The Last Leaves Falling (33 page)

“I wanted it to be a flip book so that it moved, but there wasn’t time.”

Kaito shakes his head. “It’s brilliant!”

“Read it?” I ask, because I want to hear it in her voice, so she shuffles around behind us so that she can see the page.

“Professor Crane was wise, but he was sad,” she said, and I let the pictures—a crane, folded awkwardly into a wheelchair, staring through the window at a gorgeous sunny day—tell the rest.

“His wings were broken, and he could not fly.”

My heart wrenches as I see his tear-filled eyes, and I do not care that birds don’t cry.

“His friends came to visit him, but it was not the same. He wanted adventure. And sunlight on his feathers.” She pauses to let us take in the scene: Professor Crane, dejected, while his friends—Raccoon Dog and Macaque—do their best to make him smile.

“Science and medicine had tried and failed, and Old Crane was ready to give up. But his friends were not, and one day, they arrived with arms full of bits and bobs and hoojiwhatsits, and heads full of ideas.

“They circled him, and scratched their heads, and finally, AHA! Ideas! Snowy the monkey tried first. Taking a ruler . . . and her paint box . . . and a big roll of paper, she painted him new, magnificent wings.

“But the wet paint was heavy, and when she tried to fix the wings to the professor—”

Grinning, Kaito points at the little drawn-in noises, stopping her midsentence. “Do the sound effects!”

“
You
do the sound effects.” She laughs, digging him in the ribs.

He nods.

“The wet paint was heavy,” Mai continues, “and when she tried to strap the wings to the professor . . .”

“Rrrrrrrrrp!” he yells.

“. . . the paper sagged and tore.”

I look from my friends to the ink strokes on Mai’s page, the way she’s made the paper look heavy and waterlogged, so you
know
that the poor monkey’s plan could never work, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But I don’t have time to work it out because Mai plows on:

“But the friends would
not
give up.”

They scratch their heads, and frown, and pace around in circles, until finally:

“AHA!” Mai yells.

And Raccoon Dog rushes off to find his toolbox, and he’s bashing and clanking and twiddling away until finally he emerges with . . . robot wings!

“Professor Crane’s friends helped him strap the robo-wings in place, and they all held their breath as Raccoon Dog switched them on . . .

“They buzzed . . .

“And beeped . . .

“And whirred . . .

“And then they twitched, and the professor stretched and flexed his steely robo-feathers. And with a huge smile, he stood and flapped his robo-wings.

“His friends threw open the porch windows and cheered as the professor leapt into the sky.

“And he stretched out his shiny new wings as far as they would go, and he flew!”

And Mai’s voice, in those last words, is so full of wonder and promise that as I’m staring at the final panel—a vast summer sky, and in the middle, heading higher still, a tiny, glinting crane—I feel like I am flying too.

•  •  •  •

Finally, Mai breaks the spell.

“You see?” she whispers. “This way, we can do anything we like.”

80

Over the next week the three animal friends go everywhere: taste huckleberries in an old saloon while wearing cowboy hats and boots, see the sun set over the Sahara, and rest their weary limbs in steaming rock pools at the top of mountains. A new episode appears in my in-box every day.

They’re beautiful. And each one makes me laugh, and wish that I could jump into the screen and go adventuring; taste the berries and feel the water on my skin, take my friends to wild, exotic places.

But every day it’s getting harder even to get out of bed, to click the mouse and pull my face into a smile.

Today’s episode sees Professor Crane and Snowy and Raccoon Dog building a Super Special Time Machine, only Raccoon Dog miscalculates the size of the battery, and there’s only enough juice for one round trip. They argue over where to go, whether to see the dinosaurs or pharaohs, or go forward to spy on their future selves. But eventually, the promise of a little T. rex action wins, and off they go to vast, unblemished lands to search for leathered wings and footprints big enough to stand in.

“Are you all right?” Mai asks. I stop reading, switch windows so that I can see her, and her frown spills across my screen.

“Yes.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I’m just tired.”

As I say the words, I realize how deeply true they are. I’m tired.

I stare harder at the screen, push the thought away because it is too big and terrible, and I do not want it. But I’m tired. And I wish that I could travel back in time to when it wasn’t so.

81

“Mama!” My voice cracks the night, but I don’t care. Hot pain sears my legs and spreads into my groin, and if I could move I’d curl up into a ball and die. “Mama!”

And she’s here, soothing, smoothing, asking what it is that she can do. I cannot answer. It is all I can do to squeeze the tears out from my eyes and keep from screaming.

“My son,” she says. “My son. What can I do?”

But I do not know.

I just want it to stop.

She reaches for my pills, and I
so
want them. All of them, until it stops. But I see her eyes, her stone-set jaw, and I cannot let her watch me float away. Somehow I shake my head, and when I part my lips my words spill out. Dry and desperate, but there. “No. Please. I don’t—”

My mother does not listen. She pops the foil and tries to slip the small white tablets onto my tongue. But they stick to my lips and I twist my head, spitting them away.

“No.”

She stands there, helpless, pillbox in one hand and water in the other, and looks on as a fresh wave of pain takes hold, and I bite down so hard that I taste iron.

“Sora—”

“No.” It hurts, but it will pass.

This time, I win. She pulls me up into her arms, holds me, nestles her face in my hair. And I can feel her warm breaths, as sharp and erratic as my own, and her heart beats hard against my back, and if I’d had those pills, if I were floating away, I might think that there weren’t two of us, but one.

•  •  •  •

Finally it breaks, and my breathing steadies. We stay wrapped together for a moment longer, and I let the poststorm calm wash over me, until my mother shifts beneath me and the moment’s gone.

She lays me back against the pillow and crosses the room, and I’m half-confused until she says, “You’re soaked,” and reaches for a fresh, dry shirt. Now that she has said it, I can feel the dampness on my skin, cooling fast. I feel hot-but-cold, and sticky, and I really want a shower, but the clock beside me flashes 03:00 and I cannot make my mother haul me out of bed.

She helps me into a new shirt, which catches on my clammy skin, and I wonder whether the fabric is instantly prickled with sweat. Then she kisses my forehead and steps toward the door.

“Wait!”

She stops. I know it’s late, and she is tired, but I don’t want her to go.

“Stay?”

She shuffles back toward me. “Of course.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“Hush.”

“No. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I’m sorry.”

She stares, clenching her jaw, and I don’t know whether she is angry or just trying not to cry, and then she whips around without a word and she is gone, leaving an emptiness behind.

I did this to her. Me and my stupid sickness. It’s so bad that she cannot even look at me, cannot be in the same room as her own son.

But then she’s back, filling up the room. She’s smiling, though her eyes are heavy, and she has something in her hands. An album.

She slips onto the bed beside me and opens it to the first page. My mother’s face, younger then, stares back at me, and with her is a scowling baby.

“That was the happiest day of my life,” she says. “The day I brought you home.”

She turns the page, and there’s me, maybe two years old, on a tiny purple trike. “You loved that thing. So proud of it. You’d go up and down Bah-Ba’s yard all day.”

She turns the page again. Mama and Bah-Ba and Ojiisan standing behind me in my first school uniform. I remember that day. It was three whole weeks before the start of the term, but I had begged Mama to let me wear it, and show it to my grandparents. It was hot, and I should have been out chasing butterflies, but Ojiisan and I stayed inside all day, taking turns to play the teacher and the schoolchild.

She turns the page again and again and again, and our whole life is there, baseball games and lazy summer days, mountain hikes and festival parades, Drama Club and Debate Club, and several of me curled into a chair or under tables with a book.

I laugh at the picture of my mother climbing up into a cherry tree, brandishing a wooden sword. My legs dangle from the top left corner, and I imagine yelling down at her, “Can’t catch
me
, renegade! I am Lord Sora, the greatest and most noble samurai that ever lived!”

“We’ve had some good times, haven’t we?” I say.

“Yes.” She sighs. And her fingers pause, stop turning. “Yes. We have. So don’t you ever say you’re sorry;
I’m
not.”

I’m not, either. Not for this. But every day I’m further from the boy I was, and I want
him
to be the one that she remembers.

82

I lie awake for hours, waiting for the dawn as that thought grows inside my head.

It’s selfish, leaving everyone behind to deal with the mess I’ve made. But I don’t have a choice, I’m going to do that anyway.

Is it different, if I
choose
to go?

I watch the color sweep across the sky as though the sun were a small child with a damp cloth, and the sky a magic-watercolor-fun canvas. One touch and the picture is revealed.

Yes, it’s different.

But I don’t know which is worse.

Is it worse to snatch myself away, or to drag everything out, make everybody wait for the inevitable?

I try to imagine my mother walking in to find me gone, reading the words I’d left behind, and I cannot. But neither can I see her stooping over me when I am nothing but two moving eyes inside a hardened shell.

I’m damning her whatever choice I make.

But I don’t want to stay, not like that. I don’t want to lie day after day, unable to run, to go outside and see the stars or climb a tree. I don’t want to watch her hovering and not be able to reach up and give her a hug, or speak the words “I love you.”

And yes, she’ll cry, she’ll mourn.

But she’s going to do that anyway.

•  •  •  •

Over the next few days, I watch the lines around my mother’s eyes, and listen to her gentle sighs, the slow, tired shuffling of her feet. She smiles, but it is strained, and I know she’s only doing it for me.

I start to formulate a plan, and though it’s risky, and not without pain, I am sure it’s right.