The Waking (15 page)

The girl looked right at Kara, returned her stare. Then Maiko gave an awful, brittle little laugh.

“Am I awake?” she asked, her voice very small.

What terrified Kara was the look on the girl’s face. Maiko really didn’t know.

More shouting drifted in from the open window. Kara leaned against the glass, looking out at the teachers. Even at this distance, she saw the sudden change in their faces.

Mr. Matsui actually screamed.

Hana plummeted, without any screams of her own, and when she struck the pavement, she crumpled like a discarded rag doll, bones giving way.

There were shrieks inside the classroom. Miho reached out and took Kara’s hand and they stood together. Ren turned from the window, wiping tears from his eyes.

Everyone looked at Maiko.

Who gazed out the window, not seeing any of them, expression entirely blank.

“I wonder how she got up there,” Maiko said quietly, in a tone that suggested not horror but envy.

“When I decided to come to Japan to teach, I never imagined anything like this,” Rob Harper said. “I know bullying is an epidemic here, but this kind of ugly stuff feels so American to me. I guess I figured I was leaving it behind.”

Kara sat on the floor just outside the closed door of her father’s classroom, knees drawn up beneath her. Inside, he and Miss Aritomo were talking quietly, and though it was obvious they thought otherwise, she could hear almost every word.

“I wish I could disagree, but suicide has become more common here in recent years,” Miss Aritomo said.

Mr. Matsui appeared from his classroom down the hall, glanced up and down and caught sight of Kara. He gave a bow of his head and she returned the gesture. Mr. Matsui walked toward her but turned to go downstairs, no doubt to some kind of gathering of teachers and administrators.

Otherwise, the upper floor seemed deserted. There were police in the building, and there must be plenty of them outside, and the faculty were scattered all over the place, but the students were gone. They had been kept in their classrooms for nearly two hours—through lunch, though no one in Kara’s room seemed to have much of an appetite—and then they had all been dismissed. The boarding students had been the first to be allowed to leave. Only when they had departed, in an orderly fashion, of course, did the day students get the go-ahead to leave.

There would be no o-soji. And the homeroom teachers informed their classes that school had been canceled for the following day, which was Friday.

Kara wanted to go home. And not to the small house she and her father had rented near the school.
Home
.

Instead, she was the only student still at the school.

Her thoughts drifted, her mind numb, and she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Sakura or Akane or Jiro—any of it. She rocked a little, impatient, wishing her father could leave now.

Hana had been nothing to her except another sour-faced, jeering girl who took Ume’s lead and sneered at the little gaijin bonsai. But the idea of anyone throwing themselves off the roof, hitting the pavement so hard that their bones gave way in an instant, collapsing like a house of cards . . . The idea was hideous.

She couldn’t stop wondering why Hana had done it. Maiko had said that she was falling apart because of the nightmares and her inability to sleep. Had the same things driven Hana off the roof?

Kara pushed her palms against her forehead.
No more
.

In her father’s homeroom, he and Miss Aritomo lowered their voices. Kara listened harder. The only reason for them to quiet down would be if they didn’t want to be overheard. She should have granted them some privacy, but curiosity beat courtesy, and she put her ear close to the sliding door.

“How can you be so certain there’s no connection between Hana and the boy who was killed this weekend?” Rob Harper asked.

“There can’t be,” Miss Aritomo said. “They knew each other from school, of course. But the school isn’t very big; it makes sense that they would know each other. Hana killed herself, Rob. No one pushed her. Half of the teachers saw her jump.”

“And that boy, Jiro, drowned. Two suicides, by students who knew each other? It could have been some kind of lovers’ quarrel.”

Miss Aritomo did not reply at first. Kara could feel the weight of her silence, even through the door.

“What is it?” her father asked.

“Jiro may not have committed suicide.”

“That’s not what I was told.”

“Probably because your daughter is a student here,” Miss Aritomo said. “They wouldn’t risk the other students finding out the truth . . . or worse, their parents.”

“Or they didn’t tell me because I’m a gaijin.”

“That’s possible, too.”

Her father sighed. “So the boy was murdered?”

“The police have not been able to say for certain,” Miss Aritomo replied.

“That’s why they’re still saying he drowned?”

“Jiro
did
drown, but from what I’ve heard, that isn’t the only reason he died,” Miss Aritomo said. “When they found him, he had been . . . most of his blood was gone.”

Kara flinched, trying to process that. She stared at the door.

“How is that possible?” her father asked.

“The police are suggesting that he might have been bleeding into the water,” Miss Aritomo said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kara’s father said. “That much blood doesn’t just
leak
out. He’d have to have been dead before he went into the bay, but that doesn’t work, either, because Jiro couldn’t have swallowed water if he was already dead. Drowning wouldn’t have been part of the cause of death, unless whoever did it had some way to drain his blood—or pump it out, or something—while he was
in
the bay. That’s insane.”

“Yes. I do not understand how it is possible. But now you see there can’t be any connection between Jiro’s death and Hana’s suicide, unless she was in love with him and killed herself in grief.”

Kara couldn’t listen anymore. Head spinning, she stood and knocked on the door, cutting off the conversation inside.

“Come in,” her father called.

She slid the door open. Her dad and Miss Aritomo looked at her with a mixture of guilt and suspicion, as though they’d been caught in something illicit. That look made Kara think back to a moment she’d barely noticed in their conversation. The art teacher had called her father by his first name, sort of an intimate thing in Japan for a man and woman who were only colleagues.

“Hi, honey. Sorry to keep you waiting,” her father said. “Actually, it’s good that you knocked. We’re supposed to be downstairs by now, I think.”

“I saw Matsui-sensei going down,” Kara said. She glanced at Miss Aritomo and gave her a small bow. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I know there’s a lot going on. But I’d really rather not sit around an empty school waiting, and I know you don’t want me going home alone. Would it be all right if I go over to the dorm and hung around with Miho and Sakura until you can leave?”

Her father considered for a moment, and then nodded. “I’ll come and get you. What room are they in?”

Kara told him, and then the three of them walked down to the first floor together. She hugged him good-bye and went down to the genkan to put her street shoes on.

Outside, all but a single police car had departed. In her mind’s eye, she pictured what the parking lot side of the school would look like. At the back corner, there would be police tape. On the pavement would be smears of blood, the school waiting for permission to wash it away.

She went the other way, around the side where Sakura always went to smoke, where they’d run into trouble the day before. The spot where Hana had died might not be as awful as she imagined it, but then again, it might be worse. Best to just avoid it completely.

Even as she walked across the field between the school and the dorm, Kara didn’t turn to look. But there were plenty of students who were. At least twenty kids—boys and girls both—were outside the dorm, sitting on the stairs or just standing around, some of them pretending to play catch. They all seemed to be moving in slow motion, mesmerized by death.

It startled Kara to see Miho sitting on the steps by herself, staring across at the school, the sun glinting off her glasses. Of Maiko and Ume and Hana’s other friends, there was no sign.

“Where’s Sakura?” Kara asked as she sat down next to Miho.

“Upstairs, watching TV.”

“I guess she thinks she knows why Hana did it?”

Miho looked at Kara. “Because she was haunted. Yes. I’m really worried about her. She doesn’t seem sad, or even surprised.”

Kara wanted to tell Miho about the conversation she’d overheard between her father and Miss Aritomo, but with so many people around, now wasn’t the time. Instead, she asked a question, keeping her voice low.

“I still don’t understand,” Kara whispered. “What aren’t you telling me, Miho? I know what Sakura said about Ume, but what’s the connection between Jiro and Akane?”

Miho studied Kara’s face, then glanced around at the other students who surrounded them and shook her head.

“It’s not my story to tell.”

9

T
he warm, white sand gave way under Kara’s bare feet, sifting between her toes. Her shoes dangled from the fingers of her left hand. In spite of the sun and the blue sky of that Saturday morning, the air had a chill that made her glad she’d worn a turtleneck this morning, but her jacket was unzipped. On the bay side of Ama-no-Hashidate, the thick black pines provided shelter from the wind that swept in off the Sea of Japan.

Loosely translated, Ama-no-Hashidate meant “bridge in the heavens,” but Kara liked specifics and preferred the more literal translation, “standing celestial bridge.” From the mountain overlooking the bay—accessible by cable car—the view was even more magnificent. The two miles of serpentine sandbar, with its pine trees only edged with white sand, were set off against the blue water.

According to local lore, for more than a thousand years, people had been visiting Ama-no-Hashidate and experiencing it in a way that Kara thought was just weird. You were supposed to turn your back to the view, then bend over and look at Ama-no-Hashidate through your legs. From that perspective, the dark spit of land against the blue water looked like a bridge across the sky.

Supposedly.

“I tried it once,” she said.

Hachiro had been walking beside her, hands stuffed in his pockets. She felt like some kind of Hollywood pop tart with a bodyguard. Hachiro towered over her. Yet for all his size, Hachiro had a gentleness that set her very much at ease.

On Friday, they’d had no school. A terrible stillness had settled on Monju-no-Chie School and on the entire area, as though everyone connected with the school held their breath and didn’t think it was safe to exhale yet. Maybe they were right, but Kara had to exhale.

This morning, she’d planned to come down to Ama-no-Hashidate and play her guitar by the Turning Bridge. Instead, she had left her guitar at home and walked over to the dorm, hunted down Hachiro, and asked him to come with her. He’d agreed instantly, and as they’d walked to the Kaitenbashi— the Turning Bridge—and across to Ama-no-Hashidate, he’d lightened her spirits, talking incessantly, making her smile the way he always did.

Until his words ran dry.

Jiro had been his good friend, so it made sense that there would be a limit to how long Hachiro could pretend he wasn’t grieving. Kara thought that her quietness probably also made him nervous. For her to ask him to accompany her this morning had been a very un-Japanese thing to do. She liked the way it made her feel, and if Hachiro was off balance, not knowing quite how to handle it, she didn’t mind very much. His utter lack of smoothness and cockiness charmed her, and given the way her expectations about life in Japan had turned out, she wasn’t in the mood to worry about fitting in.

“Tried what?” Hachiro asked.

“Hmm?” She glanced at him, saw him studying her curiously. “Oh, the whole ‘viewing heaven’s bridge’ thing. I didn’t care that I looked silly, since everyone else was doing the same thing. But I didn’t see it. To me, it just looks like an upside-down view of the sandbar, and it made me dizzy as hell.”

Hachiro laughed. “You’re not much of a romantic.”

Kara cocked an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised.”

He gave her a befuddled look and glanced at the pine trees as though he’d never seen anything so fascinating. Shoes in hand, Kara started walking again, and Hachiro fell into step beside her. Her free hand brushed his and for a moment, as though by instinct, his fingers curled with hers, then set them free.

“It’s hard to believe this is just a sandbar,” she said nervously.

“Just a sandbar?” Hachiro said. “It cuts off the bay from the sea! There are thousands of pine trees out here! It’s hardly just a sandbar. Ama-no-Hashidate might be the most beautiful place on earth!”

Kara smiled. “It sounds like you’re enough of a romantic for both of us.”

The words disarmed him. Hachiro had no idea what to make of her, and Kara liked that just fine. She found herself wishing she had brought her guitar after all.