands up straight and stretches, savoring the warm glow of the afternoon sun. “Sasuke!” he calls again at the thicket of trees. The only sounds that answer him are the faint trickle of the stream’s water and the hush of golden leaves drifting in the air. The breeze whispers through the swaying bamboo stalks.
A few seconds pass before Hideo lets out a sigh and starts trudging over to his brother’s end of the park. “Come on. We don’t have all day,” he says. “Sasuke! Hurry up!” I look on as we follow him through the trees and into the overgrown grasses, slowing occasionally whenever the foliage turns too thick.
“Sasuke?” Hideo calls again. His voice sounds different now—the exasperation gone, replaced with a twinge of confusion. He stops in the middle of the trees, looking all around him as if unable to believe that there was another person who had just been here. Long minutes drag by as he does an exhaustive hunt of the small thicket. He calls again. Now there is a note of concern. Then, fear. No sign of another boy. It’s as if he had simply ceased to exist.
“Sasuke?” Hideo’s voice becomes urgent, frantic. His steps quicken into a run. He hurries out of the thicket and back into the clearing, hoping that his brother had somehow wandered back there without hearing him. But the rest of the park stays empty, the boys’ blue and red plastic eggs still scattered all over the grass, waiting for the game to start.
Hideo halts in the middle of the clearing. The Memory turns panicked now, the world blurring around us as Hideo spins in place, looking one way, then the other, then running to another section of the park. The view shakes wildly as he goes. His breaths come in short gasps, sending clouds of mist up in the chilly air. When I catch a glimpse of his face reflected against the metal of a parked car, his eyes are wide and dark, the pupils dilated with terror. “Sasuke! Sasuke!” Each shout sounds more like a scream than the last. Hideo calls and calls until his voice begins to crack.
He stops abruptly, gasping for air, and clutches his head with his hands. “Calm down. Sasuke went home,” he whispers. He nods to himself, believing it. “He went home early without telling me. That’s where he is.” Without another hesitation, he starts running home, scanning the sidewalks wildly, looking for the back of a small boy wearing a bright blue scarf. “Please, please,” I realize he’s whispering to himself as he goes. The word trails out in a repeated line, thin as a ghost.
He doesn’t stop running until he reaches his home, a house I now recognize. He pounds on the door until his father opens it, his face bewildered. “Hideo—what are you doing here?” He cranes his neck and looks behind Hideo at the sidewalk. “Where’s your brother?”
At the question, Hideo seems to waver in place, and I can see that, in this instant, he knows his brother never came home, he knows something terrible has happened. Behind him, the sun has already started to set, washing the landscape from gold into pink.
All I can think is that it is far too beautiful of a day.
The Memory ends. I’m startled as the onsen reappears around me and Hideo, the peaceful fog of hot water and the glisten of early lamplight on the rocks. I look at him. He doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t even seem to be here anymore, for the look on his face is distant and grim. Afraid. After a pause, he brings up another Memory. It is the same sequence we just watched—except he has altered the park’s landscape, shifting the stream a little this way, a little that. He brings up a third Memory. Same sequence, but with the brothers in slightly different positions.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone over this scene in my head,” he finally says to me in a soft voice. He flips to another, and yet another, each with subtle details changed. This time, the scene shows Hideo turning around a few seconds sooner and calling Sasuke back before he can go into the trees. Another one shows Hideo steering Sasuke out of the park and back home before they can start playing their game. Yet another shows Hideo going with Sasuke to retrieve the plastic egg instead of leaving him to do it himself. My heart cracks a little with each new variation. This is his endless hell. “I can remember every single detail about that day . . . except the details that matter. Where he went. When I stopped hearing his footsteps in the leaves. Who took him. I think about what might have happened if I’d done this. Or that. If things had shifted even a little.” He shakes his head. His jaw is so tight that I’m afraid he might break it. “I don’t know. So I keep building.”
He’s torturing himself. I watch with a lump in my throat as he brings up another constructed Memory—this time of the same night, with flashlights dancing through the park. His mother’s and father’s voices are high and frantic, breaking. Then the scene switches to a young Hideo on his knees before his parents, sobbing, begging forgiveness, hysterical, inconsolable, even as they try to make him get up. The scene switches yet again to Hideo lying in bed, curled up, silent, listening to the faint crying of his mother coming from his parents’ bedroom. It switches to him waking every morning and looking in the mirror . . . and seeing a thin, silver streak grow steadily into his black hair. I wince. The trauma was what had slashed him in white. And even though I am not him, I understand, and even without the Link connecting our emotions right now, I can feel the vicious, unending shame that clouds his heart.