Goth (16 page)

Why had Morino known instantly that Yuu was dead? They were always pretending to be dead and surprising people, so why didn’t she assume her sister was simply faking it?

Shrieking in surprise when you saw something like that was only natural, and a real corpse probably looked much more horrible than someone pretending … but the fact that she had never even considered the idea that it was a prank, instead instantly running to tell her grandmother … that seemed very unnatural to me.

I compared the map and the road again. There was a deep river valley in front of me. According to the map, this was a dry cleaner’s. The clothes would get wet as soon as they were cleaned, I thought.

As I crossed the bridge, I looked up at the sky. The clouds were hanging low around the mountaintop, and the trees up there looked very dark.

After walking awhile longer, I found the house where Morino had once lived. Built in the mountain’s embrace was an old building, the roof covered in moss, just as she had said. There was nothing around but trees and fields, and it must have been pitch-black at night. No gates or walls—I simply followed the road until I found myself in their yard.

As I headed toward the front door, I noticed the shed on the left. This must be the shed where Yuu’s body had been found. The walls were of dry, white wood. There was a blue tarp over the top, tied in place with plastic string. It was very old and leaning to one side.

Glancing sidelong at the shed, I stood at the entrance. The door was made of glass set in a wooden frame, and it slid open to one side. I rang the doorbell, and someone called my name from behind.

When I turned around, an old woman was standing there, a hoe in one hand.

Her back was curved, and she was wearing loose work trousers, with a towel around her neck. I decided she must be Morino’s grandmother.

The hoe in her hand had dirt stuck to it. She was standing a fair distance away, but I could smell the earth on her.

“Yoru called last night. I was worried you weren’t coming!” she said. The grin on her wrinkled face made it hard to see any resemblance to Morino, who always seemed as if she had already died, sharing nothing of the vitality and sunny disposition her grandmother radiated.

I bowed my head and explained that I would leave as soon as I had a few good pictures. But Morino’s grandmother ignored me, hustling me into the house.

There was a shoe box inside the door and a number of what looked like souvenirs placed on top of it. The hall led away into the house, which smelled of air freshener and strangers.

“You must be hungry!”

“Not really.”

She ignored me, sitting me down at the dining room table and placing a dish laden with food in front of me. Eventually, Morino’s grandfather appeared. He was a tall old man with white hair.

The two of them seemed to think I was engaged to Morino.

“You must marry Yoru someday,” her grandfather said suddenly, bowing his head as I reluctantly ate. I glanced out the window, wondering if I would be able to see the shed and get back before it started raining and the final bus left.

There was a picture on the side of the kitchen cabinets. In the picture were a pair of doll-like little girls. They both had long black hair, and they were staring directly at the camera, not smiling at all. They were dressed all in black, and they were holding hands. It looked like the picture had been taken out front. I could see the door to the house behind them.

“Yoru and Yuu,” the grandmother said, catching my gaze. “You heard about her twin sister?”

I nodded.

“That was when they were six,” the grandfather said. Neither one of them had anything else to say about the picture.

After I had eaten, I was allowed to clasp my hands in front of the shrine. I knew that showing my manners like this allowed a number of other things to move forward smoothly.

Looking at the photograph of Yuu in the shrine, I imagined that her death must seem like only yesterday to her grandparents. It had been nine years ago. Nine years to Morino or me was more than half our lives—but to people her grandparents’ age, nine years was probably not much different than one or two to us.

After I had clasped my hands, Morino’s grandparents sat me down in the living room and asked what their granddaughter was like at school. Before I could begin to answer, they were telling stories about what Morino had been like as a child. I assumed they had no interest in anything I had to say.

“Oh, right, we have some pictures she drew in elementary school!” her grandmother exclaimed happily, standing up and vanishing into the back.

The grandfather watched her go, and then he bowed his head to me apologetically. “My wife’s getting a little carried away, I’m afraid.”

I shook my head—a generic reaction seemed appropriate.

“Yoru has never really brought any friends home, you see. When we heard you were coming, she got excited.”

Morino’s grandmother came back in carrying a paper bag, which she set down on the table before pulling from it a number of pages of old drawing paper—pictures Morino had drawn in elementary school using paint and crayon. I had guessed as much from her maps, but Morino appeared to have no artistic talent at all.

On the back of the pages were names and grades.

Some of these were drawn by Yuu. Their drawings had been kept together. There were drawings with Yoru’s name from first through sixth grade, but Yuu’s were only for first and second. This fact really drove home the truth that there had been a girl here named Yuu who was no more.

I compared drawings the two of them had done in second grade.

“You can hardly tell what either one of them was trying to draw, can you?” the grandmother said, beaming. There was no difference in the twins’ artistic ability. But they had been attempting the same subject, and they had produced similar drawings.

Both pictures featured a symbolic representation of a cross section of a house, in the middle of which two girls with long hair stood next to each other. Presumably, those girls were themselves.

“I wonder what they’re doing,” the grandmother said.

“Standing in the house?” the grandfather replied.

“I suppose,” she laughed.

I said nothing, but I knew what they had been drawing. There was a red line around each of the girl’s necks, connected to the ceiling. These were drawings of them playing at hanging themselves in the shed.

“They drew those pictures during summer vacation in second grade, for homework. Yuu was supposed to take that picture to school when vacation ended, but … they drew it just a few days before Yuu died.” She smiled fondly at the memory.

There was not much difference between the pictures, but Yuu’s was a little more detailed. In hers, a red line wound around the beam above, boxes were stacked on top of each other, and the sun shone above the house. And there were the shoes they wore.

In Yoru’s picture, none of this was drawn in any detail; it was colored very simply, or possibly boldly. The legs were flesh colored all the way down, with no attempt at shoes. The background was all dark gray.

My attention focused on the shoes in Yuu’s picture. One girl was wearing black shoes, and the other was wearing white ones. I wasn’t sure if there was any meaning to that, but I decided to make note of it.

I put the picture back down on the table.

“I’d better take those photos,” I said, and I went outside, carrying my digital camera.

When I opened the door, though, everything looked white. At first, I thought it was mist, but it was merely drizzle—tiny drops all over the mountains. It wasn’t the kind of rain that made it worth using an umbrella, so I wandered around in it, snapping pictures at random. After I’d done that for a while, it started to rain harder.

Eventually, I pretended to randomly find my way to the shed.

The shed door was made of wood. It was closed, and I couldn’t see inside. I could hear rain pounding on the tarp on the roof. I grabbed the door handle and opened it. It was a little stiff, but it opened.

The light slanting in through the entrance lit the interior hazily. It smelled of dried plants.

It was about six and a half feet tall and about ten by thirteen across. The floor was dirt, almost clay.

There was a beam near the ceiling, under the half-broken roof. There were a number of holes in it, and I could see the blue of the tarp though them. A single light hung down.

In the story, there had been a dog here, but there wasn’t anymore. It must have died. There was a small door cut in the wall next to the door, presumably for the dog. The dog must have been tied up next to that.

I stepped inside. The air in the room seemed to quiver. It was slightly damp and a little chilly.

Once, Yuu had been there, hanging from the ceiling beam. It felt like the dead little girl was still hanging there.

There was a switch next to the entrance. I flipped it, and the light turned on. It was a very dim bulb that illuminated very little.

I remembered everything Yoru had told me: two boxes piled on the ground with the girls on top, about to hang themselves … the bleach they had mixed into the food for the dog they kept in there.

I had my doubts about Yoru’s version of how Yuu had died.

Yoru had known her sister was already dead when she’d opened the shed door; she’d only pretended that she’d just discovered it at that moment.

Why had she needed to do that? What would make her want to hide that? The more I thought about ir, the more I felt like she must have had something to do with her sister’s death.

“We found Yuu here.”

I turned around and found Morino’s grandmother standing in the entrance. She peered gravely into the shed, gazing slightly upward.

“I heard she died trying to surprise everyone.”

I turned to look at the same place her gaze was fixed. That must have been where Yuu was found.

It was raining really hard now. I could hear it pounding on the ground. But inside the shed, it felt like all the sounds outside were muffled, even the rain hitting the tarp above us and the wind rushing past.

Drops of water slipped through the hole in the roof, which had been broken in a storm and had never been repaired. But there was almost nothing in the shed, so the water did no harm.

To one side were farming hoes and spades, even a scythe leaning against the wall, plus pruning shears and a thick roll of coarse rope.

There were several different kinds of cord next to the dog’s door, left there even after the dog had died. There were several different colors, but my eyes were attracted to the red one.

“I remember it so clearly,” Morino’s grandmother said quietly. “I came back from a neighbor’s, and I was putting my umbrella away. Yoru was standing in the entrance …”

Her version was the same as what Yoru had told me. When Yoru had seen the bag of pears, she’d gone to call her sister. She’d opened the shed door and screamed. There was one thing about the story that bothered me; before I could ask about it, though, I felt something strange underfoot.

My feet were sticking to the ground. The floor was made of clay, so when it rained, the water leaking from the ceiling moistened everything, making the ground soft and sticky.

I lifted my foot and felt my shoe peel away from the ground. A film of mud remained attached to my sole.

It had been raining the day Yuu died. The ground must have been like this. But the footprint I’d left behind was not very deep, and the twins had been children, weighing a lot less than I did. Were they heavy enough to leave footprints?

I looked out through the open door. It was raining hard. If it had been raining longer than it had today, the floor of the shed would have been wetter still, so the girls might have left footprints.

It had started raining around noon the day Yuu died. Yuu had gone into the shed shortly afterward, and Yoru said she had stayed inside. When she found the body, Yoru said she had seen it from the shed door.

If Morino’s grandmother had seen Yoru’s footprints inside the shed, then the story I’d been told at the bus stop was a lie. If Yoru’s footprints had been in the shed, then that would prove she’d been there before she supposedly found the body.

“When you found Yuu, were there any footprints on the ground?”

It seemed unlikely the grandmother would remember such a trivial detail, but I asked anyway.

“Yuu’s footprints, yes,” Morino’s grandmother said. The box she’d been standing on had been knocked on its side; when the grandmother had gone to pick it up, she’d seen child-sized footprints on the ground.

Oh well, I thought. It was only natural that Yuu’s footprints were on the ground.

“You could tell they were Yuu’s footprints at a glance?”

“Those girls looked exactly the same, so we told them apart by their shoes. Yoru wore black shoes, and Yuu wore white. They had different soles, and the ones on the floor of the shed were definitely Yuu’s.”

I remembered the picture Yuu had drawn. It made sense. They must have been Yuu’s shoes then. Yuu had been found hanging from the ceiling, barefoot, with her white shoes placed on the ground next to her. As with many suicides, she had lined her shoes up neatly next to her.

“There were no signs of Yoru’s footprims?” I asked, just to be sure.

Morino’s grandmother nodded, wondering why I had even asked. Yoru had not stepped inside after finding the body. Her footprints were nowhere to be found. Only one child’s footprints were in the shed.

“Is the rope that was tied around Yuu’s chest still around?”

Morino’s grandmother shook her head. She seemed to have forgotten all about it. “Anyway, you’d better stay here for the night. It’s raining very hard.”

I thought about it and nodded.

We left the shed and went back into the house. Morino’s grandmother told me a number of places that would make for good photographs.

“I hope the weather’s better tomorrow,” she said.

As I took off my shoes, I noticed a little plastic toy among the objects on the shoe box. When I picked it up, I discovered it was a little flower brooch, the kind you get as a prize in a candy box, of a very cheap color and design.