by Kanae Minato
Apparently there were phone calls to city hall suggesting that they ask TV programs to do an investigation, since the statute of limitations was due to run out soon. “Why on earth does the city hall have to do that?” my brother complained over dinner. “Both women live somewhere else. It’s just a coincidence. Akiko’s living a normal life, and if people start all kinds of groundless speculation, it’s annoying.”
He turned to Wakaba beside him and gently cautioned her: “If a stranger talks to you, never go with him. Mommy and Daddy have to be really careful,” he said to her, “since you’re so cute, Wakaba.” He ignored me and was only worried about Wakaba. That wasn’t necessarily the reason, but I decided not to say anything about getting two letters from Emily’s mother.
After I got the letters my forehead started aching and wouldn’t let up.
What did the letters say? I was too scared to read them. I didn’t even open them. They were sent, one soon after the other, right before the statute of limitations was going to run out, so I’m sure the point was to remind me of the murder one more time. They’re in my desk drawer in my room, so if you’d like to read them, feel free.
And on top of that same desk…after Wakaba had finished her homework and had gone home with my brother, I noticed she’d forgotten a homework handout and her key to her apartment.
In the mornings Wakaba went directly to school without stopping by our place, and though it was raining I decided to go over to their place that evening to return the handout and key. It was about 10 p.m. I heard that Haruka came home every night around eleven, and I thought I’d give them to Koji after Wakaba was asleep.
Their bedroom was on the first floor in the very back. I should have gone to the front door and rung the intercom, but I’d cut across the parking lot in back and had seen the light on in the kitchen, which faced outside, and the window was open a crack and I thought about calling in through there and having Koji take the items Wakaba had forgotten.
But when I peeked in through the opening I didn’t see anyone in the kitchen. I was about to go around to the front door when I heard a small voice from the room in back.
“Help!” the voice said.
What’s going on? I wondered. Was Wakaba feeling sick? “Are you okay?” I was about to call into the open window, when I heard a different voice.
“Don’t be afraid. It feels better now, doesn’t it? This is a kind of ceremony so we can really become parent and child. Parents and children who get along well always do this together.”
The ache in my forehead quickly spread to my entire head. It felt as if it was going to split apart. I didn’t understand what was going on, but a feeling of disgust rose up inside me…the exact same feeling I had when we found Emily’s dead body. I should never have opened that door. I remembered how much I regretted doing so years before.
I turned my back on the window, determined to leave before my head hurt even more, but just then I heard that voice again calling out for help. And that other voice.
“You always behave. Why not today? Who are you calling to for help? Aren’t I the one who helped you?”
She was calling to me for help. What should I do?…Frightened, I shut my eyes tight, and when I did a voice echoed in my head.
Hang in there! Just a little more! I know you can do it, Akiko!
I have to do it. This is why I’ve trained every day.
For this moment.
I opened my eyes, took a deep breath, and, using the forgotten key, opened the front door and quietly slipped inside. I stepped softly, heading for the room the voices were coming from, and yanked open the door.
And there I found a bear.
In the dark room, lit only by the light filtering in from the kitchen, a bear lay heavily on top of a naked little girl. As I stood there silently, the bear slowly lifted his head. I’d pictured an awful, scary face, but what I saw instead was a relaxed, genial-looking face. Within the bear’s shadows, I caught a glimpse of the girl’s face.
It was—Emily.
Crying, she looked up at me.
Emily was being attacked. But she wasn’t dead. Thank God—I’m in time! The criminal was a bear. I have to help Emily. Help her this very instant. Otherwise—she’ll be strangled and killed.
In a corner of the room, next to a little backpack, was the jump rope. I grabbed it, untied it, and wrapped it around the neck of the bear, still pressed down on Emily. He looked about to start crying, and I yanked it as hard as I could. The bear’s eyes, startled, went wide and he struggled, but I tightened the rope with all my might and with a thud he toppled over on top of Emily and lay there, unmoving.
At the same instant, Emily’s cries rang out through the room.
Thank God, I rescued her. I’ll go get Emily’s mother to come and take her home.
I turned around, and standing there, right in front of me, was Emily’s mother.
Oh, I see. She was worried and came to get Emily.
Emily’s mother stood there, silent and dazed, staring at the collapsed bear.
“It was touch and go,” I said to her eagerly, “but I saved her. ’Cause I’m so strong.”
I was sure Emily’s mother would thank me and stroke my hair. And then I would be freed from this awful pain, my head splitting as if my brain were going to be ground to powder and blow away…
I waited expectantly, but what I heard were different words entirely.
“Why couldn’t you mind your own business…”
At that instant I heard the sound of something collapsing.
It was Wakaba who had been attacked. Wakaba whom the bear was assaulting. And I had killed the bear. Was this—a crime? Maybe it was—
When you said you wanted to hear about the murder, was it this one you meant?
Then you should have told me earlier.
I heard that Wakaba was put in an orphanage facility. Again sounding as if she was mimicking a Korean TV drama, Mother said that Haruka was to blame for everything. Because she had never loved my brother at all. Even so, she had accepted his proposal because marrying him seemed like the easiest way to turn around her messed-up life.
Even if she didn’t love him, once they married she should have done her wifely duty, but she didn’t allow Koji to ever touch her. She must not have wanted another child. It must have been the aftereffects of the violence she’d suffered from that yakuza guy. Not being able to stay anywhere overnight, and only being able to cook the dishes that man liked, were all due to the trauma of that earlier time. She must have been quite traumatized. But still, if only she had talked with us about it…
Instead, she chose the cruelest method of all.
She wanted a peaceful life but didn’t want a man—my brother—to ever touch her. So she offered up Wakaba. Koji couldn’t have been hoping for that. If she had opened up to him I know he would have understood. But step by step Haruka drove Koji to it. Completely ignoring what it would do to her very own daughter, her own flesh and blood…Who knows, maybe Haruka wasn’t even aware she was suffering from the aftereffects of trauma.
Wakaba was lovely—pale skin, chiseled features, slim long arms and legs. The very image of her yakuza father, apparently. But for Haruka, Wakaba was nothing more than a tool she used to find her own happiness.
Whenever Wakaba came up in the conversation it always made my mother cry. We can’t ever see her again, but she is alive. The children’s home is in our prefecture, I heard, so who knows, someday, somewhere, I might run into her.
And that would be enough. Enough for a bear family. That incident wasn’t Haruka’s fault. We’d forgotten what our grandfather had taught us, had tried to reach for something above our station in life, and were punished for it. If only Koji had not been so prideful as to think that he alone could make an unhappy person happy, and had married a healthy, straightforward person who would make a good companion for a bear, they would have been blessed with a cute child. And then everyone could have taken good care of that child. Because n
o one had a problem having a cute little girl come to a bear’s house, they were overjoyed by it, in fact. That’s why no one noticed what was really going on.
No—Seiji knew. He’d told us it was better for Koji not to marry her. If only he had made his case more forcefully.
But the real one to blame is me.
I should have known long ago something was wrong.…I’ve spent the last fifteen years thinking of nothing else.…Instead I wore those cute shoes, went to a beauty parlor, ate a tart, and became this little girl’s friend.
If Emily’s mother knew all this, she would definitely take revenge. Probably shoot the bear. She’s rich, so I bet she owns a gun.
I’m not afraid, just wondering if there’s anything else I can say that would be helpful.
Oh—one more thing.
This was last year when Seiji stayed at our house. In the middle of the night as I was passing by the guest room on the way to the toilet, I overheard him say to Misato:
“Do you remember fourteen years ago, Misato, when we arrived at the station? You turned around to look at a man you’d just passed, and I was sort of jealous and said, ‘Hm—so you like that type, huh?’ and you said, ‘He looks like a teacher I had in elementary school.’ Isn’t this the guy?”
I heard the sound of pages in a magazine being flipped open. And then Misato said:
“That’s him. I remember now. I was wondering: Why is Mr. Nanjo in a place like this? Because I’d heard there was an accident and he quit teaching and moved to the Kansai area. A boy in his free school had set a fire. I’m sure that was him. It’s hard to think he’d run a place like that. But then again, he was always such a fine teacher, with a strong sense of duty.”
Could this be a clue? I mean, Misato saw someone she never expected to see here, right? What if he were the murderer?…Oh, that’s right—I forgot about the French doll affair. The pervert who stole the French dolls was the one who murdered Emily. That’s why Seiji asked me about it on the way back from the mini-mart.…
Someone who lives in Kansai, even farther away than Tokyo, isn’t going to come all the way to this town to steal French dolls, is he.…
So it’s too late. And there are only five more days until the statute of limitations runs out.
I wanted to ask—are you really a professional counselor? You remind me more and more of Emily’s mother.…But I’m just imagining things, I suppose.
I’m sorry, but my head is splitting. Can I go home now? It’s still raining a little. I’d like them to come get me, but I don’t have a cell phone, so could you call them for me? I don’t have the cell phone number on me, it’s at home.…Call the welfare section at city hall, if you would.
Ten Months and Ten Days
My contractions are still twenty minutes apart so it looks like they won’t let me into the standby room quite yet. So could we talk here, if you don’t mind? I know—a waiting room in a big hospital in the middle of the night is dark and kind of creepy, but no one will bother us, so it might actually be a good place to talk about that incident. There’s a vending machine, too. But I was wondering—have you ever had canned coffee from a machine?
Really? You like it? I never would have guessed.
There are five other women here tonight with contractions ten minutes apart, so the staff is kind of busy. The nurse had this sour look on her face and told me, “You didn’t need to come here yet.…” I didn’t plan to come here this early myself, and just basically stopped by to say hello, but don’t you think that was rude of her? I thought giving birth was supposed to be a more sacred event, something people should appreciate more. Especially with the declining birth rate in this region.
It wasn’t this crowded when I came in for my last checkup, and I wonder why it is tonight of all nights. I always feel as if I’m an extra in life, but I never imagined that when it came to giving birth I’d be treated as if I’m on an assembly line. Just my luck.
My due date is still a little way off, and at my checkup last week I was told the baby might be a little late, but today I went out at night, which I don’t do a lot, and maybe the waxing and waning of the moon had an impact. I hear it often does.
My due date is August fourteenth.
A year has 365 days, so doesn’t it make you wonder why this day of all days? Just one day earlier or later would be enough, but that’s the day the doctor said, so there’s nothing I can do about it.
A surprising number of people don’t know how to accurately calculate the normal gestation period. The notion of ten months and ten days that people talk about is, to begin with, wrong.…
For example, say your doctor tells you your due date is October tenth, then most people would simply subtract ten months and ten days and figure it was January first when the couple had intercourse. But that’s not the case. You don’t figure the due date as ten months and ten days from the time you had sex, but rather forty weeks, or 280 days, from the start of your last period. It’s a bit complicated, but what you do is subtract three from the month when your last period started. If you can’t subtract three, then add nine, then add seven to the day when your last period started.
So in the example I gave, the day the last period started would be January third, so the sex that led to the pregnancy would most likely be between January fifteenth and the nineteenth—counting one week for the period and one week afterward for ovulation.
You’ve given birth, so I know I don’t need to explain this to you. Most people don’t really care about figuring exactly which act of intercourse led to their pregnancy, but a friend of mine from high school, Yamagata, nearly got divorced because of this.
Yamagata got married to a man who is a serious and conscientious type, and when she showed signs of being pregnant she went to the hospital and was told she was three months pregnant. She happily reported this to her husband. Her husband was overjoyed too, and circled the due date on the calendar. But when he flipped back through the calendar ten months and ten days to calculate when the child had been conceived, he saw it was when he’d been on a business trip. And that’s when he started to have his doubts.
“Are you sure it’s my child?” he demanded. “Did you have an affair when I was out of town?” He started to press Yamagata, insisting on her showing him her cell phone, and things quickly escalated. For her part she’d simply been told the due date and didn’t know the correct way of calculating conception, so she couldn’t explain it away easily. “I never, ever had an affair!” she countered. All she could do was repeat that denial. Soon she started to wonder if maybe her husband was accusing her because he had something himself to feel guilty about, and she started venting her suspicions about him, and they ended up having a huge fight.
Neither one backed down, her husband finally announcing that if he found out it wasn’t his child he’d divorce her. I don’t know if you can do something like that when you’re only three months along, but the next day the two of them trooped off to the hospital and insisted on getting a DNA test.
The nurse there explained how to calculate the due date and they realized they’d made a huge mistake. The baby had been conceived the night the husband had come back from a two-month business trip, their first night back together, when they’d made passionate love after his long absence. So they’d gotten worked up over nothing. Come to think of it, Yamagata works at the Adachi Manufacturing plant. Not that that matters…But it’s good to be like those two, getting everything out in the open. Their doubts about each other were erased in one day. It would be awful for a woman, just because of problems figuring out a due date, to know her husband had doubts festering forever in his heart about an infidelity that never, ever happened.
There are other people who are the opposite, who breathe a sigh of relief when they miscalculate.
Like my brother-in-law—my older sister’s husband.
Subtract ten months and ten days from August fourteenth and you get November fourth. He and I slept together on November twenty-first,
so he figured it’s not his child. That’s what he thought, or rather what he convinced himself of.
And I never told him the baby is his. I told my parents and sister that I couldn’t reveal who the man was, that I’d had an affair with one of my bosses at work, and they believed it, my brother-in-law told me.
The child in my womb is, 100 percent, my brother-in-law’s. But I can’t blame him, since I was the one who seduced him. My sister first brought him to our house four years ago, and I’ve been in love with him ever since.
What do I love about him? More than looks or personality, it’s his workplace…his profession, I mean. I came to love him because he’s a police officer. I always enjoyed detective dramas on TV, but my special feelings for the police started on the day Emily was murdered.
You must have heard this from the other three girls, but right after the murder Maki told me to go to the local police station. It was on the way to school and I passed by there every day, but this was the first time I’d ever stepped inside. I’d never lost anything, or ever done anything particularly bad, so there was no reason to.
Though Emily did treat me as a thief. You didn’t know that?
I’m sorry, but could we take a five-minute break? My stomach’s killing me.
I think Maki spoke about the way we played Explorers, but wasn’t it amazing that everything she said at that PTA meeting was out on the Internet? Apparently a parent was recording it all, which made me wonder—are you maybe recording this now? Not that it really matters…
I was the one who discovered that we could get into that abandoned cottage. Our family grows grapes, and the thing I hated most in the world was helping out with the farmwork. I thought it was totally unfair—that just because I was born into a farm family, I had to, for free, do the kind of labor I would never have had to do if I’d been born into an ordinary white-collar family. Not that I hated everything about it. Because of the cottage. The back of our fields faced the cottage grounds and whenever I was roped into helping out in the fields I’d take a break sometimes and wander around the grounds of the cottage as if I owned the place. The outside of the cottage was quite sophisticated and I tried many times to get a peek inside, figuring it, too, had to be gorgeous, but the windows and doors were boarded up tight.