Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Three
For Santa Claus, part one. Not that it’s really a part one.
At work, hands still moving, I found myself wondering what exactly I thought I was planning. Some part of me had already started drafting a second proposal in my head, entirely without permission. I watched my own hands moving across the desk like they belonged to someone else. Perhaps that other self had a name. Perhaps it was Yuki. The thought struck me suddenly, and struck me as ridiculous too.
Hoping the actual quote I was drafting would clear approval as cleanly as any Christmas present I might want for myself, my fingers kept moving half on their own. My mind wasn’t on the screen at all, and yet the work went on without a single stumble. It genuinely felt like two separate people operating at once, which was a little unsettling.
Supposing, hypothetically, I actually did this. On that premise alone, purely hypothetical, I found myself puzzling it through anyway.
Where would you even get a Santa costume?
Had I ever seen one in a regular clothing shop? I’d never specifically looked, so I had no memory of it either way. Mail order, maybe? I’d seen people wearing Santa costumes as shop greeters before, so somewhere, someone had to be mass-producing them. Surely not something you’d have to make yourself. Probably.
Search it on a break and it would probably turn up. But… am I actually doing this? some other part of me kept objecting. Wasn’t I being far too indulgent with Kai? A Santa costume, something you’d only wear once a year, and almost certainly never again after this, was an obviously wasteful purchase by any reasonable standard. Kai was just one of my daughter’s friends. …Just one of… that was a lie, wasn’t it?
Whether there was a connection between Kai and me that existed independently of my daughter… difficult to put into words, but probably, yes. I still couldn’t articulate, even to myself, what exactly this connection with someone as fundamentally unknown as Kai actually was. What I did know was that it had no name within any framework of common sense I’d built up until now.
Kai, for her part, seemed to carry none of that hesitation. She simply watched me, and smiled, always.
There was nothing easy or open about Kai’s smile, something bent, layered under ceiling after ceiling that blocked out the light, full of shadow. I’d never seen her smile any other way. But once I noticed the clumsiness underneath it, I found myself able to face it with something closer to watchfulness, care. The number of times our eyes actually met had grown steadily, and whatever her eyes told, sorrow, brightness, whatever it amounted to, I found myself straightening up, settling, at the thought of it.
There, see, thinking about Kai again.
What even was this?
…For Santa Claus, part two. Let this pointless spiral end around part two.
What should I actually get Kai? Was a gift even necessary? Obviously, yes. Santa Claus showing up empty-handed would be a disgrace to the role. If I was doing this at all, I wanted to do the job properly. But I genuinely had no idea what Kai might want.
I didn’t know the personal parts of her. What she liked, what she disliked. Even that basic information stayed mostly opaque. What I did have was a home she couldn’t possibly be sent back to, a cynical smile, and eyes with a beauty that seemed to sink endlessly downward. Eyes that pulled focus from everything else, that seemed to be pleading with something.
Without those eyes, I don’t think I’d have been pulled toward a girl I barely knew at all.
I wasn’t pulled by Kai.
“…Never mind that.”
I muttered, catching myself derailing again. Kai’s eyes had nothing to do with any of this, right now.
If I didn’t know, the fastest solution was obviously to just ask her directly. But asking directly was as good as announcing the Santa costume plan outright, so that was out. Kai’s triumphant, gloating expression, easy enough to imagine, was irritating enough on its own that I refused to give anything away beforehand. Which meant I had to work it out on my own.
And so, once again, I arrived at the same conclusion: I knew nothing about Kai.
Before any gift, I needed to understand her better, or none of this made sense.
…Whether I actually wanted to understand her better was a question that kept following me regardless. But letting myself drift along naturally, I found myself, unremarkably, leaning ever closer to Kai anyway. Even now, with hesitation and discomfort both still present, I was clearly riding the current toward wearing a Santa costume for her in the end.
Dressing up in costume, I had to reach back as far as nursery school to find the last time. I believe I’d worn a bin bag with holes cut into it and gone as a rubbish monster. Not so different from now, looking back on it.
Moving from rubbish monster to Santa Claus, was that simply what growing older meant.
Even with all this running through my head, blinking myself back to the screen, I found the work had genuinely kept progressing, which quietly surprised me. Perhaps meeting Kai had some kind of activating effect on the brain.
…Was that really it?
That evening, over dinner at home, I asked my daughter.
“Anything you want for Christmas this year?”
Asking my daughter was, I realised with some feeling, blessedly easy by comparison.
“A prepaid card for in-game purchases would be…”
She gave a little wheedling laugh, gauging my reaction.
“…Within reason.”
Was this just how kids were these days now? Not that it would give Kai, brand new to owning a phone at all, much of a reference point. My daughter and Kai were apparently friends, but what on earth did the two of them talk about together?
The simmered squid and taro were rich and delicious enough to keep drawing my chopsticks back. My husband’s cooking caught me off guard with how good it was, every so often. I’d been telling myself I’d learn from him one day for several years running now. Reminded of it, I updated the timeline: one day. I’d surely be an excellent cook, several years from now.
“What about you, Mama, is there anything you’d like?”
My husband asked, carefully peeling the skin off his salmon.
“Thought a Christmas present might be nice for once, myself.”
“You two could go on a Christmas date, you know.”
Our daughter cut in. A Christmas date… when had the two of us last spent it that way? Since our daughter was born we’d always kept it modest, as a family, so the idea hadn’t even occurred to me.
“I like a party more than a date, honestly.”
“Awww.”
My husband made a childish noise of complaint.
“Oh, watch the salmon bones, sweetheart. One’s sticking out.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Dates are fun too, you know.”
My husband kept swinging his attention between our daughter and me, busy.
“Do you want to?”
“Hmm… if our daughter came along too, maybe.”
“Then nothing’s really changing,” our daughter said, and we both laughed together. Just that was enough to feel like sitting beside a warm light.
A complete circle, without a single snag in it. This, I understood, was probably what people meant by a happy, harmonious family.
All from such a small, ordinary exchange.
“So, nothing you’d like?”
“Hmm… asked outright like that, nothing comes to mind right away.”
“Clothes?”
“Clothes, well… I realised once I started working, there’s not really an occasion to wear anything nice.”
Weekdays meant a suit, and I didn’t want to dress up unnecessarily on days off, which meant well-mannered clothes simply never got their turn. My husband was no different, an apron thrown over a work coat was as far as his effort went at the onigiri shop.
“There was a time we both used to worry about how we looked, getting ready for a date.”
“There really was.”
The peak of our romance, university, back then… just counting the years made me a little dizzy. With our daughter fourteen now, the number added up easily enough, easily enough, and yet I looked away, laughing.
And closed it out.
“Not being able to think of anything you want might be its own kind of happiness.”
Settled, unhungry, days without any real craving in them.
That was the life I lived. But Kai’s, surely, was not.
Kai had no circle.
Sharpened to a point no one really tried to hold, something that would cut you if you touched it.
If this household stood at the opposite end of that, how deep must Kai’s own hunger run.
“Oh, by the way, Chitaira-san hasn’t been coming to study lately.”
Our daughter said it without any particular weight behind it, and I answered, “That’s right,” careful to keep my tongue from catching.
My neck stayed fixed, tense, to hide anything that might have shown.
My husband said “hm, is that so” with studied indifference, though he was probably, privately, relieved. Not knowing it was his wife, not his daughter, who had ended up deeply entangled with the Chitaira family instead.
“Here, an early Christmas present.”
To smother the guilt of staying silent about all of it, I handed my husband my own portion of salmon skin, and he lit up, genuinely moved, “got the good one.” Maron, beside him, lifted his head and stuck out his tongue at the sound of my husband’s joy, quick as ever to catch his mood.
Checking the fat on the skin with his chopsticks, my husband smiled. “Right.”
“Might make some shoulder-massage coupons this year.”
“…Minimum of ten in the book.”
“Whoa there.”
I was, honestly, rather pleased by that.