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

After covering a distance that would leave you hollow-cheeked if you tried it on foot at night, the enormous perimeter wall and the extravagant gate of the house had just come faintly into view when Kai asked me to stop. “Here is fine.” I pulled over to the side, feeling faintly like a taxi driver, the kind of stop where if it were someone I knew well I’d say is here all right for you? and send them off like a passenger.
“Thank you very much.”
From the quiet movement of those lips came a voice like fresh snow, dissolving before you could quite catch it.
“Of course. Next time, try to head home a little earlier…”
“Oh, so I can come again?”
Kai said it as though she hadn’t expected permission, in a tone that felt almost like pinning down a commitment. The way she said it, as if I were the one with reservations, was itself what gave me pause. I had no particular feelings about this girl.
That was a lie.
“If you’re my daughter’s friend, there’s no particular reason why not.”
“Yes. We became friends yesterday.”
“…Well, these things aren’t always about time.”
Some people you cut ties with over a single incident. And the reverse is equally true.
My husband and I had been together a long time, but time alone wasn’t what held it.
Kai lifted herself from the seat, hovering in a half-crouch, peering at me. Her gaze wasn’t directed at my face but somewhere further back into the car. Specifically, at my feet.
“…What?”
I drew my shoulders in and asked, wary.
“Stockings on a woman with nice legs really are something, aren’t they.”
“Sorry?”
“Erotic.”
“…Excuse me?”
“Good night.”
She lined up everything she wanted to say with brisk efficiency, got out of the car, and walked away.
She didn’t give me a single moment to say good night in return.
Sitting there, slightly stunned, I looked down at my own legs, composed in the driver’s seat, started to turn her words over in my mind, and shook my head.
“What on earth.”
Of all the vulgar things to suddenly come out with.
At that age, well, fourteen, when you considered it, a self and a body in the throes of development might produce all manner of erratic and impulsive behaviour without it being particularly strange. Probably. My own daughter had only ever seemed placid, but surely inside she too was tangled up in all the complicated threads of adolescence.
Kai probably had her own things going on too.
Chitaira Kai. A small figure walking toward the fortress-like wall. Standing under the shadow of that building, she looked as though she might simply be absorbed into it and disappear. Such fragility, and yet within it, something absolute.
Left alone, I found myself turning those eyes over in my mind, going back to them again and again.
Cutting in between the stored photographs in my memory, surfacing unbidden, over and over.
“…What unpleasant eyes.”
Said as if I half-believed it, because in its way that was true as well. Those eyes cast a shadow over me.
Even with my forehead resting against the steering wheel, looking down, there was no escaping the yellow-green impression they had burned into me. Like having stared directly at the sun, those two stars wouldn’t leave my field of vision. This had never happened to me before.
Something like a swamp of deep, saturated colour. Looking into it too long and you’d start to sink.
And at the bottom, the feeling that something was waiting to be remembered, anxiety and fear and the unknown swirling together.
Those eyes could be a swamp, or they could be stars. Whether you looked to the sky or pressed your face to the ground, the light didn’t go out.
That radiance, too vast to contain, was fate, and a natural enemy both. …Fate. Even as I questioned the grandiosity of the word, there was a feeling I couldn’t push away. Fear and attraction born together in contradiction. A pull toward and a pull away, coexisting, and somewhere inside I watched that strange equilibrium with bewilderment.
That colour, that stillness.
I couldn’t deny that I found it beautiful.
I wanted to look at myself reflected in those eyes. I was trying to look away.
I was afraid to find out what expression I was making.