Fifty Words for Rain(29)

All this time, she’d asked God for a gift. She hadn’t realized that she’d been living in one all along. A sweet little bubble, filled with a combination of dreams, hope, and blatant stupidity. It wasn’t a cage, as she had thought it was. It was a shield.

Her mother wasn’t coming back for her. She was never, ever coming back.

And it was this realization that finally made the tears come.





CHAPTER SIX


    AME (RAIN)




Kyoto, Japan

Summer 1951

Akira woke her at dawn the next morning and, without saying a word, dragged her down the stairs and then told her to wait in the living room. Nori watched in stunned silence as her brother disappeared into the study to “have a word with our dear grandmother.”

Akiko was gaping at her, clearly unsure of whether she should even ask. She wiped her hands on her apron and frowned.

“Little madam . . .” she began.

“I don’t know,” Nori whispered, tugging on one of her curls. Unbrushed and unbound, it caught her finger in its tangles and refused to let go. She was still in her nightgown and shivered as a gust of air washed over her. “Go see what’s happening.”

Akiko nodded and started out of the room, but hesitated before turning the corner. She was supposed to be watching her charge. If anything should chance to be broken, they would both pay. Nori offered up a wry smile.

“Don’t worry, Akiko-san. I won’t go anywhere. Promise.”

That was all the reassurance the maid needed, and she rounded the corner, leaving Nori alone. Nobody, not even her grandmother, seriously doubted her obedience. It was her one true skill.

The rugs beneath her bare feet were wonderfully plush and soft. They were probably obscenely expensive, and she carefully maneuvered herself off of them. Regardless of what Akira said, Nori knew that she was not impervious to beatings. Her grandmother was not a woman who could be told what to do, and she didn’t intend to push her newfound luck.

She stood there, pressed against the wall, desperately trying not to touch anything. She still felt uncomfortable in the main house. Even when she had her clothes on, she felt naked.

Twenty minutes turned into an hour. With every passing moment, her anxiety mounted.

Nori had not the slightest clue what they were talking about now. But usually Akira’s requests were greeted with a sigh, a flutter of the fan, and a calm “As you like, dear,” or “If you must.”

For the conversation to drag on for so long . . . what had her brother chosen to ask for this time? The prophet’s head on a silver platter?

Finally, after what seemed like a thousand years, Akira reentered the room. The expression on his face told her that whatever he had wanted, he had won. He was looking at her with a twinkle in his eye that she had not seen before.

“Nori,” he whispered, his voice queerly high-pitched. “Come with me.”

She could ask why. She could ask where they were going. But she did none of those things.

Wordlessly, she held out her hand. Akira took it, and she realized that his palms were sweating. He guided her down the hallway and around the twists and turns of this seemingly endless house.

She’d only ever seen it from her window: the gardens. Now that she was standing behind a thin, sliding screen door, it struck her that she’d never seen it at eye level. She knew at once that the door before her led outside. Her mouth opened involuntarily. She could smell the air. It brushed across her skin like a gentle caress, so tender it nearly made her weep.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “This . . . this is the most important rule. I’m not allowed to leave. Someone will see me.”

“Who will see you, Noriko?” Akira asked in earnest. “There isn’t another house for miles. This entire property is gated off.”

“But Grandmother says . . .”

“She’s given her permission. All she asks is that I go with you, that you stay away from her roses, and not to go out when the sun is highest in the sky, for the sake of your complexion.”

Somehow, Nori strongly doubted that her grandmother had used such docile language.

“I can’t,” she whispered again, digging her nails into her palms in the vain hope that it would somehow anchor her. Her head was beginning to spin. “I don’t . . .”

“I see the way you look outside. It’s pathetic. You look like a whipped puppy. And now you’re saying you don’t want to go?”

Nori bristled. He had no idea, this golden boy, how many nights she’d spent in silent desperation wishing for the open sky. She turned to face him.

“No, I’m saying I can’t go. She will kill me, Oniichan. Obaasama would give you anything in the world, I know she would, but not this. If anyone finds out about me, the gossip will plague you and yours for the next hundred years. We’ll never get rid of the stain. That’s why I have to stay inside. That’s why she bribes the servants with fine things. That’s why she has told me countless times that to set one foot outside that door means death.”

“And I am telling you,” Akira growled back, lowering his face so that it was at eye level with her own, “that she needs me more than she needs the titles, or the money, or the estates. More than the servants or the cars or this archaic sense of pristine honor she holds on to. She needs me. She’s far too old to have any more children, and Mother is likely dead in a ditch somewhere. She needs me here, she needs me alive, and she needs me to get a child on some dainty little flower of a noble girl from the capital. What she doesn’t need is you. If she wanted you dead, you’d be dead already, you stupid girl.”