by Yoko Ogawa
"You knew?" My voice was hoarse.
"Yes."
"How?"
"I was always watching you." This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell. "I've known what you were doing to her for a while now." His eyes were fixed on the bottom of the pool. "Rie's had a hard time," he said, his voice low and even. "Her mother was mentally retarded, and she had Rie in a restroom."
If he had attacked me outright, I might have been able to defend myself. Instead, he exposed my secret as if offering himself to me. I was left mute, listening to my heart pounding in my chest.
I wanted him to stop talking. Anything he said would only make me sadder. Rie's sharp cries echoed in my ears, cutting Jun's shining muscles all to shreds. The world was spinning in front of me, as if I were falling head over heels into the empty diving well.
We sat for a moment, saying nothing. The railing had become warm against my back.
"We'll be locking up soon," one of the men called from the bottom of the pool. The spinning slowed.
"Okay!" Jun called back. "I hope the rain's stopped," he added, looking up at the ceiling. As I traced his profile with my eyes, I realized that I could never ask anything of him again: not caresses, not protection, not warmth. He would never dive into the pool inside me, clouded as it was with the little girl's tears. The waves of regret were gentle, but I knew they would ripple on forever.
"Let's go," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder.
"Where?" His palm was almost painfully warm.
"Home, to the Light House."
His voice reached me through the hand on my back. It struck me as a terrible joke that we were going home together, but I rose, nodding obediently.
PREGNANCY
DIARY
DECEMBER 29 (MONDAY)
My sister went to the M Clinic today. Since she rarely goes to see anyone except Dr. Nikaido, she was nervous about the appointment. She had put it off, worrying about what she should wear and how she should speak to the doctor, until it was the last day they'd be seeing patients this year. This morning, she was still fussing.
"I wonder how many months of temperature charts I should show them?" She looked up distractedly from the breakfast table but made no move to get up.
"Why not take all of them?" I answered.
"But that's two years' worth," she said, her voice rising as she churned her spoon in the yogurt. "Twenty-four charts, and only a few days that have anything to do with the pregnancy. I think I'll just show them this month's."
"Then what was the point of taking your temperature every day for two years?"
"I can't stand the thought of some doctor pawing through them right there in front of me, as if he were trying to find out every detail of how I got pregnant." She studied the yogurt clinging to her spoon. It shimmered, viscous and white, as it dripped back into the container.
"You're making too big a deal out of it," I said, covering the yogurt and putting it back in the refrigerator. "They're just charts."
In the end, she decided to take all the charts, but it took her some time to find them.
I'm not sure why, when she was meticulous about taking her temperature, she was so careless with the charts themselves. The sheets of graph paper, which should have been kept in her bedroom, would stray to the magazine rack or the telephone stand, and I'd suddenly come across them as I was flipping through the newspaper or making a phone call. I realize now that there was something odd about my finding these scraps of paper with their jagged lines and telling myself, She must have ovulated then, or Her basal temperature stayed low this month.
My sister had chosen the M Clinic for sentimental reasons. I'd tried to get her to go somewhere bigger and better equipped, but she had made up her mind. "When we were kids, I decided that if I ever had a baby, I'd have it there," she said.
The M Clinic was a small, private maternity hospital that had been around since our grandfather's day. When my sister and I were girls, we had often sneaked into the garden to play. From the front, the three-story wooden building was gloomy, with moss-covered walls, a half-faded sign, and frosted windows. But if you made your way to the garden around the back, it was bright and sunny. For some reason, this contrast thrilled us.
There was a carefully tended lawn behind the building, and we loved to roll down it. As I rolled, glimpses of green grass and dazzling sky alternated in my vision, blurring to a pale turquoise. Then the sky and the wind and the earth would recede for a moment and I felt as if I were floating in space. I loved that moment.
But our favorite pastime was spying on what was happening inside the clinic. Climbing on stacks of empty boxes that had once held gauze or cotton balls, we'd stare through the window into the examination room.
"We'll get in trouble if they catch us," I said. I was always more timid than my sister.
"Don't worry, they won't do anything. We're just kids," she'd say, calmly rubbing the glass with her sleeve to wipe away the condensation from our breath. As we pressed our faces up against the window, we could smell the white paint inside. That odor, like an ache deep in my head, still reminds me of the clinic after all these years.
The room was always empty at midday, before the afternoon appointments began, and we could study it to our hearts' content. A collection of bottles arranged on an oval tray seemed particularly mysterious. They had no caps or seals, just glass stoppers, which I felt an irresistible urge to pull out. The bottles had been stained brown or purple or deep red by the fluids they held, and when the sunlight shone through them, the liquid seemed to glisten.
A stethoscope and some tongs and a blood-pressure cuff lay on the doctor's desk. The thin, twisting tube, dull silver fittings, and pear-shaped rubber bulb of the cuff made it look like a strange insect nestled among the other instruments. There was an odd beauty in the unintelligible letters printed on the medical charts. Next to the desk was a simple bed made up with faded sheets. A square pillow lay in the middle. It looked quite hard, and I wondered what it would be like to sleep on. A poster on the wall read "Position for use in treating breech presentation." In the picture, a woman in a leotard was curled up in a ball on the floor. She lay there in the yellowed poster, staring vacantly into the distance. Then the chimes from a school somewhere in the neighborhood would start ringing, telling us that it was time for the afternoon examinations. We knew that we had to leave when we heard the nurses coming back from lunch.
"Do you know what they do on the second and third floors?" I asked my sister one day.
"That's where they have the cafeteria and the rooms for the mothers and babies," she answered, as if she'd just been up to have a look.
Sometimes we could see women at the windows on the third floor. They had probably just given birth. They had on thick bathrobes, and their hair was pulled back in ponytails. None of them wore makeup. Wisps of hair floated around their temples, and their faces were expressionless. I wondered why they didn't seem happier at the prospect of sleeping above an examination room full of such fascinating objects.
My sister came back before noon, and I found her in the front hall just as I was getting ready to leave for work.
"What did they say?"
"I'm in the second month—exactly six weeks."
"Can they really tell that precisely?"
"They can when they have all the charts," she said, pulling off her coat and hurrying past me. She didn't seem particularly excited by the news. "What's for dinner?"
"Bouillabaisse," I said. "The clams and squid were cheap."
She had changed the subject so quickly that I completely forgot to congratulate her. But, then again, I wasn't quite sure congratulations were appropriate for a baby who would be born to my sister and her husband. I looked up "congratulate" in the dictionary: it said, "to wish someone joy."
"That doesn't mean much," I muttered, tracing my finger over a line of characters that held no promise of joy themselves.
DECEMBER 30 (TUESDAY), 6 WEEKS +
1 DAY
Since I was a little girl, I've disliked the thirtieth of December. I could always get through the thirty-first by telling myself that the year was finally over, but the thirtieth was confusing somehow, neither here nor there. Cooking the traditional New Year's dinner, cleaning the house, shopping—none of my tasks were completely finished.
When my father and mother got sick and died, one right after the other, my ties to the New Year's season became even more tenuous. Nor did things change when my brother-in-law came to live with us. Still, breakfast this morning was a bit more relaxed than usual, since I didn't have classes and my brother-in-law's office was closed for the holiday.
"When you haven't had enough sleep, even the winter sun seems too bright," he said, squinting behind his glasses as he lowered himself into a chair. The light shining in from the garden fell on the table, and our three pairs of slippers cast long shadows across the floor.
"Were you out late?" I asked. He'd gone to the year-end party for the dental office where he works, and I must have been asleep by the time he got home.
"I caught the last train," he said. As he picked up his cup, a sweet smell wafted across the table. He puts so much cream and sugar into his coffee that the kitchen smells like a bakery at breakfast. I've often wondered how someone who makes bridges and dentures for a living can drink such sweet coffee without worrying about cavities. "The last train is worse than the rush-hour ones," he added. "It's always packed, and everyone's drunk." My sister scraped her butter knife over her toast.
Since her visit to the gynecologist yesterday, her pregnancy is now official, but she doesn't seem any different. Usually the least little thing—her favorite hair salon closing, the neighbor's old cat dying, a water-main break—is enough to get her completely agitated and send her running to see Dr. Nikaido.
I wonder how she broke the news to her husband. I don't really know what they talk about when I'm not around. In fact, I don't really understand couples at all. They seem like some sort of inexplicable gaseous body to me—a shapeless, colorless, unintelligible thing, trapped in a laboratory beaker.
"There's too much pepper in this," my sister muttered, sticking her fork into her omelet. Since she always has something to say about the food, I pretended not to hear her. Half-cooked egg dripped from the end of her fork like yellow blood. My brother-in-law was eating slices of kiwi. I can't stand kiwi—all those seeds make me think of little black bugs, and the kiwi this morning was particularly ripe and soft. Beads of sweat had collected on the surface of the butter.
Apparently, neither of them was anxious to bring up the subject of the pregnancy, so I didn't mention it, either. Birds were singing in the garden. A few wisps of cloud dissolved somewhere far off in the sky. The clatter of dishes alternated with the sound of chewing.
None of us seems to have realized that the year is almost over. There are no pine branches decorating the door, no black beans or mochi in the house. "I suppose we should at least do the cleaning," I said, as if talking to myself.
"You shouldn't overdo it in your condition," my brother-in-law said, turning to my sister as he licked the kiwi juice from his lips. It's just like him to say the most obvious thing as if it were a profound truth.
JANUARY 3 (SATURDAY), 6 WEEKS + 5 DAYS
My brother-in-law's parents came to visit and brought a box of traditional New Year's foods. When they're here, I never know what to call them or what to talk about, and it makes me uncomfortable.
We had been hanging around the house all day with nothing more to eat than a frozen pizza or some potato salad, so the lavish display of holiday food was a bit overwhelming. It looked more like fine art than something you could eat.
I'm always struck by how nice they are. It doesn't seem to matter to them that the yard is buried in dead leaves or that there's nothing in the refrigerator but apple juice and cream cheese. They never have a bad word to say about my sister, and this time they seemed genuinely delighted with the pregnancy.
When they left in the evening, my sister let out a big sigh and collapsed on the couch. "I'm exhausted," she said and fell asleep as if someone had turned off a switch. She seems to sleep a lot these days; and she seems quite peaceful, as if she's wandered off into a deep, cold swamp.
I'm sure it has something to do with the pregnancy.
JANUARY 8 (THURSDAY), 7 WEEKS + 3 DAYS
Her morning sickness has started. I had no idea it came on so suddenly. She'd been saying all along that she wouldn't have it, that she hates that sort of cliché. She's convinced, for instance, that hypnosis or anesthesia would never work on her. But we were eating macaroni and cheese for lunch when she suddenly held up her spoon and began staring at it.
"Does this spoon look funny?" she asked. It seemed perfectly normal to me.
"It smells weird," she said, her nostrils flaring.
"Weird how?"
"I don't know . . . like sand. Did you ever fall over in the sandbox when you were little? Like that, dry and rough." She set the spoon back on her plate and wiped her mouth.
"Are you done?" I asked. She nodded and then rested her chin on her hands. The kettle began to whistle on the stove. She looked at me but said nothing, so I went on with my lunch.
"Doesn't the sauce on the macaroni remind you of digestive juices?" she murmured. I ignored her and took a sip of water. "So warm and slimy? The way it globs together?" She bent forward and peered at me, her head cocked to one side. I tapped the end of my spoon on my plate. "And the color, does it look like lard?"
I continued to ignore her. The sky was overcast, and a cold wind rattled the windows. The stainless steel counter was covered with the things I'd used to make the sauce—a measuring cup, the milk carton, a wooden spatula, and the saucepan.
"The noodles are strange, too," she added. "The way they squish when I bite into them makes me feel like I'm chewing on intestines, little, slippery tubes full of stomach juices." As I watched these words dribble out of her mouth, I fingered my spoon and thought how sad it was to see her like this. She went on talking until she had nothing else to say and then rose to go. The macaroni was a cold, white lump on her plate.
JANUARY 13 (TUESDAY), 8 WEEKS + 1 DAY
When my sister showed me the picture, I thought I was looking at freezing rain streaked against the night sky.
It was the size and shape of an ordinary photograph, with a white border and the name of the film company printed on the back. But when she got home from her exam and threw it on the table, I knew immediately that it was different from other photographs.
The night sky in the background was pure and black, so dark it made you dizzy if you stared at it too long. The rain drifted through the frame like a gentle mist, but right in the middle was a hollow area in the shape of a lima bean.
"This is my baby," my sister said, picking at the corner of the picture with a perfectly manicured fingernail. The morning sickness had made her cheeks pale and transparent.
I stared at the bean-shaped cavity. The baby was curled up in the corner, like a wispy shadow that might be blown away into the night by the first breeze.
"This is where the morning sickness comes from," she added, sinking heavily onto the sofa. She had eaten nothing since getting up this morning.
"How do they take these?" I asked.
"How should I know? I just lay there. As I was getting ready to leave, the doctor handed it to me—as a 'souvenir,' he said."
"A souvenir?" I repeated, looking back at the picture. "So, what's he like," I continued, remembering the smell of the paint, "this doctor at M Clinic?"
"He's an older man, white-haired, quite a gentleman. He isn't very talkative, and neither are the two nurses who work with him. They don't say anything unless they have to. They're not so young themselves, probably about the same age as the doctor, and they look remarkably alike, almost as if they were twins. Their builds, their hair, voices, even the spots on their uniforms are in the same places—I can never tell them apart.
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