Brave Story (24 page)

His uncle’s voice got suddenly quieter. “Look, don’t give me a hard time about it, Wataru.”

“I don’t mean to give you a hard time, it’s just…”

“You’re still a kid! You can’t walk around with these adult problems on your shoulders. You haven’t done anything wrong, so you don’t have to do anything now. Your mother asked me to tell you that there’s nothing to worry about. So please, don’t worry. For me?”

Something’s wrong. Uncle Lou’s not usually like this. Why is he siding with Mom and not me?

There was only one thing left to do, and that was to talk to his father directly.

I can’t. Not without telling Mom. I shouldn’t.

But what was his mother telling him? What was she doing that wasn’t hidden from his eyes—in words he couldn’t hear? She was trying to clean things up all by herself. It wasn’t fair.

I’ll do what I think is right. I’ll make my
own
rational decision.

June slid into July, the depressingly overcast days of the rainy season became scarcer, and the sun shone hotter. The bespectacled weather reporter on TV pointed at his weather map and warned about heavy sudden thunderstorms and rapidly fluctuating temperatures.
Careful you don’t catch cold!

Before Wataru realized it, summer vacation was upon him. It was everywhere in the air. Even at cram school, the excitement was palpable. It was like he could hear a whispered countdown in the air:

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Vacation!

In reality, the cram school held classes even during summer vacation—actually, they held them
because
it was vacation—and if you were to attend them all, you wouldn’t have much of a vacation left. Still, having some schoolwork to do and having to actually go to school were two separate things entirely. The former always seemed much brighter and full of hope than the latter.

He sat in his usual chair, but his mind was far, far away. From the outside he figured he looked much the same as always. No one had said anything about him seeming down, or not himself. They didn’t get many tests this time of year, so there were no bad marks to raise his teachers’ suspicions either.

Of course, there was no fooling Katchan.

“Hey Wataru, why do you always look so angry lately?”

Exactly a week had passed since the Sunday when Grandma Tank rolled into town and blew his world to smithereens. Wataru was over at Katchan’s house, playing in his room. It was a small room, with a big dresser, and laundry hanging outside the window. There was a ton of it, flapping in the breeze.

Wataru looked away from the video game and peered at Katchan. His friend sat with a large mug of soda in one hand, his eyebrows raised in an exasperated look.

Wataru’s mug sat untouched atop a serving tray, sweating in the summer humidity. The mugs were the same exact ones they used for beer and mixed drinks down in the bar. Compared to a regular soda glass, they were huge. If he drank the whole thing he’d be burping the rest of the day.

True to form, Katchan had already downed half of his, and when he opened his mouth to say something more, a loud belch erupted.

Wataru cracked up, and Katchan joined him. Wataru dropped his game controller on the floor, laughing while his computer-generated opponent proceeded to dice up his character.

Katchan suddenly straightened up. “It’s like you’re wearing this angry face all the time.” Wataru was silently surprised. He had no idea it was so obvious.

For the past week, Wataru had been trying to contact his father every way he could think. He just wanted to talk to him once, just once. But it was proving difficult. It was as if Akira had flown to the moon. What Wataru thought would be so simple was turning out to be so difficult.

His dad had a cell phone, he knew, but Wataru didn’t know the number. There had never been a need until now. That Friday night, travel bag bulging, his father had told him to call him on his cell phone, but how could he do that, if he didn’t know the number?

There was no use asking his mother. Kuniko wouldn’t tell him. Since their talk she had been trying her best to cram Wataru into a box labeled “father on a business trip”—for his own good—and she was desperate not to let him think anything else.

Hoping it might be written down somewhere in the house, Wataru had leafed madly through address books and phone books. He could find it nowhere. He wondered if it was programmed into their telephone at home, and one night when Kuniko wasn’t looking, he pulled out the operating manual. There was nothing.
Maybe she knew I would look, and erased it?
It was more than probable.

His next target was Akira’s company. But, as Wataru realized with some embarrassment, though he knew the name of the company where his father worked, he knew practically nothing else. He didn’t know if his father worked at the main office, some branch office, or even at some subsidiary.

He tried calling the main office’s service centers as listed in the phone book, going from the first to the last. That’s when he encountered a new problem. At a big company such as the one where his father worked, you could call a number from the telephone book (or from directory assistance), and ask for Akira Mitani—and even if he worked there, they wouldn’t just connect you. They always asked for a division or department name, if you were family, or a client, and what your business was. If he couldn’t answer their questions they would probably tell him to stop making crank calls, or ask to speak with his mother. He’d be worse off than if he had never picked up the phone.

I’m really Akira Mitani’s son, I just want to talk to my dad.

Speaking slowly, Wataru told Katchan everything that had happened from start to finish. The whole time he spoke he didn’t tear up once, nor did he get excited. He was calm. Or maybe just exhausted.

Katchan’s round eyes went even wider. He listened without saying a word. When Wataru had finished talking and reached out for his mug, he looked up to see Katchan staring at him with his mouth hanging wide open.

“Whoa.”

Wataru wasn’t sure why, but suddenly, convulsively, he laughed like a madman. “Pretty out there, isn’t it?”

Katchan nodded vigorously. “I only know like one other person whose parents got divorced, and that was a long time ago!”

“Me too. Hey, but aren’t Yutaro’s parents divorced? And I think there’s another kid in cram school whose parents got divorced.”

“Maybe we’re thinking of the same person? Tanaka, that guy in Class Two?”

“No, no, it’s a girl, Satoko-something. She doesn’t go to Joto.”

“I know one kid whose parents died in a car crash,” Katchan said solemnly. “I never thought it would happen to someone I knew! I mean, uh, it’s not like he died or something, but still!”

Wataru felt the exact same way.

“So why do you want to talk to your old man now?”

“If I don’t, how will I know what happened? I don’t like this not knowing what went wrong. It ticks me off.”

“Yeah, I hear that.”

Katchan peered into his empty glass and belched again. This time he didn’t smile. “Shouldn’t you just leave it up to your grandma? Sounds like she’s pretty hardcore about fixing him.”

“You think my dad will come home if I do?”

“Sure. Married people are always gettin’ into fights and then gettin’ back together.”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“Oh, they talk about it at the bar all the time. My dad and mom, they’re great at ironing out those marital disputes. Lots of people come to them for advice.”

“You mean customers talk about their private lives like that? At the bar.”

“You bet.”

“Wait, so, even if my dad has this woman on the side, you think I should just wait it out and he’ll come back? You can’t guarantee that!”

No one could. Katchan chewed his lower lip in thoughtful silence.

“I just don’t want to leave it like this,” Wataru said at last. “There has to be something I can do.”

“You’re bright, Wataru. That’s why you don’t like it when people do dumb things,” Katchan said. “If all you need to do is call him, I might be able to help you out.”

It took Wataru a few seconds to process what his friend had said. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. His number’s in the call list.”

“The call list? What’s that?”

Last year their neighborhood held a fire prevention day, with all the local community boards participating. Katchan’s dad had been one of the committee members.

“See, we gathered a list of emergency contact numbers for everybody in the town. Your dad wasn’t on the committee or nothing, but he was like this emergency contact for when there’s an earthquake or fire or something like that, so his name, his company, the address, and the phone number are all on that list. I remember seein’ it there.”

Wataru grabbed him by the shoulders. “Show me!”

Katchan raced to get the book. It was a sheaf of stapled photocopied pages, with a simple piece of colored paper as a front page. The numbers were there, as promised.

“Akira Mitani…got it!”

The book listed both the name of his division and the direct phone line.

“Can I borrow your phone?”

“Sure, but you won’t get him today. It’s Sunday. Companies are closed.”

Oh, right.

“Come over after school tomorrow. I’ll call for you.”

“You’ll call?”

“Yeah. I’ll pretend I work at a shop, and that a Mr. Mitani left something, and get them to the phone. I do that kind of thing all the time. You gotta throw ’em a bit of a curve ball, or they’ll just ask to talk to your mom.”

“Good thinking, Katchan.”

Katchan grinned. “Hey, you share your homework assignments with me and all, but this kind of stuff is my specialty,” he said with evident pride. “Also, what if you said you were a Mitani calling, and he didn’t even answer the phone?” Katchan looked at Wataru’s face and his smile faded. “Sorry. Got a little carried away.”

Wataru shook his head. “No, it’s okay. It’s like you say—I mean, Dad tried to leave when I was out of the house.” The likelihood that he would try avoiding any sort of direct contact with Wataru was high. Wataru looked back at his friend. “Let’s play a game or something.”

Katchan slowly picked up the game controller. The mood was still dark. Wataru’s mouth twitched, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Come to think of it,” Katchan said, a little too loudly, “You go to cram school with that Mitsuru kid, right? Did you hear what they were saying?”

Wataru picked up the change in topic with relief. “What about him? He take another ghost picture or something?”

“Heheh. You haven’t heard!”

It turned out he didn’t grow up in America at all.

“The story goes that his uncle or something works at a computer company, and got transferred to some place in America—some place no one had ever heard of. Nothing famous like New York.”

All Mitsuru had done was visit his uncle for a year before transferring to their school. He was born and raised in Kawasaki.

“No way!”

“But he speaks English pretty good, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. It wouldn’t take long in America to get better than us, that’s for sure.”

Knowing Mitsuru, he hadn’t been the one to start the rumor about him growing up in the States—in fact, he was most likely the one who had set the record straight. That the truth had come out now was more a testament to how well Mitsuru was getting along with his classmates. The less people knew about someone, the bigger the rumors tended to get.

Something occurred to Wataru. “I wonder why he was living with his uncle for so long? Maybe something was going on with
his
family?” Given his current circumstances, it seemed like a rational thing to think. Maybe that was the reason Mitsuru was so
odd
. And why he could be scary sometimes…

“So you don’t hang with Mitsuru much?”

“Not at all,” Wataru said quickly. “We talked a few times, but…he’s weird. Kind of stuck up.”

The conversation at the shrine—he remembered having talked to Mitsuru at length, but for some odd reason he couldn’t remember a single detail of what they had said.

Memories of Vision had disappeared from Wataru’s mind. The wizard, the door, Mitsuru running—he had completely forgotten the dire warnings to stay away from the haunted building. He had even forgotten about Mitsuru’s threats. In fact, his interest in Mitsuru had waned considerably.

“Maybe he’s got issues,” Katchan said, gripping the controller. “I hear no one’s ever been over to his house to play or anything.”

Wataru picked up the second player controller. “Maybe he’s not as popular as we thought?”

“He gets along with Yutaro fine. But I don’t think
he
’s been over to his house, either.”

“Where do you hear all this from, Katchan?”

“Sakuma told me. He’s in with the girls in class.”