Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [70]
Kuniko sat with her head hung low, wrinkles showing on her forehead. “The woman…”
“He’s right, isn’t he?”
Kuniko looked up with a wan smile. “I suppose you heard what your grandmother was saying down in the garden. There’s no point in trying to hide anything from you now.”
No, there’s not.
“Wataru, do you know what that means?”
“I think so.” Wataru recalled what his uncle had said about that sort of thing happening on television all the time. He said so.
“Soap operas…” Kuniko said with a sigh. “You’re right. I used to think this sort of thing happened only on television. Those advice columns, and those radio call-in shows, I thought they were all fake. I never thought…” her voice trailed off. She was talking half to herself. “Those sort of things happen to other people. People who didn’t run a good family, people who were lazy, who got into trouble. Not…not us.” She shook her head. “Maybe I was too proud, and this is my punishment.”
Wataru knew he should say something. You’re wrong. That isn’t it at all. But he said nothing. Because I feel the same way!
He only had more questions. “What do we do now? How do we get Dad to come home?”
“I don’t know,” Kuniko answered quickly, the words coming out in a jumble. For a second, Wataru saw his mother differently. She was more than his mother and more than his father’s wife. She was a complete person, someone he had, until this moment, never seen before.
And then it was gone.
“No, Wataru, you shouldn’t think about this. It isn’t your problem to worry about. It’s like your uncle Satoru said, you haven’t done anything wrong. This problem is between me and your father.”
Wataru’s logical brain—inherited from his father, no less—immediately began clicking, constructing a counterargument. Sure, if it was a problem between “Akira” and “Kuniko,” then it may very well have nothing to do with “Wataru.” But what if it was a problem between his “mother” and his “father”? Then it didn’t make sense to leave him out of the equation.
So who are you? Kuniko and Akira, or my father and my mother?
What good would asking do anyway?
“Dad told me that even if he—even if he divorced you, he would still be my dad.”
“He said that when you came back on Friday night with Uncle Lou?”
“Yeah.”
“Your father told you that, did he?” said Kuniko, her eyes filling with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? You only said he told you that he would be leaving and wouldn’t come back for a while.”
Wataru had lied to her, he remembered. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not something you need to apologize for,” Kuniko said with her elbows resting on the table and her hands covering her face. “Why should you have to apologize? That’s terrible. I…”
She slumped onto the table, and started crying. Wataru whispered that he was sorry. Everything he saw went blurry. He rubbed his eyes again and again but the blurriness didn’t go away.
“No, Wataru, I’m sorry,” Kuniko said between sobs, her head still down on the table. “The terrible one is your father. Can you believe it? He says that even if he leaves he’s still your father—and what are you supposed to say to that? Nothing, that’s what. You had to just swallow it all up inside. And then he walks out.”
Uncle Lou’s voice rang in Wataru’s head. Akira had always been that way, keeping his thoughts to himself, voicing only his conclusions. Wataru knew this about his father. Logical thought led to rational decisions, and those, once made, were final. No amount of arguing could dissuade him once he had set upon a course of action.
Rational decisions. For Akira Mitani, the rational decision had been to leave, to abandon his wife and son, so that’s what he had done. But how had he come to that decision? What path did his reasoning take? How could Wataru be sure his father hadn’t made a mistake, an error in his calculations?
Because Dad never gets anything wrong, never makes a mistake. Until now. This was the exception, it had to