Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Two

“…Hello.”
I hadn’t anticipated her appearing on a day off, and the sense of wrongness wouldn’t leave me. Kai looked over the car sitting in the garage, then looked at me. Eyes so delicate, so free of anything impure, trembling the heart like a painting — eyes that seemed as though they might let you see the reflection of yourself floating on their surface. Just being looked at by them carried a pressure that threatened to make my body stop working.
“I’ve come to be taught.”
“Ah, is that right…”
I tried to keep my face turned away and carry on talking, but the habit of ordinary interaction drew me naturally toward Kai. In that moment my gaze landed on Kai’s lips, the ones I had been deliberately avoiding, and I couldn’t hold back the heat rising in my face. Whether she caught that out-of-place adolescent reaction or not, the corners of Kai’s lips and eyes lifted. She closed the distance between us in one motion, as if she had nothing to fear, and looked up at me from close range. I felt as though the inside of my lower lip was being traced by her gaze.
“It doesn’t seem like you’ve forgotten at all.”
At that drilling proximity and the way those words rose, the temperature of my blood shot up. The seawall of reason collapsed in an instant, the world ahead went white as if I’d witnessed a flood of light, and time jumped.
On impulse, I had slapped Chitaira Kai across the cheek.
No sensation of the contact remained in my palm.
“You’re the one doing the mocking.”
My own voice was shaking. Whether from anger or from the fear of having raised my hand against someone, I couldn’t tell. Kai, having been slapped, staggered, her balance giving way until she nearly fell to the ground. Had I really hit her that hard. I instinctively moved to crouch down and check on her, then stopped, remembering I was the one who had hit her, and hovered there halfway. In that time Kai had righted herself and pressed her hand to her cheek, almost as though shaking hands with the mark left there.
“I’m relieved you’re the kind of person who hits somewhere visible.”
“…What?”
Kai said just that and headed straight for the front door. I nearly chased after her like an idiot, still holding the hose, but I spotted my daughter coming to meet her and quickly turned back toward the garage, affecting no involvement.
“Welcome… what happened to your face?”
The delayed consequence of hitting her without thinking arrived now, draining the blood from my head.
“An old woman I passed heard me mutter hag under my breath and smacked me.”
“Oh wow.”
Unable to look at Kai telling that bare-faced lie, the hag retreated into the garage.
“That’s not nice, you know.”
“Really isn’t.”
A beat later, my fingertips began to report something like a burning, prickling sensation.
It wasn’t the first time in my life, but it had been long enough since I’d last hit someone that my heart was in turmoil. Driven by an agitation close enough to make me douse myself with the hose, my mind couldn’t settle back into washing the car.
The water ran on pointlessly, and I spent the time simply feeling the unpleasant disconnection between my hands and feet.
The anger cooled as time passed, congealing into something bleak. I wanted to say sorry. I wanted to say it right now, to relieve the ache in my own chest. I wanted to apologise for my own sake. But I couldn’t go barging into my daughter’s room and presenting her with the sight of her mother making apologies.
I’ll say it when she’s leaving, I thought, glancing toward the front door, and then looked up at the sun wondering when that would even be. The sun’s reign remained unchallenged, and if that girl intended to settle in for a long stay, a dizzying stretch of time lay ahead.
Never mind the studying, come out here right now.
Harbouring a thought entirely unfit for a parent or a responsible adult, I simply waited for her to leave.

---

By evening I had somehow finished washing the car, though I had no interest in admiring the result.
Genuinely beginning to wonder whether the sun had even completed a full rotation, at dusk, the front door opened and tension seized my shoulders. Kai, who had exchanged a brief farewell with my daughter and stepped outside, noticed my gaze straight away.
Perhaps partly because of the slap, Kai glanced over but kept her mouth closed. I addressed her in the manner of someone who had just happened to notice her while finishing up outside.
Given I’d been washing the car for several hours, that was quite something.
“I’ll drive you home.”
“It’s not night yet.”
She looked up at the sunset with her mouth half-open, vaguely. Kai had expressions that were entirely those of a child, and that was… unfair was the wrong word, but. She was a child, after all.
I said nothing and watched her, and Kai brought her hand to her own cheek in imitation of a moment earlier, narrowing her eyes.
“Well, since you’re offering.”
Taking my meaning, Kai changed course toward the garage. I didn’t even stop to tell my daughter I was driving her home, and made my way to the car, still feeling an awkwardness in my own steps.
I had genuinely been reluctant to drive the freshly washed car so soon. But I had wanted to secure a place where the two of us were alone and no one else could hear, and quickly. I watched from the corner of my eye as Kai got into the passenger seat.
Today, having her next to me suited my purposes. Easier to talk than with her in the back.
I got in too, and gripped the steering wheel, key still unturned. Gripping it, I imagined using it as a support to lean my body forward.
That much momentum was what a genuine apology was going to need.
“I’m sorry for hitting you earlier.”
I wanted to clear the obstruction in my chest before anything else, so I tried to do it before starting to drive, thinking I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I left it.
Kai brought her hand to the slapped cheek and looked away.
“It was entirely my fault, you don’t have to apologise.”
“Even so.”
That much was undeniable. But hitting this girl was, for me, the wrong I had committed. Not attacked from the outside but from within, it had been a misery the whole time I was waiting.
That I had been tormented by such overwhelming remorse, made so desolate, as though I had done something as grave as take a life — something was wrong with me. What was this girl to me. Only my daughter’s friend.
“But raising my hand against someone isn’t right.”
I put my hand to Kai’s face and turned it toward me. Unusually, it was Kai’s eyes that moved uncertainly, as if she were the one thrown off.
“Has it left a mark?”
“I wouldn’t know… I haven’t seen my own face.”
I checked for her, and almost had to close my own eyes.
Even the faintest red showed clearly against that white cheek.
“I’m sorry.”
I said it again in place of an answer, and Kai laughed.
“It’s the first time someone hit me and apologised straight away.”
“I suppose… yes, perhaps.”
I was admittedly in a rather busy state, but it couldn’t be helped given how rapidly I had swung between extremes. Was this emotional instability? Instability, certainly. Just looking into Kai’s eyes was enough to set a whirlpool going in an evening calm. There was no hope of being steady around her.
“Yuki-san hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Kai, with that voice, let snow fall on my heart. As if to cover over the churned-up clod of earth.
But Kai, the moment she saw that accumulated snow, was the kind of child who immediately wanted to leave footprints in it.
“You haven’t done anything wrong, but in exchange, could you grant me a request?”