Goth (18 page)

That’s why she had known I was acting in class. It made sense. We each had detected what the other was hiding from those around us.

“I find it hard to believe that you used to laugh and smile when you were Yuu.”

“I know. I once was like that, but ever since I left the shed, I thought people would know I was Yuu if I smiled. I spent nine years trying not to have any expressions, trying to be my sister. Now I can’t smile, not even if I want to.”

She seemed ever so slightly forlorn; I doubted anyone else would have noticed it. She looked away from me as she continued, “I thought you might be the first to call me by my name.”

I stood up. “I have something for you. I took it with me from your home in the country.”

I removed it from a bag on my desk. “What?” she asked, not getting up.

“The rope you were looking for. I think it will fit nicely. Close your eyes—I’ll put it on you.”

Morino sat still, closing her eyes. I stood behind her, and her tiny shoulders stiffened; she was more than a little tense.

I wrapped a red rope around her neck. It was a dirty rope. I had found it in the shed, where it had been used to tie up the dog.

“I also know why you hate dogs so much.”

I gently tightened the rope around her long black hair and her pale slender neck.

As the pressure tightened, her shoulders shook. For a moment I stood there like that. Then I tied the rope, letting the ends of it hang down behind her.

“Yes … that’s it …” she sighed. All the tension poured out of her, everything inside her softening, releasing.

Yoru had died hanging from the dog’s rope, a fact that had been sealed away deep in Morino’s memories. She had never realized the rope she was looking for was the same one that had killed her sister.

“I never hated my sister. She did horrible things sometimes, but no one could ever replace her …”

I picked up my bag and went home. When I passed her seat as I left the room, I turned back to look at Yuu one more time. She was sitting in her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands folded in front of her chest, the red rope around her neck tumbling down her back to the door.

Her eyes were closed, her lashes lowered. There was soft downy hair on her cheeks, like on a rabbit’s back. It glistened in the light of the setting sun, as though she were clad in light. A tear ran down her check, falling from her chin onto her uniform.

I left her alone, closing the classroom door behind me without a sound.

i

Kousuke was calling Saeki. The boy always sounded innocent and full of fun, but today he sounded downcast. Kousuke was a little neighbor boy who had just entered kindergarten.

“What is it?”

Saeki was in his garden, tending to the morning glories. It was summer, early in the morning. There was a faint mist in the garden, making everything glitter. Children were walking past the wall around his garden, heading for their group exercises. Saeki couldn’t see the children over the wall, which came up to his chest, but he could hear their footsteps and their chattering.

“Is my daddy still angry?” Kousuke had shown up at Saeki’s house the night before, crying, and he hadn’t gone home since.

When Saeki asked what had happened, Kousuke explained through his tears that he’d knocked over an antique his father had prized, breaking it. Kousuke had been told countless times never to touch the antique, but curiosity had gotten the better of him.

“No, I don’t think he’s angry anymore.”

Saeki told the boy how the child’s parents had come looking for him the previous night. When Saeki had met them at his door, they’d asked if he’d seen their Kousuke, looking very worried. Saeki had shaken his head, playing dumb. Then he’d helped them search for Kousuke.

“He’s really not angry?”

“Really.”

In front of Saeki, the stems of the morning glories were wrapped around bamboo poles that were sticking out of the ground. The bamboo had been dried, so it was light brown.

Saeki lived in an old house, with a garden larger than those of the homes around his. The property was an almost perfect square, with the house and garage flush against the east side. The rest of the grounds was open space, and Saeki had filled that space with trees. In the middle of summer, like today, the grounds were covered in leaves.

Saeki had always enjoyed gardening, even as a child. He’d raised the morning glories that bloomed along the wall around the garden himself.

That day, it was sunny. The sun was rising steadily into a cloudless sky, sunbeams slipping past the wall and the trees, and the bamboo poles supporting the morning glories cast long shadows across the ground.

He could hear Kousuke crying.

When Kousuke had knocked on his door the night before and begged Saeki to hide him, Saeki had let the boy in at once, peering out into the street to make sure nobody had seen the boy come in.

“You’re sure you didn’t tell anyone you were coming here, Kou?” Saeki asked again. The boy wiped away his tears, nodding. How reliable was a child’s word? lt occurred to Saeki that it was already too late for such concerns.

In the past, when he’d caught cicadas with Kousuke or watched him play with a cardboard box, an idea had been lurking in the corner of Saeki’s mind, a fantasy he could never allow himself to entertain. He hated himself for thinking about such horrible plans. But yesterday, it had been like there was a fog across his mind …

“Do you think I should say I’m sorry?”

Saeki felt his heart breaking. Kousuke didn’t even understand what was happening to him. He felt so sorry for the boy.

He didn’t hate the child. Saeki himself lived alone, his family long since gone, so he’d always thought of Kousuke like a little brother. He’d often babysat when Kousuke’s family was out, and the two had taken any number of walks together. Saeki was sure he loved the child as much as Kousuke’s own parents did. So why was he doing this? There was no turning back now.

“You can’t go home again, Kou,” Saeki said, his voice shaking despite himself. The morning glories in his garden were each wrapped around a single bamboo shaft. Two of the bamboo shafts were marginally larger than the others.

Kousuke’s voice trembled. He must’ve sensed that something was wrong. “Why not?”

His voice came from the thick bamboo shaft stuck into the ground. lt was hollowed out, allowing sound to travel from the coffin buried underground up to Saeki’s ears. Kousuke didn’t know that he’d been buried alive. How sad.

The day before, when Kousuke had come into his house, Saeki had made up his mind. He’d led the boy into a back room. “Hide inside this box,” he’d said, pointing at a box in the center of the room. lt was just big enough for Kousuke to lie down inside.

Kousuke almost always did exactly what Saeki told him to. And he was too scared of his father’s anger to suspect anything, so he climbed right inside the box.

Kousuke hadn’t noticed, but that box was a coffin Saeki had made just for him.

Saeki put a lid on the box, nailing it shut. There were two air holes in the lid of the coffin, one over Kousuke’s head and the other at his feet. Even though he was nailed inside, the boy could still breathe.

He left Kousuke’s coffin in the room and went out to the garden, where he’d been digging a hole opposite the porch, in front of the wall. He only had to make it a little bigger, and it would be large enough to bury Kousuke’s coffin.

When Saeki was finished with that task, he went back to the room, carrying the coffin out to the hole. He told Kousuke he was putting him somewhere his father would never find him. lt was a struggle getting the coffin off the porch into the garden, but Saeki had managed, and he’d lowered it down into the hole.

He fit the hollowed-out bamboo into the holes in the lid. Then he scooped dirt on top until Kousuke was completely underground.

Saeki thought it looked strange to have two bamboo poles sticking out of a patch of bare ground, so he transplanted some morning glories he’d been raising elsewhere, along with the bamboo stalks he’d been using to train them. He’d carefully transferred two of the morning glories from their original poles to Kousuke’s breathing tubes, disguising their primary function so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

“What do you mean? I want to go home!” the bamboo pole cried.

Poor Kousuke, buried alive, Saeki thought, calmly holding the bamboo pole steady while he packed the earth around it, making sure it would stay upright.

What was wrong with him? He knew he loved this child. He had once seen Kousuke about to be hit by a car. The boy had been chasing a ball, and he never saw the car coming. When the car had braked just in time, Saeki had been so relieved that his legs had gone out from under him. So how could he do this to the boy now?

Saeki had grown up in this house. At first, he’d lived with his parents and grandmother. Both his parents had worked, so he’d spent most of his time with his grandmother. While the other children were playing basketball or making models, Saeki had spent his time gardening with her, filling pots with dark earth and planting the flower seeds inside. Saeki’s classmates often had made fun of him, telling him he was like a girl. He was a frail boy, and strangers occasionally thought he was female, which always stung. But when he was with his grandmother, watering the flowers, she always told him he was a gentle child. Whenever his spirits were down, he remembered her words, and he promised himself he would live a good life, never letting her down.

Then, somehow, the fantasy of burying someone alive had taken over. Before he knew it, that was all Saeki could think about.

He liked watering his garden, often doing so on sunny days—a hose in hand, his thumb over the mouth. The pressure built up, and the water sprayed quite a distance. A fan of water aimed at the trees, glittering in the light. When Saeki saw that, or when his grandmother smiled, he was so happy that it was as though the world grew brighter.

But at the same time, there was a dark place inside him where that light could never reach. He thought about putting his grandmother in a box and burying her in the ground. Every time the thought crossed his mind, he was instantly horrified.

How could he imagine such devilish things? There were times when he couldn’t even bring himself to look at his grandmother, terrified that she would guess what he’d been thinking.

Was there some fatal scar inside his heart that had made him like this? He could think of nothing, but perhaps he had simply forgotten. Or—and this was his greatest fear—perhaps he’d simply been born that way.

A few years after Saeki had come of age, his parents and grandmother had died in an accident. Saeki had been informed of it at work.

Until then, his family had always been around at home, and his contact with them had been a constant reminder of his position in society. But after that, he’d been alone in the house, and there was nothing to keep his fantasies in check. Every day, he left work and came home; with no one to talk to there, he found himself thinking about the same thing, those same ideas that had been in his head since childhood. He tried to shake them off, though, telling himself that even thinking such things was unforgivable, and this served to increase his interest in gardening.

When his family had been there, he’d grown a few plants in pots and weeded the garden. But now he brought in better dirt, improving the quality of the earth in the garden, and the number of plants along the wall began to increase in number.

Saeki spent the whole year digging holes to plant trees. That was all he did outside of work. He showed no interest in anything other people his age did, instead spending all his time making holes in his garden and planting trees in them.

At last, there were trees all around the house: inside the garden walls, every inch was covered. If you poked your head over the wall, you were barely able to see the house through the forest. Only one part of the garden was left unforested, the area he could see from the porch. There was nothing blocking the line of sight from there to the wall. That ground was filled with flowers, and it was in bloom all year long.

At first, Saeki believed he was digging holes to plant trees. But along the way, he realized he was planting trees to justify the holes he dug. Eventually, he starred digging holes only to fill them in again. The garden was covered with trees, so close together they could barely grow branches, and there was no more room to plant, yet Saeki kept on digging, because that was the only thing that seemed to clear away the fog of his fantasies, his desire to bury someone—in the ground. When he was digging, Saeki forgot everything else—but only for that brief moment when the tip of his trowel bit into the earth.

Digging holes only to fill them in again had begun to feel empty and meaningless. Digging the hole cleared away the fog—but when he was done, the fog came back, stronger than ever. Saeki had to keep digging anyway, though; that was why there had been a hole ready for Kousuke the night before.

His neighbors didn’t seem to find his activities sinister, even when they heard him digging late at night. Everyone bowed when they saw him, and they asked him for advice on their own gardens. Everyone knew he liked to garden, and no one thought it was odd. They all sympathized with him; he had lost his family, and only his hobbies remained.