Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Five

“Welcome back.”
“…I’m home. And welcome to you too.”
The friend of my daughter’s who had come to the front door yesterday was inside the house today.
She turned to look up at me, and in those eyes was the same light from somewhere else. Not in the dim grey of a rainy day but in a bright room, there was still something that reached me independently, without mingling with anything around it.
“Oh, this is Chitaira-san.”
“The one who came yesterday, right?”
“Yeah. I thanked her in class for dropping things off, and she asked if I could teach her in return.”
“Teach her?”
“I’m sooo incredibly stupid so I need someone to teach me or I’ll never catch uuup.”
“…………………………..”
It was a cloying, drawn-out tone that communicated sooo incredibly stupid through voice alone.
The attitude grated on me slightly, though I didn’t let it show, and I glanced at the clock on the wall. Getting on toward eight in the evening. Not a reasonable hour for a middle schooler to be at someone else’s house without particular cause.
“Even so, it’s already quite late.”
“You’re right. I should be going.”
Chitaira Kai tucked her study things into her bag, said thank you to my daughter, and stood up.
“I don’t mind, honestly. I didn’t teach her anything, if anything I feel like she taught me.”
“You’re imagining things.”
Kai brushed it off lightly and slipped past me where I stood in the doorway. She was going to walk home now, through the night?
I thought of the sensible thing to suggest, and did not simply see her off. And yet, in the same moment, I felt, for some reason, that I had already made a mistake.
“Chitaira-san.”
She stopped at the sound of her name, and there was a small pause before she turned.
“Yes?”
Kai turned to face me in the corridor where the light from the room didn’t quite reach, her expression neutral, her pale skin merging with the blue-white air around her. There was a composure to her that made words feel inadequate, like looking at a cluster of blue flowers blooming in the dark.
This girl, just by her presence, had something that overwhelmed me. Perhaps I was the only one who felt it. Without thinking I had closed my hand into a fist, and felt the car key pressing into my palm.
The car key I had forgotten to put away. Had it known what was coming.
“It’s late, I’ll drive you home.”
“Are you sure?”
She didn’t offer the usual polite refusal. Instead she turned it back to me, as if confirming it was what I wanted.
Am I sure, I found myself checking with myself. It was only a lift home, so what was the question.
“…It’s not safe, at this hour.”
I pushed the hair back from my ear as I said it, and Kai accepted the offer without resistance. “Then, thank you.” I had assumed she would be the type to brush it off with don’t worry about me, so this surprised me.
Honestly, I had been planning to say goodbye if she refused twice.
I turned back to tell my daughter.
“Have dinner with Dad without me.”
“Aw, I’ll wait.”
“It might take a while.”
And it would, because as far as I knew the Chitaira house was a considerable distance from here. If she walked, the night would get to hours that suited a middle schooler even less. Though, why had a girl who lived that far away been the one to drop things off for my daughter. It wasn’t as though my daughter had no other friends, not at all. I might be biased, but she had a bright, open personality and seemed to have plenty of people around her. I thought that came from her father’s better qualities. As for me, well, for various reasons I had rather a lonely time of it as a student, friendships-wise.
That aside, I stopped by the living room to tell my husband. He was playing with Maron, our dog.
“I’m taking one of our daughter’s friends home, it’s late.”
“Oh, is that right? That’s good of you, off you go. And welcome back.”
“Mm, I’m home.”
Maron stayed pressed against my husband’s side through all of this. As he always did.
I went back to the entrance, and Chitaira Kai was already there with her shoes on, waiting. The entryway being a step down from the corridor made her look even smaller than usual. She looked like a primary schooler wearing a middle school uniform.
I put my shoes back on, the ones I’d only just taken off, and willed the switch back on inside me that had only just gone off. I couldn’t afford to let my guard down behind the wheel. It took some effort not to let the this is a lot escape out loud.
“I’m sorry, I’m taking you away from family time.”
She said something considerate once we reached the garage. And yet finding it hollow felt uncharitable, perhaps a flaw in my own character. Or perhaps it was something about Kai’s voice itself, the way it seemed to dissolve before any deeper feeling could be drawn from it. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, and before opening the car door I looked up at the night sky.
What is it that visits you when you look up at clouds at night, that particular ache. Something like the urgency of being left behind, and a homesickness for a place I’ve never left. Perhaps something handed down through the generations, making itself known.
Tonight those clouds were moving, blurring the moon in and out of sight.