Fifty Words for Rain(75)

She threw the glass. Akira yelped and ducked behind the couch.

“NORI!”

She picked up another glass. This one was heavier than the first—it must have been part of the expensive crystal collection that Akira had inherited from his father.

“Stop it!” Akira cried. “Not that one! For God’s sake, Nori, it’s an heirloom.”

She shrugged and felt her blouse slip off her shoulder. She had lost so much weight that almost nothing fit her anymore.

“Mother left because she was terrified,” she said. “And miserable. And because she had a song to sing, and our grandmother and your father jammed it right back down her throat until she was suffocating on it. She couldn’t breathe. She could never breathe . . .”

She should have been unnerved by the way her voice sounded, but she couldn’t feel anything anymore. She wasn’t even angry. Just numb.

“And that wasn’t me,” she continued. She could feel the emotions she’d ignored for so long spilling over. “That wasn’t my fault. Everyone has always blamed me, but it’s not my fault . . . and now you . . . you too, Oniichan . . .”

Akira’s eyes were fixed on her.

She felt her fist close on the glass. Vaguely, she heard it shatter, felt the shards dig into her palm. A warm rush told her she was bleeding, and it felt like freedom, like that terrible, wonderful moment when she’d thought that she was forever past her pain.

“You were all I had,” she whispered.

Is this what it comes down to in the end, Mother? Do we all end up alone? Dancing figurines in a music box, moving, but never going anywhere at all?

Her brother’s face changed. He was pale and shivering, but once his eyes fell on her blood, his strength appeared to return to him.

“Ayame,” he croaked. He tried again with a stronger voice. “Ayame!”

Nori looked down at her hand. There were three large shards of glass sticking out of her palm and two smaller ones between her thumb and forefinger. The cuts weren’t particularly deep, but it looked bad.

But it didn’t hurt. Her emotion spent, she sank to the floor.

She sensed a flurry of movement at the door, some rushed words. Akira said something to Ayame twice before she finally left.

Nori wrapped her hand in her blouse.

Akira knelt in front of her with the medicine kit at his side. His hands were shaking as he tried to open the tin lid.

“Give me your hand.”

She didn’t move.

Akira reached for her. “Nori, give me your hand.”

Her head was throbbing. She didn’t have the energy to fight him anymore. She did as she was told.

Akira’s face was a funny green color. He picked up a pair of tweezers and started to pull the largest shard out of her palm.

Nori winced but did not cry out. She watched with a kind of macabre fascination.

Akira cursed under his breath. “Look what you’ve done. What’s wrong with you, Nori?”

She looked away. “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

He touched the side of her face, and against her will, she met his gaze. Something inside of her stretched and broke at his touch.

“Are you okay?”

She felt tears starting to fall. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

She choked on a tiny sob. “Oniichan . . .”

Akira hesitated. “I know you think I don’t see you,” he whispered. “But it isn’t true. I just don’t know what to say to you. I have never been able to protect you the way I wanted. And I’m not . . . I was never meant to take care of anyone. I’m not built for it.”

Nori shook her head. “You have done more than enough.”

He sighed. “You know, when they told me about you, I wanted to hate you. It would have been so much easier for me to hate you. I never understood why Mother left, and then they told me about you and it made sense. I blamed my father for years, but then he died and I had no one to hold my anger. No one to put it on. And then they moved me to Kyoto and I found you.”

She bowed her head.

“But then I saw you and you looked . . . so much like her. And you were such a frail little thing, I just couldn’t do it.”

He plucked the next shard of glass from her palm, so quickly that she didn’t have time to cry out.

“You’re a lot like her too, you know,” he continued.

Nori didn’t dare breathe. Akira never talked about their mother this much.

He met her eyes. “You terrify me, Nori.”

She nipped her lower lip. “But . . . how?”

Akira’s eyes were shining with unshed tears. “I don’t think she ever had a happy day in her life. She was beautiful and she smiled often, but she always seemed sad. She used to sit me at the piano beside her, you know, and she’d play . . . she played remarkably well. And then when she’d finish, she would smile for just a moment and it was . . .” His voice cracked. “It was the only time it was real.”

His cleared his throat. “She adored me,” he confessed. “And I tried . . . I tried to make her happy. I started playing the violin to make her happy. And . . . then one day, she kissed me on the forehead, told me I was her world. And then she was just gone. And my father would never talk about her. For the next eleven years, I never knew . . .”