Fifty Words for Rain(85)

And then she let it go.

“Where is Akira-san?” Nori asked.

And in the smallest voice, Ayame answered her.

Nori’s mouth opened.

She remembered now.

Lying there, on that frozen ground, there had been someone beside her, just a few feet away.

Akira.

His body had been curled up, almost as if he were sleeping. His hair was slightly tousled, just as it always was.

And his face . . . his face . . . was gone.

Nori doubled over.

And then she screamed.



* * *





They give me something to make me sleep.

But I don’t sleep, though it is all I want to do.

I lie awake and I stare at the ceiling and I think over and over again: Let me die.

Please, God.

Just let me die.



* * *





I do not die.

Though I lie here all day, every day, and turn my face to the wall and wait for death, nothing happens.

I see Akira’s faceless body, just like my mother appeared to me all those years in my dreams, and I have to retch into the bowl beside my bed.

I drink a little water to appease Ayame, who looks close to death herself, but I eat nothing.

The doctor comes to check my wounds, and I feel a ridiculous, unworthy rage when I see him.

I hate him like a scorpion.

Where was he when he was needed? Where was he to help the one worth saving?

I tell him to let me die and he says he cannot, that he is a doctor, and anyway, I don’t deserve to die.

Yes, I do.

I have always deserved to die. But I refused.

And now I have killed him.



* * *





Ayame says that I must get up.

She says that I cannot stay in this bed forever. She has bathed and put on a new, starched dress. She is restored.

He has only been dead for three weeks.

I hear sounds outside my door, of people moving and speaking, of cooking and cleaning and life.

But the sun has gone away.

Don’t they know? Don’t they know that the sun has gone away and everything is finished?

So I cannot get up.

I will never get up.



* * *





AYAME





Tokyo, Japan

March 1st, 1957

The messenger arrives at the crack of dawn on a miserable day. The fog is so thick that I can scarcely see out the window. It poured all night, a wretched hisame: cold rain, the kind that seeps into the air, and seeps into the house, and seeps into your bones. You can’t get warm no matter what you do.

I have been waiting for this since it happened. I divide my time between sitting vigil in her room and sleeping by the front door with a knife beneath my pillow.

I wrap a shawl around my shoulders and meet him at the front gate. I won’t allow him to take even a single step past it.

He bows his head and hands me the letter. It is marked with the seal of the Kamiza family: a white chrysanthemum with a purple center.

“Please be advised, Ayame-san, that this will be her first and only warning.”

I want to be angry, but I cannot. I cannot seem to feel anything anymore.

I have known Akira-sama since the day he was born. I used to hold him, when I was just five years old, and sing him to sleep. I watched him change from a loving, happy little boy into a secretive child who rarely spoke.

When he left for Kyoto, I thought it was over. I even went to work for another great family.

And then he came to find me. He was standing right in front of me, smiling at me, just like a miracle. He asked me to run his household; he said he would trust no one else.

And all of these years, I have watched over him. As my mother watched after his father.

Every day I brought him his coffee, and every day he would look up at me, smile softly, and say, “Thank you, Ayame-san. You always take such good care of me.”

And every day I pretended that I wasn’t desperately, passionately, impossibly in love with him. Because I am a servant. And he is . . . he was . . .

I cannot fathom a world without him.

I clutch the letter in my cold hands.

“That woman can’t come here,” I say in a furious whisper. “It is out of the question.”

He smiles thinly at me. “Do make sure she reads it. My lady will be expecting a reply soon.”

I am shaking. “How soon?”

“Three days.”

He bows again, turns around, and disappears back into the fog.

I go back into the house.

It takes me too long to find the strength to go upstairs. I know what’s waiting for me there. And I don’t want to face it.

I finally will myself to move, and it amazes me how heavy my limbs have become. I have aged a hundred years in weeks.

I don’t knock. I open the door and I find her there, as I knew I would.

She is lying in bed with her face turned up to the ceiling, completely unblinking. Her hair is matted with sweat; it will probably have to be cut.

But the worst is her skin. Her skin, which was once the most peculiar shade of almond brown, is now as gray as ash.

She is turning into a dead woman right before my eyes and there is nothing I can do.

“Nori,” I whisper.