Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Page 9

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing then. It could not be real. Not a denial of what I know to be the truth, not that kind of disbelief, but something much deeper: the complete inability to comprehend that such a sight was even possible, within the laws of physics or any other law by which real things happen.

  “That stupid cardinal. We took our eyes off our kids for what, thirty seconds? Thirty seconds of looking at a cardinal. Now, of course, after replaying it over and over in my mind I see that the cardinal was giving me a warning. From high on her perch she saw my son run into the road and she saw the speeding car close the gap. She was telling me to look out, to protect my child. She was a siren, and I just stared at her, listening to her song, not doing a goddamned thing, like I was staring up in amazement at a screaming smoke detector in the middle of the room, surrounded by flames, oblivious.

  “Silke screamed from upstairs in the window, and the frozen moment was over. The white mug from Paris crashed to the cement. I leapt down the steps and into the street. My son lay on the road, bloody, barely conscious.”

  I kneeled over him and held his hand and touched his face. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? We’re told not to move the victim, it’s better to wait for the professionals. My son wasn’t crying, just groaning, and barely. From the looks of him, an impartial observer might have said it was already too late. What could the professionals do? Send the professionals back, no need for them here. Send them somewhere they might do some good. Not here. Too late.

  “But I was not an impartial observer. I debated: maybe if I picked him up so carefully and took him into my arms and hugged him hard enough I could squeeze out all the hurt. I heard a siren off in the distance.

  “Silke rushed down and we became mirror images of each other. I was on my knees and held his right hand and gently stroked his forehead full of cuts. She knelt on the other side, holding his left hand and stroking his forehead. The siren grew louder but never seemed to come. I held his hand as he lay dying. The driver of the car stood behind Silke, bawling, hysterical, horrified at what she had done, and I remember thinking she had chosen the perfect spot to stand: not too far away, as though she weren’t responsible, as though she were trying to escape the scene, and not too close that she was intruding on us, who wanted nothing to do with her. There was only one spot that fulfilled those requirements and she was standing on it. Some human instinct drove her there. She was the only one crying. I wasn’t crying. Silke wasn’t crying. I had to lean in close to hear his fading gurgles. We were so focused on comforting him we didn’t think to cry. Soothing words, soothing touches, that’s all we could offer.”

  “It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay, I said, stroking his forehead even as he spit up blood, running out the corner of his mouth and down his chin and cheek, and I had an instinct—my left arm actually twitched—to pick up his bib and wipe off the blood as though it were pureed peas. But he wasn’t wearing his bib, and it wasn’t pureed peas.

  “The paramedics said, ‘Stand back, please.’ And just like that our jobs as parents were over.”

  Stand back, please. You’re no longer needed.

  Fifteen

  She orders Thai for dinner. I give her cash and she goes to the front door. When I suggested Japanese food she puckered her face and said the Japanese food here is no good.

  We share everything. Tom yum soup. Pad thai. Sour sausage with raw onions and raw ginger and peanuts. Panang curry. We go back and forth between the dishes. “How come Americans don’t like to share their food?” she says. “In my country we are always sharing. Korea, too. One big pot in the middle. But Americans need their own plates of food. Even if two people order the same thing, they each need their own private plate. Why is that?”

  “I’ve never thought about it. Is that true?”

  “Except for pizza. Pizza is the only thing I’ve seen Americans eat like Asians. A big pizza in the middle and everyone takes a slice when they need it. And pizza is America’s favorite food, but why don’t they like to share anything else?”

  “Americans like their own.”

  Megumi is still in my room when my wife returns. “What’s that smell?” she says from the hallway. “Did you get food delivered?”

  “Thai food,” I say.

  “And you came out to get it?”

  “I went down to the front door.”

  A stiff silence. I wait. Disbelievers don’t always reveal their suspicion. Layers of lies, back and forth.

  “Sweetie,” she says, “I’m proud of you. It’s Megumi, right? She’s helping you emerge. Any leftovers for me?”

  “I was so hungry. Sorry.”

  “I’m sure you were.”

  Hours pass. My wife shuts off the television and goes to bed. She cries. Her door is open. We lie together on the bed and listen to her sobs. It’s like the nights after his death, when Silke and I lay in bed next to each other, wide awake in the dark, listening for the other to fall asleep but saying not a word.

  I wake up in the middle of the night. Megumi’s hand is on me. I keep my eyes closed. She explores. Perhaps she, too, is only half awake. The blanket shifts.

  It starts as a single spot of warmth. Her tongue and hands work in concert, improvising. I keep my eyes pinched shut. The warmth spreads, slowly.

  She pulls my hand to her breast. Her nipple is thick. I pinch. She makes a sound. There is no me anymore, no skin, no bones, no guts. There is only warmth.

  I peek. The whites of her eyes flash up at me. Pure white surrounding circles of pure black, a void. It is enough for me to finish. She waits until she has it all, then she waits longer, until her warm mouth puts me asleep, until I fade away.

  In the morning, Silke’s knocking wakes me. She calls out my name. “Maybe tonight when I get back from work you can come out and we can sit on the sofa and watch a movie. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  My voice refuses me.

  “Think about it, okay?”

  Megumi showers. She comes out of the bathroom already dressed, offering me no naked glimpse. “How about some coffee?” she says. I head toward the microwave. “No,” she says, “I mean real coffee. I’ll go out and get it.” She puts on her coat and a pair of blue mittens. But at the door she stops. “Come with me.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “It’s okay, I’ll wait.”

  In return for the warmth she gave me last night, I owe it to her to go get coffee, that is the deal, that is the give and take between people, the beginning of the tangled knots. “I can’t,” I say.

  “Please? It’s just around the corner. I really want you to come with me.”

  “You’re so demanding,” I say in what I hope comes off as a playful voice. It’s been a while since I’ve made these kinds of inflections. I’m sure it sounds a little off, but I keep trying. “You know what I used to call you before I even met you, when you first came to my door?”

  “You didn’t call me anything. You just stayed so quiet.”

  “No, I mean what I called you to myself. In my head. I called you my pest. Actually I didn’t call you my pest. I just called you a pest. Because you were one.”

  She comes over and straddles me, then makes her arms into a life preserver and drops them onto my shoulders. She looks me right in the eye. “But now I’m your pest?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s all you called me, your pest?”

  “Lately I’ve been saying pretty little pest.”

  “But am I your pretty little pest?” She tightens her hold, pulling me closer. She kisses my neck and jumps off my lap. “No answer? Well think about it while I get the coffee. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll expect an answer,” she says, smiling.

  Time is seeping in, pushing into my room, collecting on the walls like condensation, the drops touching and growing larger, out of control. My life is no longer a hovering point. When she is gone, I am anxious for her return.

  What I did to my son is unforgivable. The c
ar came speeding around the corner. It was the one moment, above all others, that I should have been a father. But I did not leap into action, into the road; I did not scoop him into my arms and hold him tight and scold him by saying, “What did I tell you about running into the street?” He didn’t live long enough for me to scold him.

  Instead I waited for my instincts to kick in and catapult me into automatic, thoughtless, selfless action. I sat on the top step as the scene unfolded, waiting for the instinct, the instinct that makes us human, the instinct that says we must protect the ones we love, the ones for whom we are responsible. But that instinct never came.

  The implications are too horrifying to face.

  She returns to my room, but she has no coffee. Tears and blood run down her cheek. One eye is swollen.

  She sits on my bed, hiding in her hands. “What happened to you?” She turns away. “Let me see.”

  She tells me she’s sorry. “I should get going,” she says.

  “No. Stay. What happened? Did someone do this to you?” I go to the window. The street is empty.

  She takes another shower. The wait is unbearable. My insides churn and wrench. True feelings emerge when you see someone suffer. There is no denying them. The sight of her pain sickens me. And once again I am too late to help, to prevent, to protect. I did nothing. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I should’ve gone with her.

  I pace the room. Out the window, the street is lifeless. Nothing moves. Both hands burrow through my hair and squeeze my head to contain the pressure. The water drops explode against the porcelain. But propriety says I must stay out here and wait. She needs time to be alone.

  The water stops. “Are you okay?”

  “Do you have any bandages?”

  “Can I come in?”

  She opens the door. She has a towel wrapped over her chest. My towel. I rummage through the drawer. “Sit on the toilet,” I say. A single gash cuts across her cheek, washed clean but still seeping blood, split wider from the pressure. I select the appropriate size and carefully cover the wound. A purple bruise bulges from under the bandage. She looks up at me with a heartbreaking expression. “I guess I really am a pest,” she says.

  I kiss her bruised cheek. A dome of angry blood.

  “Do you have a sweatshirt or something?” she says. I find one and turn away as she changes. The towel drops to the floor. “I’m so stupid,” she says.

  My sweatshirt is too big for her. It looks like a thick hooded dress. She lies down on my bed and burrows under the covers. “Megumi, what happened?” I repeat. I am suddenly jealous of people who can pronounce her name perfectly.

  “I’ve been through worse than this. I’ll be okay,” she says.

  “Let me help you.”

  “You have. You are. I’m supposed to be the one helping you. I’m so embarrassed. Don’t worry. Okay?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Your neighbor.”

  “Morris?”

  She nods. “I just want to sleep for a time.”

  She is curled into a ball beneath my sheets. I sit at the window. Fresh air swirls in. The maple tree trembles. The bandage bisects her cheek. The bruise will take time to fade completely into her pristine face. Without waking, she pulls the hood over her head. The scar might never go away.

  Again I caused pain. I sent her to her fate. I refused to move. Are my feelings so important that I must allow them to cause pain?

  Fifteen minutes should be okay. It’s the least I could do. I quietly put on my jacket and shoes. I leave a note, just in case. I’ll be right back.

  Outside, I look into Morris’s windows. Nothing. A mother and her child walk toward me. They pass without looking at me. I press Morris’s bell. He does not answer. The knob does not budge. There will be another time. I am a patient man. As I walk down the block I hope he is spying on me from the window, that he knows it was me at his door, that he knows I know what he did.

  The cashier greets me with a smile, as though I am normal. The air is stained with coffee. I find my voice and place my order. I breathe in the coffee air and hold it. My cheeks tingle. My second time outside this week, both times in daylight. I feel like a sail unfurling.

  As I climb my front steps, I again look into Morris’s windows. The blinds are closed now. I hold my stare and hope he is watching me through one of the gaps.

  Megumi is uncurled, awake, still wearing only my sweatshirt. “Coffee delivery,” I say. She lowers the hood and fixes her hair. She smiles. We drink the coffee on the bed. “I got doughnuts, too. Do you like doughnuts?”

  “Yum, who doesn’t like doughnuts?” She tests the temperature with her lips. She drinks. We pass a doughnut back and forth. “Japanese even share doughnuts?” I say.

  “It’s my fault,” she says. “I shouldn’t have gone over there. I should’ve known better. But I thought I could handle it.” She tells me how Morris asked her to come inside, that he was concerned about me and that he offered to help. Showed her pictures of his wife and son. “He said your sons were close.”

  “They played together sometimes, that’s all.”

  “He said you were best friends.”

  “We were neighbors.”

  “He told me he knew why I was coming to see you. I told him he had the wrong idea. I tried to leave but he grabbed me.”

  She says Morris had her arm. She pulled and pulled but didn’t scream. She tried making her way toward the door, but he kept pulling her arm. He told her that they had plenty of time before his wife came home, and that if she does that psycho Thomas, why won’t she do him?

  “His wife?” I say. “She’s dead. Cancer.”

  “He told me she was at work. He held on and I pulled, and then suddenly he let go and I fell and my face hit the table. I came straight here.”

  “And that’s everything that happened?”

  She nods. “But if Morris was your friend at all, if he knows you’re up here, then why didn’t he try to help you? And you must’ve had other friends, too.”

  “At first, maybe. But grief and guilt as deep as mine, people see it and run the other way. I think they were somehow relieved I wouldn’t come out—saved them from having to avoid me. Like how nobody gets too close to a vagrant. It’s just an instinct people have, I guess, to stay away from grief and guilt.”

  She pulls me on top of her. What’s left of my coffee spills and soaks through the sheets. Her lips taste like coffee and sugar.

  I wonder if this is my wife’s intent, if she told the girl to do whatever it takes to get me out, or if maybe these kisses are real. They feel real.

  She takes off the sweatshirt. She squeezes her breast and pulls my mouth to it.

  I take off my clothes. She no longer needs to pull me. My naked body remembers now what to do. She is so young, her appetite immense. She devours me. Her eagerness awakens me. The dark foreign scent that stuck to my pillow, it covers her entire body, every curve and surface. It is not just a scent. It is a flavor.

  I am embarrassed. I have no stamina. She’s too much. Every time I push the impulse down it surges up stronger. I hold perfectly still. “Don’t stop,” she says. She wraps her arms around me. Not a single space exists between us.

  I am careful not to rupture her bruised cheek. A small red splotch of blood seeps through the bandage. My failure.

  There’s no stopping it this time. At a certain point the force continues forward regardless of my wishes. The most determined will is powerless against it. It’s a force of nature in the most violent, beautiful, uncontrollable sense. It puts us in our place. I start to pull out, but she clamps her thighs around me like a vice. Her legs are steel. “Don’t go,” she says. Our convulsions flow through each other in waves. She says something in Japanese and hugs me tighter. Even when I finish she doesn’t let go. Our breathing synchronizes, slower and slower, like dying music.

  My nose grazes her neck. Her neck is wet. I kiss it. She puts her hand on my head. I kiss it again. “I ruined yo
ur bed with the coffee,” she says.

  I sleep deeply, too deep for dreams. When I wake, my head is still on her shoulder. She is staring up at the ceiling. “What’s it like when you have sex with me?” she says. Her hair tickles my face.

  I may have just created a life, something I vowed never again to do. They are swimming inside her now, beyond my reach. They are on their own now. I can only wait. Three years of resolve, shattered. What use is resolve?

  She kisses my chest. The tip of her tongue licks my skin. “You’re salty,” she says. “Have you ever slept with a Japanese girl?”

  “No.”

  “Is it different?”

  Her breathing grows louder. She is sleeping. A string of drool spills out the corner of her mouth and lands on my chest. The red splotch on her bandage has turned brown. Once, twice, her foot jerks. Then her shoulders. I try to imagine her dream.

  My mind races. My thinking is clear but aimless. Thoughts pour in and out before I can catch them. I used to fantasize that I was a caterpillar and this room my chrysalis. I’d fantasize about my metamorphosis, about the day I’d emerge. Then I realized that this room is not a chrysalis, that it is isolation, banishment. But now a naked girl is sleeping on my chest, so I can hardly be called an isolate. So, if not a chrysalis and if not banishment, then what is my room?

  “You blame yourself, don’t you?” she says, upon awakening.

  “I shouldn’t have sent you out there alone. I should have gone with you.” I try to land my gaze on her eyes, but the angle isn’t right. I can only see the top of her head and her bare shoulder.

  “You’re very kind. But I meant your son. You blame yourself.”

  The room grows darker. The sun is setting. It’s sad how in winter the sun’s arc is so low in the sky, no energy to go higher. A gentle lob. “Of course I blame myself. But it’s worse than that. When the car sped down the street, I discovered I’m a monster.”

  She tells me I’m not a monster. Says that the way I bandaged her cheek was gentle. My neighbor, she says, is a monster.