Women On the Other Shore (30 page)

"But I thought you and Takeshi were close," she put in before Aoi had a chance to go on.

"Yeah, I know," she admitted without the slightest hesitation. She lit a cigarette, exhaled, and smiled. "When something went badly here at work, it felt so good to have someone to talk to, someone who'd lend an ear and tell me he understood. You have a husband, so you probably don't realize, but it's hard to find people you can really talk to about your work."

Sayoko bristled. She had been constantly at odds with Shuji since starting work. She'd even cried herself to sleep some nights, despite telling herself she had nothing to cry about. Why did Aoi always make assumptions like that, when she didn't actually have the first idea what Sayoko had been going through? But she said nothing.

She simply stared at the coffee Aoi had placed before her, feeling very awkward.

"Well, we've kind of gotten off track, but what do you say? Will you do it?" Aoi leaned across the table and peered at Sayoko.

Sayoko was remembering the first time she'd met her in this room.
Oh, wow, can you believe it? We went to the same school!
Aoi had exclaimed excitedly, leaning closer over Sayoko's resume as if to make sure it was true.
We might've bumped into each other under the
ginkgo trees, or in one of the dining halls!
she'd beamed. She sounded almost like a student again.

"I... I don't know. It's all so sudden," Sayoko mumbled almost inaudibly.

I thought you knew,
she wanted to say.
Even when my own husband sneered at what I was doing, I thought you, at least, knew how
231

seriously I took the work that
I
helped build up from scratch.
But again she said the words only in her heart.

"It's sudden all right. But I promise I won't ask you to stay late and I think being such a small operation means we can accommo-date you more easily. You could even bring Akari here if need be.

Which reminds me. Have you heard of this place called the Family Support Center? I thought it might be something you could take advantage of and I looked into it a bit—you know, because you're always worrying about making it to the school at pickup time. Anyway, if you need me to find out more or look for other things like that, I'll help in any way I can."

Sayoko's face burned. She'd known about the center for quite some time. They matched families that were past their child-rearing years with young families nearby to help with tasks such as nursery school drop-off or pickup and babysitting after school. She'd seriously considered signing up a number of times—there was no telling when help like that might come in handy—but she'd always held off because she was leery of having to deal with people she didn't know.

What if there was a problem of some kind and things got messy, she worried, and continued to drag her feet. Now she felt as if Aoi was chiding her for that. A retort—that she'd never asked for that sort of help—formed on the tip of her tongue, but she said nothing, and simply sat staring down at her hands folded in her lap.

"As a matter of fact, I've been thinking maybe I was a little too quick to jump into housecleaning anyway. In some ways I hate turning jobs already in the pipeline over to Noriko because that's like giving up. But I'm telling myself it's okay because our customers are probably in better hands that way. They'll probably be happier with Noriko."

Aoi rose to her feet. Sayoko couldn't bring herself to look up. In
better hands that way? Happier with Noriko than me?
Aoi was probably right, of course, but it was the last thing Sayoko wanted to hear from her. She felt tears starting to well up and quickly bit her tongue to keep from sobbing out loud.

"Well, I guess I'd better brush my teeth and get to work," Aoi said, turning toward the bathroom. Sayoko held her head down, blinking hard to clear the tears from her eyes. When she was sure all trace of them was gone, she looked up.

"Can I ask you something?" She raised her voice so Aoi could hear her in the bathroom.

"Yeah? Wha-a-at?" a cheery voice came back.

Sayoko took a deep breath and blurted out the question. "What ultimately happened?"

Aoi poked her head out into the hall with her toothbrush in her mouth. "What ultimately happened with what?"

"After you jumped off the roof," she said, fixing her gaze firmly on her. She intended this as payback: payback for asking why Sayoko wasn't using the Family Support Center; payback for blithely suggesting that their customers were in better hands with Noriko. She could think of no stronger riposte.

For several seconds, Aoi held Sayoko's gaze without moving a mus-cle. Then she pulled the toothbrush from her mouth and burst out laughing.

"I didn't realize you knew about that," she said between laughs.

"Who filled you in? Junko? Takeshi? They all get such a kick out of that story. Did they tell you I was gay, or that I had a death wish?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just an ordinary girl who likes guys.

I just don't have much luck with them is all."

After another burst of laughter, Aoi ducked back into the wash-room. Sayoko could hear her rinsing her mouth.

Sayoko looked down at her untouched coffee as she waited for her to reemerge. The black liquid in the middle of the cup looked like a tiny portal offering a glimpse of the darkness beyond.

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What ultimately happened...

The full weight of what Nanako had been saying finally sank in for Aoi.
None of that stuff scares me. None of that stuff matters to
me If you don't like it, then just don't be part of it. It's as easy as
that.

It wasn't merely bluff, or empty bravado. She was stating simple fact.

At the start of the new academic year in April, Aoi returned to the school Nanako no longer attended. Her mother had urged her many times to just say so if she wanted to transfer, and Aoi had spent much of her break worrying about how stressful going back to the same school was likely to be after what she'd done. When she finally announced her decision to stay, it was purely out of consideration for her parents. She'd uprooted their lives to come to this school. How could she ask them to go through that again? And besides, even at a new place she'd be holding her breath all the time for fear of attract-ing the wrong kind of attention. It made her feel faint just thinking about it.

So when school started up again, Aoi simply went back as if nothing had happened. It still felt like everything was taking place on the far side of an invisible wall surrounding her. None of the girls from the nondescript group she used to hang out with came to talk with her, nor did she approach any of them. The meanness that ran rampant the year before had not altogether disappeared, but it had lightened up considerably. Nobody called Aoi names the way they 234

had with Nanako, nor did her possessions go missing or her uniform get trampled on, and no lurid stories about the incident flew back and forth across the classroom. Her classmates kept their distance and that was all. She simply had no one to talk to.

But as she looked around her, she realized it was true: there was nothing that really mattered to her here. She couldn't see a single thing on the other side of that invisible wall that she felt any desire to reach out for.

It was quiet. Encapsulated as she was inside her own solitary cocoon, no ripple disturbed the silence that enfolded her so long as she herself remained still. In fact, that placid quietness was what she treasured most—what mattered to her more than anything else in a building no longer graced with Nanako's presence.

After spending her school hours wrapped in this bubble of silence each day, Aoi raced home as fast as she could, yanking open the gate and leaping for the mailbox. But day after day, the letter Aoi longed to see failed to arrive.

Summer vacation neared and still there came no letter from Nanako. Opening the phone book, she began calling every number listed under Noguchi. But none of the Noguchis she called had a seventeen-year-old daughter who wrote her name "fish child" and read it Nanako.

As she sat in her room staring into space, memories came flood-ing back. The train on the way to Izu. White sheets fluttering on the line in the Manos' yard. Their little boy's plastic cars. Nanako breaking down in Imaihama Station. The love hotel rooms with their bizarre decors. The discos with purple and pink flashing lights.

And each time this chain of images scrolled back through her mind, a single exchange from that day on the bridge with Nanako echoed in her ears afterwards:
We never did get anywhere. What
I wonder is

where we were trying to go. We never did get anywhere. What
1 wonder

is where we were trying to go.
As those words repeated themselves 235

over and over, all the things they had done, and everything that had followed from them, spun rapidly through her head. Nanako insisted that her moving away had no connection to those events, but if it weren't for those things, wouldn't she still be here now? Wasn't the lack of any communications from her part of the same thing? Why had Aoi been left alone to come home each day and stare at the same unchanging landscape outside her bedroom window?... As she mulled over these thoughts, a white haze seemed to descend on everything inside her head. It was a decidedly unwelcome sensation, for she couldn't help thinking that the white haze spreading inside her was Nanako's absence itself.

Aoi passed the days in her bubble of silence, and she walked for graduation surrounded by that same silence. Having made the cut at her first-choice school, she moved to Tokyo with little more than the clothes on her back. Her first home away from home was a dormi-tory in Nogata.

The biggest surprise she had when she started college was that everybody talked to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Say, have you joined any clubs?"

"There's going to be a class party. Wanna go?"

"Ooh, where'd you buy that outfit?"

Men and women alike treated her as a friend from the start. She ate lunch with them in the student dining halls and went along to cheap drinking places after classes. She joined the raucous, drunken crowds at large student mixers, and sometimes crashed at a classmate's one-room apartment afterwards. She soon had friends she met up with on weekends to see movies or to go shopping, and a sorta boyfriend she talked with on the phone every night.

But Aoi found it impossible to fully open herself up to any of her new friends. She could laugh with them, rant with them, even play at falling in love with them. But there remained a certain line she 236

was loath to let anybody cross, and if someone tried to come closer than that, she hastily erected a wall, not answering the phone and staying away from classes until a more comfortable distance reas-serted itself. A number of her gal pals eventually drifted away as a result, and her sorta boyfriends never became true boyfriends. She was afraid of getting too close to anyone. To her, closeness represented a loss rather than a gain.

As her nineteenth birthday approached, Aoi secretly fantasized about receiving a delivery from Nanako with the promised present inside. But her mailbox remained empty. Then it hit her that Nanako might not actually be alive anymore. She might have chosen a more reliable means of departure this time, and successfully made her way to another place all by herself. The thought was deeply unsettling, as if the ground were slowly crumbling from beneath her feet.

At the start of what would have been her junior year, Aoi set out on an open-ended trip abroad. She'd heard that one of her classmates had hopped the Ganjin Ferry to Shanghai, and decided to follow his example. Although it was both her first time traveling alone and her first time outside Japan, she didn't feel the least bit nervous.

From Shanghai she flew to Hong Kong, and from there on to Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. The places she visited and the things she saw kept her in a constant state of culture shock. She realized just how tiny her world had been. Feeling that world grow bigger and bigger as she traveled, she pressed eagerly on from one strange town to another.

Nearly a year after first setting out on her journey, Aoi found herself in Laos. She was waiting at a bus stop along the route leading out of Vientiane toward Vangviang when a young man approached her.

"I have a Japanese friend who looks a lot like you," he declared in fluent English. "I met her when she was traveling along this route last year. You reminded me so much of her, I couldn't help wanting to say hello. I wonder if you might know her."

237

A
constant
stream of motorcycles and trucks roared by along the unpaved road
of
red clay. The dust kicked up from the roadbed gave everything in the vicinity a thin red coating as it settled back to earth. Next to the bus stop stood a food stall offering sandwiches made with French bread and a variety of fillings. Flies swarmed busily about.

Aoi asked the natural question: "What was her name?"

It was hard to catch what the young man actually said, but to Aoi it sounded a bit like Nanako.

"Nanako? You say Nanako?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, Nanako," he said with a big nod, and then repeated as if to reconfirm, "Nanako. Nanako."

"Where you meet her? What she doing? How she look? Where she going? What city in Japan she live?" Though frustrated by her own poor command of English, Aoi bombarded the Laotian youth with questions.

"She was a pretty girl, shorter than you, and she said she came here from Thailand, She went back to Japan from here. She said she lived in Tokyo."

Aoi felt her fingers quivering as she listened to his replies. She couldn't actually believe it was the Nanako she knew, yet somewhere deep inside she was convinced of it.

"At my house, I have a letter and some pictures. Would you like to come see them?"

"Yes!" Aoi replied eagerly. She leaped onto the back of his motorcycle without a second thought.

After bumping briefly along the dusty road, which despite being an important traffic artery was dotted with only a few scattered shops, they proceeded onto the thoroughfare spanned by the Patuxai Gate, modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. They passed through the gate and drove on. Soon the shops and food stalls disappeared entirely, giving way to the occasional shantylike dwelling set among 238