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

“Clouds across the moon.”
Chitaira Kai murmured it, looking up at the same sky.
“Wasn’t it?”
“…Full marks, if it were a test.”
She didn’t seem like a girl who needed to be taught anything by my daughter.
We watched the moonlight disappear completely behind the clouds, then got into the car together. I could barely remember the last time I’d had anyone other than family in this car. I looked up before pulling out and caught her eyes in the mirror, and very nearly lost hold of the composure I was keeping, almost past the point of recovering it.
In the darkness of the back seat, those eyes seemed to float and shine all the more.
The kind of glow that could give birth to a ghost story, softly parting the dark, luminous.
“Onee-san.”
“…Are you talking to me?”
I wasn’t used to being called that, and it threw me.
“I couldn’t think of what else to call you.”
“Amamiya-san works, doesn’t it?”
“That overlaps with my friend.”
I nearly tilted my head wondering what the inconvenience was in that. In any case, I pulled the car forward.
“Whatever you like.”
“Then for now, onee-san will do.”
The way she kept fussing over it made me half-smile.
“Your eyes say you’d rather call me oba-san.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, I am an oba-san.”
Leaving the property, the car seemed faintly disgruntled, its engine shuddering as if protesting the overtime. The tremor settled quickly, and like me it switched back on and returned to its purpose, for which I was grateful.
“So then… oba-san, huh…”
“Did you say something?”
“Onee-san, you seem very clever.”
That was absolutely not what we had been talking about. I caught the ba of oba-san perfectly clearly.
“I like refined, beautiful women, you know.”
Our eyes weren’t even meeting now, and yet something yellow-green lit up inside my chest.
It took a little while for that glow to fade.
Being praised so freely like that, I didn’t know what to do with it. Refined and beautiful. My own husband had never put it quite so plainly.
“…Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure what register to receive it in. My daughter’s friend was, when it came down to it, more or less a stranger.
Though, it occurred to me rather late that I had been driving toward that mansion without asking a single question, having simply assumed from the family name. I only thought to check once we reached the main road.
“Your family, the Chitairas, the ones with that…”
“The pointlessly large house. Do you know the way?”
“I know where it is.”
Having never driven there from my own home, I couldn’t claim to know the exact route. It might end up a slight detour. The main road at night was busier than during the day and our progress was slow, the tourist shops and restaurants on either side increasingly shuttered, the street growing quieter.
“It’s late, hasn’t anyone at home tried to contact you?”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Oh… that’s unusual.”
A house that size, perhaps they had strong ideas about raising children.
“Besides…”
Kai started to say something, then stopped.
“Besides?”
Our eyes held in the mirror, my chest unsettled, waiting.
“There are many people in that house, but they aren’t family.”
She said it with a kind of resignation, as if releasing something she had been holding.
“My house is full of nothing but rotten scoundrels.”
“Rot… ten…”
It came out of nowhere, like throwing a lump of mud at a wall. Her tone hadn’t changed at all, which made the sharpness of the words themselves stand out all the more, a weapon suddenly raised.
It wasn’t an expression I had ever used, even in my own mind.
“I don’t think you should talk about people that way.”
There was nothing else a sensible adult could say. What else was there, knowing nothing of the circumstances.
Perhaps her relationship with her family wasn’t a good one.
“It’s the truth, so there’s nothing to be done. And I’m one of them.”
In the mirror, Kai had her eyes closed, and was smiling. Looking at that face, those slight shoulders, those legs that looked as though they might give way, I couldn’t find anything rotten or scoundrel-like. She was fragile. The kind of fragile that made me imagine she might crumble if you touched her without wrapping her gently first. Not that I would be touching her.
“You’d be better off having nothing to do with my house, onee-san. There isn’t a single pleasant thing that comes from getting involved.”
“…Even so.”
I was heading there right now. With that house’s child in the car. My daughter’s friend, no less.
Keeping entirely clear of it didn’t seem likely.
Yes, I had already become involved.
With the Chitairas. With Chitaira Kai.
The way so many roads feed into a main road, and people are carried along by the current.