Another, Vol. 2 (17 page)

It was several seconds later that we learned the phone installed in the building was unusable. Mrs. Numata ran in from the kitchen when she heard the alarm to tell us that. She said the circuit had been malfunctioning since the night before and had stopped working entirely that afternoon.

“We can’t place any calls, so we haven’t been able to arrange to have it fixed yet. But now, of all times…”

Before she had finished, Mr. Chibiki rummaged in a pocket of his coat and pulled out a cell phone.

“It’s no good.”

His voice was a dispirited—a deadened—mutter.

“The signal…”

“You can’t get through?” I asked, taking a step toward him.

“We’re out of range.”

“My cell phone worked before.”

“Then we’ll use that. Hurry,” Mr. Chibiki ordered. “Every company is different.”

“It’s in my room.”

“Go and get it, quickly!”

Then—

“I’ve got a phone.”

“Me, too.”

Two people offered theirs. They were Teshigawara and Mochizuki. Mei was silent. I guess she’d left hers in her room, like me.

“I see. Then please,” Mr. Chibiki said to them. “Try calling one-one-nine for an ambulance. It’s an emergency.”

But in the end—

“That’s weird. I’ve got one bar, but it’s not getting through.”

“Me, too…They’re not working, sir.”

Teshigawara’s cell phone and Mochizuki’s PHS had been rendered useless in this place.

In fact, when Mei had called me earlier, there had been so much noise that it was hard to make out her voice. I guess the signal was just fundamentally bad in the mountains. So then…

There was one other cell phone and a PHS among the other students. But they weren’t able to get through, either.

Wakui’s asthma attack continued the whole time. He wasn’t able to sit in the chair any longer and finally sank to his knees on the floor. Maejima was frantically rubbing Wakui’s back, which was heaving with the boy’s respiratory distress.

“This is bad. I don’t see any cyanosis developing, but we can’t just stand around.”

Mr. Chibiki pulled his lips into a stern line.

“I’ll take him to the hospital in my car.”

He looked over at Ms. Mikami, who stood unmoving and pale.

“All right, Ms. Mikami?”

“Er…Yes. I’ll go with you.”

“You can’t do that. You stay here, with the other students.”

“Oh…Yes. You’re right.”

“I’ll contact his parents from the hospital. I’ll come back once his condition has stabilized. Oh, Mrs. Numata? Could you please bring a few blankets? We have to make sure he doesn’t get cold.”

“Right away.”

Mrs. Numata pattered off down the hall.

The students who had gathered around the table and the students who were watching from a distance…All wore expressions betraying the anxiety and fear that gripped them. One of the girls was even sniffling quietly.

“It’s fine,” Mr. Chibiki addressed everyone. “There’s no need to worry. If we go to the hospital now, he’ll be fine and nothing serious will come of this. I promise you, everything is fine, so try not to upset yourselves. All right? This is an attack he’s used to suffering with his condition, not some extraordinary event. Nor is it a freak accident. So there’s no need to let your anxiety and fear take control. Calm down, and do what Ms. Mikami tells you. I’d like you all to go to bed early tonight. Understood?”

There was no change in the firmness of his expression, but his tone was impossibly calm. More than half the students nodded obediently, myself among them, but…

He’s lying.

The words whispered through my heart.

Obviously what Mr. Chibiki had just said was a lie. And if the word “lie” is too harsh, well—it was a desperate maneuver to assuage everyone’s distress ever so slightly.

None of the “disasters” befalling the class were simply “freak accidents.” Hadn’t Ikuo Takabayashi, one of the “deaths of June,” always had a weak heart? And yet he had lost his life to an attack involving his heart.

It wasn’t out of the question that Wakui would just happen to forget to check the amount of medicine he had left right when he was going on this trip, even though he used it every day for his asthma, but it was hard to see the situation as normal. In addition to the tension and anxiety we’d all felt, his stress just happened to be heightened by the eruption of that shouting match…And the result had been an attack. When we’d tried to call an ambulance, the phones at the lodge just happened to have been out of service all day. And then on top of everything, the signal strength made it hard for mobile phones to get through.

The fact that so many coincidences and instances of bad luck had collided was, in fact, an example of the
risk bias
peculiar to third-year Class 3 in an “on year.” How could we not think so? To use Mei’s words, this class was “close to ‘death’”…

Finally, Mrs. Numata brought blankets and bundled Wakui up in them, then Teshigawara and I helped take him to the building’s entrance. The car Mr. Chibiki had come in was parked in the driveway, close to the front door. It was a mud-spattered silver sedan. I couldn’t tell what model it was, but I was pretty sure it was something pretty old.

It was almost nine o’clock at night.

The rain was still falling in a drizzle, but the wind gusting through the night was getting stronger and stronger. I even convinced myself that I could hear, now and again, the high-pitched scream of some creature or other rising up from the woods around us on the wind that stirred through the branches…

When Wakui was settled in the backseat of the car, I ran over to Mr. Chibiki, who was getting into the driver’s seat, and called out to him. “Um, Mr. Chibiki, there’s actually something I…”

The cassette tape Katsumi Matsunaga had made: I wanted to tell him about it, even if only to give him the barest description, but there was simply no time for that anymore.

“It’s all right. I promise you, I’ll help Wakui,” Mr. Chibiki said, almost as if to convince himself.

“Um…Be careful.”

“I will. But you look after yourself, too. You have a time bomb in your lungs.”

“…I will.”

“All right, we’re off. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Mr. Chibiki raised a hand in a casual wave, then closed the door.

I realized Ms. Mikami was standing alongside me, though I hadn’t noticed her approach, so I decided to ask, “Are you all right?”

She turned her ashen face to look at me, and nodded. “Yeah. No need to worry about me…Okay?”

Running a hand down her rain-slicked hair, she put on a smile whose frailty was unmistakable.

“Um…Maybe we really should cancel going up the mountain tomorrow.”

In a hoarse voice, she replied, “Maybe.” And then even the smile she’d worn a moment earlier vanished from her face.

We watched Mr. Chibiki’s car drive off and were just retreating back inside when—

“Sakakibara—hold on.”

Mei stopped me.

“Thank you for what you did.”

“Wha—?” The question slipped out of me.

“When they were saying all that stuff about me in the dining hall.”

“Oh, you don’t need to…”

We were standing on the porch outside the front door. A little rain was blowing in. The only illumination was a dim porch light. It backlit Mei perfectly, so I couldn’t really tell what expression she wore as she looked at me.

“It wasn’t just me. Mochizuki and Teshigawara were…”

“Thanks,” she repeated, almost in a whisper, then she took a step closer to me. “Will you come over later?”

Once again a “Wha—?” escaped me.

“No one’s sharing my room with me.”

There were five girls on the trip. When they split up two to a room, there was one left over. And of course, Mei was that one.

“I’m in room two-twenty-three. On the opposite end from your room.”

“…Do you think I should?”

“I told you there was something I’d tell you later, remember? I want to keep that promise.”

“…Okay.”

“And also…”

Just then, over Mei’s shoulder, I saw Teshigawara. He was standing in front of the door, ogling us with a “well, well!” look on his face.

I got flustered and before Mei could finish, I said, “Okay, okay. I get it.”

“How about ten o’clock or so?”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“All right.”

Mei turned smoothly on her heel and went back into the building by herself. I waited a few seconds, then followed her inside. Just as I’d expected, as soon as I was inside the front door, Teshigawara pounced.

“Hey, there.”

He thumped me on the back.

“Major score, Sakaki. I heard you guys planning your little rendezvous.”

“Hold it, what do you mean ‘rendezvous’? It’s not like that.”

“Don’t get so embarrassed! I’ll never tell a soul.”

“Cut it out. You’re just making stuff up. Me and her have something serious to talk about, okay?”

“A serious talk about your future together?”

Teshigawara’s unrelenting needling got me kind of irritated, so I told him, “Seriously, I’m getting angry.”

He just put his hands in the air with a jovial “Woah, woah.” But…

At some point I had detected that, despite the way he was acting and talking, there wasn’t the slightest hint of a smile in his eyes.

I told Mochizuki, who was sharing my room, the overall situation and then slipped out of the room before ten o’clock.

Putting my cell phone in my pocket before I left was a reflex. No, that’s not quite true. Everything that had just happened in the dining hall must have imprinted the idea on me. That it was better to have my cell phone with me in case of emergency. After all, I’d connected with Mei’s phone once tonight, even if the signal had been terrible…

I encountered no one on my walk down the shadowy second floor corridor from room 202 to room 223. Apparently everyone was following Mr. Chibiki’s instructions and obediently shutting themselves in their rooms.

Outside Mei’s room, I glanced through a window in the hall.

The wind was as fierce as ever, but it looked as though the rain had stopped. The clouds blanketing the sky had grown diffuse, revealing the ghostly round glow of the moon. In its light, I could make out the somber shapes of the wood surrounding the yard.

Just this side of the forest, in a corner of the back lawn, I noticed a small, one-story building. It wasn’t even big enough to be called an annex or a side building. Maybe a shed or a tool house.

Observing the scene absentmindedly, I watched as a window in the building suddenly lit up. Apparently someone had just now turned on a light inside.

It wasn’t enough to make me seriously question who it could have been. Obviously, it would be one of the Numatas. They’d probably gone out there to get something they needed.

I moved away from the window, took one slow, deep breath, and then knocked on the door to room 223.

After a long moment, Mei opened the door. She had a lightweight ivory cardigan on over her summer uniform and her complexion looked even more waxen than usual.

“Go ahead,” she said tersely, gesturing me in without even a smile. The night wasn’t that hot, and yet the air conditioner in her room was pumping at full strength. “Sit down, at least.”

It was the same thing she’d told me the first time I’d been allowed up to the living room in her house. I settled myself lightly in the chair at the table next to the window. Mei sat down on the edge of one of the two beds in the room; then, out of the blue, she said, “We were talking about Misaki.”

She turned an unflinching gaze on me. I nodded silently.

Naturally, the “Misaki” she was referring to was not the “Misaki” of twenty-six years ago, nor the “Misaki” of her own last name, nor even the “Misaki” that was the town she lived in. She meant her cousin, Misaki Fujioka, who had died at the Yumigaoka Municipal Hospital that day at the end of April.

“I’ve honestly been thinking about it ever since I first saw you at the hospital, wondering why you got off the elevator at the second basement level.”

I spoke as if to refresh my own memory.

“Misaki was hospitalized there, but that was the day she passed away, right? So her body was in the memorial chapel on the second basement level, right? And you said you were taking that doll to her. But even so…”

“You thought it seemed odd?”

“Well, yeah.”

“The situation is a little complicated.”

Mei lowered her eyes as she spoke.

“I never really wanted to tell anyone this, but…”

“Do you mind if I ask? Will you tell me?”

After a slight pause, her eyes still lowered, Mei replied, “Okay.”

“Misaki Fujioka and I were cousins. We were the same age. But—how should I put it?
We didn’t start out that way.
”

Mei lifted her eyes slightly as she began speaking, her voice soft. She had chosen such a suggestive way to lead into her story. I cocked my head, struggling to extract the meaning behind her words.

She went on, unconcerned: “Misaki’s mother’s name is Mitsuyo, and my mother—Kirika’s real name is Yukiyo. They were sisters, exactly the same age.”

“You mean they’re—” I cut in, my head still cocked to one side. “They’re twins?”

“Fraternal, apparently. And their last name is Amane. They said that my Grandma Amane never got married her whole life.”

I thought “Grandma Amane” was Mei’s great-aunt on her mother’s side—the old woman in “Twilight of Yomi”?

“They’re fraternal twins, but even so they looked a lot alike, and they grew up in the same environment, were raised the same way, all the way to adulthood…Mitsuyo was the first to get married. She married a man named Fujioka. I’ve heard he was an office worker at a small food-related company, very young and no-nonsense.

“A little while later, Yukiyo married Kotaro Misaki—my father. He’s a competent businessman, rich, and flies all over the place all year round. Pretty much the exact opposite of Mitsuyo’s husband, you might say.

“And Mitsuyo was the first to have kids, with her husband Mr. Fujioka.”

“And that was Misaki?”

Mei nodded in silence, then her eyes slid smoothly in my direction and she added,
“And one other.”

“What?”

“She had twins.”

Mei’s eyes dropped again.

“Two girls. Who were also fraternal twins, but they also looked amazingly alike.”

Misaki Fujioka had a twin sister?

I cocked my head to one side yet again.

Then could that mean…? Impossible.

“Meanwhile, Yukiyo got pregnant, too, a year after Mitsuyo. But there were problems when her baby was born.”

“You told me about that.”

“Yukiyo was incredibly, incredibly sad. To the point that she was going crazy. The sucker punch came when she learned that, because of the stillbirth, she wouldn’t be able to have any more children in the future.”

“…Man.”

It was at this point that I started to get an inkling of what was coming.

“The Fujioka family, which had been blessed with twins, also had some financial concerns and weren’t sure that they would be able to raise two children at the same time. In contrast, the Misaki household needed to do something to save Yukiyo’s spirit, which had fallen into the deepest despair. I’m sure Mitsuyo felt sorry for Yukiyo, too. And so at that point, you could say the balance was struck between supply and demand.”

“Supply…and demand?”

“Yeah. You know what I mean, right?” Mei asked, never spoiling her quiet narrative. “One of the twins born to the Fujiokas was sent to the Misakis as a foster daughter.”

“So then…”

“That was me. I changed from Mei Fujioka to Mei Misaki when I was around two years old. I don’t have any memory that might suggest why I was chosen instead of Misaki.”

Mei broke off subtly at that point, and then continued, as if to push the question away.

“I figure it was probably because of our names.”

“Your names?”

“If Misaki had been adopted by the Misakis, she’d be Misaki Misaki. I’ve decided to think that they made the decision based on some stupid reason like that.”

A ghost of a smile came over her pale, peach-like lips before quickly disappearing.

“And so, since before I can remember, I’ve been raised in the Misaki family as Yukiyo’s—as Kirika’s only daughter. Without ever being told that I was adopted. So when I was younger, I was totally convinced that Mitsuyo was
my Aunt Mitsuyo
. And I thought that Misaki was my cousin, who was the same age as me and just happened to look a lot like me. Even knowing that we had the same birthday, it was just like, wow! What a coincidence! Chalk it up to our moms being twins, I guess.

“I was in the fifth year of elementary school, I think, when I found out the truth. Grandma Amane let something slip by accident, and then she explained it to me, but that day Kirika…my mother completely lost it. I think she would have kept it hidden from me my whole life if she could have.”

Despite the fact that she was revealing something significant about her own origins, Mei’s tone was unutterably soft and her expression almost perfectly still. Having no idea how best to react, all I could do for a long while was listen to her talk.

“For her, I was essentially a substitute for her own stillborn child. A replacement. It was something similar for my father, too. I think they cherished me more than most people would have. And when I had the issue with my eye, they did everything they could for me, and my mother even made this special glass eye for me…I’m grateful to them. But…”

I’m one of that woman’s dolls.

“But a replacement is still a replacement. At some point, she started to see her own child, the one she should have had, in me.”

I’m alive, but I’m not the real thing.

“I’m sure the reason she shuts herself up in her workshop and keeps creating all those dolls is because of the intense heartbreak she still has deep down for her child. I can’t help thinking that. And from my point of view, once I found out the truth, she’s been nothing but the mother who raised me, not my actual mom…”

Mei’s words trailed off, so I interjected a question. “So what did you think when you found out?”

After much fumbling over her words, Mei replied, “I…wanted to see her. My mother, Mitsuyo. And my father.”

I thought I saw her cheeks flush with the words, though only slightly.

“I didn’t intend to be bitter or blame them for sending me out to be adopted instead of Misaki. I really didn’t. I just wanted to see them and have a real talk with them and confirm the fact that these were the people who had given me life.

“But around then, the Fujiokas moved away. Until then, Misaki and I had gone to neighboring elementary schools and our houses were pretty close to each other’s, but then Misaki changed schools and even though we lived in the same city, our houses were far apart and we couldn’t see each other very easily anymore. Even so, I wanted to see my mother, and I told Kirika that. She got such a sad look on her face when I said that, and then she got so angry…”

“What, because she didn’t want to let you see your birth mother?”

“Right.” Mei nodded, her shoulders slumping very slightly. “I think I mentioned this before. How she’s hands-off about making up rules for where I can go and what I can do, but she worries a lot and gets really sensitive about
certain things
.”

“Yeah…I remember.”

“That’s what I meant. Getting closer to my mother Mitsuyo. I think it’s natural for her to be nervous about it. Especially because the other woman is her own twin sister. Forcing me to have a cell phone is probably a manifestation of that anxiety. We’re always
connected
by it. I kind of understand how she feels, but still…”

Again Mei fumbled for words for a moment.

“But…While all that was going on, I would sometimes meet up with Misaki secretly. Especially after we moved up to middle school and we started participating in more activities. And around that time, she found out that the two of us were originally sisters, too.

“Maybe it was a strange idea, but she and I felt this unbreakable
connection
. We’d been linked by sharing time together inside the same mother. We were each half of the other, which is such a clichéd thing to say, but that’s how it seemed.

“Oh, but in case you’re wondering, I don’t think it felt that nice. This mysterious sensation…that
my other half is right over there
…that was the strongest impression I got. Beyond that, well, Misaki had grown up in a family with her real mom and dad, while her other self had been sent to live with a foster family, where she had even lost an eye as a young child…I might have come out a little more cynical than her.”

All of a sudden, the windowpane rattled violently. Had the wind shifted direction? I started to feel as if someone were peering in through the window from outside—though that was impossible—and I instinctively turned to look behind me.

“Around then…This was happening last spring. That’s when Misaki got sick.”

Mei continued with her story.

“It was a really serious illness, in her kidneys. She would have to be on dialysis the rest of her life. The only way to avoid that was to get a kidney transplant.”

“A transplant…”

“Yeah. So Misaki got one kidney from her mother, Mitsuyo, and got admitted to a big hospital in Tokyo for the surgery. Actually, I wanted to give her my kidney. I mean, we were twins, even if just fraternal, and we were the same size, so wouldn’t you think that’s the best option for a transplant? They said transplanting an adult’s kidney into a child was pretty hard, what with the size difference and everything, so…

“But apparently there’s some guideline that says children under fifteen years old can’t be live organ donors, so I couldn’t do it. No matter how much I swore I wanted to. Although…Even if the hospital had made an exception, if she—if Kirika had found out, she would have dug her heels in and refused to let me do it.”

So that had been the “major surgery at another hospital” Misaki Fujioka had had before coming to the municipal hospital. All at once, Ms. Mizuno’s voice reawakened vividly in my mind, speaking those same words over the phone, and I squeezed my eyes shut reflexively.

“The surgery was at the beginning of the year and it was a complete success. But they needed to monitor her progress afterward, so when her condition stabilized, Misaki transferred to the hospital here. Even after the transfer, her recovery was on schedule. I would secretly go and visit her. Without telling Kirika what I was doing, of course.

“Misaki and I talked about all sorts of things, but then she said, ‘You have all those amazing dolls at your house. I’m so jealous.’ So I made her a promise. I showed her a picture of the dolls in my room and asked her which one she liked, and I told her ‘I’ll give you the one you like best to celebrate when you get out of the hospital.’ And that…”

“That was the doll you took to the memorial chapel that day?”

“…I promised her.”

Mei blinked slowly, sadly.

“I never thought she would die like that, all of a sudden…I really didn’t. She wasn’t having any problems in her recovery and they were saying she’d be able to go home soon. And yet, all of a sudden, she…”

…Right.

Ms. Mizuno had said that, too.

Misaki Fujioka’s condition had taken a sudden turn and before anyone could do anything, she had passed away. That had been April 27, a Monday. Ms. Mizuno had told me,
“
She was an only child
, and apparently her parents were incoherent with grief.”