Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [80]
Wataru didn’t meet his father’s gaze again that day.
Akira stood quietly in front of the hard bench where Wataru sat staring at the ground in uneasy silence.
The wind is blowing water from the fountain and it’s cold. I can hear a girl laughing. I hear a baby crying.
“Wataru…This idea to meet me—was this your idea alone?”
“Katchan helped me.”
“That’s not what I mean. Um, did you come up with the idea yourself?”
Wataru looked up. Funny, he looks scared. “What do you mean?”
Akira’s lips curled, as he searched for the proper words. He thrust his hands into his pockets and looked away. “Did your mother send you here to do this?”
Wataru didn’t catch what he said. “Huh?”
“Did your mother tell you to meet with me and ask me to come home?”
Wataru’s mouth gaped open. “No, not at all.”
“Okay.” Akira nodded, still frowning. “That’s fine. If your mother had put you up to this…if she was trying to use you, that would be bad. You understand? I just wanted to make sure.”
“Mom wouldn’t do that.” She wants me to pretend you’re on a business trip. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”
Akira’s shoulders relaxed. He seemed relieved.
“It’s the truth, Dad.”
“Right, I understand. Well, I’m going now. You take care of yourself, and go straight home.” He began to walk off, then paused. “Call me on my cell phone anytime. If you want to talk, just call. Even if it’s just about homework. Anything.”
Wataru sat alone, staring off into space when he heard a tiny voice. He was too tired to actually focus on it, to hear what it was saying.
“Sonny?”
He felt a light tap on his shoulder and looked up to see the old lady who had been sitting on the bench next to him. He saw the dark stains of the ice cream in the fabric of her skirt. She was plump, and bent over to the point where she was only about as tall as Wataru. She crouched by the bench and smiled a faint smile. “Where do you live, sonny?”
Wataru was empty. An old shopping bag turned upside down. His voice had fallen out a long time ago to clatter on the floor.
“We could take you home?” she offered.
Behind her Wataru could see her husband sitting on the bench, frowning. Then Wataru’s mouth opened, and the sound that came out was alien to him, flat, like a synthesized voice.
“No, I’m going to the library.”
“You sure, sonny? You live far from here?”
Wataru repeated himself, then stood.
“Leave him alone,” the old man said to his wife. “He can take care of himself.”
The lady grabbed her husband’s shirt by the sleeve. “But aren’t you worried?” Wataru heard her saying. “He’s so young…”
He left them and began to walk toward the library building. “Oh, sonny!” the old lady called out. “How about some ice cream?”
He could hear her husband scolding her, but their voices were already fading into the distance as he walked away. All but one sentence he heard as clearly as if the old man had been talking right in his ear.
“I knew there were irresponsible fathers in the world, but that was my first time seeing one.”
The old woman grumbled something about men, but Wataru was already too far away.
He wasn’t falling anymore. He had gone down as far as he could go, and now he had hit rock bottom. He was so far down he didn’t know where he was.
Chapter 11
The Secret
If somebody had later asked Wataru how he had spent the next several days before summer vacation began, he would have given them a blank stare and said nothing. He was in a daze. Details blurred and faded in the space of hours. Those days, he lived for nothing, and did even less.
Not that there was much of a change in his daily routine. Uncle Lou visited again and they hammered out the details for his summer trip. Late in the evening, he saw him speaking in hushed tones with his mother, but he wasn’t told what they were discussing, or whether they had reached any conclusions.
Kuniko settled into the exact same patterns she followed when Akira was on one of his long business trips. In that respect, what she told Wataru wasn’t exactly a lie. They would watch TV together