Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Eleven
“Your stomach? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but… were you crying because you were that scared?”
“No.”
I scrubbed at my eyes hard with my forearm, clenching my back teeth to stop any more from coming.
“It’s such a terrible environment, the kind where you could die in some accident at any time and no one would even be surprised… but you’re alive, and that just, that made me glad. That’s all.”
None of it was all right, none of it, and yet I’d thought that anyway, and that was why I’d started crying.
“…I guess so. I did get to meet you, after all.”
Kai didn’t catch the tears the way I had. She smiled, same as always, as if celebrating the fact that we’d met at all. Being alive meant she’d gotten to meet me, she said, pressing her palms together like a small offering of joy, and that very nearly set me off again. A different kind of tears this time, at a different temperature.
But I told myself there was no time for more crying, and lifted my face.
“That’s not really what matters right now.”
“That kick after you spun around was amazing, though.”
I felt something like reverence in the way she looked at me. That’s what you took from it? I felt embarrassed at having shown her something that raw, something with nothing behind it but pure instinct.
“That was… someone grabbed my hair, and it just, reminded me of something.”
Long ago. Someone persistent like that, and I’d gotten angry, and spun around.
And it became a real problem.
“Huh… you’ve grown up since then, Yuki-san.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you slapped me, you apologised.”
“Don’t dig that back up. Get in, quickly.”
Talking had settled me considerably, and the nausea had receded.
At my prompting, Kai climbed into the passenger seat and tossed her bag into the back. I followed her example and threw mine in too.
Free of her bag, Kai stretched her arms and legs out. Watching her do it loosened something in my own shoulders. Though it was too early to relax. I needed to put distance between us and that house as fast as possible, and started the car immediately. I twisted around to check, more than once, that no one was following.
“It’s fine. They almost never come outside the house.”
“What even are they, some kind of monster…”
At the very least, not people. Beyond anything I understood as human. Kai had been right about all of it, and I found myself marvelling that she’d managed to grow up able to communicate properly at all, in that kind of environment. She could hold a real conversation. There had apparently been someone who’d raised her, and perhaps that person was the reason.
But had even that person, in the end, never really intended to save her at the root of it.
Driving without any destination in mind, Kai murmured.
“What should we do from here, I wonder.”
“I wonder…”
There wasn’t really an answer I could give. I’d acted with no plan at all.
What I had instead was simply the refusal to let giving up be the answer. Sending her back to that house, not an option, not even worth weighing. With that road closed off, what remained was one option, or two, really.
One: bring her home, explain everything, and let her stay.
Two: put her up in a hotel for the time being.
If I told my husband I’d brought her home after causing some kind of incident with the Chitaira household, he would almost certainly not be pleased. He might object. That would be the entirely reasonable response of someone thinking of his family, and if I were thinking of my family the way I should be, I’d be standing beside him on this. Even now, that’s what I should be doing.
And yet I knew, already, that I would take Kai’s side instead. Sympathy was clouding whatever sense I had left.
“May I say something?”
She raised her hand, oddly formal about it.
“Go ahead.”
I had no idea when we’d started needing to raise hands, but I gave permission anyway.
“There are, as it happens, a couple of people who might help me stay somewhere else, if I asked.”
“…What kind of people?”
“Two who might help, or maybe just one. My cousins. They spend the household money however they like, which means there’s effectively no limit, so financially they’re reliable. And neither of them resorts to hitting or kicking.”
Hearing that, I pulled the car over. There might finally be a direction to drive in.
“Are these the people like the guardian figure you mentioned before?”
“More or less. Though one of them will probably want my body in exchange for helping.”
“What?”
“Failed last time, so I imagine she’ll be thinking this time for sure.”
Kai’s… body?
Body, meaning—
A bitterness rose on my tongue, twisting my expression.
“Absolutely not. Out of the question. Rejected.”
Without quite meaning to, I reached over and brushed Kai’s shoulder, as if wiping away something that had attached itself to her just from saying it aloud.
I was, right now, in a state of maximum overprotectiveness toward this child.
“Then it really comes down to one person after all. The older one, who’s, well, more like a foster mother to me. Though I think she’s the worst of the two, psychologically speaking.”
Worst covered a lot of ground, and remembering what I’d just walked away from, I winced at the thought of worse still.
“Without sugar-coating it, you mean unhinged? Worse than the people back at the house?”
“She actually communicates, unlike them, and she has a working sense of normal. It’s just… think of her as eccentric, if that helps. She doesn’t tend to hurt anyone besides one particular target, so she’s not what you’re imagining.”
“And this particular target… doesn’t include you, I take it?”
“Guaranteed safe for about a year.”
“A year…?”
More to the point, Kai threw a hypothetical at me, as if testing something for herself all over again.
“This is a strange time to bring it up, but… what if I told you all these injuries were self-inflicted, just to get your attention?”
She offered the scenario with something close to amusement, knowing full well I’d just watched her get kicked clean off her feet.
“Doesn’t matter. I’d just be glad there isn’t actually a child being hit by people in that house. And then I’d never speak to you again.”
At my answer, Kai closed her eyes, murmuring with what looked like satisfaction.
Whether that was simply her habit for expressing her feelings, or a way of hiding embarrassment, I couldn’t say.
“In that case, let’s go with genuinely assaulted.”
“Stop saying ridiculous things and call them, quickly. I have plenty to deal with too, you know.”
“I don’t have a phone. I do have the number, though.”
“Ah, right… use mine, then… no, wait, I need to contact home first…”
The list of things to do kept growing. Nothing was being set aside, only piled on top of an already full day. I couldn’t see any future in this but one where everything collapsed under its own weight.
But I refused to let myself become the kind of person who only rises to the occasion when there’s grief to perform, having done nothing to deserve it.
That was the only thing I was sure of, right now.
Explaining the whole situation in detail seemed like too much effort, so I simply told my husband work had gotten busy. There was nothing shameful in it, a lie in service of something necessary, I told myself, but my hands were unsteady sending it regardless.
It was still a lie, in the end. Would this carelessness come back to find me, someday.
After I’d finished my own messages, I handed the phone to Kai, who made a call to someone and came back.
“Thanks for the phone.”
Kai, having stepped away to make the call in private, returned it to me.
“We’re meeting my cousin in a hotel lobby. Should I give you the address?”
“Tell me and I’ll put it in the navigation… but, a hotel?”
“She likes the atmosphere of hotels, apparently.”
I entered the name Kai gave me into the navigation and let it guide the way.
The destination was a hotel quite a distance outside the town where we lived.