She could never forget these tender memories, nor could she measure the joy he had brought her.
“Take care…,” she murmured.
And then she gave him her biggest smile.
“Live well!!!”
The strong morning sunbeams illuminated the whole world as the last echoes of his howls faded away. He looked slowly down at Hana.
The wind picked up.
She smiled confidently up at him.
He was a magnificent, powerful, full-grown wolf, but his eyes were still the familiar eyes of Ame.
His fur glinted golden as the wind ruffled it.
Hana smiled a pure, clear smile and whispered once again:
“…Take care…”
The wolf returned her gaze as if in acknowledgment, then jumped lightly over the top of the waterfall and disappeared across the cliff.
Hana was left alone in the empty parking lot. The puddles on the asphalt reflected a bright sky. She stood for a long time staring at the spot from which the wolf had vanished. She knew she would never forget what had happened that morning.
The beech leaves had been washed clean, and the spiderwebs, and the sky. All of it glittered under the sun as if, Hana thought, the world had been reborn overnight.
The cycle of seasons advanced, and summer arrived in earnest.
Magnificent thunderheads formed a powerful mass in the pleasant blue sky. Hana’s house had completed its summer transformation. The garden was awash in brilliantly colored flowers.
No one was in the entryway with its doors thrown open wide. No one was in the big main room. No one was in the kitchen.
On the refrigerator, magnets held letters and pictures, and among them was one of Yuki, wearing her junior high uniform and joking around with her new friends with a brilliant smile.
Yuki had left home that year to live in the junior high dorm.
Hana herself had suggested the move. Yuki had asked if her mother would be lonely all by herself, but Hana had assured her that she wouldn’t. After all, even if Yuki and Ame lived apart from her, she would still be their mother. Her face completely content, Hana had laughed and told Yuki that when she looked back on these twelve years, they seemed to have passed in an instant, like a fairy tale. It felt like looking at a distant mountain peak, she’d said. The way Hana smiled then made Yuki very happy.
Hana still lives a quiet life alone in her mountain house.
Yuki’s desk still stands in the study, now tidy. Ame’s desk stands beside it, just like it did back then. Their stuffed wolves still sit on the desks.
Sometimes, if she listens carefully, Hana can just barely make out a lupine howl, carried to her on the wind from the mountains far away. And that, she thinks with a smile, is enough.
The day Hana met him was a beautiful, fresh summer day just like this one.
When she thinks back now to the girl who didn’t find it the least bit strange to fall in love with a wolfman, that girl seems quite extraordinary to her.
She eats her delicious grilled chicken skewers by herself and places one next to his driver’s license.
(The End)
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Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki Page 14