Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Six
“I hit it on the… door frame in my room. We have a traditional-style house.”
“At your height?”
Kai looked away. And in that turned neck, exposed to my view, I found another bruise.
“Here too.”
I brushed aside her wet, plastered-down hair, and found a similar mark at the base of her neck.
“This… isn’t that from being hit?”
I regretted saying it the moment it left my mouth. If I had thought through what that meant, I would never have spoken so carelessly.
And Kai confirmed it without hesitation.
“Whoever does it isn’t very good at it, hitting somewhere that gets noticed like this.”
Kai’s offhand explanation wasn’t landing properly.
I couldn’t tell if the blood was rushing to my head or draining from it.
“Who did this to you.”
“Hmm… I can only really say it was someone in the house.”
The rain hammered down hard enough to make noise not just in my ears but somewhere in my chest.
I couldn’t get a proper breath of that rain-thick air, and something like a thin, airless gasp escaped me.
She’d been absent yesterday too.
In uniform even on days off.
That joke that wasn’t really a joke, about her clothes being burned.
Fragment by fragment, the pieces were pushing one word toward me.
“Abuse.”
“It’s not abuse.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Abuse is something parents or guardians do. What happens to me is just violence.”
Was that the logic Kai used as her seawall. From where I stood, it felt like nothing but self-deception.
“Are your parents the ones hitting you.”
“I just told you, that’s not it! It’s a house where I don’t even know who my parents are!”
Rainwater struck Kai’s lips and sprayed back toward me.
It was the first time I had heard her raise her voice in frustration.
“I think I told you before, maybe I did, doesn’t matter. It’s a house you couldn’t understand, Yuki-san. Because you’re clever, and sensible, and kind. So, let go of my arm… please.”
Everything in what Kai said reached me except the very last word, which I couldn’t process properly.
There was too much to feel about the fact that this girl was being hit, and nothing else could get through.
Slowly, I let go of her arm. If she ran now, I would.
Just watch. Just stand there. Letting the rain fall on me.
Free, Kai didn’t run.
Seeing that, I.
I knelt down on the rain-soaked ground without caring, bringing my eyes level with hers.
And took her face in both hands.
“Mmf.”
“Sorry, I squeezed too hard.”
I’d meant to say something serious, and instead felt faintly ridiculous. I adjusted my grip, and Kai, freed from the discomfort, settled and looked steadily back at me.
Just this once, I fought to keep from being pulled under by those eyes.
“If you really don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. If my interfering is just an irritation to you, I’ll respect that.” A complete lie. “But if that’s the case, I mean it when I say I’ll stop caring entirely. I’ll make myself stop. I’ll never look at your face again. Is that really what you want.”
I forced the words out as if I were the one clinging to something.
Don’t say it’s fine.
Please don’t say that.
If she said it, what would I say next.
None of this was fine for me, not at all.
I kept piling worry on top of worry, waiting for Kai’s answer. Her eyes drifted, scattering like something carried off in the rain.
While the conflict turned over inside her before producing an answer, my own chest kept hammering with the same anxiety. I didn’t want to be rejected. And yet I had asked anyway. It wasn’t confidence that made me ask, pressing into someone else’s life is always frightening.
But something told me that running from this moment would haunt me for the rest of my life.
And then.
This time it was Kai who took hold of my sleeve. The bend of those clinging fingers carried a sharpness straight to my chest.
“…I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologise for. Just tell me honestly, does it hurt.”
Kai’s eyes always pulled all kinds of feeling out of me.
I wondered, in turn, what Kai saw when she looked into mine. What she had been hoping for.
We held each other’s gaze, and Kai closed her eyes, surrendering her true feeling.
“Of course it hurts.”
“…Then.”
Then I supposed it was all right for me to interfere.
“We’re getting this looked at, one way or another. Come on.”
I stood, took her hand, and started toward the car, and felt resistance as she planted her feet. So I simply pulled her along, her weight barely registering at all.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“If anyone finds out I got it treated, I’ll just get hit worse.”
That single line, equal parts resignation, nearly brought tears to my eyes without warning. I felt Kai’s pain as if it were my own. Walking with her in tow, the urge to save her right now, immediately, ran ahead of everything else in me.
“Let’s go to the police. Or, the child welfare office?”
“It’s pointless. The second they hear it’s about the Chitaira house they’ll find some excuse and drop it.”
“That’s not—”
Before I could finish not true, you haven’t even tried, Kai spoke over me.
“Nobody wants to get involved. It’s too much trouble.”
“…………………………………”
The particular weariness in that word, trouble, struck me with force, now that I was an adult myself.
Just registering it made me feel as though I could let go of a great many things.
“If someone on the other side of the world dies, it doesn’t affect you, does it. Even though the other side of the world is still physically connected to you, somehow strangers who aren’t even that far away matter even less. People just don’t care.”
“…I suppose.”
There was some truth in what Kai was saying. I didn’t have it in me to save every struggling person in the world either.
I had never once felt the pain in the heart of a stranger passing by.
How to save someone who wasn’t standing in front of me was none of my concern.
But.
“You’re not on the other side of the world, though. You’re standing right in front of me.”
I pulled her arm and kept walking toward the car.
“So I’m not leaving you alone.”
I guided drenched Kai into the back seat, pressing her down into it. Whatever strength she had left seemed spent from the rain, and she let herself be moved, slumping against the seat.
“…Strange person.”
“Not something you get to say to me.”
A bratty, contrary, peculiar fourteen-year-old who wanted to lick people’s fingers.
Twenty-four years apart, I muttered, starting the car. Though I’m going to be late, I thought, eyes wandering as I worked out an excuse, and turned back onto the familiar road.