Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Four
How much longer would work stay this busy? The year-end rush wasn’t technically a lie, not exactly, but telling my family I needed to leave earlier because of it while actually spending that time driving Kai around was something else entirely. How long could this go on. Once the middle school broke for winter holidays there’d be no more need for morning visits to the hotel, but I’d still need to check on Kai on the way home. Would I, though? I think so. Probably.
I’d grown used to pulling into the hotel car park by now. Only after getting out of the car did it occur to me how easily this could be misread if an acquaintance happened to see it. Even at a resort hotel in a tourist area, someone visiting this regularly had exactly the look of what it wasn’t. Entirely not that, and yet.
I gathered Kai and got her into the car, and only then found myself circling back to that thought.
Thinking it through only after the fact felt a little pointless, didn’t it?
“I wonder if this is really all right…?”
“What is?”
Kai switched between the passenger seat and the back depending on her mood day to day. Today, passenger seat, rubbing her hands together against the cold. Her hands, and honestly every part of her, struck me every time as almost alarmingly small when I really registered it.
If we pressed our palms together, I felt like I could crush hers without meaning to. It was almost frightening.
There was something strange about a girl that small still wearing her school uniform, unbroken, day after day. Strange was doing all the work in that thought, lumping together a whole tangle of feelings I hadn’t sorted out. Psychedelic, hard-to-classify emotions, surfacing in the dark and dissolving again before I could hold them.
Whatever formed between Kai and me mostly had no name, which was probably why none of it ever settled.
And yet I kept maintaining it, this connection with Kai.
A connection that, by any account my family held of who I was, should never have existed at all.
“Doing all this, I wonder if it’s really all right.”
“Who knows…”
“Every so often it just strikes me as strange, that’s all…”
“Hm.”
Her answers kept coming flat, uninterested, and irritation flared enough that I glanced at her. Kai wasn’t even looking my way, head tilted against the window. Apparently this wasn’t a topic she cared about at all.
“…Seatbelt.”
I gave up on the conversation and settled for the one instruction.
If Kai actually said, someday, this is strange, let’s just stop, what would I do? Let go easily, never see her again? Some part of me tried to accept that as fine too, and that inner voice sounded as dried out as something the winter wind had gotten into.
I pulled out. The moment we cleared the car park roof, the vanguard of a clear sky poured down over us. The temperature was dropping, but the sunlight stayed sharp. Once the sea came into view, the glare off the water scattered my vision even further.
Driving the coast road this early always tempted me to forget work entirely and just keep going straight ahead. Watching the scattered boards and surfers out on the water on a weekday morning left me feeling like something caged. And yet I was the one who’d chosen this cage, willingly.
Even caged, the morning sun still reached us, plenty bright. Genuinely refreshing.
Not that it was all liberation and clear skies. On windy days the car took a beating from salt and sand, more work to wash on my day off. Outside the warmer months, my husband wasn’t about to help hose it down out there either.
“So, are you saying you don’t want to do this, Yuki-san?”
Passing the hot spring with the sea view, Kai spoke up suddenly.
“What are you talking about?”
“This. All of it.”
Her vague phrasing took a beat to land, and I realised she’d circled back to what I’d said earlier.
This. All of it. A shape drawn loosely with a marker, no clean edges, and yet I understood exactly what she meant. Driving her, going to her room, thinking about her constantly.
All of it, gathered under one word, describing the whole atmosphere surrounding us.
“I never said I didn’t want to.”
“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to come, you know.”
That she’d simply ignored what I’d actually said irritated me.
“Oh, is that right? Say something like that and I might genuinely stop coming, are you sure?”
Not quite tit for tat, but my own voice sharpened to match hers regardless.
Knowing full well she probably didn’t mean it, there were still things that stung to hear. I kept driving, doing my best to ignore her. Deliberately ignoring someone sits badly with me. So, hurry up, I found myself hoping, willing her toward honesty. If the silence dragged on much longer, I might be the one to break first.
With my daughter, things stayed easy and warm enough that this kind of standoff never really came up.
It was, in its own way, a novelty.
I understood, of course. Kai’s pushback was her way of testing whether I actually cared. Testing distance and feeling by picking a fight, because that was the only method available to her. She wanted, probably, to be told patiently, over and over, that’s not true, she was starved for exactly that kind of persistence.
Understanding all that, I could already feel myself about to be the one to fold, and realised a war of attrition wasn’t going to favour me here.
We’d driven a fair distance when a red light caught us in front of a ramen shop by the sea. Waiting there, Kai was the first to give up.
“I’m not great at being honest, so throw me a line.”
Kai offered her own version of a concession, eyes fixed on the ramen shop’s car park. Stubbornness taken this far was, somehow, almost endearing.
“No. Be honest for once.”
This was a rare enough moment of Kai softening that I refused to give ground either. Kai seemed to sense it too. “Mean erotic oba-san.” “I heard that.” “I said it loud enough to be heard on purpose.” Not cute at all.
I kept my eyes fixed on her. Before the light changed, I nudged her with a look. Go on.
“Say it, Kai.”
I wanted to hear it too, if I was honest.
Nothing worth anything runs one direction only.
Kai stopped running. In those jewel-bright eyes, my own reflection floated.
“…I want you to come.”
Something cool and full settled in my chest, like a dark green marble rolling somewhere inside it.
With the sunlight pouring in, it was hard to tell exactly what colour her cheeks had gone. But it looked healthier than her usual pallor, almost lit from within.
“You could’ve just said that from the start.”
Watching her, I had to press my lips together to keep the corner of my mouth from betraying me. As the light turned green and the car moved forward, my racing pulse eased back down to something close to the speed limit.
Relief, that I hadn’t dug in myself and let this go too far.
Relief, that whatever this was with Kai hadn’t just crossed into somewhere irreversible.
Ridiculous.
Why had that, of all things, been enough to bring me close to breaking a sweat.
“I want to see you every day.”
“…Ah. Right.”
Having managed one honest admission, she pushed straight into another. I glanced sideways at her, and, unusually, found her smiling.