Dewa mata
Two weeks in a Canadian hospital, a week in a hotel, and then I was finally well enough to fly.
Osaka hadn’t changed a whole lot in nearly six years. Bright. Busy. Beautiful. Life went on in a city. It tended to pick itself up after a tragedy and move forward in a way small towns didn’t. In a way people didn’t. Even the block where I used to live, where my husband and babies died, was fixed up with the foundation of a new complex. Many people had died there, not just my family. Many people mourned. But my bustling little district moved on.
For once, the idea of country living was starting to appeal to me.
Autumn was out in full, leaves in oranges and reds, mostly still in trees. The air was dry, sun beating down on my face warm. My knee did a weird thing with every step, bone crunching funny. It didn’t hurt, at least, but I’d yet to test it by running. So far I’d kept it casual and didn’t rush anything.
Hell, I didn’t want to rush anything. Just putting one foot in front of the other was enough to keep my fingers trembling, my heart twisting up painfully. Scariest thing in the motherfucking world, just moving forward.
“Persephone?”
I halted before I could think not to, nearly bumping into an elderly gentlemen. He sent a disapproving look my way and I bowed deeply, muttering my apology. And then I turned.
Kazuhiko. He’d always been handsome and that hadn’t changed. Tall. Wiry. Glasses. The friendliest smile—I remembered him smiling at me like that, the first time I met him, and I melted. He smiled like he saw a better person in my place—like he didn’t see who I really was.
His smile had lost a lot of its shine to me and it wasn’t just because he’d aged a bit.
I’d gone the whole time from the plane landing, trekking through the airport, taking a few trains, checking in on my stuff in storage, all without seeing a single person I knew—and of everyone, it was him I ran into. But of course, no matter what happened, I had the luck of a black cat born under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth.
I nodded. “Ohayou-gozaimasu.” Good morning.
He tilted his head to the side, like he was reconsidering me. Like he didn’t recognize me. It’d been a lot of years so politeness seemed in order, but perhaps he disagreed. Kazuhiko stepped closer.
I didn’t move.
“Hisashiburi ne.” Long time no see, right?
I gave a half smile in response. Nodded again. Talking to him wasn’t making this thing any easier, and I opted to switch to English because it let me be more blunt and bitchy, both of which I preferred. “Yeah, right. I’m kind of in a hurry.”
He looked me over again—at my hair, which he’d not seen since it was shoulder length years ago; at my skinny jeans, big boots, and stiff black leather jacket, quite a contrast to the suits I wore to work. “Itsuka yushoku o goissho shimasenka?” Would you like to have dinner some time?
I sighed, irritation rising in me. “No.” And I looked pointedly at the silver band on his finger. “Maybe you should have dinner with your girlfriend?”
His face flushed. I spun and started walking again, weight lifting from my shoulders with every step. Just because I’d nearly died didn’t mean I was less of a bitch.
And I was okay with this.
****
Though I stepped gingerly through the cemetery, the soles of my boots slapped the cement loudly, decisively. It felt disrespectful but if I took them off and ran around barefoot, that would probably piss someone off too. Small collections of graves were peppered everywhere, single stones for families with urns and ashes beneath. Colour popped here and there, plants and shrubs between the steady line of gray graves. I wondered if they’d found enough of my kids to properly cremate but couldn’t gather the courage to ask Ken’s mother. I just wanted to know where they were and she told me.
Then hung up on me. I didn’t take offense.
At last I saw the tall, narrow stone marker, my heart seizing. Steps stuttered and I nearly gave up, six feet away, just staring. It was worse than kneeling at my kamidana, worse than feeling their eyes on me. The photo of them was from when they lived. Let me remember when they lived.
But this...nothing but the dead waited here.
Takata ran down from the top, names of my family below. Kenjiro. Shinichi. Hisa.
And with red painted over the engraving, my own American name written in katakana. Red because I wasn’t dead yet and it was easier—cheaper—to add me with the initial engraving.
So I’d always have a place. With them.
I couldn’t see it anymore because tears rose, fast and demanding, and blinking them back did no good. My dry, cracked lips parted and hung open a minute as my voice hid, afraid to come out, before I whispered at last.
“Moushiwake arimasen.”
I’m sorry.
I wiped at my cheeks, dragging my fingers under my eyes. I didn’t know if I was sorry for being a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad person, or sorry because they were dead, or sorry I wasn’t with them then—or sorry I didn’t have the balls to be with them now. A bullet to the head would do it and when I got out of the hospital and sat in that hotel room for a week, I thought long and hard about it, but every time I turned the gun to my face...
I think that sometimes you only realize you’ve been in the light when it goes dark once more. If you seek out that light again, perhaps you’re not entirely broken.
I didn’t know if I could find that light. If it was even worth trying, if it would turn away from my darkness when I did stand before it. But my name waited in red on a grave marker, a spot for my ashes below with my husband and kids. They weren’t going anywhere—they’d wait. And I’d come back—I wouldn’t wait nearly six years this time. At the very least I’d be back every summer for Obon, to properly honor them. I didn’t know if I could be better, but I’d try.
Wind kicked up, drying the tears remaining on my cheeks as I drew a ragged breath through my nose. I frowned at the edge of something white fluttering in the breeze at the base of the stone. Knelt. Reached forward. Pinched it between my index finger and thumb.
A business card. Not uncommon in a cemetery—
I turned it over to see the Veil’s seal, Adrian Lachlan’s name and number near the bottom.
Son of a bitch.
I rose, tore the thing in half, and then half again. Let the pieces drop. Gazed once more at the grave, at my name painted scarlet beneath. Takata.
And I walked away.