Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Twelve
The hand that marks time stops once, broadly, takes in what it has witnessed, then moves on as if nothing has happened.
Wearing the face of moving just as it always did, the hand continues.
That day too, it was raining.
It must have been about a month after I first met Chitaira Kai.
I was driving home through the night, listening to the fine rain against the car. The feeling of the day’s work fatigue gradually cooling on the way home, settling into something pleasant against the skin, wasn’t unpleasant. Simply put, the tension wound up at work began to ease.
The time spent turning over what to do between getting home, having dinner, and going to sleep might be when I felt most free. In practice the drowsiness would worsen while I was going through my routine of removing my makeup, bathing, tending to my skin, and I’d never manage much in the way of leisure, but my heart lifted all the same.
It was on one such ordinary evening, thinking those kinds of thoughts, that I came home as usual.
“Welcome ba…”
It was unusual for my daughter to meet me at the door, and she was whispering.
“I’m home. What’s the matter?”
“Come here a moment.”
She beckoned in a half-crouch. Puzzled, I took off my shoes and followed, putting the car key away as I went. I looked into where my daughter led me, and for a moment lost my voice.
Chitaira Kai was lying down in my daughter’s room.
“She seemed sleepy all day at school today,” my daughter whispered, filling me in.
“She fell asleep while we were studying, so I very, very carefully shifted her sideways and put a towel blanket over her.”
“I see…”
It was our first encounter at the house since I’d told her to come home earlier. I looked down at the faint rise and fall of Kai’s shoulders, then at my daughter, thinking we couldn’t very well leave her sleeping indefinitely. My daughter only smiled helplessly, and I understood: she had been waiting for me to come home so she could have me drive Kai back. I supposed that was the only option, and moved closer to wake her, when Kai’s eyelids lifted, as if she had sensed the slight vibration and presence with some fine-tuned awareness.
Then, after a brief moment, her eyes flew open and she sprang upright. She shot back to the wall in one movement, a reaction entirely out of proportion, like a wild animal startling at something that had come too close, on guard against an intrusion. Those wide-open yellow-green eyes moved quickly left and right. Her five fingers scrabbled urgently against the wall as if trying to find purchase, nails scratching. It was the movement of an animal. She looked like someone caught off-guard not in a house but in the middle of a forest, suddenly desperate to regain her footing.
We had both gone still at the outsized reaction, and gradually Kai’s eyes calmed and settled.
“Oh…”
Registering our expressions, Kai twisted her lips with a look of embarrassment. She glanced at the displaced towel blanket, folded her left arm against herself, and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry, I seem to have… fallen asleep.”
“It’s fine, really, isn’t it?” My daughter looked to me for agreement. “Well, yes,” I said vaguely, and in that moment Kai moved quickly.
“I’ll go straight home.”
She crushed her stationery and notebooks into her bag and walked out of the room at speed. My daughter called after her that it was no trouble, but Kai didn’t slow. My daughter’s eyes turned up to me, asking for help.
“Wait.”
I called out to Kai, taking my daughter’s meaning. Kai, who had been showing us her back as if in flight, stopped and turned with restraint. Whether from agitation or nerves, sweat had broken out on her forehead.
There was none of her usual composure, none of the ease with which she ordinarily regarded the world.
“…It’s late, I’ll drive you.”
I retrieved the car key I’d only just put away, told my husband I was taking someone home, and came back to the garage. On hearing it was Kai, my husband came to see us off at the door while plainly taking stock of her, the family name having caught his interest and his caution both. He was visibly thrown by the colour of Kai’s eyes at first.
“Thank you for having me.”
When Kai bowed to my husband he managed an oh, not at all, but his smile had gone slightly stiff. I caught his eye and we exchanged a small nod, and I unlocked the car.
“Your husband came to check because my name is Chitaira, didn’t he.”
Kai said it while opening the car door. I couldn’t very well say yes, so I said nothing.
We got in. Which was fine, but this time, unlike before, Kai had climbed into the passenger seat, and I kept my expression steady as I noted it from the corner of my eye. Why next to me, I felt, though I couldn’t think of a reason to object.
While I went through the motions of getting ready to go, I glanced at Kai. The sweat had been wiped away and on the surface she appeared to have returned to normal. Whether I was concerned about that excessive reaction would be a lie to deny, but it didn’t seem easy to press into. To me she was my daughter’s friend and nothing more. The chat-up didn’t count.
I reversed out of the garage and gave a brief wave to my husband standing at the door, and my daughter who had appeared there at some point. With the dark and the rain on the windows, how much of it reached them I couldn’t say.
“Oh.”
A little way from the house, Kai suddenly spoke up. But she didn’t follow it with anything, just sat holding her school bag.
“What is it?”
“Nothing…”
“Did you forget something?”
Reading her reaction I offered a guess, and Kai answered as if conceding.
“I forgot my umbrella.”
“Ah…”
I thought back to the pitch-black umbrella she had been carrying the first time she came to the house. Kai thrown into blue-black against that umbrella had put me in mind of a dense forest, and beyond the parting branches, those yellow-green eyes like a swamp. The image had burned itself clearly into my memory and surfaced whenever it found occasion.
Dark and unsettling, yet inviting, the dreadful beauty of a forest that beckons you in.
“I’ll have my daughter bring it to school tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t too far to turn back, but it was probably not a good hour to be making a middle schooler’s return home any later. For a while after that there was no call for voices in the car. The sound of the engine ran straight ahead like the road itself, and when we stopped at lights the brief patter of rain took its place, landing against the windows.
I happened to look over and Kai’s eyelids were drooping again, heavy with sleep. She shook her head as it began to nod, rubbed at her eyes, and sat up straight. She could sleep until we arrived for all it mattered. I sensed a will in her not to show weakness in front of anyone.
“Did you stay up late last night…?”
The inability to think of anything better to say made me feel the gap in our ages.